Making beautiful music together

Long ago, when I started out gardening and imagined my spring flower shows to be like beautiful musical symphonies, I discovered that the hardest thing to do is to get the timing right. 

I realised that symphonies were out, and jazz was in. While I'm not a jazz music aficionado, I realised that the way flowers do their thing each spring is much closer to jazz soloists taking their turn on stage while the rest of the band plays along behind them. 

Right now, sticking to the jazz theme, my garden's musical band consists of yellow clivias on trumpets, pretty poppies on percussion and flannel flowers chiming in on vibraphone.

They look great and if only I had special ears that could hear what they're singing, I am sure it'd be a wonderful tune.

The yellow clivias are at their peak right now, and each year the clump is growing, with more trumpets playing for many weeks in spring.

The flannel flowers have been teasing Pammy and me with their "about to open" phase lasting a week now. There's lots of them, all so soft and furry, with pale green tips at the end of each petal.

They're growing in a largish pot and I consider it a job well done to have sheltered them through a whole cycle of Sydney seasons starting in winter last year. These native blooms thrive in light sandy soils, and we definitely don't have that in our garden, so a pot filled with native potting mix is my next best option.

Every year I plant poppies for Pammy, patiently waiting for punnets of Iceland poppies to appear at my garden centre in autumn. The only thing I have learned is to crowd them in a bit closer than it says on the label, and to pinch out any early baby poppy flower stems and fertilise the daylights out of them so the leafy bases of the plants grow big and strong. Then, and only then, do I let them flower. I think it produces a slightly better show.

It's not quite true when I say I grow the poppies just for Pammy. I grow them for me, too. But as well as loving how they look in full bloom, my favourite sight is tired wet poppies in the morning. They look like pretty girls who've partied too hard but had a good time anyway.

And so that's this week's jazz band. Coming soon we'll enjoy solos put on by the Louisiana iris, New South Wales Christmas bush and half a fence full of mandevillas. They all do their own thing in their own good time, and I'm content playing my small part in keeping them happy and healthy, then sitting back and enjoying the show.

Our front garden has a mind of its own

Well here we are, almost one year after our great Front Garden Makeover of 2023, and my brilliant plans have not quite worked out how I planned, but I'm fascinated to see what happens next anyway.

You see, the problem is that our front garden has a mind of its own. It is doing what it wants to do, not what I want it to do, and it's looking pretty interesting anyway. Let me explain ...

This is the scene this morning, late August 2024. The main star of the show, the Corymbia 'Dwarf Orange' is growing rapidly and happily. And the easy-care green groundcover has spread to all corners of the space. So what's the problem? It's the wrong groundcover!

A wider angle view shows the carpet of green in context, but instead of being the creeping thyme that I searched for, bought and planted, it is almost entirely made of the native violets which I thought I had eradicated prior to the whole makeover starting. This area was once all bare dirt. Click on this link to get see the naively hopeful beginnings of my 2023 planting plan. It seemed like such a good plan, too!  

But I must not dwell on life's minor disappointments too much, as the great news is that the Corymbia 'Dwarf Orange' tree is going gangbusters and feels and looks like it's growing every day. That red new growth is such a cheerful sight; fills me with hope.

This is what I am hoping for (this is a late 2023 photo, not a 2024 one). Lots of dazzling orange blooms set against that darkish green eucalyptus style foliage. (Eucalyptus? you ask? Yes, many Eucalypts have been renamed Corymbia for some reason known only to botanists with PhDs.)

So, my big unanswered question at this stage is ... what happens next? All of the creeping thyme I planted is still there, still alive, with little bits of creeping thyme foliage poking through the carpet of native violets. So will the creeping thyme flower this spring? I don't know. I hope so.

Down by the front gate is the best chance of creeping thyme flowers bursting into bloom. This is a variety called 'Bergamot' and it has mauve-purple flowers. The native violets haven't swamped the bergamot like they have in most other areas.

It would be great to have splashes of purple-mauve, purpley-red and crimson flowers jazzing up the white-and-purple flowers of the native violets. At best it could be riotous, but more likely it will look like a messy painter's palette.

In the meantime, there is one more flower show that passers by in the street can enjoy as they walk past. The New Zealand Christmas Bush (Metrosideros) that occupies a pot beside the low front verandah wall is blooming better than ever before. 

I know why this has happened. I'm paying more attention to this plant, because I'm visiting our front garden more often to check on progress on the makeover, and while I'm there I water this pot, clip off dodgy looking bits and scatter around some slow-release fertiliser.
 

It's shameful to admit that I have neglected this lovely shrub over previous years, but it's true. My main focus is on our back garden, so "out of sight out of mind" played a part in its neglect, as I simply forgot to water it often enough. But not any more. 

