Curry leaf tree, the second generation

There we were at our friends Jolanda and Paul's place enjoying another great meal out in their backyard. In one corner of their very nice garden a young curry tree is doing really well. It's such a graceful, delicate tree, and useful in the kitchen too, where both Paul and Jolanda create many superb Asian meals. 

We used to have a curry tree, had it for a dozen years, but in the end it just got to be such hard work keeping it happy in its pot, and so we removed it.

Since then we've missed not having one here, and sitting there at Jolanda and Paul's recently both Pam and I realised we just had to get another curry tree for our garden. And so this is the story of what we plan to do with our second-generation curry tree. 

However, to start things, the best thing to do is just enjoy the beauty of this leafy, small, subtropical tree from Sri Lanka and other subtropical parts of southern Asia and southeast Asia.

A few years back Pammy did a beautiful botanical
illustration of the leaves and seeds of our curry tree.

And here's the original, first-generation
potted curry tree in its prime. I bought a
little white stone Buddha statue to sit at
the base of the tree. He had a lovely view
of the rest of the garden from that spot.

Our old curry tree even was the perfect spot
for two orchard butterflies to engage in a bit
of baby-making, captured in this photo by Pam.

The leaves of the curry tree have the mildly spicy flavour that
gives it its name, and its uses in the kitchen. From my various
recipe books, it seems to be used in two different ways. One is
as a fresh herb, chopped and added to the pot usually towards
the end of cooking. The other way to use it is to toss a whole
stem of leaves into hot oil at the very beginning of cooking
a curry, to flavour the oil. As far as I know, the berries aren't
used (or at least I've never seen a recipe using them).

One important little thing to note about curry tree berries is that they sprout very readily indeed, and they are also very attractive to birds. The downside of this is that in the right climate (usually subtropical) the curry tree can become a weed that invades bushland zones. Birds eat the seeds, poop elsewhere, and another tree grows. Certainly in our backyard, we were forever pulling out curry tree seedlings that sprouted from these fallen berries.

So now we've decided to grow another curry tree, but this time round I have some plans to keep things a bit more under control. Here's the new baby, or should I say, babies.

Baby curry trees, by the way for Australian gardeners, are now starting to show up in nurseries, as now is a good time of year to plant one. The one I bought had two stems, and when I unpotted them, they fell apart easily as two completely separate plants, with hardly any entangled roots. I repotted them as separate plants and will grow these on for a month or two and keep the healthiest one, and give away the second place-getter.

Curry trees are easy to grow here in Sydney. For a pot all it needs is a biggish pot, good quality potting mix, and lots of sunshine. Also put the pot up on pot feet so excess water can drain away. Slow-release fertiliser is ideal for all potted plants, and I just scattered some of the stuff made for citrus trees around my curry tree.

Your main problem is likely to be excessive happiness (not yours ... the curry tree's). Our first curry tree is the only plant I have grown which actually cracked the sides of its pot by growing too vigorously. The pot just fell apart, and you could see these muscular curry tree roots poking out the sides once the ceramic slabs fell away. So I repotted mine into a bigger pot, and it grew like mad again. These are such vigorous plants when happy!

I dare not put one in the ground in our small garden, however, as they will eventually grow into a tree 4-6m tall (14 to 20 feet), and we don't have space for something that big.

And so, like Blackadder's loyal sidekick Baldrick, I have a cunning plan. I am going to treat our second generation curry tree as a rather large bonsai.

For this year and the next, I will let it grow on until it's happy in a larger pot than the current one. However after that, I plan to remove our happy little curry tree from its "final" sized pot and cut its roots back, cut some foliage off the top, then repot it into fresh potting mix – but keep it in its "final" pot. I think spring will be the time to do that. I guess I'll eventually find out whether it will work.

My plan is to keep it down to about half the size of our original curry tree, which was about 1.75m tall (from top of potting mix to the top of the canopy of leaves) and it lived in a large pot 60cm across at the rim. If all goes according to plan, we'll have all the curry leaves we need for the kitchen, and a much smaller potted specimen for the garden in a pot that's about 40cm across, with a plant less than 1m tall.

