Gardening Under the Southern Cross

February Already!

2012-02-21T19:35:00.002+11:00

It seemed to be a slow start to summer proper this year, but the heat over the New Year period reminded us gardeners that although we have been blessed with lots of rain, the summer heat is not to be forgotten in the garden. I hope with the easing of water restrictions that you haven’t gone back to the bad old days of sprinklers left going for hours and driveways hosed down instead of using a broom! My sole concession to the increased moisture in the soil thus far, is to replant the red cannas that have been languishing in a pot for years.

I had a lot of work to do in the garden just before Christmas. Many of the annuals that looked so good over spring were finishing and needed to be removed as they were smothering neighbouring plants. This included all the poppies, sweet peas and the love-in-the-mist (Nigella sp.). I really must thin them out next year so only a few grow to maturity as when they die they really do leave a hole in the garden bed. Weeding has been a never ending priority too in a way I have not seen for over a decade. The compost bin has been full to overflowing with prunings and weeds. I am amazed at the smokebush Cotinus ‘Grace’ as it has not stopped growing since spring. It seems each day I spot another whippy growth reaching for the sky. These I have shortened as they have appeared and then several shorter growths are produced with alacrity. I am also considering giving the purple berberis a haircut as it has grown nearly 500mm all over since spring!

I thought I was going to lose the white plumbago during the big wet as it didn’t grow very much; what little growth it produced had blackened and withered tips and its leaves turned yellow. However it struggled on and is currently covered in flowers although still with yellowish foliage. The dwarf white agapanthus that I have planted along the street frontage also looked like giving up the ghost before the drought broke, but the clumps have tripled in size and are currently in full bloom.

In the vegetable garden the sweet corn that I planted in November is almost as tall as me already – I don’t think I have ever seen corn grow so fast. My tomatoes are growing well and I have harvested my garlic – both the Tasmanian type and the Russian or elephant type. I am also starting to harvest my brown onions. I am so proud of this crop as it is the first time I have ever successfully grown onions! They were sown from seed in situ which I think is a big plus and I only fed them with a phosphate based fertiliser as well as a sprinkling of lime as onions love lime. I bought 4 seedlings of Waltham Butternut pumpkins at the Woodend Farmers Market and these are beginning to grow really well, so I am hopeful of getting some pumpkins this season as I got not one last year!

In the native Australian garden the annual everlastings (Bracteantha sp.) that I planted as seedlings in May last year have formed large plants covered in fiery orange flowers. These close up on dull or rainy days and look quite awful but on sunny days the flowers open wide and make a great blazing show contrasting well with the purple flowers of the brachycome daisies. The Victorian Christmas bush (Prostanthera lasianthos) put on a great show too. My bush is almost 3m tall and this is the tallest of the mint bushes. The lomatia has doubled in size and is smothered in flowers. This plant was really starting to struggle towards the end of the drought and I thought I was going to lose it. The kangaroo apples (Solanum sp) are covered in purple flowers too and I have spotted the odd seedling popping up around the garden. These are short lived large shrubs or small gangly trees so it is good to see a few replacement seedlings coming on that I can easily transplant to a suitable location. I hope we have welcomed in a great year for gardening and perhaps a return to the ‘normal’ weather patterns pre the 1990’s. It has been great seeing the growth in the garden due to the drought breaking and I look forward to the future with interest.

Garden Opening and other things

2011-11-28T11:28:00.004+11:00

So what was the stand out plant at the garden opening that everyone wanted to talk about? Well the ‘Cobalt Tower’ echiums drew a lot of comment standing well over 3m tall. The striking fuchsia pink flower spikes of Beschorneria septentrionalis also drew a lot of comment – seeing as it was at the front gate it grabbed everyone’s attention. And the carpet of pink Erigeron 'Elsie' also drew a lot of comment. But many people were curious about the turquoise flowers of Ixia viridiflora (seen left) just coming out in the Fairy Garden. This South African corm produces a flower in such an unusual colour it always invites lots of comments.

The garden is so full of growth and so full of colour! Flowers everywhere, bees buzzing madly and the honeyeaters and blackbirds sounding their alarm calls when the currawong comes to prowl. It’s still such a joy to be able to dig a hole and see the soil is moist all the way down! And so much easier too. However the work is never done and after the opening I went around lightly pruning some of the excessive growth on such things as the smoke bush Cotinus ‘Grace’ and pulling back the poppies from smothering the aster. Euphorbia characias wulfenii needed its spent flower heads removed to let through the new growth. The bluebells have long finished and need their spent flower heads removed although it doesn’t really matter. The sweet peas are still flowering their little socks off and I pick a bunch to bring inside and perfume the house every second day.

In the vegetable garden I have planted my tomatoes, sweet corn and basil. Seeds of pumpkins, zucchini and cucumbers are popping up in my little greenhouse as well as several different types of lettuce. The rhubarb is going gangbusters as is the asparagus patch which I have just fertilised and mulched. I have also thinned the apples and fertilised the olive trees and citrus trees which are covered with flowers.

Have you noticed how full and leafy the trees are? A year of regular rainfall has obviously encouraged trees of all kinds to put on a huge amount of growth. I particularly noticed this as I was driving up the hill from the petrol station out of a neighbouring town. The street trees seemed to be shading the road much more than before. It makes you realise just how drought stressed they must have been. I certainly noticed how vigorously the weeping elm at the railway station was growing, after thinking in years past that its end was nigh. I nominated this tree for significant tree status earlier this year but was knocked back. If we could find out who planted it that might help with a reapplication. I worry that the bitumen that has been laid right up to its trunk will not be good for its long term health.

Do you know in Victoria that anyone can nominate a tree for significant tree status for any tree, anywhere? Just go to http://www.nattrust.com.au/ and click on Trust Register scrolling down to Tree Nomination Form. You must supply a map and photos with each nomination. You need to read the questions carefully but it’s pretty straightforward. There are ten categories including such things as horticultural value, particularly old and particularly weird etc. If you think the tree doesn’t warrant National Trust nomination, try nominating it to your local Council/Shire. This places it on the planning overlay making everyone aware of the tree and its importance.

Another thing I have noticed is how well the bottlebrushes (Callistemon sp.) are flowering this year. This genus is such a hardy one able to cope with drought once established but then making a wonderful comeback when it rains. I have seen some amazingly vibrant colours around the town – pink, yellow and purple as well as red. Cut back hard after flowering and they will put on a heap of growth. Don’t forget now is the time to be mulching your garden. I bought a tandem trailer load (I½m) of mulch from the shire depot the other day for $31. We might actually get to enjoy our gardens over summer. It looks like we may not have much watering to do!

Open Garden

2011-10-30T20:06:00.002+11:00

Well another opening done and dusted. About 100 on Sat - the weather was glorious despite all forecasts and I even got a little sunburnt. Then it rained all day Sun - not heavy rain - more like a continual fine mizzle (mist/drizzle). It kept everyone away and only about 30 visited. As the day wore on we added more and more layers in an effort to keep warm. Even had to put up the gazebo to protect the gatesitters! Oh well you never can predict the weather so one good day isn't bad I expect. Its just that I still have a lot of plants to sell.....

Garden Opening

2011-10-29T09:17:00.002+11:00

Its rained all night and I have taken 5 minutes to write this. We've had 16mm and there are pools of water sitting everywhere but I'm hopeful that will be all the rain for the present. The gates open in 45 minutes and we are busily doing all the last minute things necessary - including baking muffins to keep the gatesitters going!
Second listing on the Open Gardens website:
http://www.opengarden.org.au/regions/vic_calendar.html
I have lots of plants for sale - or should I say the 12 year old is selling plants. Part proceeds to BreastWest - helping the women in the west with breast cancer.
The bees are buzzing the honeyeaters are darting about, there are ducks on the dam and my heart is in my mouth! Wish me luck!

October in the Garden

2011-10-22T10:27:00.001+11:00

It’s amazing how much the garden grows during spring! Over winter it just sits and sits and as I walked around checking progress in the middle of August I thought it would be looking pretty bare for my opening. But of course the warm weather and welcome rain has done its stuff and the garden is bursting at the seams! Just one week until my opening as I write this and the sound of buzzing bees fills the air – they particularly like the echiums – and the wrens and honeyeaters are darting from bush to bush.

Unfortunately a wretched rabbit has taken up residence in my garden and evidence of its appetite can be seen in the bare stalks of love-in-a-mist, the chewed roses and little scrapes at the base of the cedar hedge. For 20 years no rabbits have lived here and now suddenly there is one and I feel quite murderous towards it! I wouldn’t mind if it munched quietly on the back lawn but its targeting my plants – and the ones at the front of the garden beds to boot! It doesn’t help that daughter number 2 squeals “how cute” whenever we spy it scampering down the driveway. Now I know how Mr McGregor felt!

This year as an experiment I have planted seedlings of the giant red mustard as an ornamental in my ‘red’ garden. I saw it once in another garden and was blown away by the enormous bronzy-red leaves. The seedlings have taken off and are obviously too hot for the slugs and snails to chomp on and each plant looks amazing and has grown half a metre high. I’ll be interested to hear what people think of it. Another experiment was to sow the seed of a bronzy-red form of an annual millet. The seedlings are tiny but all green and I don’t know whether they will change colour as they grow. Never mind its fun to watch and wait. The soft-leaf buffalo lawn has responded well to some fertiliser and the warm weather and looks fantastic.

In the vegetable garden I have been harvesting the kohlrabi. We have eaten this curious cabbage relative both raw and cooked. Raw it has a great crunchy texture and is good for using for dips because its mild flavour does not overpower. Cooked it is acceptable – a very mild broccoli flavour that goes nicely with butter and salt. I have also been harvesting broad beans and will eat a bowlful for lunch soused in a little olive oil and crushed garlic (don’t come near me afterwards!) I planted the potatoes on the 24th of September and the wet weather since then may have caused some of the tubers to rot because I have a few spaces in my rows.

In the Australian native section of the garden the everlasting daisies (Bracteantha sp) planted as seedlings last autumn have formed large plants and are about to flower. The seed sown pink everlastings (Rhodanthe sp) have flowered and flowered but are susceptible to drying out and the depredations of the slugs and snails. Alyogyne ‘West Coast Gem’ is in full purple bloom contrasting nicely with the fluffy yellow balls of the clay wattle Acacia glaucoptera. Some of my grevilleas are blooming and the possum banksia B. baueri has produced enormous, fluffy and very cuddly looking cones that look like a family of possums clustered within the bush.

Twelve months of rain has done wonders in the garden and already the memory of the drought is dimming although not forgotten. In this wide brown land drought is never forgotten.

Asparagus Pea

2011-09-23T11:40:00.003+10:00

Last autumn I planted the seeds of the asparagus pea Tetragonolobus purpureus available from Erica Vale seeds. The seeds came up and grew slowly making little mounds of slightly furry green leaves. A few flowers appeared before winter set in and I picked half a dozen pods from about 6 plants. They stopped flowering over winter and I wondered how frost tolerant they were. They turned out to be very frost tolerant and they grew and grew and grew. Last week when I took these photos the plants had reached knee high and had spread twice that width. They were covered with their little maroon flowers and I was finally able to pick a bowl full of peas. I steamed them for a minutes and then doused them in butter and a little salt.

Now the big question is - did they taste like asparagus?!? I don't think so. In fact they didn't taste very much of anything at all! Would I grow them again? Probably not. I would need a lot more than 6 plants to produce enough for the family and the pods are very tricky to find amongst the foliage. Also they have to be picked when only 1 inch long (Gen Y read 2.5cm) any longer and they are tough and fibrous. Quite pretty though.
Here is a link to a website which talks about growing them in the Carribean where they appear to grow only 6 inches tall.

http://www.bbg.org/gardening/article/the_asparagus_pea/

Routine Jobs

2011-09-06T15:16:00.002+10:00

I remembered to prune the roses a few weeks ago and also sprayed them with some smelly lime sulphur to kill any overwintering fungal spores that cause powdery mildew. I also sprayed my dwarf peach with the lime sulphur and this will stop it getting peach leaf curl. Other routine jobs I have done include cutting the ornamental grass miscanthus off just above ground level and chopping it up roughly to add to the compost heap. I have been weeding madly leaving some of the poppy seedlings for a spring display. It is quite amazing how closely the seedling of a milk thistle resembles that of a poppy! You really have to look closely before yanking anything out. I cut back the ‘Nanho Blue’ buddleia (better late then never) and the stalks of golden rod Solidago canadensis. I have pulled all the old shrivelled leaves off the silver astelia which I swear has doubled in size over the last 12 months.

This weekend I hope to go and collect a trailer-load of rotted horse poo which I will use as a surface mulch around the garden. For once I am not concerned about applying mulch too early and stopping the rain from getting through to the soil. This spring I hope the soil critters have the moisture to do their job of incorporating the horse poo into the soil. I also have to move my rose ‘Graham Thomas’ because it is crowded by shrubs all around it and it struggles to get enough sun during the day. Roses really need at least 5 hours of direct sun every day or they will just elongate and succumb to every beastie and disease going.

The vegetable garden is looking a little empty with many of winter’s crops harvested and summer’s crops have not gone in yet. The asparagus peas have grown really well and aren’t frost sensitive at all. Each plant has grown about 30cm high and twice as wide and they’re dotted with little maroon flowers. I’m hoping as the weather warms these will be pollinated by the bees and I’ll start to get peas. The pods are a bit weird looking with frilly ribs running down the outside and you pick them when they are quite small – about 3cm long but they really do taste mildly of asparagus! The rainbow chard finally came good after all my trials and tribulations in autumn but I know it will be going to seed any day so I should plant some new seedlings to replace it. I dug up the rhubarb and separated it and replanted some crowns after mixing a bag of horse poo in the soil. Rhubarb LOVES to be fed and watered – I remember my dad digging loads of manure into our rhubarb bed at home and being rewarded with lots of long red stems.

In the Australian native plant garden the scarlet wattle Acacia leprosa ‘Scarlet Blaze’ is in full bloom and the seedlings of pink everlastings that I sowed in autumn are budding up. The pin cushion hakea has finished flowering but the grass-leaved hakea Hakea multilineata is covered in pink flowers. The wilga Geijera parviflora and pine-leaved geebung Persoonia pinifolia are still alive – haven’t killed them yet! Various correas are flowering as is the tree violet Hymenanthera dentata – its fragrance wafts around the garden on warm days.

The soft-leaf buffalo ‘Palmetto’ lawn that we laid 10 months ago has come through the winter really well. It is supposed to be the best soft-leaf buffalo for holding its colour through the cooler months and while it is not an emerald green it is green enough for me. Trevor spent some time with a daisy weeder going around pulling out the few clumps of winter grass, poppies and flick weed that had come up and I plan to fertilise the lawn this weekend. Then it should be looking great for when my garden is open over the last weekend in October. This is advance warning to all you gardeners out there that you should plan to stay home that weekend as we have not just one or two gardens open here but three! See the Open Gardens Australia guidebook for details.
http://www.opengarden.org.au/

A Garden Thug Stopped in its Tracks

2011-07-24T13:30:00.005+10:00

I had a tough job on my hands the other day when I decided to reduce the size of a clump of gardener’s garters or reed canary grass Phalaris arundinacea picta. It may be 'Feesey's Form' but I'm not sure. For the last decade (of drought) the little clump of striped cream and green leaves blushed prettily with pink has behaved itself admirably and I wondered why I was advised to treat it with caution. Well after 9 months of regular rainfall my clump had tripled in height and width and was mounting a take-over campaign of its bed. It had got into a clump of Cuban lilies Scilla peruviana and was starting to pop up under the brick edging in the path. The picture is of me using a spade to lever the entire clump out – this plant spreads by rhizomes and the roots had penetrated almost 30cm deep and twice as wide. Having learned my lesson I planted a small clump into a pot and sunk this into the garden bed. I will need to lift this to divide and replant every year but this should keep it contained. I have blocked the holes in the base of the pot with fly wire but I am under no illusions as to whether this will keep the plant confined. The lip of the pot is a good 4cm above the level of the soil both inside and out. Fingers are crossed!

Winter

2011-07-05T20:49:00.004+10:00

Winter is actually an excellent time after all the removal of herbaceous material and pruning has taken place, to work out where the gaps are in your garden. Normally I say planting in autumn is best as the plants have over 6 months to establish before summer’s heat hits. However with the soil so moist I think for the first time in years we might actually be able to plant during spring, so start planning a trip to the nursery soon! In fact you should be at the nursery now and choosing your bare-rooted trees. I visited a local nursery the other day and was impressed with their large selection of both fruit and ornamental trees. Buying bare-rooted trees is cheaper than buying potted trees and they are a lot easier to get home!

