The 10-Year Rewind – Part 9 – Friendly natives

Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 9 is this one — Friendly Natives — from April 2009. It's mostly a look at our front garden, part of Garden Amateur land that this blog rarely visits.

After enjoying the challenge of the desert island plants a month or two ago, I've found a new blogger's photo challenge involving native plants in our gardens. I came across the challenge at several other blogs, in my case Phillip Oliver's Dirt Therapy blog and Grace Peterson's blog although I believe the people responsible for starting the whole thing can be found at Gardening Gone Wild. 

It's a simple thing: just send them a photo of a plant native to your area, growing in your garden. Pictured below is the one I sent, but I'm a bit of a rule-bender (as I was with the desert island plants 'rules' too). So here's my photo of three of the Australian natives growing in my Australian garden, and below that several more detail shots for good measure. 

Here they are: in the left foreground, my gum tree, Eucalyptus leucoxylon 'Rosea'. Spilling over the fence in the middle ground is a just barely prostrate form of the Cootamundra wattle, Acacia baileyana, and in the background is a native without a common name, Correa alba. They're all worth a closer look, so I thought I'd post a couple of close-ups as well.


The Acacia baileyana in the foreground has wonderful blue-grey foliage. It's meant to be a prostrate groundcover but in its tightly confined space it rears up about a metre off the ground in places. The silver-leafed correa behind is due for yet another trim. I keep it clipped into a dome shape most of the time, but as it's flowering now I'll wait until that's over before its next trim.


As well as being a lovely colour the foliage of the Cootamundra wattle is delicately ferny. While it is producing some tiny flower buds now, it won't unleash its pretty little yellow pompom blooms until later, around June or July.


The flowers of the Correa alba are modest at best and not the reason I grow this plant. Well, to tell the truth, the reason I grow this plant is that Pam chose it, and a very, very lovely choice it has proven to be, a beautiful foliage plant. And our neighbour's tabby cat loves sleeping under it, too!

Our street tree, the Eucalyptus, has just started blooming this week. It's late this year, as it usually starts in early April. It will stay covered in blooms till September at least, and all sorts of native nectar-eating birds will be squabbling for territory in its branches for all that time, notably the wattlebirds, the New Holland honeyeaters and the rainbow lorikeets.

The gum tree's flower buds are full of colour now and very decorative in their own right.

This photo shows nicely how the flower buds open. The little conical cap on the underside of the bud loosens under the pressure within the bud, then pops off suddenly, allowing the pink tutu of blooms to pirouette across the stage. Traa daaaa! 

But to finish this little photo blog I thought I'd toss in a bonus garden native photo. Pictured above is my fully-recovered Grevillea 'Superb' in my backyard, after its brush with death last December. But thanks to the application of a spray which killed off the fungal disease which was causing its woes, it's happier and more floriferous than ever. (For Australian readers, the product is Yates Anti-Rot, which is made from phosphorous acid, and it certainly was a Christmas miracle worker for this grevillea).

Stop press – someone at the door! It's Greek Easter this weekend, and my lovely neighbour Katarina knocked on my door a few minutes ago, wishing Pam and me a very happy Easter, and bearing an Easter gift of traditional Greek cakes, pastries and dyed eggs. So happy Greek Easter, everyone!

Times a' changing

Should we ever misplace all our calendars, gardeners would always have a very good idea of what day it is simply by looking at what's happening out in their patch. Like this morning, when I wandered outside to discover that it's June right now! Surely. The first of the orchids are open, so it's the first half of June. They always open then. Alas, we're having a weirdo of a year as far as timings go, and things aren't happening when they should. (The fact it's also warm and sunny this morning should have been the big hint that it isn't really June, Jamie.)

Poor old regular readers of my blog. Every June I post a photo
of these cymbidium orchids, as a ceremony to mark the times.
Yet this year this orchid started blooming last week in fact, almost
a full month ahead of schedule.

Much better at time-keeping this year, our street
tree, a pink-flowering gum, Eucalyptus
leucoxylon var. 'Rosea' started its cool season
blooming right on schedule, in early April.
If all goes according to normal patterns (and
that's a big assumption) it should still be in
bloom, feeding the raucous lorikeets, wattlebirds
and clever little New Holland honeyeaters
in mid-September. What a tree!

Lots of other plants are having a weird year here. The frangipani, which should be dropping leaves now, is still full of leaf with a few flowers soldiering on. And the zygocactus (Schlumbergera), which always bursts into bloom in early May, is only now sending out its flower buds, and they'll be lucky to bloom before June arrives.