At the same time, I'm planning to do exactly the same thing to our potted bay tree, another fabulously useful plant for the kitchen, but also another vigorous growing thing that needs a lot of taming, root trimming and repotting if it is going to stay here for many years.

Wish me luck! 

Some (slow) progress

The guy I work for, Don, has a great garden design method that is known as 'put and look'. It's simple enough: just put the potted plants (still in their pots) where you plan to have them, then stand back and see how they look. If you don't like that look, move them around until you do. That's usually a doddle to do with seedlings, baby shrubs and saplings, but with a 10-year-old, 2m tall curry tree in a large, heavy pot it was strenuous going. Enough complaining, here's how 'put and look' worked out.

The curry tree used to be on the 'far right' of this photo,
just behind the money tree (ie, a crassula) on the right.
Before moving the curry tree I had to lean it on its 
side and use tree loppers to cut through the thick roots 
which had grown through the bottom of the pot and 
no doubt were halfway down to China. Rolling it 
around to its new spot took a while, too, but it's 
good morning work, curry-tree-rolling!

No doubt the curry tree will settle into the soil, develop
a lean and need propping up, but it already looks bigger
and happier in this more open spot. As I have cruelly
cut off its tap root it will no doubt lose some leaves and
sulk a bit, but I am hoping that the magic of seaweed 
solution (Seasol) treatments plus the mildness of our winter
will encourage the roots to grow again. We shall see.

The money tree is staying where it is. For a while I 
entertained the foolish idea of moving it, but it's staying
where it is, and the curry tree is to move up the lane.

I showed the full story of this gardening crime last
posting. This was once a potted plant but its roots found 
their way into the soil, the plastic pot burst long ago and
this had grown into a beast with an anaconda-thickness
trunk. Somehow I think moving it might be somewhere 
between impossible and fatal, probably both. So ugly as it
is, but with a story to tell, here it resides.

In between the curry tree and the money tree is this
person, Crassula argentea 'Coral', a charming weirdo 
for whom I have quite a soft spot. Love the chunky trunk,
and the oddball foliage. I think I will plant this one into
the ground, but at the moment it's staying in its pot until the 
'put and look' decision is finally made (ie, Pammy likes it too).

Here's a close-up of its foliage, which is, depending on
which leaf you examine, either hollow at the end or 
deeply dimpled. This isn't a photo taken today, by the way. 
It's one taken back in 2008, when this was a far 
healthier, happier and sunnier personality.

Here's the 2008 plant. Compare this dense foliage on 
this far younger tree with the relatively sparse 
coverage on today's tree, two photos above. I am sure this
is purely due to a lack of sunlight, as the rescued plant has
been heavily shaded by both the grevillea and the rosemary 
which have now both gone to that great compost heap in the sky.

So this is the humble site of stage 2 of the makeover 
(stage 1 was clearing out all the unwanted stuff and having 
it carted away). I still want this to be a succulent bed, 
but not with everything in a difficult-to-manage jumble of
pots. At this stage I'm thinking of laying two courses 
of bricks around the bed, and filling this with a 50:50 mix
of sand and soil mix, so it's very free-draining, the kind
of soil that succulents love.

Here's the old 'succulent city' back in 2008, and 
a happy jumble of plants it was, too, and I would like
to maintain something of the colour and spirit of 
this potted gaggle, but without the pots.

Cuckoo in the curry tree

When you think of cuckoos, most of us tend to think of Swiss clocks with a little door that opens to allow a little bird to pop out and say 'cuckoo' once every hour, on the hour. Last Sunday I finally managed to take a photo of our resident cuckoo, a koel.

It'd have to be a very large clock to house this cuckoo. At least our koels maintain the cuckoo tradition of reliable time-keeping. Every morning around 4am they wake up the neighbourhood with their loud, repetitive calls. As a result, unfortunately, koels are not exactly our most beloved birds! This particular individual is a bit of an oddball version of koel. It's a juvenile male that's going through its first moult, to become a glossy, all-black adult male.