I was buying three Gleditsia 'Lime Gold' for the local primary school (the colour of the foliage is the same as the interior paint of the new building - this is really taking the garden inside!). When I got the trees to school, I soaked them in a bucket of water and seaweed solution for 30 minutes before planting to ensure they were thoroughly wet. I pruned off some damaged roots and planted the trees in a hole twice as wide as it was deep ie. at the same level they were before. I put in two stakes placed 30cm out from the trunk of each tree and this will help stabilise them for the first 12 months but then I will remove them. I then tipped the bucket of seaweed water onto the trees to water them in. Come the first sign of leaf burst in spring I will scatter some pelletised chook poo around and mulch the trees well.

Some plants may have their growing tips burnt in a frost during winter and it’s important that you do not cut off these blackened leaves. They will protect the rest of the plant over winter and cutting them off just encourages the plant to put on more growth which will also get burnt. My box hedging is turning bronze – this is normal – it will go green again in spring. My ornamental deciduous grasses are turning brown (miscanthus, red pennisetum etc) this is normal, and I will cut them back very soon. The tree dahlia has flowered its last and soon I can cut the stem down, cut it into foot lengths and plant in large pots which will hopefully shoot in spring.

I am leaving pruning my few roses until the end of the month. Here is my rough guide to pruning roses. Sharpen your secateurs and loppers. Cut off half to two-thirds of the bush. Then cut off anything dead. Then cut off anything thinner than a pencil. I’m not going to talk about slanting cuts or vase shapes or cutting back to a bud. All these things are good but seem to scare someone who has never pruned a rose before. You won’t kill them; in fact they will love you for it. When you see the leaves begin to shoot in spring scatter a handful of pelletised chook manure around the bush and water in.

Tree Dahlia

2011-06-03T17:05:00.003+10:00

This was my tree dahlia Dahlia imperialis three days ago. I had to wait for a sunny morning to get a good photo with a nice blue sky for the background. Of course blue skies mean frosts and a day later we had the first frost of the season. The leaves up to a height of about 2m are blackened but the flowers appear to have been spared. I remember a huge clump of these growing at the back of the 'new' rose garden at Burnley Horticultural College when I was a student there in the early 1980's. Protected from frosts by neighbouring clumps of bamboo and giant trees they were never frosted. Each pale lilac flower is the size of my hand and luckily for us short people, the flowers hang down so we get a good view looking up at them. There is also a white form which I once saw lining a path outside Cabrini Hospital in town. They looked fantastic!

If you plant this then make sure it is where you want it to be forever. I once dug up the tubers to move them - the clump filled the wheelbarrow - and it was only a five year old plant!

Late Autumn

2011-05-29T11:28:00.002+10:00

The garden feels like it is slowly beginning to settle itself down for the months of cold ahead. I checked the cobs of the late crop of sweet corn today and as I suspected fertilisation had not taken place and the cobs are empty. I think January is the latest you could plant corn here and expect a bountiful harvest. This lot went in about early March at my daugter's insistence – much too late. Brown onions I sowed last week are coming up as are the garlic corms. I am starting to harvest my broccoli and rainbow chard. The broad beans are a foot high and the capsicums were still green and growing so I pruned off most of the leaves covering the fruit and now they are beginning to turn red. In one section of the vegetable garden I sowed a green crop and it seems to be coming along ok. This will be dug into the soil in spring just as it is about to flower.

In the front garden I have cut back most of the gauras. I could leave these to flower for another month or so but I really need their bulk out of the way so I can get in there to plant and shift things around. I never set out to shift plants but suddenly as I stand there I realise that something is too close to something else and one of them just has to be moved. Cutting back a pink gaura revealed a huge swathe of love-in-the-mist (nigella) seedlings which promptly all fell over when denied their support. I love this pretty blue annual – it was one of the first flowers I ever planted as a child and it just keeps on coming up year after year. I have also put in some snapdragon seedlings – another childhood favourite as well as some polyanthus and pansies. Growing annuals over winter is stress free as you don’t need to be constantly watering them. Other annuals coming up include Flanders poppies, Chinese forget-me-nots (cynoglossum, much bluer than English forget-me-nots) and some violas. Some perennials that self seed and could be problematic (if I left them all) include the pink evening primrose (oenothera sp), kiss-me-quick (centranthus) and gaura.

Time soon to sharpen the secateurs and think about pruning the roses. I’ll also have to prune the smoke bush (Cotinus 'Grace') when it has shed all its leaves. The leaves are just starting to turn now making it one of the very last shrubs to light up the garden in a blaze of orange. It has grown so much over the last 8 months with all the rain. It’s almost doubled in size. Another plant that has doubled in size is the tree dahlia. I have a species and a hybrid growing and both have just begun to flower. The species is pale lilac and three metres tall and the hybrid (Timothy Hammet) is a metre tall and is purple. I hope I get a few more flowers before a hard frost reduces them to mush.

Lastly I was thrilled to discover a new plant in my blue and yellow garden the other day. Many years ago I had a tweedia (Oxypetalum caeruleum) growing in the garden but it succumbed to the drought. One little seedling has appeared and I am looking forward to its baby blue flowers next summer – it’s such an old fashioned cutie!

Pineapple Sage

2011-05-09T16:04:00.007+10:00

This pic (with the ultra fashionable gardener wearing her GreenHip trousers) was taken just a few weeks ago and shows my pineapple sage Salvia elegans also known as Salvia rutilans in my red garden. Last year it grew waist height as it has every year I have grown it and both the New Holland honeyeater and eastern spinebill love its flowers and are either constantly flitting about the bush or hanging upside down to feed. This year with all the rain we had it has grown to prodigious heights soaring over my head and being smothered in blooms.

However this plant (from the same division and only 3m away) which spent most of spring and into summer with wet feet is not nearly so tall. I thought it was going to die it looked so sick but eventually it got going and is now also in full bloom albeit on shorter stems.

Pineapple sage gets knocked around quite a lot during the winter frosts here but bounces back in spring. The smell of the crushed foliage is unmistakably that of pineapple and is reputed to be good for adding to a bowl of punch (does anyone make punch anymore?!)

This salvia comes from Mexico and is one of the last salvias to bloom before winter. It is vying with Salvia 'Anthony Parker' (a vigorous blue flowering sage) for attention although Salvia 'Hot Lips' (red and white flowers) is still going strong too.

Haemanthus

2011-04-19T09:38:00.004+10:00

I planted one small pot of the South African bulb Haemanthus coccineus many years ago and it has quietly grown and multiplied: flowering every year in April. A nearby Lophomyrtus had grown so much it was threatening to smother it completely so I thought I had better dig it up and move it somewhere more open. What a surprise I received when I dug the clump! My one bulb had multiplied into several - the largest being bigger than a grapefruit! The flower is a great talking point in the garden as they emerge before the leaves and look a little odd appearing through the bare earth. Commonly known as the shaving brush lily or blood lily or ox tongue lily the long (to 40cm or so) tongue-like leaves emerge after the flowers have died. It is important to keep some snail bait out for slugs and snails at all times once the leaves have emerged, otherwise you will spend the entire season looking at holey leaves as I have learned. This year thanks to all the rain we have received the flowers were as big as I have ever seen them - each one the size of a tennis ball. I have replanted the clump in a more open area and hope that this disturbance will not set them back too much.

Curse the Rabbits!

2011-03-23T21:02:00.003+11:00

Even though I thought I had taken all the dead plants to be mulched I found a dead grevillea on the weekend. Don’t think that because I am a 'qualified' gardener that no plants die in my garden – they die allright!! And I make mistakes all the time. I try to learn from my mistakes but am not always successful. For instance I have planted three punnets of rainbow chard over the last month. Something was eating them and I couldn’t work out what it was. I sprinkled snail pellets – the damage continued. I set up an earwig trap – it remained empty (google sga earwig trap). I covered the seedlings with bird net – no improvement. Finally I sprayed them with Yates Success (caterpillar killer) and my fingers are crossed. I HAVE NEVER HAD PROBLEMS WITH CHARD BEFORE! What on earth was going on!?! Was it too wet, too dry? Maybe it’s a bit too early. I don’t usually plant any seedlings in Feb/March because it’s usually too hot. But with the mild weather and frequent rain I thought I’d be ok. But then last night I saw a rabbit - maybe he was the culprit! I've never had rabbits in the garden before. I feel a bit like Mr McGregor!

The BATH pulled out the big yellow hedge in the secret garden last weekend. It was Coprosma ‘Beaton’s Gold’ and originally planted as a divider between the yellow/blue area and the pastel area. But as the ‘bookends’ of the hedge had gone (the cyprus hedge at one end and the paulownia at the other); it looked a little odd. Not to mention the fact that the BATH hated trimming it because “you plant everything too close to it!” Its removal has opened up a large area for new plants – which are gradually accumulating in my little nursery area.

Now is a good time to fertilise your lawn. I know lawns have been a pain this year and have required cutting long after we normally stop (Christmas). But strengthening them with a dose of lawn food now will help them to cope with whatever Mother Nature throws at them over autumn and winter. I am aimed to get to that job last weekend: after everyone had been to inspect my vegetable garden for the Local Food Fair. But a migraine intervened. Also its important to always water fertiliser in – whether its lawns, fruit trees, pot plants, vegetables etc… so I may now wait for some rain. I am finding it a challenge to stay on top of the weeds. As soon as I finish one bed its like the Sydney Harbour Bridge and I have to go straight back to the beginning! Still it’s been good for the compost heap. I wish I had mulched in November – not to lock moisture in for once but to suppress weeds! Another job that never got done because it was always raining!

Did you ‘Put a Plant on Your Desk’ as urged by the nursery and garden industry on March the 2nd? Apparently 5000 indoor plants were given away that day in Fed Square Melbourne to lots of happy office workers. It’s been fun watching the posts on Facebook from delighted people as they ‘dress up’ their indoor plant. Check them out at ‘Improve Your Plant/Life Balance’. My indoor plants continue to do well – thriving on neglect for 18 months now. Really they need so little attention and yet do so well. And they're absorbing all the VOCs in my house. Indoor plants are generally killed through kindness – too much water! There is this little thing on the end of your hand called a finger that is a great indicator of whether the soil is wet or dry. Use it before watering!!!

So for the next month I will be planting (hopefully), fertilising (probably), weeding (most definitely) and picking the last of the cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, lettuces and parsnips. And anxiously watching the asparagus peas begin to produce their maroon flowers and set fruit. What’s an asparagus pea I hear you say? Look it up!

Recovery

2011-03-07T10:47:00.003+11:00

Its been really interesting watching the garden recover from the record breaking rains over the last 6 months (wettest summer on record apparently).
1. Initially most plants responded to the extra moisture by growing really well - and being spring helped this process too.
2. Then the odd plant or two began to turn up its toes. Mostly anything Mediterranean.
3. Then we had some really hot days and lots of plants died. Excess soil moisture had rotted roots earlier on and the hot day stressed the plant so much so it seemed to die overnight.
4. Then I noticed that many plants that grew well early on had stopped growing altogether. This was particularly noticeable with my weeping apricot and white plumbago.

The weeping wands of the weeping apricot are usually brushing the ground by now and yet this year they are still about 60cm away. The white plumbago would normally be throttling visitors as they walked down the path by now but it is only half its usual size. It is flowering prolifically as usual but the leaves are turning yellow already. Its in what was a really wet spot so I am surprised it is still alive. The aptenia groundcover that grew like topsy last summer has been a bit slower this year. Erigeron 'Elsie' has also been stopped in its tracks and hasn't grown much since it flowered in spring. The Eunonymus alatus that has only been in for a couple of years showed promise early on but then grew very little. And Crataegus tanacetifolia didn't do much at all but has set a lot of fruit which the rosellas haven't discovered (yet!).

All in all as we gardeners have to remind ourselves occasionally - gardening is a learning experience and every plant death means a fresh opportunity. So on the weekend I went to the AOGS Plant Fair held just up the road. I'll tell you next time what I bought!

After the Floods

2011-02-09T14:01:00.002+11:00

Some good advice here from our mates at Yates.
http://www.yates.com.au/feature/after-the-floods-repairing-your-garden/
I am about to bring the tandem trailer to the driveway and start filling it with all the dead plants in my garden. It seems I've lost more plants in the past few months than I ever did over the 14 years of drought. Its probably not quite true but it sure feels like it. Oh well, at least it will leave me with quite a few holes to fill.....
On a different note, the soft-leaf buffalo lawn we laid in October looks sensational! Its so green and lush and with each downpour of rain it puts on heaps of growth. Its hard to mow though - its so spongy that you really need your muscles to push the lawnmower along. I have to eat my weetbix before mowing the lawn!

Weeping Apricot in Summer

2011-02-01T20:42:00.006+11:00

In response to a request I am posting a pic of my weeping apricot Prunus mume so you can see what it looks like in mid summer. In the pic you can see that the weeping 'wands' are about half way earthwards. They will hit the ground (some, not all) in another month or two. All our rain has not affected the tree which has reacted by putting on a lot of growth this season. Mind you its in a pretty good position where it receives all the run-off from the driveway so it has done well ever since we planted it nearly 19 years ago. I prune it hard every year in late winter so it has remained a compact weeping tree. If left unpruned it would tend to spread sidewards and eventually it would obstruct the paths on all three sides of its triangular bed. There is a specimen in a garden near here that although only 2m high is about 4-5m wide.

As I have said before, this is a very hardy deciduous tree that does not succumb to pear and cherry slug like many weeping cherries. It flowers with pale pink blossoms from June to September that stay on the tree for weeks, good green dense foliage through spring and summer and autumn foliage of yellow and orange. Sometimes a small number of bitter apricots are produced but they are useful only for pickling apparently.

The plant beneath the apricot is Erigeron 'Elsie'. It flowered profusely in spring but then did not take kindly to the excessive amounts of rain and is looking rather ill at the moment. However it is coming good and I expect it to make a full recovery.

Yes more rain

2011-01-14T21:43:00.003+11:00

We did have a break from the rain - for about 20 days over Christmas and New Year which brought the final total for 2010 to about 1000mm! Thats about three times the average for over the last decade. Have I mentioned this before? I think I may have.
Anyway it started raining again on Tuesday and since then we have had 182mm. The creek is a raging torrent and has slammed a huge tree up against the bridge. The little carpark besides the doctor's surgery that has for many years had a sign at its entrance warning that the carpark may flood - did so last night. We had no power for 16 hours because a tree brought down the powerlines just up the road. Yes its flooding in Queensland but its also flooding here.
The garden looks splendiferous - the lawn so green it hurts your eyes. The chook run is a swimming pool and the vegetable garden is an island in an even bigger swimming pool. On a different matter something hungry has paid a visit to our apple trees. The ground is littered with gnawed apples! Well known author Jackie French maintains that birds only eat the ripest choicest fruit and as our apples are nowhere near ripe these were either very stupid birds or very hungry birds or maybe not even birds at all......

Ok Send-er-down-Hughie we've had sufficient!

2010-12-04T16:24:00.003+11:00

183mm in October and 200mm in November, 10mm so far this month with more thunderstorms brewing as I write. "Rain from the east, three days at least." I heard on the radio the other day and this axiom has proved to be correct. I've never seen rain like this in all my born days. The ground is absolutely saturated and gutters are ruuning after the briefest shower. The local reservoir has gone from about 18% full in September to 41% in 2 months. Lake Eppalock has gone from empty to overflowing in a similar time frame.
I took a walk around the garden to count the mounting cost. The following plants are dying - rosemary, various salvias and some succulents. Looking stressed are a South African lobelia, more salvias, a foxglove, petunias, Penstemon barbarae, Teucrium betonicum, the spurge olive Cneorum tricoccon and the giant fennel Ferula communis. All have either dropped leaves or are drooping or turning yellow. And (mostly) all are fabulous drought tolerant plants that hate having wet feet. If it doesn't dry out soon I fear for these plants.

More rain, more rain, more rain

2010-11-27T21:20:00.003+11:00

We're up to about 100mm for November and its pouring as I write. The drains on either side of the street are torrents once again and the crossovers for the driveways have been washed/scoured out for the fifth time in the last two months. In fact they were reinstated this morning by the council and have been washed out again this evening! We have never seen rain like this - either here on anywhere else we have lived. Its extraordinary.
The dam is still overflowing, the frogs have gone hoarse with all their croaking and the shed has been flooded again. The vegetable garden paths are lap pools and the chook yard is full of little ponds. The roses that were looking so bountiful are now hanging their heads in sorrow. The towers of sweet peas have all but collapsed and the petals have been blasted off the poppies. But I refuse to be dismayed by all this rain. We've had a drought for over a decade! I told my kids it would take weeks if not months of rain to break the drought and the chooks have come home to roost!

