Too easy

Unless you're gardening in Antarctica or the Atacama, there are usually a few plants which thrive marvellously well in your district, and yet no-one calls them weeds, because they're not. Here in Sydney there is one plant which is ubiquitous in this way – Murraya paniculata. It's everywhere, and I have eight of them growing on my tiny property, in various spots (seven trimmed into hedges, and one trimmed to fill an awkward space). This is my problem-solver plant, my "go-to" shrub. If I have a nasty assignment for a plant, the murraya gets the gig. Predictably enough, various friends who are professional gardening writers here in Sydney sneer at murrayas. "Too easy" they cry!

Here's the biggest of my murrayas, magnificently filling the role of "please won't something grow under that big olive tree and give a green backdrop to our outdoor dining area". I had tried a couple of other things there in the early days but they all struggled in the shade and the root competition from the olive. "Step aside folks, let a murraya show how it's done." It's been here for years now, and this is it pictured this afternoon, aglow with fresh young foliage following its routine cut-back a month or so ago.

This murraya is a summer-bloomer mostly, and gets its other common names of orange jessamine and (confusingly, for Philadelphus fans) mock orange. The scent of these flowers is almost too sweet, as it's every bit as sweet as an orange tree's scent. On a perfectly still summer morning, opening the back door and getting a waft from the murraya is like walking through the cosmetics section of a department store, where those pretty salesthingies spray shoppers walking past as if they're sheep needing a perfume drench. But I digress... Murraya blooms are fairly short-lived, but you can get a number of flushes of blooms from them, usually a couple of weeks after some heavy rain, as happened this time round.

The other seven murrayas I have on site are all hedging plants. This hedge (three plants in all) does a stirling job hiding the mess of the composting and potting area. Surprisingly it has also turned out to be a favourite home and shelter for small birds such as wrens, bulbuls and silvereyes. My other murraya hedge is at the front of the house, in the worst imaginable spot for a hedge. It's the hedge across the front of our building, which faces south-south-west. So this spot gets no sun for about four months a year in winter plus the worst of the hot afternoon summer sun. And yet it's also dense and green, in bloom and thriving, and has been doing wonderfully well there for the last half-dozen years.

One of the things I love about my Murraya paniculatas, though, is the new foliage which erupts after each cutback. It's a lovely young, fresh, vivid green.

One little-known fact about Murraya paniculata – and this will surprise many Australian gardeners – is that it's listed in the native gardener's bible 'Australian Native Plants', by Wrigley and Fagg, as being native to Australia. It's also a native of South-East Asia as well as northern Australia, but the odd thing is that it thrives so well in temperate Sydney, given that it comes from our tropical north. Down here, these plants are not attacked by pests, need little or no feeding, survive on our natural rainfall and grow in sun, shade or semi-shade.

I do have one other Murraya growing in my garden, and I've mentioned it a few times before in my blog. My beloved curry leaf tree, Murraya koenegii. Here's it's foliage, for comparison with its cousin's foliage, pictured just before this one.

The curry leaf tree's flowers are smaller and less conspicuous than the orange jessamine's, and they have no scent.

There are far more berries than flowers on the curry leaf tree at the moment, and this afternoon, while taking a few shots for this blog, I made an interesting find. As I mentioned in my last blog, my wife Pam is doing a botanical illustration course at the moment, and she's working on a piece on the curry leaf tree. For her course she takes in snippets of leaves and berries from her tree, and now some of the people in the course want to have their own curry leaf tree. Where do you get them, they ask?

They're easy enough to find here in Sydney. I bought mine many years ago as a little seedling for sale in a pot in an Indian spices shop here in Sydney. I occasionally see them in garden centres, too, but the fact is they grow very easily from seed. I popped some seeds in a pot a week or two back and the first one is up this morning. Here it is.

However, while I was walking around my potted curry leaf tree I looked down and noticed half a dozen seedlings coming up from berries which have dropped off the tree. I dug them up carefully, trying to take as much soil as I could, and transferred them to some pots of mix. Each seedling had a good little root system going, and so by this time next week we'll know how many have survived the trauma of my clumsy midday transplanting efforts. And by the end of next week the other four seeds which I sowed in the pot should have come up as well. And, with fingers crossed, we should be able to give little memento curry leaf trees to Pam's fellow course members a few weeks from now.

The incredible ease with which the curry leaf tree seeds have sprouted should sound warning bells that this is probably a weed of the future, of course, but whether something is a weed or not is all about climate and soil. When a plant loves your climate and your soil, it grows like a weed. Take it somewhere not so ideal, and it's just another tree.

I can understand my gardening-writer friends who poo-poo the Murraya paniculatas of Sydney. Sure, there's no challenge in growing it, and it really is used so often in landscaping here that it's truly boring. "Oh look, a murraya hedge," is something you'll never hear around these parts...

But I love the way Murraya paniculata can fill a truly dreadful spot in the garden with vivid, lush greenery, unfailing good health and sweetly scented white blooms. Provided it's grown somewhere truly daunting, where many other plants have tried and failed, it's well worth admiring!