What attracted him to our backyard was the sight of all those juicy curry tree berries. Unfortunately, this is not a good thing. All sorts of berry-producing non-native plants are turning into bushland weeds. The berries might be eaten in my backyard, but the seeds are then carried by birds to bushland sometimes miles away, where they then sprout and compete with native plants.

While the koel family has been part of our neighbourhood for years, these birds are a relatively rare sight, even if they're a familiar sound. The sight of the young moulting male was a big enough surprise midway through Sunday afternoon, but right on dusk another koel appeared perched on our clothesline, this one a juvenile female.

The interesting thing about cuckoos, of course, is the clever way they fool other bird species into raising their young. The adult cuckoos lay their eggs in other bird species' nests, and when the baby cuckoo hatches it pushes the 'host' baby birds out of the nest and the 'host' parents raise the cuckoo baby.

For our koels, their most regular 'host' birds are currawongs - big, black-and-white birds similar in many ways to magpies, but with black beaks. The system seems to work, as the two koels visiting last Sunday were both born last spring are only now getting out and about. The nice thing about juvenile birds is that they tend to spook a lot less easily than adults, and so bumbling amateur photographers such as me can blunder about and manage to get a couple of snaps without startling the birds into flight.

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!

Idle idyll

Too much of a good thing right now. Wet days, plenty of them, above average February rainfall after a too-dry January. Fair enough. The only thing an idle gardener can do at the moment is wander around during a break in the rain and enjoy the scenery. Rain softens summer gardens here in Sydney – like a delicious sauce it adds complexity to the dish.

My healthy, happy, potted cumquat, all dolled up in pearls. Its summer flush of flowers has just given way to reveal a host of little fruits eagerly making their way in life.

Next door to my potted cumquat is my friend, Michelle's, potted cumquat, which I am baby-sitting for her while she and her husband, Evan, spend a year in the Outback discovering the other Australia. For some strange reason, Michelle's cumquat is about two to three weeks more advanced in flowering and fruiting than mine. Both plants are the same variety, in the same spot in the garden, next to each other, and they receive an identical regime of food, water and encouragement from me. Yet Michelle's plant finished flowering three weeks ago and is steaming ahead with fruit formation, while mine happily lags behind at all times. One of life's little mysteries, but the main thing is that both plants are doing well (and you'll get another batch of home-made cumquat marmalade later this year, Michelle!)

As well as babysitting Michelle's potted cumquat, I'm also looking after Evan's standard 'Friesia' rose. Ever since I gave it a light mulch of old cow manure, plus a treatment with a soil wetting agent, it has really started to power along beautifully, a much happier chap. Such a lovely scent to its yellow roses, many of which make their way indoors into Pam's little empire of vases, which are dotted like pretty little forts guarding bookcases and ledges here and there throughout the house.

Speaking of lovely scents, these scented-leaf pelargoniums (rear, left) smell heavenly on this moist morning. The other participants in this pleasingly green scene are a golden marjoram (front left), potted mint (front right) and Murraya (rear, right). The trunk in the centre belongs to an olive tree, by the way.

The berries on the potted curry leaf tree are changing colour from red to black at the moment. My wife Pam does botanical illustration in watercolours, and she has chosen the curry leaf tree as her subject for a course she's doing at the Sydney Botanic Gardens, doing studies of its flowers, berries and leaves. Can't wait to see the completed work, but I will have to wait, as she doesn't like to hurry these things. She takes her own time, and the results are always a thing of lasting beauty.

After a snooze through the dry heat of January, the new 'Eureka' lemon tree has perked up wonderfully in the February rain. And, as part of the annual routine with citrus here, I'll be feeding all of them this weekend. I feed the greedy in-ground plants twice a year, in late February and late August (the potted citrus are given lighter feeds every six weeks). Citrus love their pelletised chicken manure, which adds a certain farmyard aroma to Amateur Land for about 48 hours, but it keeps them very happy, even if Pam and the neighbours aren't always thrilled.

Everywhere on this idle morning the garden is gently sagging under its shiny coat of rain. Coleus Corner is much more maroon-hued than in any previous year, but that's OK with me. I think this colour scheme is probably at its best in the rain. The more varied and colourful versions of Coleus Corner of other years looked better in the sunshine, but on a rainy day I like this darker, moodier scheme best.