Garden Visitors

2010-11-16T18:14:00.003+11:00

60mm on Saturday meant it was very wet under foot for the 40 garden visitors yesterday. They didn't seem to mind however and overlooked the shaggy lawns that were too wet to mow. The rain has meant the new lawn has bedded in well and is beginning to put on new growth which is very promising. After a frantic day weeding on Sunday (after the rain finally stooped) I was reasonably happy with how it all looked. Yes there were weeds but they weren't too obvious.
All the rain we have had has meant prolific blooming for most plants. Echium 'Cobalt Tower' has produced enormous spikes almost 3m tall as has the giant fennel Ferula communis. It looks like my NZ flax Phormium tenax possibly the cultivar 'Goliath' is going to produce about a dozen flower spikes - its only ever produced one or two before. The sweet peas I planted back in April are starting to produce heaps of sweetly scented flowers in all sorts of colours including bi-colours. I planted the seed at the base of conical tomato trainers and they are already reaching beyond them (about 1.5m high). The Flanders poppies are a blaze of heat in my red garden next to Cotinus 'Grace' which is covered in its smoky blooms. The purple fountain grass Pennisetum advense rubrum has not recovered from its autumnal prune. What is it with this wretched plant - talk about behaving like a prima donna! This is the fourth time I have tried this spectacular grass but I can't seem to keep it for any longer than 12 months! If I don't prune it dies, if I do prune it dies! On the other hand my Miscanthus 'Sarabande' just goes on and on and on.....

Rainfall totals

2010-11-04T18:49:00.002+11:00

After the deluge last weekend we received 65mm here. This made the total for October 183mm! You have to go back to Jan 1995 to find a month with a total greater than that. So since the beginning of August we have received 353mm which has almost reached the average annual rainfall here for the last 16 years. Year to date 716mm (well over the 16 year average and over the 100 year average) so I guess the drought has well and truly broken. Although strangely the Rosslynne Reservoir is only 17% full whereas every other reservoir in the state is overflowing....
Everything is doing so well! Its amazing to watch the growth of plants and see the huge floral displays. I have garden visitors coming on the 15th of this month and I am so relieved that it will all look as good as it has ever been.

Instant Lawn

2010-10-27T16:53:00.005+11:00

Since we have been banned from watering our lawns several years ago, our two small areas of lawn have gone from a lush green swathe of cool season grasses (fescue, rye grass, Kentucky blue grass etc sustained on 45 mins of water twice a week) to a weed strewn patchy wasteland. I have dithered for the last few years trying to decide what to do with it. Would it look better turned to granitic sand the same as the path (too glary and would shed a lot of water), synthetic grass which gets more realistic looking everytime I check it out (couldn't live with myself), pavers (cost heaps, too glary and shed a lot of water) or change to warm season grasses (couch, buffalo or kikuyu). Well I decided to change to warm season grasses with the easing of water restrictions here and the decision made by the gov't to offer a 28 day watering exemption to anyone who installs a warm season lawn. Warm season grasses need much less water to stay green in summer – but if they don’t get it they don’t drop dead like cool season grasses.

So we bit the bullet and ordered 60m² of a soft-leaf buffalo. On a warm spring Saturday afternoon we both tried to dig up the dead lawn. Even after sharpening the post-hole shovel it was the devil’s own job sliding the blade beneath the turf and then lifting it into the barrow. “There has to be an easier way!” I thought. A sod cutter was the answer and a quick phonecall to a builders equipment hire place revealed they had one for hire for $140 for 4 hours. Yikes! Sunday dawned clear and bright and hubby went off to work! I collected the sod cutter and proceeded to cut the turf. I mean how hard could it be? It looks pretty easy on those TV garden makeovers. Well let me tell you that I have the bruises to prove that wrestling a sod cutting machine is like wrestling a rotary hoe which is like wrestling a hungry calf!

After cursing and swearing and growing muscles on my muscles I managed to cut all the sod into strips which was then quite easy to slide a spade beneath and hoick into the barrow. This then exposed the curl grubs in the ground! At first I began to pick them up and put them into a cup to give to the chooks. Pretty soon I decided it would be easier to bring the chooks to the grubs! So I collected said chooks and as I worked they trotted along behind me delightedly pecking at every grub I exposed. Then began the task of levelling the ground and roughing up the surface. This was only half finished before nightfall called it a day. And then it rained. The bare soil had turned to mush by Wednesday morning (we had 3 consecutive days where we got 84mm). Stomping all over it carrying rolls of heavy turf made it worse and the rain made the rolls even heavier. The turf came from up on the Murray River so the soil was a characteristic red sand. By lunch we were covered in it from top to toe. We finished by 6pm with 10 rolls over. They were left on the trailer. I have 28 days in which to get this grass to establish with drinking water. After that it will be the water from the dam that will keep it going.

Over the next couple of days I lugged barrowload after barrowload of sand from the sandpit (sorry kids!) and spread this over the joins in the turf. This stopped it from drying out and dying back. The remaining rolls have been laid on bare areas out the back and look a little out of place but I wasn’t going to throw them away! With the gentle rain and mild weather so far so good. Fingers are crossed! Never letting the turf dry out during the first few weeks is crucial to the establishment of the new turf. Lawns have received some bad press over the last few years, but did you know that a lawn can sequester (store) carbon and produce oxygen, keep down the dust, reduce run-off, modify air temperatures around buildings and make us (particularly kids) feel good! In our case the lawn also acts as a firebreak a very important consideration. So now we have a green lawn once again and it transforms how the rest of the garden looks!

Western Australia Wildflowers

2010-10-14T21:11:00.006+11:00

We have just returned from a fabulous trip to Western Australia! Its been about 17 years since I was last in that floriferous state and this time we decided to go north of Perth (last time we went south) and follow the Everlastings Trail. This self drive trail took us up through New Norcia and Mingenew to Mullewa and then across to the coast and south back to Perth. We saw carpets of everlastings (Helichrysum sp, rhodanthe sp) as promised by colourful tourist brochures and some really unusual plants like quandongs Santalum lanceolatum covered in fruit and woody pears Xylomelum occidentale and the WA Christmas Tree Nuytsia floribunda.

I was particularly keen to find the wreath lechenaultia Lechenaultia macrantha which only grows in areas of recent disturbance (fires, earthworks) so you have to ask at the town Information Centres for their location. The volunteers are only too happy to help and we were able to find several plants in a few locations. Nothing like driving 75km out of your way to photograph a flower! It was very exciting coming across these amazing plants which can apparently grow to almost a metre in diameter. The leaves are succulent and they grow in almost pure sand. What a perfect adapation to their arid environment.

On the way home we stopped at Adelaide Airport and I read in the local paper that at Roxby Downs the hillsides are carpeted with Sturt's desert pea Swainsona formosa thanks to the recent rains. Upon reaching home I immediately set about working out how I could get there to take some photos before the flowers succumbed to the rising heat. Unfortunately it was all too hard and too expensive and will have to wait for another day!

PS After another generous fall of rain last night we are now up to 180mm of rain for Aug and Sept and 70mm already for Oct. The dam is overflowing again and everything is starting to go gangbusters!

More rain!

2010-09-04T12:33:00.002+10:00

Our dam is overflowing for the first time in years! That is really exciting. Its still pouring as I write and more heavy falls are predicted on this weekend of wild weather. Over the last 6 weeks we have had 164mm which is really amazing. I'd say the drought is well and truly on its way to being broken.
So far I have observed that Cotyledon macrantha (the large green leaved form) and some of the agaves and aloes are not coping with all this water very well. Large wet patches are appearing on their leaves and one clump of cotyledon has turned to mush; although some clumps are unaffected. It will be interesting to observe the effect all this water has on the rest of the garden as the weeks go by and spring arrives in earnest. I have always wondered what would happen to the drought tolerant plants if and when it actually rained! Probably not too much in my garden because most of the garden beds are raised and therefore well drained. Still.....

The Rain in Central Vic falls mainly on the Plain!

2010-08-25T19:34:00.003+10:00

It feels like it hasn't stopped raining for weeks! This is how winter used to be! When friends shiver and grumble about how cold it is, I shrug my shoulders and say "It's winter! What did you expect". And they all work inside. I have so many layers on when I work outside I can barely bend over to pick up something! We had 70mm in June and then 40mm in July. Then the rain started in earnest and so far in August we've had nearly 100mm. The rain has obviously fallen statewide as the government has just announced the relaxing of water restrictions. We are now back to Stage 2 restrictions last seen in 2003. This means you can hand water your garden when you want and wash your car. You still can't water lawns; although a 28 day exemption allows you to establish a lawn of warm season grasses. This means couch, kikuyu or soft leaf buffalo. I am seriously thinking of poisoning my (mostly dead) lawn of cool season grasses and replacing it with a warm season lawn. This would also mean installing a barrier between the lawn and the garden beds as warm season grasses are all running grasses. Rats, more work.
Warm season grasses require less water to stay alive during summer although they turn brown in winter. I don't care - I'm not in my garden much during winter. We have the dam to supply water to the lawn during summer and I'm hopeful that a watering every 2-3 weeks might just suffice. Our lawn is on the north side of the house and as well as sequestering carbon it will keep down the dust and act as a firebreak in the event of a bushfire. I've got to try this as we are sick of the dusty expanse every summer. I have contemplated synthetic lawn but I think my horticultural colleagues would never talk to me again. If you want to read about the pros and cons of real lawn versus fake lawn read this http://www.sgaonline.org.au/?p=678

The Big Prune

2010-08-10T09:36:00.006+10:00

On Sunday my husband and I tackled the hebes that line our driveway. Its taken me two days to recover and write about it. My arms are still aching from wielding the loppers! I hold the national collection of hebes for the Garden Plants Conservation Association of Australia http://www.rbg.vic.gov.au/garden-plant-conservation-gpc and have about 60 species and cultivars - many of them beside the driveway. When I planted them, there was plenty of room (being a new garden) but they have grown as plants do and our driveway width has shrunk so much something had to give and it wasn't going to be the cars I was told in no uncertain terms!

Thirty minutes spent sharpening the various weapons (secateurs, loppers, hedge clippers) was well spent and cutting was a breeze. The biggest bushes measured nearly 2m X 2m and I cut them back by half. Cutting hebes back so hard is not usually a problem because there are often green shoots arising from the branches low down. This was the case with most of my hebes. The prunings were piled onto the tandem trailer and the job was finished by 3pm with just a trip to the tip to be undertaken after a reviving cup of coffee. Being late winter I am hopeful that the bushes will produce new growth in a month or so. I have probably foregone flowers on those species and cultivars that flower in spring, but those that flower in summer (the majority) should have recovered enough to produce flowers by then. Apparently in their native homeland (New Zealand) gardeners regularly cut back hebes this hard with impunity. Only time will tell whether I have been too hard on them or not. The rain that is currently falling will aid them in their recovery after more than a decade of below average rainfall.

They look pretty sad now but I'm sure they will look fine in a few months time.

Gardyn

2010-07-16T13:03:00.001+10:00

I came across this You Tube video today. Its a beauty! I wonder who Pogo is? Someone in Western Australia.

Front Garden Makeover

2010-06-17T11:44:00.007+10:00

Following the disastrous Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria in February 2009, I have become even more aware of the fact that we live less than a kilometre from the ranges which are covered in eucalypts. And even worse, the ranges are to our north, so a hot northerly wind would bring any bushfire to our doorstep in a very short space of time. With this in mind I took a good hard look at the garden on the northern side of the house. The two beds against the house were breaking all the rules about the type of vegetation that should be that close to a house. So I decided that a complete makeover was in order.

I started with the smaller bed outside our bedroom window. First to go was a beautiful juniper called 'Skyrocket' that had grown so well it was touching the eaves. Did I mention that our house is clad in western red cedar? It had to go. I was then able to repaint that wall before the garden reno began in earnest. Succulents were the order of the day and my burgeoning collection of aeoniums finally found a home. The bed was mulched with 12mm gravel locally called Tuscan screenings. That was 12 months ago and the bed has done extremely well - much better than I expected. So over the last two weeks I have renovated the larger bed.

This was a bigger job and involved removing quite a lot of plants that were unsuitable (flammable or past their prime). This time I decided to lay some newspaper down before spreading the gravel. The reason is that this bed has a much worse weed problem and I know the soil is holding a considerable seed bank. After the gravel was spread I was able to poke holes through the gravel and paper and insert cuttings of Cotyledon orbiculata (the wavy leaf form), aeoniums and some dudleyas. Once the dust had been washed from the gravel by the rain the true colour of it shone through - cream and tan shades that look great. I expect the paper will last at least 6 months which is the worst weed period here and then we'll see what happens. Maintenance involves picking up debris regularly so it doesn't accumulate in depressions and corners where an ember may alight. I know with a wooden house these precautions may be a waste of time, but I feel better for having done something.

This bed now contains as its main features a furcraea, a ponytail palm (beaucarnea), contorted filbert (corylus), Pseudopanax ferox, Ruscus hypoglossum, Cotyledon macrantha and Dietes grandiflora. Eventually the silver-grey Cotyledon orbiculata will be a dominant feature as it weaves its way like a silver river through the bed.

PHOTOS SHOW BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER

SMALL GARDEN BED BEFORE AND AFTER (12 MONTHS DIFFERENCE)

Back in the Vegetable Garden

2010-05-08T17:23:00.002+10:00

Today I got out into the wan autumnal sunshine to do a few hours in the vegetable garden. Tomorrow is Mothers Day and I know I won't be allowed outside - at least for the morning! I planted some seedlings of Bastoni (like Broccolini) and Rapa which is a member of the turnip family apparently - its a new vegetable with which I am not familiar. I mounded up the soil around the leek seedlings and gave them another dose of pelletised chook poo. This is supposed to lengthen the white bit of the plant which is apparently desirable - I have only grown leeks once before and that was ages ago. I also mixed up some BT (Bacillus thuringiensis - otherwise known as Dipel) and sprayed this on all the brassicas as there seem to be so many cabbage white butterflies around at the moment. A mature savoy cabbage that was not harvested looks like its leaves have been made of green lace! I also gave the yacon a drink as it is beginning to flower and was drooping as we have had no rain recently. I have to wait for it to turn brown and die down before I can harvest the tubers. The carrots are forming and are nearly ready to harvest and I am awaiting the first frost before harvesting the parsnips as this is said to sweeten them. The pumpkins are waiting for me to cut them off the vine and bring them inside and the corms of last years garlic harvest are beginning to sprout, signalling that they need to be planted soon! The crimson flowered broad beans are just beginning to show above the ground and the tendrils of the snow peas are waving around in the air looking for something to hang onto. After the late summer lull it's all go in the vegetable garden!

Hollyhocks

2010-04-24T16:43:00.004+10:00

This afternoon I planted hollyhocks (Alcea rosea) in my garden. I love the sight of tall spires of flowers swaying gently in a spring breeze at the back of a border. There is something about tall spires of flowers (more correctly called a raceme) that resonates with me - has done ever since I was a child. My dad once told me how his dad planted Canterbury bells in their garden every year. Inspired I went out and bought some Canterbury bell seedlings with my pocket money and my love of all things tall was born. I then went on to plant snapdragons in my little patch of garden beneath my brother's north facing bedroom window. As the years went by, these were followed in various gardens by foxgloves, delphiniums, monkshood, penstemon and larkspurs as I explored the world of skyscraper flowers.
I have discovered that you shouldn't plant hollyhocks in front of a movement sensitive floodlight and that larkspurs once cut and hung upside down dry really well and retain their colour. Snapdragons unfortunately seem to always succumb to rust but I love to grow them just so I can show my kids the way each little flower goes SNAP! Delphiniums in their glorious shades of blue are a highlight but why oh why do the slugs and snails love them as much as I do?! Foxgloves are glorious too but seem to need more water than I am able to give them. I've decided its better to see them at their best in the famous hill station gardens near me - the deep volcanic soil, regular moisture and cooler temperatures cause them to grow to well over head height.
I also planted some sweet pea seedlings and seed today but thats another story....

Queensland Bottle Trees

2010-03-22T14:45:00.004+11:00

I've been doing some research on bottle trees lately. Brachychiton rupestris is a native to Queensland (around Roma and inland from Rockhampton for example) and the northern parts of NSW. I've been fascinated with this tree since a lecturer at Burnley took a group of us students out to admire the young tree in the gardens. The tree was then about 12-15 years old if my memory serves me correctly and thought to be one of very few in Melbourne as it was believed they would not grow down here. Well this tree has stood the test of time and is still alive and doing so well it is even flowering and fruiting. It is now about 45 years old. Horticulturists have come to realise that this tree will cope with low temperatures and moderate frosts and thanks to our drying climate - it copes with less water too. There are now several notable bottle trees to be found around Melbourne; the most well known would have to be the 5 trees at the entrance to the Children's Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne (third photo). They have grown so well that they are cracking and raising the surrounding pavement! Bottle trees were included in two gardens at MIFGS in 2009 and these trees were grown initially at Teesdale (north of Geelong). Small trees are available in nurseries from about $10 and mature trees can range from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars (second photo is me with trees valued over $1000)! Luckily they don't mind being transplanted and thats because they are a type of succulent called a caudiciform. The trunk of the bottle tree develops its characteristic 'bottle' from the age of 5 to 8. This acts as a storage organ for the tree holding moisture in times of drought (first photo is a closeup of one of the bottle trees near the roundabout in Bacchus Marsh).