The pot is in a spot that gets morning sun only, just a few hours. Also, the side passage cops a whole winter full of chilly southerly breezes, so it's by far the coldest part of the property, but this tough little shrub doesn't mind wintry winds. Its varietal name is 'Fiji Fire' and that reflects the fact that Metrosideros can be found on many Pacific islands, not just lovely, often cool New Zealand.

As for the front garden having a mind of its own, it reminds me of a great song called "My Mind's Got a Mind of its Own", written by Butch Hancock and performed by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, who along with Butch and Joe Ely formed the legendary Flatlanders band from Lubbock, Texas ...

"My mind's got a mind of its own
It takes me out a-walkin' when I'd rather stay at home
Takes me out to parties when I'd rather be alone
My mind's got a mind of its own."

So, my garden has a mind of its own, or at least the native violets do. They're in charge of this makeover, not me! So, once the riddle of what happens when it's time for the surviving bits of creeping thyme to bloom through the native violets is solved, I'll post an update of my update here. Stay tuned!

Asleep at the wheel

 

Spring has a way of waking you up like no other season. It brings you outside, don't forget the camera, "oh look over there that one is flowering too". You know the kind of thing. For a gardener it's called excitement.

And so this morning I spent the first hour of daylight wandering around the place capturing the morning glow. So come take a walk with me around our little Marrickville garden — all 7m x 10m of it — and say hello to the first of our spring flowers.

Our Scadoxus patch is steadily increasing in size. I could only fit in nine of the 11 flowers we have, and down at ground level there's another dozen babies doing well. Too small to flower yet, they'll eventually flower at some stage. Not sure when. That's half the fun of growing these things. I barely know what I am doing, but it's working.

This wobbly pano shot shows where the Scadoxus live, under the big old frangipani (that's the ideal place for Pam to hang her forests of Spanish moss that she loves). This is a super shady place in summer but it's well lit in winter once the frangi drops its leaves. To the left of the birdbath those strappy looking things are bromeliads, and they love it here too. I never touch them and they're happily thriving. 

While we're under the frangipani tree, here's another flowering bulb from South Africa (as is the Scadoxus). This is Veltheimia, given to us by our good friends John and Liz, so it always reminds us of them.

The final South African residents happily multiplying under the care of the big old frangipani tree are the yellow clivias. Their flowers should pop out any day now, so the combination of yellow clivia trumpets and dazzling scadoxus fireworks is well worth seeing, and waiting for each year.

Speaking of yellow-flowered people, down the other end of our garden, near the house, the Mardi Gras style blooms of the native Sydney Rock Orchid, Dendrobium kingianum, are in full glory right now. The miracle of this performance is that last year these plants were being attacked by orchid beetles, little chompers that love to dine on unopened flower buds, and so the shows weren't as good as previous years, or this year. These beetles are impossible to control with organic sprays, and I'm not prepared to buy or use the bee-killing commercial sprays (containing Carbaryl) that can control these beetles. So I don't know why the beetles haven't attacked this year but I'm glad they haven't.

I couldn't decide which Nasturtium flower to show you so here's two: there are dozens of them and no two seem to be the same, although they come in all possible combinations of yellow, red and orange, maybe a bit of black trim. Pam and her watercolour art students absolutely adore nasturtiums as a painting subject, and as a gardener I do appreciate the way that nasturtiums suppress other weeds, but they do like to spread out and bully every other plant they come near. I cut them back every few days and they just merrily bounce back without a care in the world. They never complain, they just grow back each time.

We grow our Italian lavender in a pot and it likes it there. There's also a white-flowered type that Pam asked me to get, and it is slower off the mark and probably won't be in flower for another month or so.

One of the hardest flowers to photograph is this thing, a hellebore. That's because the flowers point down to the ground, and I'm too old to take photos lying on my back, so I hold up the flower's foliage with my hand, quickly take a snap and then edit out my finger from the photo. 

I'll finish off with two "panorama" shots of our small inner-city garden, just to give you a bit more context for what I have shown you already. To see the "pano" view, just double click on the photo itself and it will show the much wider shot (hopefully).

This first pano shows the left side of the garden looking out from the back of the house and its covered pergola. 

And this second pano is of the right side of the garden with lots of succulents in pots, more bloody nasturtiums trying to take over. The largish round white pot on the centre right is a native flannel flower bush that flowered beautifully last year and we are hoping will do so again this year too.

Finally, I actually have a couple more blog postings waiting to go. Our front garden is looking lovely but it has not worked out as I had intended, not at all. I'll fill you in on that bit of gardening fun next time.