So, there's no weeding, no trimming, no jobs to do at all this idle weekday morning. Just a few minutes during a break in the rain in my soggy little idyll before getting down to work. The perfect start, really.

Morning ramble

November 1 started off cloudy yet warm, the perfect sort of weather for a little morning ramble, a pleasure I'd been denying myself for several days, due to that annoying malady known as work.

Here's Garden Amateur land this mild morning, with everything chugging along nicely. The two pots at the front left are potted cumquats which I've come to call 'The Twins'. One belongs to me, the other to my friend Michelle, who's living in Birdsville, a place where cumquats would not like to live. Michelle's blog mentioned that it got up to 42.8°C there the other day... gets hot in Birdsville, and it isn't even summer yet.

Meanwhile here in Sydney, the Blue Lake beans are casually twining their way up their little willow teepee. They shot out of the ground on 'being born' day, but since then their pace has been merely steady.

I like the way climbers and twiners go about their business. I keep on thinking of doing some time-lapse photography one of these days...

I must admit that I'm finding vegetables a lot more beautiful than I expected them to be. Perhaps it's their radiant good health that appeals, but I love all the details of how they grow, their foliage, their flowers, the forms they take. In the past I restricted myself to growing lots of salad greens, some tomatoes and herbs, but these last two years have seen me trying to grow all sorts of vegetables – and almost all of them have proven to be the most handsome plants. These beans are no exception.

Given that this is such a big, sprawling plant it's amazing that I haven't mentioned its presence in the 9m x 7.5m of my little backyard. It's cardamom, and it's one of the oldest plants that I have growing here. This is about 16-17 years old. I grow it mostly because it provides a good screen for the fence, actually, but its fragrant leaves are nice to be near. Alas, it produces no pods for me at all. Never has! An Indian-born friend, Rema, occasionally takes some cardamom leaves home and then wraps them around little milk-based sweets. She then steams the sweets in the leaves, and the heady cardamom scent goes through them. Delicious!

And while I'm talking culinary matters Indian, my good old curry tree is in bloom, and over the last few weeks since I posted about this plant it has leafed up beautifully. Such a lovely little potted tree, and so useful in the kitchen, too.

For the record, here's the leaves and the flowers of the curry tree this morning. The flowers are small clusters of stars which last a few weeks. Later on in late summer and autumn, berries appear.

Producing a good flush of leaves and flower buds everywhere, our baby frangipani, which we've grown from a cutting taken two years ago and transplanted in early spring, has settled in beautifully to its new, permanent home. The mulch is there to suppress weeds mostly. Frangipanis and Sydney were meant for each other. I'll never worry about watering or feeding it and it will thrive on my benign neglect. Raising it as a baby was all the help it needed from me, and all I need to do now is leave it alone!

Leave it alone I have promised to do, but I still have visiting rights. Here's a flower stalk rising from one of the frangipani branches. Can't wait to enjoy that scent again!

Another backyard baby is this only child, the sole Jalapeno chilli, and the only chilli in fact, that I have growing here this year. I use some chillies in cooking, but not a lot, so one plant is all I really need (given that they are so plentiful in our local Asian shops). I like the Jalapeno because it's mild, rating about 5 on the 10 point heat scale. In previous years I have grown habaneros, serranos, jalapenos, anchos, cayennes and several others, mostly because I love the look of the plants when they're laden with fruit (especially the pretty apricot-coloured habaneros). This year I've scaled back on the chillies to make way for the other vegie crops.

Speaking of making way for space reasons, the potato patch is turning into the real-estate takeover merchant of my backyard. Sprawling everywhere, lush and green, happy and flowering, spuds take on a suburban sprawl like no other.

The packet for these Roma (egg) tomatoes says they're ideal for pots. Every book I have says Romas need staking. We shall see. They have stout stems and do seem to be a bit squat in growth habit so far, but I do have some spare stakes at the ready, just in case.