Just to avoid any confusion I will tell you that a bottle tree is not the same as a boab as a gentleman in the nursery was trying to tell me the other day. The boabs from the far north of Western Australia Adansonia gregorii are in the family Bombacaceae and are related to the baobabs of Africa. The bottle tree is in the family Sterculiaceae and like all the other brachychitons (kurrajong, flame tree etc) have evolved wholly in Australia.

This is a great specimen tree for your garden wherever you live - it also makes a great avenue. It appreciates good drainage, some fertiliser in spring and watering during the first few summers to get it going. Plant one for your grandchildren today!

Attila and Michelle Kapitany's garden has many bottle trees to gaze at and is open 10th, 11th and 12th of April at 1 The Lough Crt, Narre Warren North, Victoria for the AOGS. 10am to 4.30pm entry is $7. This is an amazing garden that will knock your socks off. As featured on Better Homes and Gardens and Gardening Australia (this Sat) and in 'Your Garden' current edition.

AOGS Plant Fair

2010-03-08T17:13:00.003+11:00

I recently went to visit a wonderful garden in the Yarra Valley which is north-east of Melbourne. The occasion was the annual plant fair for Australia's Open Garden Scheme held each year in a different garden. It was the Yarra Valley's turn this year in an area not so far from last year's devastating bushfires. The garden is called 'Lubra Bend' and is situated on a small rise by the Yarra River. For those who don't know, the Yarra River is the river on which Melbourne was established back in 1835. At Lubra Bend the river is about 10m wide and stained brown from the tannins of surrounding vegetation. The word 'lubra' (meaning an aboriginal woman) is now politically incorrect but refers to times past when there was a camp of lubras on this particular bend of the river.
The garden was established in the late 1950's when the house was built, but sections of it have been re-landscaped and extended by Phil Johnson from Phillip Johnson Sustainable Landscape Systems. Phil's speciality is designing billabongs, usually complete with waterfall and often with outdoor showers, spas and a sustainable Australian plant planting. Lubra Bend was only landscaped a few years ago but the frogs have already moved in, indicating that a balance has been achieved in the pond and surrounding vegetation. I love Phil's billabongs and wish I could have one in my garden! He has a real flair for putting together a harmonious but visually thrilling landscape.
The annual plant fair is not to be missed and I enjoyed wandering around the stalls talking to the growers, book sellers, artists and purveyors of yummy sausages with coleslaw and grated cheese! There were so many plants to choose from - Australian plants, clematis, unusual perennials, bulbs, succulents and hellebores to name a few. I obtained two new cultivars of aloe from Aloe-Aloe Horticulture and am looking forward to seeing how they grow in garden. I also succumbed and bought two books to add to my burgeoning collection.
If there is a plant fair near you, try and get along to it. It is really worth your time and is an enjoyable way to spend a day walking and talking with other plant lovers in a fabulous garden.

Radishes

2010-03-02T21:40:00.002+11:00

I actually ate the radishes in the photo tonight. I have to say they were woody and very very hot! Nearly blew the top off my head! Dad used to tell me that if they were hot it meant they'd been grown too slowly or had been in the ground too long.

Root vegetables

2010-02-27T17:01:00.006+11:00

I just had to blog about buying root crops as seedlings in punnets. Take a close look at the above photo. These radishes were for sale at a nursery and had obviously been there for a few weeks. They were priced at $3.90 which makes each radish (there are five, the sixth hadn't formed a root) worth a little under $1 each. Currently at the supermarket radishes are $2 for about 8 (about 25c each). So buying radishes like this is an extremely expensive (although very fresh) way to get your fix of this hot crunchy snack! I mean why would you? Everyone knows that radishes are easy-peasy to grow from seed - they're always being recommended for children to try because they are so quick (although as a little aside, I don't know why - have you ever seen a child eat and enjoy a radish?!?) I guess you could wow your dinner party guests by asking them to harvest their own radishes at the dinner table - I could just see a little row of orange punnets down the centre of the table!

I am sure I remember my dad or someone else telling me to never buy root crops as seedlings because the action of transplanting would ruin the root structure and check them so severely they would not grow as they should. Well I have grown beetroot from seedlings (great), chioggia (great), onions (great most of the time), carrots (not so great) and parsnips (still in the ground with enormous leafy tops but no root as yet). I think its all about careful soil preparation, careful transplanting and diligent follow up care; particularly with watering. I can justify buying beetroot, carrot, onion and parsnip seedlings where you get about 20 seedlings in a punnet (or more!) but with radishes you get barely 8 seedlings! I think I'll just stick to growing them from seed.

Replanting

2010-02-23T20:08:00.003+11:00

I spent some time replanting in the vegetable garden today. I find that usually I get to late March and realise that all the summer vegetables are fading and there is nothing to take me through to winter! So today I pulled out the spent sweet corn and replanted the area with brown onion seedlings. I read somewhere you should follow fruiting or leafy vegetables with root vegetables (because the former drag all the nitrogen from the soil which root crops don't need a lot of) so this is what I've done. I harvested the entire crop of chioggia on Saturday and sold them at the local Farmers Market! We tried it at home and although it looks very pretty (its a pink and white striped beetroot) its a bit sweet for us - probably because its related to sugar beets. In this area I replanted with mini cauliflower and where the mizuna ( a type of lettuce) was, I've replanted with leeks. I've still got carrot seed to go in and whatever looks good at the nursery. I find that working in a nursery means I am faced with vegetable seedlings all the time and can't fail to notice what should be going in.
Then I moved on to the front garden and pulled out a few weeds, deadheaded a few roses and cut back spent flowers on the phygelius, penstemon, salvia and echeveria. The soil is drying out again - the last decent fall of rain was a few weeks ago now.

I tried some of the new chia enriched bread the other day. I bet you didn't know that chia is Salvia hispanica and is apparently rich in Omega-3. The bread was nice with a slight tiny crunch as the seeds are so small. This new crop (for Australia) is being grown in the Ord River region of Western Australia near the town of Kununura. The Ord River was dammed decades ago to create a horticultural heaven for growing warm weather crops. But the planners forgot that it was such a long way from the markets and the scheme was widely regarded as a bit of a white elephant. For many years its claim to fame was producing curcurbits year round (pumpkins, cucumbers, melons, zucchinis etc) Its great to see that this new crop is ideally suited to the area and may prove to be its salvation.

MGS website

2010-02-08T10:47:00.002+11:00

My garden is now featured on the website of the Mediterranean Garden Society! Go to their website (its listed under my favourite websites) and click on 'members gardens around the world' and mine is the one at the top of the list! How cool is that!

Summer

2010-02-05T21:56:00.003+11:00

Yes I am still alive, still gardening and still writing just not as much as I used to (the writing that is). Christmas and holidays have been and gone in the blink of an eye. We have continued to have regular falls of rain and looking back the rain in spring was the best we've had in over a decade. The growth on most plants has been nothing short of amazing. Or maybe this is what it used to be like BEFORE climate change........I can't really remember.
The vegetable garden is powering on and I am picking sweet corn, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, chioggia (pink and white striped beetroot), lettuce, beans, broccoli and rocket. The pumpkins have grown really well and quite a few baby pumpkins are to be seen. I went down in the cool of the early morning the other day and did some hand pollination to ensure a few more fruit set. How to hand pollinate a pumpkin: you pick a male flower (straight stem with a flower on the end) carefully peel off all the petals leaving the stigma and anthers behind (they're the bits in the middle). Find an open female flower (they have a bulbous base to the flower) and plunge the male flower inside the female flower and twirl. Throw the male flower away because its done its job and is now useless. Caress the female flower and whisper words of encouragement and then LEAVE IT ALONE!
In the front garden the strobilanthes looks like its on its last legs - must remember to check again for ripe seed tomorrow. The aptenia (baby sun rose) is threatening to take over the garden beds - with no summer rain it is controllable, with summer rain as we have had it can behave thuggishly unfortunately because it is a great succulent ground cover that simply will not burn (I know - I tried) it would be perfect in a bushfire area.
Gotta go - work again tomorrow.

Pumpkins

2009-12-02T06:37:00.004+11:00

I spent a fruitful morning in the vegetable garden yesterday. The garden is three quarters full but I am continually finding something more to plant and am sqeezing extra rows in between the rows I have! I decided to plant the pumpkins I bought on the weekend. I had to buy some seedlings because of the 20 or so seed I sowed from pumpkins saved from last year, not one seed germinated! How is that for an 'expert' gardener! I washed and dried the seed and laid it on sheets of paper towel where its been since autumn. They were carefully sown in punnets of potting mix and kept moist but not one emerged. The baby watermelon seed that I had saved came up but no pumpkins.
I had sown the seed from a pumpkin called Long Island Cheese and a Potimarron which I had purchased at our local Farmers Market. The Potimarron was a small round orange fruit with deep orange flesh with a faint chestnut flavour and tasted very nice. Maybe it was not quite ripe enough when I saved the seed. So I went to a couple of nurseries looking for seedlings. The nursery I work at had run out of pumpkin seedlings so I went to two others. At the first nursery I had picked up a punnet of Jap pumpkins when I suddenly spied two punnets of Potimarron seedlings grown by the Diggers Club! How fortunate was I? Each punnet had two seedlings in it (although one seedling looked very weedy) so I bought both. At the next nursery I picked up a punnet of Gold Nugget pumpkins. I like Gold Nugget because it is a bush type plant and doesn't send runners all over the place. Thats the hardest thing to cope with in a vegetable garden during summer - trying to train the pumpkin runners to where you want them to go!
I dug the area over where the pumpkins were to be planted. I struck the roots from the trees next door and had to sever these and remove them. No wonder the soil at that spot - even after all this rain - is still bone dry. We have had a total of over 100mm for November which hasn't happened in such a long time. After the initial downpour of 63mm this was followed by several days of rain in dribs and drabs so it has all soaked in.
Back to the pumpkins. I then added some compost from my compost heap and raked this in together with some potato fertiliser left over from last season (potato fertiliser says it is good for all vegetables particularly those that produce fruits or roots). The bed was now higher than the rest of the vegetable garden which is good. I planted the pumpkins (11 in all) and watered them in. Then I decided I should mulch them before some anticipated hot weather later in the week. I was going to buy some more sugarcane mulch but then decided to use what mulch I have onsite. We have a row of allocasuarinas (she-oaks) along the back fence so I raked up some of their dead needle-like leaves. It was damp beneath the leaves so obviously the rain can get through. Now the bed is thickly mulched (with drip irrigation beneath) and so is the adjacent vacant bed where I plan to direct the runners. Fingers and toes are crossed that we'll be eating Potimarron pumpkins again this autumn!

Stonefields

2009-11-23T21:01:00.004+11:00

I went to visit Paul Bangay's new garden 'Stonefields' yesterday. Its only about a 45 minute drive from where I live so we set off after the rain eased at lunchtime (did I mention the rain - we had 63mm in less than 24 hours - there go the road shoulders so carefully graded last week!). Mr Bangay is well known here and overseas. One website expressed his work quite succinctly "Paul Bangay Design is internationally recognized for modern garden design and landscape architecture. The uncomplicated and structured garden design which is Paul’s signature style is featured in his many books and works. Individuality, balance, form, elegance and simplicity are key elements in his work."

So what was the garden like? As I said in an email to a friend - expertly done, well maintained, no expense spared and undoubtedly watered with gallons of water which comes from the heavens or from a tank or bore. The local paper kindly reported that Mr Bangay has installed a tank with a capacity for 250,000 litres of water. Hmmmmmm.

Stonefields is aptly named - the surrounding fields were studded with volcanic rocks. The rocks sit on top of a deep red rich volcanic loam - the type of soil where if you stick a broomstick in, it will grow. The area is known for its high rainfall and cool temperate climate. Many of the plants Mr Bangay has chosen will probably do extremely well without the addition of too much extra water. Its that sort of gardening climate. And he has installed in-line drip irrigation for all the plants which is very sensible. His plant choices reflected the current shift towards more drought tolerant plants such as sedums, bronze fennel, box, cotoneaster, privet, Portugese laurel, lambs ears, alliums, species roses and ornamental grasses which is great to see. They were all enormous well grown lush specimens and I was insanely jealous.

The view across the valley was breathtaking, the water features superb (although I did wonder a bit about all the bronze snakes), the summer houses alluring, the clipped box shapes perplexing (perhaps he likes trimming - many men seem to like cutting things...its called the Edward Scissorhands complex) the swimming pool doubling as reflecting pool/water feature quite cunning. By the way do you know about wet edge pools? A wet-edge pool is a body of water which "produces a visual effect of water extending to the horizon, vanishing, or extending to infinity". Well Mr Bangay has created at Stonefields a green-edge lawn where the lawn seemed to extend to the horizon/forest. It was very well done and didn't even need a ha-ha.

Doable in the climate where Stonefields is located and at a few other locations in Victoria, the Blue Mountains in NSW and parts of Tasmania: the combination of good soil, high rainfall and cool temperate climate makes for terrific English style gardens of herbaceous borders, large ponds, lots of trees and green lawns. However in my opinion this type of garden is not really doable in Melbourne anymore because 1. with water storages currently at 38% we simply don't have the water anymore. 2. Melbourne is not known for its good soil and 3. the climate is warming up and very few gardens stand up well to 46º C heat which is what Melbourne got to last summer. I hope everyone who visited on the weekend realised that.

Water alone does not a great garden make.

Flanders Poppies

2009-11-11T21:53:00.004+11:00

"In Flanders fields the poppies grow. Between the crosses, row on row." Canadian Dr. John McCrae penned these lines in early May 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres. Our school paused for a minute at 11am today to mark the cessation of the first world war. My little vase of poppies stood at the front desk during the day. Because the children are taught about the significance of the poppy, every child who passed by the desk during the day understood why they were there and stopped for a closer loook. Some had never seen a poppy before - certainly not a Flanders poppy -and were entranced at their silky petals.

Spring = Weeds!

2009-11-10T12:49:00.004+11:00

The spring rain a few weeks ago has encouraged the first decent crop of weeds I have seen in my garden for many years. I have been busily removing them, feeding them to the chooks and filling the compost bin. Other plants that are growing well are the Flanders poppies that are waist height and I will have plenty for my kids to take to school tomorrow. Everything has been looking so good, although the hot weather over the last few days and for the next few days (over 30ºC) will make sure everything gets browned off and the lawns will be stopped in their tracks. I think thats spring over for us and we're now into summer a good fortnight before the official start date. Many people are saying this does not bode well for the next season which is bound to be hot. It gets hotter in Melbourne in summer than in Sydney which many visitors don't realise. But its generally a dry heat.

While closing all the curtains this morning I was suddenly struck by a dilemma. How do I keep my indoor plants going through summer when we generally live in perpetual gloom inside the house? I'll have to give this some thought.

I am picking lettuce leaves, broccoli and immature garlic from the vegetable garden and the rainbow chard (coloured silver beet) has bolted to seed and is taller than me. The crimson flowered broad beans are finally setting some pods and I am looking forward to feasting on them soon. A friend was telling me of their 'broad bean feast' where they served broad bean custard among other concoctions! Stephanie Alexander apparently has a lot to answer for! I love broad beans but I have never gone as far as twice peeling them - seems far too fiddly. When they're really young and the beans are less than the size of your little finger nail, I eat them pod and all. With a bit of butter, salt and pepper. Yum!

Strobilanthes (again!)

2009-10-25T21:57:00.005+11:00

Here is the update on my Strobilanthes gossypinus. This plant hails from the East Indies and all things considered has done remarkably well in my garden which receives several frosts each winter. My plant is about 5 years old and came from Lyle Filippe at Roraima Nursery and he got his stock from a single plant at the fabled Wirruna Nursery. Some species of strobilanthes are semelparous - that is they reproduce once and then die. Some species also appear to flower synchronously on a cycle of seven to ten years before dying - a bit like bamboo.

Mine is looking good and as you can see it is covered in lilac flowers. However the flowering looks like it is coming to an end (since commencing in July) and no new leaves are being produced. I sincerely hope its not dying but I don't hold out great hopes. I have checked the base of the dead flowers and there looks like there might be a single green seed present so I will have to collect some seed. I initially grew this plant for its silvery ribbed leaves and gold new growth - the silver and gold together on the same bush at the same time makes a striking combination. It can grow to about 1.5m across by the same high but mine has never quite reached 1m in height or width.
Only time will tell whether it will cark it or not!

Feral Plants

2009-10-21T06:57:00.004+11:00

I was saddened to see a host of feral plants during my visit to the Sunshine Coast. Almost everywhere we went I spotted something that was out of place. Many have appeared in the bush because the wind or birds have transferred the seeds from nearby gardens. But many infestations are a direct result of ignorant gardeners dumping their garden refuse on the side of the road. Wherever you are in the world, never ever dump your garden refuse anywhere except at a designated tip or waste disposal centre. Feral plants (they've jumped the garden fence and gone wild) are costing our economy (and probably your economy too!) millions of dollars to eradicate every year.

These photos were all taken within 50m of the beach - on top of the foredune.

