Betting on hedges

My wife Pam and I have a code word which we use to announce to each other that the morning newspaper is here – "thud" – because that is what happens most mornings here. Our newsagent, Nathan, is a pretty good shot, landing each paper with a thud on a narrow path that's edged on both sides by hedges. With a 95% accuracy rating, Nathan could throw newspapers for Australia at the Newsagents' Olympics. But it's the 5% of his throws which don't result in a good, solid 'thud' which have prompted this little posting about hedges and front gardens

Here's what happens sometimes when Nathan misses the path. Like a javelin waving around after it has landed, the Sydney Morning Herald occasionally sits there poking a hole in our hedge. For some reason, a fair percentage of Nathan's misses end up in this hole, when he misses to the right.

When Nathan misses to the left this is the usual result. The hedge on this side of the path gets bit more sunshine than the other one, and so is a bit more dense, and tends to hold the paper rather than let it through.

There are a few different hedges out front. In the foreground is a newspaper-catching lilly pilly hedge. The plant's cultivar name is cute – 'Tiny Trev' – a native Aussie lilly pilly bred for hedging. In the background is a Murraya paniculata, one of Sydney's best hedging plants. This tough specimen is in full shade for four whole months in winter and never complains. Then over summer all it gets is blazing hot afternoon sun every day. A wondrous plant.

This is another of our short-but-sweet, three-metre-long Tiny Trev hedges, just after trimming. You can see a couple of dents and hollows here and there where Nathan tossed in a particularly heavy edition of the Herald complete with bonus shopping supplements that I don't read. The holes will slowly fill with new growth, and the best I can manage with this hedge is a neatly trimmed shagginess.

But here's the real nemesis of Tiny Trev, the psyllid, a tiny, sap-sucking insect that creates lots of ugly little pimples in the plant's new leaves. Infestations can get bad, but regular trimming plus follow-up sprays of a non-organic spray product, Confidor, keep the problem under control quite well. The only organic solution would be to rip out all the Tiny Trev hedges and start again with psyllid-resistant plants, and right now that's just too much work!

In between the hedges I have planted foliage plants of different hues. In the foreground is a groundcover native Cootamundra wattle (Acacia baileyana prostrate form) and behind that is native Correa alba, which I regularly prune into a dome, for a shape contrast against the square hedges. The Correa produces lots of small white flowers in autumn, but it's really just a foliage plant. The groundcover wattle is a lush, wild, almost untamable beast that spills through the front fence and either delights or terrifies all passers-by. It does produce golden ball flowers in winter, but not that many. Again, it's the lovely blue-green foliage which is its best feature.

Here's a cross-section style shot of the different foliage colours out front. Tiny Trev foreground, wattle in the middle-ground, and grey-leaved Correa alba behind.

In winter and spring the new growth on the Tiny Trev lilly pilly is a lovely, rich red colour that adds to the picture, and complements the other native plant we have out front, our eucalyptus street tree.

The street tree's formal name is Eucalyptus leucoxylon 'Rosea', but another name for it is the pink-flowered form of the yellow gum. It's a wonderful flowering gum, starting its blooming each year in autumn (very early April) and continuing all the way to spring (late September). It's still in flower now, and native lorikeets and honeyeaters are constantly jockeying for feeding rights on its branches. It'll still be in bloom in October.

Though a gorgeous, long-flowering and fairly small tree (around 5-6m) it's a shocker of a street citizen, dropping leaves and twigs all over the footpath, and turning any car parked under its branches into a sea of gum nuts, twigs, flowers and other detritus overnight. Add to that several dollops of bird poo on the windscreen, and maybe even a bonus of the evilly black and smeary poo of the fruit bats which feed in the tree at night, and every local in our street now knows not to park there! But aside from being thoroughly anti-social, it is the loveliest tree in the street.

And so that's a quick dip into my front yard. Spring is in full swing out in the backyard now. Predicted maximum today is 33, which is seriously warm for spring. Everything had a good drink this morning, there are plenty of jobs to do, so I'd better stop blogging and get down to the real reason I am here on this planet – to do some gardening!