This gaggle of pots have made their way onto the main path up the middle of the backyard, where the sun is good. The chives in the foreground aren't that flash, as they were a victim of the spreading potato metropolis. As I had been busy with work lately I'd forgotten about the pot of chives around the side. I found them almost completely covered by spud leaves. They'll bounce back. The little pot at the back left is rocket, mixed lettuce on the right, basil in the centre at the back. All happy as can be.

The zucchinis are happy plants, too, their big starry yellow flowers yelling "over here" to all potential harvesters. There are three plants here, and in the previous week we harvested about 6-10 baby zucchinis with their flowers, then cooked them up after stuffing the flowers with a mix of ricotta, goat's cheese and herbs.

Tonight, I'm cooking these guys. The variety is 'Black Beauty', by the way, and it seems to be cropping a little bit better than the 'Blackjack' which I grew last year. I've deliberately harvested these when much smaller than the usual size of zucchini sold in shops, as I think that in general, zucchinis taste better as quite small vegies.

And speaking of cooking zucchinis, that's what I had better get busy doing right now – preparing some lazy, simple food. Roast a chicken, with baked potatoes and baked cauliflower florets (ever tried caulis baked? – heaven, they become sweet, completely different from steamed or boiled caulis) plus the zucchini babies. I might even bake them, too...

Give me curry

If I was allowed only one cookbook in my kitchen I would certainly be inconsolable for awhile, but once I came round to my senses I'd probably hang on to Charmaine Solomon's 'Complete Asian Cookbook'. While my wonderful old mum, who's been cooking up a storm in heaven since 1981, taught me all the Aussie basic recipes that I still love to cook, it was Charmaine, through her book, who taught me how to cook curries. And as soon as we moved into this house 17 years ago, when I finally had space to create a garden, I bought a curry tree (Murraya koenigii), and it's still doing fine in its pot all these years later on.

Here it is this morning, doing its little spring blooming thing. Hardly anything to stop you in your tracks, but to me the piddly little flower show says the magical words of "Hi, I'm happy, healthy and ready to make curries again." Great news!

Standing back a little, here it is in its third pot. Third pot? Yep, this little tree has muscle-bound roots which can crack big, glazed ceramic pots. So every time it wants to upsize its pot it lets me know. As it's native to tropical southern India, it doesn't like cold Sydney winters all that much, and drops leaves and looks scraggly by the end of every winter. A light clip over to remove daggy bits, followed by a feed with chicken poo and some Seasol tonic in spring, and it always bounces back well. Though not especially thirsty it likes a regular drink in summer.

For several years I always thought that you used curry leaves in cooking by dropping a branchlet of eight or so leaves into hot oil right at the beginning of cooking, to flavour the oil. But now I've learned that some Asian cooks chop the fresh leaves and add them to curries right at the end of cooking. Others add the leaves to the blender when blending up the onion, garlic, chillies, ginger etc at the beginning of curry making.

This charming photo of Mr and Mrs Orchard Butterfly making babies was taken by Pam one morning, when she spotted them in flagrante on the way out to her shed. The other thing the photo shows, if you can divert your attention for a moment please, is the curry tree's berries, which start off red then ripen to black. I don't use them in cooking, but last autumn I popped several berries into some potting mix, and every one of them came up, and fairly quickly, too. When berries do this you start to think "oh, no, environmental weed" and indeed this might prove to be the case with my beautiful little curry tree. But then again I've never seen a single native bird feeding on the berries.

The constant companion for my curry tree for almost all its days here has been this Buddha. I found him a pearl shell backrest a while ago, in deference to his age. As the years have gone by the mulch of fallen leaves has slowly grown and yet Buddha remains remarkably pale and serene, as if he's dust-proof.

I'm not a Buddhist, but it is the religion I respect the most, philosophically speaking. So it did occur to me to contact our local ashram just to check whether using Buddha in this way would be offensive to them. I would have removed it if they didn't like the idea. After explaining the basics of where he was, contemplating the curry tree, in a dignified spot elevated well off the ground...

"Does he have a pleasant view of the garden?" I was asked.

"Probably the best, and he gets to see every sunset," I replied.

And that was that. It's agreed all-round – Buddha's got the best seat in the house.