The top left photo shows an umbrella tree Schefflera sp next to the indigenous allocasuarina in a sea of lantana. I'm not sure if the schefflera is the native species or an introduced one but I'm pretty sure it should be growing in the rainforest pockets further inland - birds eat the seeds and I saw it growing in the most unlikely places. Lantana (which comes from the West Indies) is a widespread problem throughout Queensland and it forms dense prickly impenetrable thickets shading anything growing beneath it. Again its fleshy black seeds are eaten by the birds.

The second photo shows a stand of mother-in-law's tounge (from Africa) Sansevieria sp almost being swamped by the lantana. It has definitely arrived at this location through unwanted plants being dumped. The third photo is I think some sort of kalanchoe with balloon shaped seeds - you can see the dead strappy leaves of the local dianella that gave up the fight amidst some asparagus fern that was carpeting the ground. The fourth photo is a species of euphorbia and the fifth photo is a crassula commonly called mother-of-millions - at the end of every leaf a baby plant forms and drops off and huge clumps are the result.

So please remember all you gardeners out there, dumping your rubbish is a no-no! It causes one giant headache for someone else to clean up, stuffs up the environment and looks unsightly. I would much rather have seen the local plants at this location - but I couldn't because they had been killed off by feral plants.

Home again!

2009-10-13T16:36:00.004+11:00

Within hours of arriving home (ie as soon as I put the first load of washing on) the holiday seemed like a distant memory. Two weeks of balmy bliss on the Sunshine Coast staying at my uncle's house (look for Noosa in Queensland on Google Maps all you overseas bloggers). We visited the beach, shopped at the Eumundi markets, checked out the Big Pineapple and spent hours watching migrating Humpback Whales frolicking in the water just offshore. I also squeezed in a visit to some local garden centres and walked around the neighbourhood to see what people plant in their gardens in such a benign climate.

The pandanus or screw palm was very popular (Pandanus tectorius) and in almost every garden. The huge prop roots startled my kids who thought they looked kinda creepy. They wanted to try eating the fruit but I believe it is inedible although I will do some research into that. Of course there were palms everywhere - it would be a good business to get into up Noosa way - collecting palm fronds because they are very hard to dispose of and take up a lot of room in the average garden. I saw huge cycads in many gardens (they made me green with envy) and lots of crotons, Agave attenuata, bouganvilleas, ardisias with their crops of red berries and lots of lillypillys (Syzygium or Waterhousia or Acmena) commonly used as hedging. They've had a very dry winter on the Sunshine Coast so consequently the countryside was looking quite dry and brown. Quite a change when we finally arrived home (3 days and 1800kms later!) to find that we've had quite a bit of rain while we were away and its really green here! Best winter/spring rain we've had in over a decade.

Have had a quick walk around the garden to marvel at the amount of growth in 2 weeks but haven't had a chance to look closely. More on that in future blogs!

Holidays

2009-09-23T19:22:00.002+10:00

Frantic preparations for going on holidays has seen me potting the last of my indoor plants into pots with a water reservoir. I've also potted on some lavender cuttings that were getting too big for their tubes and some cistus cuttings growing out of their 6" pots. Both plants are for school where they have shown their worth by being hardy, tough but attractive plants for many years. I also treated two of my thuja hedge that have been looking worse for the wear in recent months. At first I thought it might be a lack of water and so gave them a good soak. That didn't work so I treated them with a seaweed solution which made no difference. It occurred to me that it might be a fungal root infection so I have sprayed both trees with a Yates product called 'Anti Rot' that is supposed to rid a plant of phytophthora and collar rot. I also gave them a dose of more seaweed solution (which stimulates root growth) and a liquid feed. I know you're not supposed to feed a sick or stressed plant but I figured a liquid feed is fairly gentle. I also rushed around pruning some of my Australian natives that have just finished flowering like correas and acacias and pruned last years growth off some indigenous helichrysums.
I have planted some plants that I acquired on the weekend at the Mt. Macedon Horticultural Society's annual plant fair. I wasn't going to buy anything because planting at this time of the year is fraught with stress for the next 6 months but I couldn't resist. I bought a lovely Lobelia gibberoa from Yamina Rare Plants which comes from Kenya and can get to 2m in height. I also bought a salvia, an African phlomis, a NZ pimelea, Acacia aphylla and Prostanthera aspalathoides which I have had before but have lost. It has a red flower unlike most prostantheras which have mauve or white flowers.
Anyway I must go and pack so I may not post while I am away. It depends on internet access. Queensland here I come!

Mediterranean Garden Society

2009-09-20T20:29:00.009+10:00

I hosted a visit from the Victorian branch of the Mediterranean Garden Society yesterday. The MGS is an international group dedicated to gardening in tune with their Mediterranean climate with plants that can cope, rather than fighting the climate by adding huge amounts of water to keep unsustainable landscapes going.
The association was founded in Greece in 1994 and "acts as a forum for everyone who has a special interest in the plants and gardens of mediterranean climate regions." The society also publishes a fabulous quarterly journal and maintains a garden called 'Sparoza' just outside Athens which members can visit. Mediterranean climates can be found in the countries that surround the Mediterranean Sea, Southern California, South Africa, the west coast of Central Chile, the SW of Western Australia and the southern parts of South Australia. As climate change continues its inexorable march, more countries may experience this type of climate - indeed it seems parts of Victoria are already feeling more Mediterranean by the day. It was great to get together with other gardeners and discuss the vagaries of gardening in an increasingly drier climate. Swapping success stories and learning from each other's failures is what its all about! If you live in a Mediterranean climate you should consider joining this worthwhile group.

The first photo shows me (second from the right) bragging about the growth of my fabulous furcraea (the spiky thing next to the water bowl) to some of the members and their friends. Also in the shot is a beaucarnea (on the left) and my wonderful river of silvery Cotyledon orbiculata which I never cease to rave about. All these plants are extremly drought tolerant. The second photo shows the members standing in my yellow and blue garden with a yellow forsysthia on the right. The forsythia is not particularly drought tolerant and therefore struggles a bit in my garden.

This photo shows the revamped garden bed beneath our bedroom window. Quite a few people expressed an interest in this bed. This bed faces due north and is the hottest, driest bed in the garden. I replanted this bed in April as I had to pull everything out when I repainted this end of the house. Everything in this bed is succulent as it is up against the house (succulents are hard to burn) and north is the direction from which a bushfire would be likely to come. You can see my collection of named aeoniums across the back. Then from the left there is a dwarf white agapanthus, Cotyledon macrantha, Senecio serpens, Echeveria 'Black Prince', Yucca filamentosa, a dudleya (I think), Cotyledon orbiculata 'Silver Waves', a corpuscularia, another echeveria, Beschorneria yuccoides etc. Around the edge I have planted double rows of small rosetting echeverias and sempervivums just to see how they perform. All I have to do now is mulch this bed with an inorganic mulch like gravel. We have a nice one available around here called 'Tuscan Toppings' which is a creamy tan coloured sandstone and should look good.

You can see that the 'lawn' has all but disappeared. We have not been allowed to water lawns with mains water here for the last few summers and this is the result. What should I replace the lawn with? Kikuyu grass? Soft leaf buffalo grass? (which would have to be handwatered with water from the dam probably fortnightly). Synthetic turf? Gravel?

Spring Flowers

2009-09-16T20:54:00.005+10:00

Its been an intense few days as I tried to carry out all the jobs in the garden that would normally take a week. I am expecting a gardening club to visit this Saturday and suddenly I realised that there was no time and the weeds are everywhere and my children cannot be cajoled into helping! Other commitments meant yesterday was the big day and I worked from 6.30am to 6pm. After working at school today I came home and worked another couple of hours until it got dark. The garden is not finished (when is it ever finished?) but it will have to do because I am working the next couple of days.

This didn't stop me from taking time out to photograph a few special things that are looking good to share with you. In the first photo you can see the sky blue flowers of a rosemary and the pale blue flowers of an ipheion. I think the rosemary is a cultivar called 'Mozart' which was apparently selected by a nurseryman in California and named after the street in which his nursery stood in Los Gatos. It grows really well for me in a dry spot and flowers profusely every spring and also provides heaps of leaves for all my lamb roasts! The ipheion is I think uniflorum and has survived a recent move. It comes from Argentina and is a reliable bulb coming up year after year.

The second photo is of Deutzia gracilis which came to me labelled as white and then startled me when it first flowered by being pink. It was promply moved out of my 'white garden' and has thrived ever since although it does better with a little extra moisture. It looks fantastic when in bloom then pretty drab for the rest of the year. It suckers too.

The third photo shows a Ferula communis at the base of the deutzia. The hollow stems of the flower spike of this giant fennel were reputedly used to transport the glowing coals at Olympia in Greece as part of the ancient olympics. The ferula has great ferny green foliage (there is a more glaucous form too) and the flower spikes are metres in height with typical yellow fennel flowers.

Australian Landscape Conference

2009-09-13T20:23:00.002+10:00

I have just spent an uplifting two days at the Australian Landscape Conference held in Melbourne. This conference has been held every two years since 1989 and I think I've been to every one (bar the very first at which Christopher Lloyd and Beth Chatto spoke and which people today still speak about in hushed tones). This years conference starred Rosemary Alexander (UK), Nancy Power (US), Josh Byrne (AUS), Stephanie Alexander (AUS), Ed Snodgrass (US), Marta Montero (Argentina), Thomas Wolz (US), Arnaud Maurieres and Eric Ossart (France) and James Broadbent (AUS). Once again it was a fantastic experience to hear from luminaries in the fields of garden design, landscape architecture and horticulture from both home and abroad.
Sometimes you need to stop navel gazing and look outside your own backyard to see what other people are doing. It is also a terrific chance to meet others and mingle/network - call it what you will. Rosemary spoke about current trends, leading designers and the gardens she has been responsible for over the last few decades. She also did a second talk on colour in the garden. Nancy gave us a potted history of garden design in California and a second talk on various Californian gardens. Josh is well known to all Australians for his appearances on Gardening Australia but did you know he is doing his PhD on integrated water systems for sustainable urban use?! Stephanie is known as a fantastic cook but she is also the instigator for a program that delivers the art of growing vegetables (and cooking them) to primary aged children across the country. Ed is the green roof king in the US and he spoke about his projects and how a green roof actually works. Marta spent many years working with the legendary landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx in Brazil. Thomas Wolz is a landscape architect involved in some of the biggest projects I have ever seen in both his home country of the US and in New Zealand. Maurieres and Ossart are two guys who spent nearly a decade designing gardens in France and then moved to Morocco for fresh inspiration! After having lived there for a decade they are now considering Mexico! James is described as a cultural historian and he gave a lyrical plea for gardens considered 'the small, the old and the ordinary'. He certainly had a way with words!
Gardening can become an inward looking obsession (which the internet and gardening blogs now go some way to alleviate) but there is no substitute for the face to face contact with other keen gardeners and the leading lights of our various disciplines. I had a great time, learnt a lot and look forward to the next conference which will hopefully be in 2011.
www.landscapeconference.com

Lavender

2009-09-08T16:36:00.005+10:00

I love lavender. Who doesn't? I particularly like the new cultivars that have the cute little topknot of bracts that flutter in the breeze. I took this photo yesterday (when the sun was out because at the moment it is pouring - yay!) and it shows a cultivar of Lavandula pedunculata called 'Lavender Lace'. It is one of PGA's introductions and it has grown very well in my garden - even surviving a move a couple of years ago! This cultivar is a very early flowering lavender - a species we normally think flowers in late spring/early summer. It grows about 70cm X 70cm and is a splash of colour in my garden at the moment. I also grow another early flowering lavender called 'Pukehoe' which originated in New Zealand. It isn't flowering yet but I think thats because I gave it a late autumn haircut and it is still struggling to catch up. Pukehou is a bigger cultivar getting to 1m X 1m. I have found that if you shear the flowers off as soon as they have finished you will get another (smaller) display in late summer. Shearing them each year keeps the bushes compact and encourages lots of new growth which in turn produces lots of flowers. PGA also grow the smaller (60cm) 'Ruffles' range that were bred in Australia. There is Boysenberry Ruffles, Sugarberry, Blueberry, Mulberry and Peachberry - sounds like a gelati selection doesn't it?! I have grown a couple of these and they too are very cute with a ruffled topknot of bracts.
All lavenders appreciate a sharp well drained soil and are very drought tolerant when established. I did try to take a photo of the bees on the flowers but they wouldn't stay still long enough or present their best side to the camera! I don't think you really want to see the bee's backside do you?

New Job!

2009-09-06T17:54:00.003+10:00

Finally I get a chance to sit down in front of the computer! Since I last posted its been a case of no rest for the wicked! I worked at school on Thursday (shifting 8 Manchurian pears - a whole other story!) and then on Friday I started a new job! I have commenced work at a local nursery - not just any nursery but Australia's Best Small Garden Centre as decided by the Nursery and Garden Industry of Australia no less! Its a busy place with a constant stream of people and I'll be working there 2 or 3 days a week. Its great to talk to gardeners 'at the coal face' as it were and see what plants people are going for. The vegetable seedlings were selling well and it was terrific to see a mother and her small son coming in for advice on what vegetables to grow from seed and what to grow from seedlings as they were starting their very first vegetable garden together. Quite a lot of parents came in with their children who delight in exploring the nursery. One mum let her kids choose one small plant each "they can choose one each time we visit" she told me. What a wonderful way to instill a love of plants in children. They may not be so keen as they get older, but one day their memories of going with mum to the nursery will return and the gardening flame may well be reignited!

Banksias

2009-09-02T13:52:00.004+10:00

I have been reading about Joseph Banks (1743-1820) in a wonderful book called "The Flower Hunters" by Mary and John Gribbin. Apart from spotting a mistake (there is no banksia species called arctinotus commonly known as the flannel flower - they got a few things muddled up there!) the chapter reminded me just how much of a debt of gratitude we owe Banks' grandfather who had the good fortune to marry an heiress! Banks was such a wealthy man he was able to indulge in his passion for all things botanical and of course famously accompanied Captain Cook on his first voyage to explore the southern ocean.

To cut a long story short we now have an entire genus named after him and I grow several species in my garden quite successfully. The first photo shows the curious possum banksia (Banksia baueri) almost smothered by its conical 'blooms' if you could call them that. They really do look like small possums crouched in the centre of the shrub! The second photo shows just how big each individual cone can be and thats not a particularly big one! The honeyeaters love banksias and there are always a couple about when I am outside.

The third photo is of a ground covering banksia called B. blechnifolia where the leaves look like those of a blechnum (fern). It spreads by producing creeping stems that end in a new cone. The picture shows last years cone on the left and a new cone emerging on the right. Banksias are such tough undemanding plants and there are about 76 species to choose from. One day I hope to grow B. coccinea in my garden. Its dramatically red cones stood out like torches when I saw them growing in the wild in the bush in Western Australia several years ago. I am onto my second plant here and so far it looks ok - mind you I thought that about the first specimen until the day it turned up its toes!

Weeping Apricot

2009-08-30T19:46:00.005+10:00

It was time for the weeping apricot's (Prunus mumé 'Pendula') annual prune. Today on the last official day of winter as it lost its last blossom, out came my secateurs and the loppers! The first photo shows what my tree looked like 4 weeks ago. It started flowering during the first week of June and finished (more or less) three months later which I think is phenomenal value for a blossom tree! Many flowering cherries (while they look stunning) last less than 4 weeks so to get 3 months is terrific.

By pruning my tree hard every year I keep the tree to a manageable size. It also forces the tree to put on lots of fresh growth which then happens to produce lots of flowers the following year. My tree is now about 15 years old and was one of the first trees we planted in our garden. I carefully pruned every weeping wand to an upward and outward facing bud and removed everything that was growing inwards, downwards or sideways. What will happen now is that as the leaf buds break, the naked branches will be clothed in fuzzy green growth and I will briefly have a 'mop-top' in my garden. Then over spring and summer the branches will lengthen and the characteristic wands will reappear. By next autumn these wands will be brushing the surface of the earth. This tree does so well because any rain that falls on the drive or path, sits around the apricot's bed until it soaks in - its about the only plant in my garden thats on easy street! I decided to remove everything that was growing beneath the tree to show it off to its best advantage and replaced them with a mass planting of the groundcover Erigeron 'Elsie'. The idea is 'Elsie' will start to flower as the apricot finishes. The trouble is these cuttings taken months ago have only just started to form roots - and summer is not far away! The best laid plans....

Here it is, the very last flower (sob!)

Indoor Plants (again!)

2009-08-28T18:52:00.004+10:00

I was finally able to visit a wholesale plant nursery yesterday to buy some indoor plants. I took some of them down to my in-laws and they were thrilled with them. Hopefully they will improve the air quality inside their house. The rest of the plants I bought home and unloaded from my car (first photo). I think I went a bit overboard. Now I have to pot them all up into pots that have a water reservoir or well in the bottom. And I have to buy the pots first after having spent all my money on the plants! I have picked a range of different plants (second photo) including parlour palms, spathiphyllums, dracaenas, ferns and aspidistras. I felt I should stick to plants I knew would be fairly foolproof. I eyed off a Ficus lyrata, a devil's ivy, some fabulous (but expensive) bromeliads and some large palms but regretfully left them behind.

I am particularly taken with a dracaena called 'Janet Craig' (third photo). I gather it is popular with the indoor plant hire companies because it will take low light situations. This is good as my study is not brightly lit and that is exactly where it is going to go. I still think it will benefit from a growing light for some of the day so that is the next thing I will be hunting down. Meantime all the plants are sitting in the middle of my kitchen and the cats think they have an instant jungle in which to play!

Acacia 'Scarlet Blaze'

2009-08-24T13:44:00.005+10:00

I was thrilled to notice that 'Scarlet Blaze' was in full bloom this morning. Acacia 'Scarlet Blaze' is its full correct name and it is Australia's only red flowered wattle. All our 1000 plus wattles are without exception cream or yellow so this one really stands out!

For those who don't know the story, 'Scarlet Blaze' was discovered by a couple of bushwalkers growing in forest north-east of Melbourne in 1995. It is a red flowered form of Acacia leprosa the cinnamon wattle. They had the presence of mind to bring a piece back to the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne who were able to successfully propagate this unusual wattle - which is pretty amazing because all wattles germinate from seed and trying any other means of propagation would have been a venture into the unknown. It is just as well they were successful because the original tree has since perished. Nobody seems to know why it is red but it is so special it was chosen to be Victoria's floral emblem for the Centenary of Federation celebrations in 2001. The anthers are a pinky red colour but the dusting of golden pollen on their ends makes the entire flower look a bit orangey. I think Scarlet Blaze is an apt description.

The wattle in the pictures is in my garden and is about my third or fourth attempt to grow this tree. This is its third year but I am not uncrossing my fingers just yet! Then when I thought the day couldn't get any better these two wild ducks came to visit my wooden ducks beside the dam! I wonder what they chatted about?!

Crassulas

2009-08-23T14:01:00.003+10:00

Its been a hectic few days of ballet exams, work, a hort media function and yesterday was my 30 year school reunion! So today was the first time to get out into the garden for ages it seems.

It must be spring as my Crassula 'Springtime' is in full bloom (first photo). It is in flower every year about this time without fail and among my collection of succulents in pots it really stands out. I have a few crassulas in my collection including both C. dubia 'Silver Spoon' and C. falcata which both have greyish leaves and do well in a pot.

I love C. lycopodioides (second photo) which struggled in a pot until I found it it didn't really like full sun so when I gave it some shade in the afternoon it really perked up. However this diminutive little plant really hit its straps when I planted it in the garden. Cuttings shoved in the ground in a part shade (but dry) situation have done really well and have formed an intriguing groundcover. I particularly like this plant because its species name refers to the genus Lycopodium the club mosses (possibly now called Huperzia). I once worked at a place where these were grown in hanging baskets in a nursery and their ferny foliage and ancient lineage (they go back further than the dinosaurs!) fascinated me. I can't possibly grow a Lycopodium here so this crassula is the next best thing.

I also grow a red crassula called (I think) 'Flame' (third photo complete with aphids). I spotted it at MIFGS one year and had to have it but my plant has never grown as well as it could. It flowers and then the entire plant reduces in size. It never seems to really get going. Perhaps I just haven't grown it in the right place yet. Perhaps I should try putting it in the ground......

Seasons

2009-08-20T16:40:00.003+10:00

I've been thinking a lot about the seasons. About how the seasons here never seem to match what is 'supposed to be' according to the English model. In Kakadu National Park the Bininj/Mungguy people recognise 6 seasons that are absolutely connected to what is happening in their environment. Everyone else just says there is a wet and a dry (and some people talk about 'the buildup').
Down here we are supposed to have 4 seasons of three months each. Tim Entwisle based in Sydney talks in his blog about recognising spring in Aug and Sept; pre-summer Oct, Nov; summer Dec, Jan, Feb, March; autumn April, May and winter June and July. Its much the same here except I call Aug pre-spring with Sept, Oct and Nov being spring because our climate is a bit cooler than Sydney's climate. It can be hot here in Nov but it can be quite cold too. The BATH doesn't think Dec should be part of summer - he thinks it is really pre-summer. Jan, Feb and March are definitely summer (its always stinking hot when school goes back!) and April and May are autumn which means we have a very short winter of only two months - how good is that?! Winter to me always seems to be over before it gets started. These days I seem to wait and wait for it to get cold and it just doesn't anymore. I hardly put a woollen jumper on during June and July this year. It would be interesting to hear the thoughts on this subject from gardeners elsewhere in the country.

Here is my model for Central Victoria
Aug: daffodils and wattle flowers, birds start to mate; the grass starts to grow, windy weather
Sept Oct Nov: trees leaf up, other flowers come out, birds nest, grass growing madly
Dec to March: growth slows and flowering finishes as heat climbs, lawns brown off, birds disappear, no rain - plants are stressed
April and May: as the weather cools the garden (and gardeners!) come slowly back to life, usually some rain, leaves fall, calm weather
June and July: growth continues slowly - seedlings pop up, lawn regreens, birds reappear

Cat Proof Herbs

2009-08-18T20:16:00.002+10:00

I was growing my herbs in a triple terracotta pot assemblage but found even having sealed the pots inside, they still dried out too fast in the heat of summer. So when I saw this nifty plastic tub at MIFGS (Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show) I snapped it up in an instant. It incorporates a type of water-well system filled by means of the tube at the end (you can just make it out) and excess water flows out the weep holes down the sides. I transplanted what remained of my oregano and thyme and bought a new parsley plant to go in the tub. Carefully potted up and mulched with sugarcane I thought the cats wouldn't go near it. How wrong I was. Cats can smell potting mix through sugar scented mulch and they were instantly sitting on the pot and pooing in the pot after having scraped off half the mulch. I tried sprinkling the pot with a dog and cat deterrent - didn't work. I tried perching a plastic pot tray over the tub but the cat sat on it and knocked it off. I tried sprinkling the tub with orange peel - didn't work. In desperation I grabbed a packet of satay sticks and poked them all over the pot. Bingo! As long as I check it daily and make sure the cats haven't dislodged the sticks it is managing to keep them off. I also offered the cats some potting mix of their own mixed in with ordinary litter in their litter tray on the deck and they seem to prefer this. The photo shows a disgruntled Hazel posing to have her photo taken! Victory - fresh herbs outside the kitchen window not perfumed with the scent of eau de chat!

Ouch!

2009-08-17T14:52:00.002+10:00

A tumble in the garden today reminded me that we all probably take safety in the garden for granted - until something happens. Well something happened to me today. I was taking the compost bucket, the chook scraps bucket and the coffee grounds bucket down the back to empty them. With my mind on other things I went to step over a temporary fence erected to keep the chooks out of the nursery and fell flat on my face when my foot caught on the top of the fence. Whoops! And of course my knee landed on a sharp piece of stone hidden by a large recent deposit left by one of the chooks. Not just ouch but yuk too! The cut on my knee is now nicely covered with a neat cross of bandaids (I didn't think you really wanted to see a photo) and I've washed the chook poo off the trousers, hands and elbows.

Lesson One: Do something about that temporary fence!
Lesson Two: Tidy away other potential hazards like superseded compost heap components (my head nearly hit them)
Lesson Three: Don't carry more than you can safely manage! Leave a hand free to grab a post when you climb over a fence!

Rain

2009-08-16T17:21:00.003+10:00

It rained today. How obsessed with rainfall am I that a downpour is worthy of a remark in a blog! We've been keeping tabs on the rainfall here since we built our house in 1993. Every time it rains we note the amount on a sheet drawn up on the computer by the BATH. So we now have annual rainfall figures for the last 16 years. What this shows us is that the average annual rainfall for the last 100 years (officially about 630mm) has changed significantly over the last 13 years. Over the last 13 years it has averaged about 380mm (about 15 inches for all you Yanks!) and this has turned us all into a household of rainwatchers. Even my kids know how to look up the rain radar on the Bureau of Meterology's website! "Mum its starting to rain, what does BOM say?" Well I have concluded that what BOM is showing us is a forcefield around the particular town where I live. We regularly watch promising bands of showers heading our way disperse and disappear. Enormous thunderstorms with lots of yellow patches (indicating heavy rain) dodge our town and rain on the next town. The radar will show a blue patch centred on our town but when I look out the window there is nothing happening. Today in the car on the way home from visiting relatives my eldest said "what if we got all the rain in the world for one day to rain on Australia would that break the drought?" Possibly I thought - but it probably still wouldn't rain where we live!

Aloes

2009-08-14T20:59:00.007+10:00

I was wowed by the three flowers on my aloe that I photographed yesterday morning (first photo). I bought it three years ago from Lyle Filippe at Roraima Nursery in Lara near Geelong. He had a long bank of them in the central bed of his carpark and when I visited they were in full magnificent bloom in July that year (second photo). Aloe arborescens x ferox is a great bird attractor when in bloom (can you see the honeyeater in the second photo? he turned his head away at precisely the moment I took the photo!). My plant had no flowers the first year, a solitary flower in its second year and now three this year! It is planted in the corner of an extremely dry bed where it receives baking sun almost all day. It has never looked back from the day I planted it and I am hoping it will fill its allotted corner as it is the latest in a long line of deceased plants which have gone before it! This aloe comes from South Africa and its spines are strangely soft - they look fierce but they're not.

Aloes appear to be on their way up judging by the increasing numbers of species being seen in nurseries. Including one Qld nursery that is releasing gorgeous named cultivars that I am dying to get my hands on! I have quite a few species of aloe in my garden now. I have several pots of the fascinating Aloe polyphylla - because I love its perfect spiral form. Mine don't seem to want to grow like that though - they just seem to want to keep having pups rather than staying single and growing large! I am also fond of Aloe plicatilis (third photo): cuttings of which were given to me by a great friend. The way its leaves are pressed togther like the pages of a book never fails to catch my eye, which is just as well because it's flower is an uninspiring shade of orange.

http://www.roraimanursery.com.au/

Garden Design in Bushfire Zones

2009-08-13T16:00:00.004+10:00

I've been looking at the amount of information available to gardeners wanting to restart their gardens after the devastation of Black Saturday earlier this year. At first it seemed there wasn't a lot out there but the more I delved the more I have found. There is a lot of information about the new building regulations and how to build a bushfire resistant house, but you have to dig deeper to find anything but the most general mention usually consisting of "keep trees a safe distance from the house". There is a great book I got to look at called "Landscape and Building Design for Bushfire Areas" by Caird Ramsay and Lisle Rudolph put out in 2003 by CSIRO Publishing. It takes quite an indepth look at how the house should relate to the immediate landscape and the landscape beyond the garden fence. The NGIV (Nursery and Garden Industry Victoria) has also put out a terrific document called "Rebuilding Safer Communities" available on their website at http://www.ngiv.com.au/ and the SGA (Sustainable Gardening Australia) have some great info as well at http://www.sgaonline.org.au/info_bushfires.html and more information may well be in the pipeline in the future from a few other sources.

A bushfire resistant garden is a lot more than no trees, inorganic mulches and no flammable plants. It would be worthwhile for every gardener in a bushfire zone (not just those rebuilding) to have a good look at these resources. Summer is not far away.

Pre-Spring - Yellow Time

2009-08-12T11:12:00.008+10:00

A walk around the garden this morning in glorious sunshine after the fog had lifted, showed me that pre-spring is really here. This season is something that gardeners are only just beginning to recognise. Instead of saying each year "oh aren't the wattles out early" we have begun to realise that our seasons aren't strictly in accordance with the four seasons found in Europe. The period of pre-spring starts in late July for me and lasts about 4 to 5 weeks - about as long as the daffodils are in bloom. It also seems to be a peculiarly yellow time of the year as you can see by my photos! The first photo is of a yellow wallflower Erysimum sp. which flowers prolifically for me, then goes steadily downhill as the moisture runs out. The second is of a yellow daisy called Euryops sp. that has struggled valiantly in a dry spot for over a decade. The third photo is of the daffodils planted beside the fence around the vegetable garden and the fourth photo is of a magnificent wattle called Acacia adunca which is literally smothered with blossom at the moment. Other yellow flowering plants I spotted include the aeoniums with their cone shaped flower heads, the mahonia, a tagetes still going since autumn and the forysthia is about to burst into bloom very soon. A very sunny time of the year indeed!

How exciting - I'm not the only one to discuss our incongruous seasons. I've just discovered Tim Entwisle blogged about this topic only yesterday at his blog:- talkingplants.blogspot.com

X Mahoberberis

2009-08-10T18:44:00.003+10:00

I decided I was going to write about Berberis darwinii today (first photo). But then I discovered it is proving to be somewhat weedy in parts of Tasmania. I am always particularly careful to check whether a plant is considered weedy in this country or is a banned import according to Australian Quarantine because if it is I won't write about it. So then I turned my attention to other members of the Berberidaceae family. I came across X Mahoberberis which rang a faint bell. I seem to remember that the botanists are arguing whether all the mahonias should be subsumed (gobbled up by) the genus berberis. I believe the argument is still raging. One of the reasons they are considering doing this is because some species of mahonia and berberis are capable of hybridising (having sex togther!).

The result of Berberis sargentiana and Mahonia aquifolium (second photo) getting into bed with each other is X Mahoberberis aquisargentii (third photo). The X in front of the genus indicates it is an intergeneric hybrid: a somewhat rare occurrence in nature. I thought Stephen Ryan might be selling them at his nursery Dicksonia Rare Plants so I gave him a ring. It turned out he had imported two plants from different sources and was growing them in his garden. An hour later I had photos of the said plant in the camera. It is a very strange plant! The one bush had leaves of several different types on it ranging from leaves with an entire (untoothed) margin to leaves that looked like a holly leaf and just as spiky! It would make a great impenetrable hedge! So this will be a topic to write about at some stage but not today because it wasn't in flower. I ended up writing about Canarina canariensis but that is a whole other story!

More on Frost

2009-08-09T17:14:00.007+10:00

It looked like it was going to be another frosty night but the clouds came over and a frost didn't eventuate. The first two photos are from yesterday morning and illustrate the difference between a mulched bed and bare earth when it comes to frost. The play area is covered with a thick layer of tanbark and so is always covered with a heavy layer of frost (first photo). The log in the second photo defines the limit of the tanbark and shows bare earth to its right before giving way to lawn. Note the bare earth has no frost on it at all. The theory is (I think) that bare soil is a darker colour and absorbs more heat during the day thereby making it less susceptible to frost. This is good for plants helping them to maintain some growth with slightly warmer soil. I know of some gardeners who remove the mulch layer from their garden beds every autumn and replace it in late spring for this very reason. I think this amount of effort may only be worth it for marginally frost hardy plants. I think there is also a difference between bare soil being compacted and fluffed up - I think the fluffed up one gets more frost on it - probably because of all the little air pockets in the soil.

I checked my Prostanthera magnifica again today. Its tips are still nodding but not as badly as yesterday (third photo) and the leaves look ok. I hope it will be allright because it will be coming into flower soon and as its name suggests, it has magnificent flowers!

Frost

2009-08-08T13:06:00.006+10:00

We were woken at 5.36 this morning by a shrill beeping. My befuddled brain was thinking "I'm sure I didn't bring my mobile in here last night!" It appeared to be coming from the central heating vent and I'm madly throwing clothes aside in an effort to locate the vent. Then I realised it was coming from above the vent - the window sill in fact. I pulled aside the curtain to find our outdoor thermometer was flashing zero degrees celsius. I must have inadvertently set the alarm to go off when it reached zero. I didn't even know it had an alarm! Eventually I worked out how to turn it off and we returned to bed. "Must be a frosty night" I thought.
I got up at 7.30am and took the camera out into the garden. It had been a doozy of a frost - even the surface of the water bowl (second photo) was frozen! I took quite a few photos and was silently praying for a few things that looked a little sad. The Flanders poppies looked very sad (first photo) but a few hours later they are fine. Not so the Prostanthera magnifica - hours later the tip growths are still bent over as if in prayer. I did remember to throw an old towel over the strobilanthes last night and it is fine: still producing the odd flower now and then. The leaves of the aeoniums appeared to be frozen stiff at 7.30am yet look okay now. They've lasted a few years here so I don't have any qualms about them except the low clumping one called Green Carpet: only time will tell if it has survived.

Eriocephalus

2009-08-07T16:20:00.005+10:00

I’ve been growing the Cape snow bush or wild African rosemary for 10 years now and it’s a tough, drought tolerant, evergreen shrub that deserves more notice. Eriocephalus africanus came to me with the vague comment “I think its some sort of woolly thyme.” Purchased at one of the Growing Friends (Friends of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne) popular twice yearly plant sales; I did a little research and discovered it had nothing to do with thyme! It is known for its fragrance though, according to one reference it smells a little like Vicks! I have found that if you close your eyes and inhale deeply and use your imagination, I guess you could say it is a little like Vicks!

This plant is well adapted to living in a dry environment; coming as it does from South Africa. The tiny needle shaped leaves (some ‘branch’ at the end) are in bunches of 6-8 on the stem and measure about 1cm in length. They are grey-green which reflects the sunlight and they are covered in minute hairs which trap moisture and thus reduce transpiration. The plant reputedly produces a tap root that can penetrate down to 6m and lateral roots are close to the surface and spread outwards to 2m. Eriocephalus africanus is in the Asteraceae (daisy family) and there are about 30 other species in the genus. It is immediately apparent that the Cape snow bush is a type of daisy when the flowers are produced in winter as it is doing now. The small white ‘petals’ surround a tiny circle of purplish florets and the entire bush is smothered with them for weeks; almost to the extent that the bush looks like it is covered with a blanket of snow. The bees love the flowers and my bush is never without a few bees hanging around. Frost has never bothered my plant which is growing vigorously in full sun in a raised dry garden bed in poor hydrophobic soil.

The fruits that follow the flowers are covered in what looks like fluff and is responsible for the genus name: erion is Greek for wool and kephale means a head aka ‘woolly heads’. When the bush is covered these too look a little like snow and is responsible for the common name in Afrikaans ‘kapokbos’ as the word kapok refers to snow. If left unchecked this shrub will grow to about 1m X 1m (possibly a bit more) and produces long thin branches that are covered with flowers. If you shear the shrub hard after flowering as I do and again in mid summer; it becomes more compact and the flowers are produced more evenly across the outside of the bush.

Verandah Plants

2009-08-05T16:18:00.004+10:00

I was taking a good look at the plants on my verandah today. When you reach the top of the steps to our front door the third photo is the sight that meets you to the right of the door. This collection of plants arrived in dribs and drabs over a few years as a bit of an experiment. Its experimental because I wasn't sure whether the sorts of plants I wanted would survive on the north facing verandah as it gets to over 40 degrees in summer and below zero with frosts in winter. I wanted something lush and tropical looking because this spot is the only place on our entire block where I thought I could do this type of planting.

I decided I needed something tall and when I discovered the Cordyline petiolaris at Kuranga Native Nursery I decided it might just work. It has more than fulfilled my expectations. Like all the plants except the bromeliads it's in a waterwell pot and gets repotted every second year. As you can see its getting pretty tall and it even flowers for me now. The only problem is that on windy days the leaves thrash about a bit and the resultant damage does show a bit (brown tips, bent leaves and petioles). The variety of bromeliads came from friends, markets, nurseries etc.. With most I don't know their genus but they all delight me when they flower and every one is different. The spider plants Chlorophytum sp. reminded me of early growing attempts when I was a child (what a great plant for children to grow - absolutely bullet proof!) and the liriope are for their fine green strappy foliage. There is a cycad, variegated dracaena and livistona palm in there as well.

Early on I decided that keeping the humidity up in this area would probably benefit all the plants so I bought a little recirculating fountain (first photo) which bubbles away quietly in the middle and hardly needs any maintenance. Recently I've added the red flowering begonia and its been fine with the cold weather so far (second photo) it sits next to a gorgeous bromeliad with dark spotty foliage. In summer a frog takes up residence in what can only be described as a frog paradise and it croaks loudly in the evenings. We added the trellis (in the far right of the third photo) and this has just provided the little bit of extra protection the plants needed.

So all in all this assemblage of plants has worked really well! At Christmas I inject a bit of colour with a potted poinsettia or two and neither summer heat nor winter cold has been a drama!

Writing Topics

2009-08-04T21:26:00.002+10:00

Its been a busy few days glued to the computer. I love the way the topics I write about vary so much - it certainly keeps me on my toes! In the last week I have written about the Cooktown orchid, spring blossoming trees, vertical gardens, what I'm doing in my garden, indoor plants and the landscape industry! While researching a topic, I invariably discover something I didn't know. Even topics I'm reasonably familiar with - there is always something new to be learnt. For instance many gardeners will know that the Cooktown orchid is a species of dendrobium: but did you know it might be changing to vappodes?! And did you know that some 'spring' blossom trees actually start blooming in autumn? And vertical gardens are becoming so popular that you can buy them in modular form now - you stick them together a little like lego blocks! But thats gardening for you, an ever evolving ever changing green world. Best job in the world.

More on Indoor Plants

2009-08-02T17:45:00.002+10:00

I spent some time surfing the net today to see if I could find out about the most suitable type of lighting indoor plants need. My study is poorly lit and if I'm going to have indoor plants in here I think they're going to need some sort of supplementary lighting. There is a bewildering array of lighting for indoor plants out there I can tell you. Many related to growing plants hydroponically - specific plants that we won't talk about here.....;-)
I now understand that fluorescent lights are better than incandescent lights as a rule of thumb which is good because we've switched over to CFLs throughout the house. I've also discovered that plants use light mainly at the blue and red ends of the light spectrum. Great what next? I want to use LEDs as I think they are the way of the future. So can I get by with a cute little auto interior festoon light (with 6 white LEDs) from Dick Smith that the BATH can fix up on a stake for me or do I have to buy a 225 LED panel in blue and red? Whoah! Getting a bit technical for me - I'm only talking about one lousy plant here! Looks like more research is needed. Stay tuned.

Indoor Plants

2009-08-01T13:35:00.005+10:00

I had the very good fortune to hear Professor Margaret Burchett speak at a horticultural media function last night. She has spent a great deal of time at the University of Technology Sydney researching the ability of indoor plants to mop up VOCs (volatile organic compounds) from the air we breathe. Did you know that we spend 90% of our time indooors? (Well maybe avid gardeners are the exception to this rule but everyone else spends way more time indoors than many of us realise). And there is more pollution indoors because when the (already polluted) outdoor air enters a building, it mixes with pollution from indoor sources. Just about all the products in an average house or office give off VOCs - paint, particle board, carpets, plastics, synthetics etc which all contribute to 'sick building syndrome'. Prof Burchett and her fellow researchers have discovered that plants are capable of sucking out the bad stuff in the air making it better for us to breathe. And not just the plants but the microbes in the potting mix do this too - how cool is that! They tested 12 different plant species including spathiphyllums, dracaenas, sanseverias, philodendrons, palms, zamioculcas, scheffleras and epipremnum (it used to be known as pothos or devil's ivy) and found little difference between them! It seems it doesn't really matter what plant you use!

They also carried out an office study using 60 offices (half with plants and half without) and she writes in her handout "we found significant reductions in stress and overall depressive mood states with plant presence, including specific scores for tension, depression, anger, fatigue and confusion, plus increases in vigour, compared with participants without plants." This is fantastic news! Mind you us gardeners already knew that plants were doing a good job for us inside - perhaps we just didn't realise how good a job they do!

So how many plants do you need to accomplish this miracle? Studies have revealed that one large or two small plants per 30 sq m is sufficient. A large plant is a plant in a 300mm pot and a small plant is in a 200mm pot. I used to have quite a lot of indoor plants until the first child started to crawl and I had to put them out of reach and that was the beginning of the end. I'm thinking seriously of getting some more plants especially for my study which is full of materials that give off VOCs. After only a couple of hours in here I usually develop a slight headache (which yes I know maybe due to looking at the screen) but its worth a try. There is heaps more information at the website of Ambius who do a great line of indoor plants in groovy pots. Including a clip of Prof Burchett talking about this subject that is obviously very dear to her heart. Food for thought.

Sturt Desert Pea

2009-07-30T16:24:00.002+10:00

I was reminded of the Sturt desert pea this morning whilst doing the washing up. I have tiles around my kitchen imprinted with the image of this flower so it's a bit hard to ignore! If I said the other day that my very favourite flower was the flannel flower Actinotus helianthii then the desert pea comes a close second. I remember the first time I saw it in the wild. I was working as a cook for an outback tour company and we stopped one evening at Marla in northern South Australia. There in the bottom of a hole that had been excavated for a swimming pool was a mature plant of the desert pea in full spectacular bloom. Too far away to take any decent photos all we could do was stand and stare. It was many years before I finally got close enough to one to take some great photos (on film!). One of these I had blown up and it also resides in my kitchen. I have come across this amazing flower many more times since then, but it never fails to entrance me and I have tried to grow it here (with mixed success) a couple of times.

The desert pea used to be known as Clianthus formosus then the name Wildampia was proposed to honour William Dampier who collected the first specimen but in the end it was changed to Swainsona formosa. The specimens I have grown were all grafted onto the New Zealand native Clianthus puniceus (which is a fabulous plant in its own right) but I believe it can also be grafted onto Colutea arborescens. Purchasing the plant in spring is the best idea and I have grown one plant in the open for almost 12 months. It eventually succumbed not to frost, cold or wet feet but slugs and snails! It is a member of the pea family and snails and slugs love it. My plant was in potting mix in a terracotta cylinder so it had perfect drainage. It grew quite large and had heaps of flowers over many months. I was once asked to obtain some seeds of the desert pea for Whoopi Goldberg when she was touring many years ago. Who would have thought that such a famous person would know about our desert pea, let alone be interested in growing such a humble little Australian plant?! She asked some sensible questions about how to get the seed to germinate and how best to grow it on. Sadly I never found out whether she was successful or not.

Just Pottering

2009-07-29T15:04:00.004+10:00

I've had two solid days in front of the computer so I rewarded myself with some timeout in the garden today. Changing from the trakky daks into the grubby jeans reserved for gardening starts to put me in the right frame of mind. The mandatory cap and secateurs stuffed into the back pocket completes the ensemble. I set out to plant a few bits and pieces left over in my little nursery area. This led to a wholesale clean-up of the nursery - weeding of pots, chucking out of plants that have succumbed and rearranging of the rest. Then it was time for lunch - more yummy chicken and sweet corn soup!

After lunch I decided that a bit of weeding was called for (which the chooks were grateful for) and this turned into a wholesale cleanout of the bed on the south side of the house which is overun with sweet alyssum Lobularia maritima. It was looking very tatty although still gamely in flower. I pulled it all out and am sure in the knowledge I will have another carpet of alyssum there shortly judging by the number of seedlings coming up.

A trip to the chooks with an armful of weeds meant checking the vegetable garden and I decided to do some more planting in there. In went some carrots, spring onions and beetroot seeds next to the emerging seedlings of the crimson flowered broad beans (I was very late getting them in). The first photo is of last years crop. Then I threw a handful of potato fertiliser on the emerging garlic shoots (second photo). I figure if it claims to help potatoes it will help garlic too. Then it was back to the kitchen to collect a pair of scissors with which to harvest the enormous amount of rocket I have growing (third photo). Letting a couple of plants go to seed every season means I never have to buy seed or seedlings of this delicious salad green. I adore it!

Aussie Natives in Flower

2009-07-28T11:42:00.005+10:00

A stroll through my garden revealed some fabulous Australian natives in bloom in the middle of winter! Its a bright sunny day here with blue skies but a biting wind. Perforce the walk was shortened - besides its nearly lunchtime and I'm making chicken and sweetcorn soup for myself!

The first flower I noticed was the pink form of Correa alba (first photo). I was impressed at how good the hedges of Correa alba were outside the Exhibition Buildings in Melbourne many years ago, so I decided to grow one here. I spotted the pink form in a nursery and had to have it. The soft pink flowers look particularly good against the dove grey leaves.

The second flower was on Eremophila 'Winter Gold' (second photo) a reliable little shrub which never fails to delight every winter. I was once told the emu bushes should be very hardy in my area and this has proved to be the case with most of the cultivars I have chosen. The buds on 'Winter Gold' look attractive for weeks before they actually open, so you get a long season of enjoyment from it in an otherwise drab part of the garden.

The last flower was on a Hakea cucullata (third photo) and I nearly missed it because the shrub's branches are so high now and the flowers are hidden inside the cupped leaves. I am amazed I have been able to grow this Western Australian plant here, but after a decade it is now nearly 3m tall! The pink flowers are hidden away from human eyes although the honeyeaters have no trouble finding them.

The first daffodil has just opened too so although it is the middle of winter you can be assured that spring is on its way! I'm off to make soup!

Fountains

2009-07-27T19:24:00.004+10:00

Did anyone read Raymond Gill's diatribe against those with their hands on the stopcock in Saturday's A2 section of The Age newspaper? Forgive me for bringing it up now but it usually takes me a couple of days to wade through the Saturday paper. He was having a go at our civic leaders for turning off the fountains. While acknowledging that there is a drought/climate change happening he also talked about the healing effect that the sight of falling water can have on us: "there is nothing so replenishing, renewing and revitalising and other green sounding words as the sights and sounds of babbling brooks, sibilant streams and frothing fountains."

Apart from the evocative alliteration he has a point. I too miss the fountains and was very pleased when a few weeks ago our local council turned the Gisborne fountain back on after a couple of years of it sitting in the middle of a major intersection gathering dead leaves and rubbish. The fountain is now topped up with a local non-potable water source and has had a wind sensor installed so it turns off when the wind gets too strong (thereby denying passing motorists from receiving a free windscreen wash!) As I drove past it tonight I also noticed it has now been floodlit from below - it looked fabulous! So will other local councils please consider a non potable water source for their fountains? It seems pretty pointless to have a fountain without water in it.
Here is a link to the local paper to see a pic of the fountain and one very soggy mayor standing beneath it (what was he thinking?!?!)
http://www.macedonrangestelegraph.com.au/news/local/news/general/fountain-wish-comes-true/1560313.aspx

Aeoniums

2009-07-26T16:40:00.006+10:00

I started growing aeoniums during my childhood. I didn't know its name at the time, but one of the first pot plants I nurtured was Aeonium haworthii one of the hardiest and most widespread of the genus. This is a wonderful genus of succulents found mainly in the Canary Islands. They form large cabbage looking rosettes and occasionally produce cone shaped spires of yellow flowers. They are very well suited to our climate where many species go dormant during the warmer months (a pretty wise thing to do I reckon!). I have quite a few different species now and have recently set up one bed featuring them. This way I can compare size and form fairly easily. I am constantly on the lookout for a species that produces really LARGE rosettes - the bigger the better. I saw some used in gardens in California when I visited last year and I thought they looked fabulous!

Today I weeded the bed and planted some cuttings generously sent to me by another aeoniumphile (aeonium lover?!?!) The photos above are three of the species in my collection. The first might be A. arboreum, the second is an unknown species but I think the third (in my cute turtle pot!) is A. aureum. When it goes dormant in summer its little rosettes close up and become tulip shaped. I love it and I think I couldn't have chosen a better pot in which to grow it! I also grow several black cultivars. 'Zwartkop' is known as the Black Rose but I also grow 'Short Black' (a small version of 'Zwartkop') and 'Velour' (a paler version of 'Zwartkop'). These cultivars do well in a pot but I cannot keep them alive in the ground whereas A. arboreum 'Atropurpureum' has purplish tinges to its green leaves and does well in the ground. I'd love to know why 'Zwartkop' won't survive - its not as if I have soggy soil....

I've just heard from my aeoniumphile friend - he thinks the one in the middle is a hybrid of A. cuneatum sometimes referred to as 'Emerald Carpet'. I do love it when I can put a name to a plant!

Silver Princess

2009-07-25T20:48:00.004+10:00

You really should make it a habit to do a tour of your garden every day. Otherwise the little things pass you by. And its a great way of making yourself stop and take a few deep breaths. I almost missed the flowers on my gungurru (Eucalyptus caesia) as I perambulated around my Australian native section of the garden. This thin whippy tree from Western Australia is currently sporting several bunches of big fat buds up above eye level. Each bud is as big as a large cherry! This bunch of flowers (in the photo) was hanging just above the ground and I nearly missed it. This is a great tree reasonably widely grown throughout Melbourne. I think someone once wrote an article about the tree saying it came from an area where it grew in rocky outcrops, so consequently every tree you see usually has several large rocks around its base. Mine is no exception. I planted three tiny seedlings in the one hole beside a large local rock in an effort to produce a multi-trunked effect and they grew very well. Then tragedy struck. Every year just as it was about to flower, the trunk would snap off. This went on for over a decade and I was getting pretty peeved that I never saw one single flower! I asked Rodger Elliot once why this was happening and he explained that my tree may have been propagated from an inferior plant. He suggested planting a named clone like 'Silver Princess' which should give a better result. Well I took Rodger's advice and bought a 'Silver Princess' and planted it a couple of metres away. It was all the impetus my trio of trees needed! From then on they produced flowers every year! They do still occasionally snap off for no apparent reason but I do get flowers - and the 'Silver Princess' has flowers too - bonus! This is a great little tree with fabulous mahogany-coloured peeling bark on older trunks and powdery white bark on newer stems but it can be precocious. You have been warned!

Weeds

2009-07-23T22:29:00.005+10:00

It was a crisp winters day so I warmed up at school by doing some pruning and weeding. Twelve months ago I planted a row of gauras (Gaura lindheimeri) and anisodonteas (Anisodontea capensis) in a bed beside a north facing building. It is a dry area that is never watered and I thought these two species might be okay with that. Well they certainly were! The anisodonteas (I think its 'Tara's Choice' or 'Tara's Wonder') grew like the clappers as did the gauras that were in flower from spring through to autumn. We don't seem to have a lot of pretty pretty flowering plants at school which is the other reason I chose these plants. With the small but regular amounts of rain we've been getting over the last couple of months and the relatively mild weather, the plants and the weeds have grown apace. The anisodonteas have quadrupled in size and were smothering the gauras. A crop of stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) and common mallows (Malva neglecta) had appeared and even in midwinter because of the location a couple of patches of couch grass (Cynodon dactylon) were still green and growing.
The wretched mallows were almost waist height with roots as thick as my thumb and the couch roots had gone down a foot. At least the soil was moist down a fair ways so it was easy to dig. I spent an hour pulling all the weeds out, cutting the gauras back to their forest of new shoots and reducing the size of the anisodonteas by half. Like the salvias (previous post) the anisodonteas appear to be a bit fragile in a school setting - that or they're just growing too quickly and the weight of the branches makes them split. Even in the middle of winter they are carrying quite a few small pink flowers. The pruning will help to keep the bushes compact (and eventually produce more flowers) and might reduce the risk of splitting. Winter grass is coming up everywhere too but there was so much of that I'll have to go back on the weekend and spray it with some glyphosate. Its been great getting the rain but I could do without the weeds......

Yates Media Presentation

2009-07-22T17:35:00.005+10:00

As part of being in the horticultural media I occasionally get invited to media events. It's always great to catch up with colleagues as we all tend to live fairly solitary existences sitting in front of computers at home. Every year at about this time Yates have their media presentation and the inimitable Judy fills us all in on what Yates are doing for the next 12 months. I was very interested to see that Yates have a kids section on their website called Garden Greenies. There are games, easy projects, colouring sheets, how to grow factsheets etc.. I have to brag that I scored 9 out of 10 on the quiz and I only got one wrong because I wanted to see what happened when I picked the wrong answer!

Yates are also bringing out a book this spring especially for kids called 'Young Gardener' which will be available wherever Yates products are sold. Also in spring they will be advertising their Great Pumpkin Challenge. Last year they had the Great Watermelon Challenge which proved so popular that they ran out of watermelon seed! This year they have arranged to get a large enough quantity of 'Atlantic Giant' seeds (thats the cultivar that grows reeeeaaaallllly big pumpkins) and these will be available to children everywhere to see who can grow the biggest pumpkin. Yates are also giving grants to schools that garden in their schoolgrounds as well as Junior Landcare grants (see their website). As a parent keen to encourage the next generation of gardeners I think these are all fabulous ideas. The future of our planet rests on these very young shoulders and its never too early for kids to get down and get dirty!

I have found that encouraging kids to get into the garden is a bit of a hit and miss affair. Often when I organised myself to do something with my daughters and set aside the time they would not be interested. The best times were when on impulse they would join me in the garden and help sow seeds or plant bulbs or seedlings (never to pull out weeds!). Or they have been at a nursery with me and expressed a desire to buy a punnet of seedlings because the flowers appealed to them. My hope is that they will absorb some gardening lore through osmosis because I talk about it and they see me in the garden so much and they visit gardens and nurseries with me. So even if they're not that keen now (and they're not) I hope one day maybe they will. The lightbulb will go on and they'll think "so thats what mum was on about!" One day.

Moon Landing

2009-07-21T10:18:00.005+10:00

I awoke to the strains of David Bowie singing 'Space Oddity' this morning and was reminded that today is the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing. That must mean I was 7 years old when I was sent home from school to watch the landing on a neighbour's (black & white!) television because both my parents were at work. What on earth has this event got to do with gardening?!?!
Last year Dr Gregory Chamitoff took 4 different species of Australian native seeds with him into space on the Discovery Mission STS-124. Species represented were the Wollemi Pine (first photo), the Waratah (second photo) the Flannel Flower (my favourite Aussie native, third photo) and the Golden Wattle (fourth photo). The seeds spent 6 months in space and orbited the earth more than 2800 times (hope they didn't get too dizzy!) The seeds were subject to microgravity and low-level ionising radiation so quite a number of people were very interested to see whether any of them would come up once they were planted. Germination tests carried out at the Mt. Annan Botanic Gardens showed viability was not affected on three out of the four species - testing on the Wollemi Pine is still being undertaken (basically it is taking longer to come up than the others!)
“Microgravity alone has the capacity to discombobulate a seed so it doesn’t know which way to grow. Certainly this would be an issue for the seeds if they had been germinated up in Space but it seems, at this stage, that our seeds still know which way is up!” said Dr Tim Entwistle the Executive Director of the Botanic Gardens Trust. (Isn't discombobulate a great word!)
So this bodes well for future projects like a seedbank in space or for carrying seeds into space for a new settlement on a planet or a space station. Not something I think I will ever see in my lifetime, but maybe in my children's lifetime.......
"Ground Control to Major Tom"

MasterGardener

2009-07-20T08:56:00.003+10:00

With all the hoo-haa over a certain cooking show on the telly last night; I had the bright idea of pitching a much better show to the TV execs. How about MasterGardener! Ta da! Thousands of contestants from all over the country would line up in their droves and present their idea to a panel of judges and hope against hope that they are chosen to be one of the twenty contestants on MasterGardener!
Now who would be the judges? This could be a talking point around the office cooler/garden tap for a few weeks at least. Don Burke, Jamie Durie and Graham Ross all spring to mind; and of course the newest of the new Stephen Ryan! I guess the equivalent of a food critic is a garden writer - what about Cheryl Maddocks or Mary Moody for Sydneysiders and Tony Fawcett or Christine Reid for Melburnians?

What would the contestants actually do?

Well they could be presented with some obscure plant to identify in 30 minutes using only a botanical key.
They could be shown a photo of a dilapidated backyard and have 2 hours to produce a plan for a makeover including a plant list and 3D sketch of the final outcome.
They could also be shown a bare frontyard in a new subdivision and have just 10 minutes to convince a couple of newlyweds (face to face) of their idea for a garden.
They could be presented with a barrowload of blunt, rusty and dirt encrusted tools with broken handles and have an hour in which to restore them to full use.
They could be given one hour to prune an old apple tree
They could be given 30 minutes to service a mower including changing the blades and air filter
They could be shown a tray of tubes and see how fast it takes to pot them all up
And for a grand finale they could be given a REALLY overgrown backyard that they had 3 hours to weed, prune, mow and mulch in time for a wedding.

See there are lots of ideas when you think about it! So how about it TV execs?

Greywater

2009-07-19T16:36:00.004+10:00

The BATH spent the morning cleaning out the hose that drains from our shower onto the garden. He has to do this about every 12 months and you always know when it has to be done because the shower starts to drain reeeeeeally slooooooowly. The beauty of living in a house on stumps is that we have access to all the waste outlets and can redirect greywater onto the garden fairly easily. We have been doing this for about 7 years now. The greywater from the kids bathroom and the washing machine was initially redirected onto the garden via a Greywater Diverter. This worked in a limited fashion because there wasn't enough fall to take the water any distance. We replaced this with a small 50 litre surge tank and pump that automatically pumps the water onto the garden when it fills. I just have to remember to move the outlet around and clean the filter every couple of days. This necessitated us changing the type of detergent we use in the washing machine (not too difficult) and this water now goes to the thirstier plants during summer. I have written quite a lot about greywater over the last few years and urge anyone considering using it to do some research first. There are a lot of rules and regs about using greywater and it is a good idea to get it right the first time.
The main concerns with the use of greywater are:
1. The level of dissolved minerals in the water (never use a powder as they contain heaps of these).
2. The level of pathogens in the water (we are a dirty species!).

The Do’s of Greywater
· Do use water from the bathroom and washing machine not the kitchen
· Do use a surge tank from the washing machine and use rinse water only
· Do use liquid soaps on your body and in your washing machine
· Do divert back to sewer when not required
· Do wash your hands after handling it
· Do distribute it under mulch

The Don’ts of Greywater
· Don’t use it on vegetable gardens
· Don’t let kids or pets play in or drink it
· Don’t use bleaches or drain cleaners
· Don’t store it for more than 24 hours
· Don’t allow it to flow next door
· Don’t use nappy wash or rinse water

More Pruning

2009-07-18T16:53:00.003+10:00

Still sunny today but much colder and more of a breeze about. Nowhere near as much fun being in the garden today as it was yesterday! We went next door and completed a job started several weeks ago. Helping our neighbour cut down some eucalypts that were much too close to the house for comfort. We live in a bushfire zone and after Black Saturday we are all much more aware of the dangers of seemingly innocent trees in our gardens. Non flammable, drought tolerant trees are on the menu as replacements.
Coming back to our garden I got out the secateurs and loppers and finished pruning the roses. Not a big task as I can just about count the number of roses I have on one hand. Consequently I am now taking the rose thorns out of my hands with a pair of tweezers. It doesn't matter how much care I take or how thick the gloves are I still manage to get stuck a few times! I also cut the dead flowers off the Jerusalem sage (third photo), an agapanthus and last years stems off Euphorbia characias ssp. wulfenii. Speaking of euphorbias, I noticed the acid yellow flowers of Euphorbia rigida were just starting to show. Its amazing what you see when you are down on your hands and knees replanting bluebell bulbs dug up by the blackbirds! I love this euphorbia's rigid grey leaves, the way the flower buds start off a dusky pink (second photo) and then turn a startling lime green and then the classic acid yellow (first photo). Its such a tough and undemanding plant.
By 4.30 my nose was beginning to drip incessantly, the sun had gone behind the hills, the wind was slicing through my clothes and I could detect the unmistakable smell of someone's wood fire being lit for the evening. Time to go inside!

A Good Days Work

2009-07-17T20:57:00.005+10:00

It was a gorgeous winter day today. Blue skies with the occasional fluffy white cloud; not a breath of wind and about 14 degrees. I couldn't have asked for better winter gardening weather. I got stuck into shovelling the rest of the organic compost (bought a few weeks ago) from the trailer into the wheelbarrow. Several trips later I had managed to cover the entire vegetable garden with a thick new blanket of lovely rich compost. The area that was done a few weeks ago already has the shoots of the garlic poking through. My daughter helped me plant the corms so I think there must be about 50 baby plants - I think she got a bit carried away!

Then it was time for a change of pace. After lunch I decided to start pruning the roses. 'Bonica' was still covered in blooms so it was hard to make myself cut them off. But cut them off I did. Then it was time to cut back Salvia leucantha with its few remaining blooms. A forest of new growth at its base suggested the time was right. Three pink flowering gauras were the next to receive this brutal treatment as was a Lepechinia hastata. A few weeds were pulled out along the way and fed to the grateful chooks. I also cut the dead stems off a couple of Sedum 'Autumn Joy'; I know some writers say to leave them over winter but the allure of their brown stalks has well and truly passed and I want to see their 'brussel sprout' shoots. I mused over Phormium 'Jester' for awhile but did nothing beyond remove a few dead leaves. Leo Schofield wrote in his book about lifting congested clumps of phormium cultivars in autumn and only replanting those with the best colour but I'm not sure I want to do this. My clump has recovered quite well from summer's rigours and has good colour. I think I'll just pull off the segments that are more green than the colourful stripes of red, pink and cream: and leave the rest of the clump as is. I really love all the colourful phormium cultivars but they have taken a hammering this last summer. They are a plant from the swamps and maybe Melburnians have finally realised they are not as drought tolerant as many growers like to think.

Salvias

2009-07-16T21:51:00.003+10:00

I was at my daughters' school today where I work one day a week. A year ago as a bit of an experiment I planted a couple of different salvias at school. The canteen courtyard is dominated by red poles supporting a veranda so I wanted to pick up on this colour. I chose Salvia gesneriflora because it is exactly the right colour (thats the second and third photos). The three plants grew really well in a position I would regard as part-shade (and quite dry) but I quickly realised that the plants were too fragile in a school situation. The kids love to hide among the garden beds (even though told not to – repeatedly!) and balls being thrown into the beds was creating havoc. I solved the problem by fencing the bed with a black plastic mesh to the height of 1m and by sticking up several posters saying NO BALL GAMES IN THIS COURTYARD. The plants then flourished and flowered profusely. They looked great! They are growing so well I have to keep pinching out their growing tips to try and keep them bushy.

The second salvia I planted was Salvia ‘Hot Lips’ (first photo). It had already proved its tenacity to me in my garden. Again the colour goes well in the canteen courtyard and the plants even though sustaining some damage seem to repair themselves quite quickly. I love the way some flowers are red, some white and some red and white! And the percentage of each changes according to the weather! They are constantly in bloom and the children have discovered that the flowers can be picked and the nectar sucked from them. This was something they had already discovered with Salvia ‘Huntington’s Red’; a plant of which has been in the garden beds at school for over a decade. It is squeezed between a cistus and a pelargonium where it is never watered, never pruned and never fed: it has persevered and blooms for a long period. The kids are not supposed to pick the flowers but how can you deny them the pleasure of sucking the nectar from a salvia bloom? It beats sucking the stem of an oxalis by a country mile! We used to call them soursobs - remember them?

Strobilanthes gossypinus

2009-07-15T08:19:00.002+10:00

It was one of those OMG moments during a stroll around the garden late yesterday afternoon. Twelve months ago I moved a two year old specimen of Strobilanthes gossypinus. It was getting a little too much frost so I moved it to a slightly more sheltered location. If you don't know this plant its a beauty! I first saw it in the grounds of Government House in Melbourne. It has large silvery leaves with pronounced veining. The new leaves are golden so it's an intriguing mix of silver and gold! For the last few months the plant has put on a lot of growth and I just figured it was finally settling down into its new location. Yesterday I discovered it was flowering. Oh no! For most people this would be a fantastic event getting an unusual and rare (and precocious) plant to flower but in this case – no. The reason is that I believe this plant is monocarpic – that is, it flowers once and dies! I hope I am wrong but anecdotally other gardeners have said that their specimens died after flowering. Bamboo too is monocarpic. You know the stories you have heard about bamboos all flowering at once and dying are true. But only one species at a time – not all bamboos everywhere. Most references state the flowers of my strobilanthes will be a pinkish colour, but mine is lavender. Exciting times but sad too! :-)

I have just heard from Lyle Filippe at Roraima Nursery in Lara where I got my plant and he said his strobilanthes are flowering too! He said to save some seed.........

Weeping Apricot

2009-07-14T11:21:00.000+10:00

When the garden was new, one of the first plants I put in was a weeping apricot (Prunus mume pendula). It sits in the middle of its own triangular bed and is virtually the first thing you see as you come in the driveway. I chose this tree because I had warm memories of a matching pair of weeping apricots on either side of a flight of steps at Burnley Horticultural College when I was a student there in the early 1980's. This tree is such good value! It starts flowering for me during the first week of June every year and the pale pink blossoms keep appearing until almost September. Its not like a flowering cherry or crabapple where all its blossoms come out at once, last a few weeks and then 'pffff' they're gone in a puff of wind. The flowering apricot continues to produce new blooms from the centre of the tree outwards and then down the long weeping wands. I prune the tree hard as the last blossom falls off and before the first leaf bud opens. This briefly transforms the tree from a weeper into a mop-top until growth gets going and the weeping branches start to grow again. In this way the tree never gets too big and always has plenty of current growth on which to produce hundreds of flowers. The tree also rewards me with a great autumn show when the leaves turn shades of butter yellow and glowing orange. And unlike the flowering cherry the apricot never gets pear and cherry slug which can defoliate a cherry almost overnight. The triangle bed is beside the driveway so this tree has always received plenty of run-off as the water puddles beside the bed. I can't recommend this tree highly enough! It should be more widely planted.

Recently I pulled out the dogs breakfast of plants beneath the apricot and decided to replace them with a monoculture figuring that would show off the tree better. I took heaps of cuttings of my Erigeron 'Elsie' a great little pink flowering erigeron that is very drought tolerant. I simply spread the bed with organic compost and stuck the cuttings in after first dipping their bases in a rooting gel. Fingers crossed it works! After two weeks the cuttings still look okay. The idea is as the last apricot flower finishes in September, the first erigeron flower will appear.

Here we go!

2009-07-13T13:39:00.000+10:00

I kept a diary (remember them? - pen and paper - lockable) for over 2 decades so I figure keeping a blog can't be much harder, can it?
I am a gardener. Before I was a wife or a mother I was a gardener. It defines pretty much everything about me - ask my family! Its what I do professionally, its what I do in my (limited) free time. Even after so many years I still love being a gardener, being in a garden, writing about gardens and gardening. How lucky am I?

A bit about my garden. We are on two-thirds of an acre with the former farm dam occupying about one third of the area. All rain from the roof of the house goes into the dam as well as overland flow (not that there is a lot of that these days) and we pump from this to water the thirstiest parts of the garden during summer. The land is flat and the soil is a silty sand (about 20cm) overlying a silty clay - basically yuk! The garden is one third exotic plants, one third Australian natives surrounding the kids play area and the remaining third around the dam consists of compost bins, pot growing area, chook run, a vegetable garden and an orchard. All in all quite enough to keep me occupied!