Of course, the answer to all this weirdness is the weather, as it always is. Summer saw all-time record high temperatures, while this May has been virtually devoid of rain, and we've also got close to Sydney's record for the number of consecutive days with temperatures above 20°C (68°F) for May, our last month of autumn here.

Not complaining, mind you. Wouldn't dare. Just observing!

Friendly natives

After enjoying the challenge of the desert island plants a month or two ago, I've found a new blogger's photo challenge involving native plants in our gardens. I came across the challenge at several other blogs, in my case Phillip Oliver's Dirt Therapy blog and Grace Peterson's blog although I believe the people responsible for starting the whole thing can be found at Gardening Gone Wild.

It's a simple thing: just send them a photo of a plant native to your area, growing in your garden. Pictured below is the one I sent, but I'm a bit of a rule-bender (as I was with the desert island plants 'rules' too). So here's my photo of three of the Australian natives growing in my Australian garden, and below that several more detail shots for good measure.

Here they are: in the left foreground, my gum tree, Eucalyptus leucoxylon 'Rosea'. Spilling over the fence in the middle ground is a just barely prostrate form of the Cootamundra wattle, Acacia baileyana, and in the background is a native without a common name, Correa alba. They're all worth a closer look, so I thought I'd post a couple of close-ups as well.


The Acacia baileyana in the foreground has wonderful blue-grey foliage. It's meant to be a prostrate groundcover but in its tightly confined space it rears up about a metre off the ground in places. The silver-leafed correa behind is due for yet another trim. I keep it clipped into a dome shape most of the time, but as it's flowering now I'll wait until that's over before its next trim.


As well as being a lovely colour the foliage of the Cootamundra wattle is delicately ferny. While it is producing some tiny flower buds now, it won't unleash its pretty little yellow pompom blooms until later, around June or July.


The flowers of the Correa alba are modest at best and not the reason I grow this plant. Well, to tell the truth, the reason I grow this plant is that Pam chose it, and a very, very lovely choice it has proven to be, a beautiful foliage plant. And our neighbour's tabby cat loves sleeping under it, too!


Our street tree, the Eucalyptus, has just started blooming this week. It's late this year, as it usually starts in early April. It will stay covered in blooms till September at least, and all sorts of native nectar-eating birds will be squabbling for territory in its branches for all that time, notably the wattlebirds, the New Holland honeyeaters and the rainbow lorikeets.


The gum tree's flower buds are full of colour now and very decorative in their own right.


This photo shows nicely how the flower buds open. The little conical cap on the underside of the bud loosens under the pressure within the bud, then pops off suddenly, allowing the pink tutu of blooms to pirouette across the stage. Traa daaaa!

But to finish this little photo blog I thought I'd toss in a bonus garden native photo. Pictured above is my fully-recovered Grevillea 'Superb' in my backyard, after its brush with death last December. But thanks to the application of a spray which killed off the fungal disease which was causing its woes, it's happier and more floriferous than ever. (For Australian readers, the product is Yates Anti-Rot, which is made from phosphorous acid, and it certainly was a Christmas miracle worker for this grevillea).


Stop press – someone at the door! It's Greek Easter this weekend, and my lovely neighbour Katarina knocked on my door a few minutes ago, wishing Pam and me a very happy Easter, and bearing an Easter gift of traditional Greek cakes, pastries and dyed eggs. So happy Greek Easter, everyone!

My favourite tree

That little questionnaire thing in the Blotanical profile section asking about 'your favourite tree' really did get me thinking, and as a result I thought I'd do a little blog on the tree I do admire the most in my corner of the world. Its formal name is Eucalyptus leucoxylon 'Rosea', and so it's a native gum tree. Though it's hardly commonly known, its common name is the yellow gum, or in this case, the pink-flowered form of the yellow gum. It's our street tree, and we planted it about 10-12 years ago, when the original street tree provided by the council turned up its toes and gave up on life.

Here it is in flower earlier this year. It's easy to get a photo of it in flower, as it starts flowering in early April, and keeps on flowering profusely until early October.

This is the grim reality of its lot in life, in a photo taken last week. A street tree. TV cables on the lower rung, power cables on the top tier, and the constant threat of "trimming" by the butchers who win the contract to keep street trees ugly throughout Sydney. With the help of some extendo-pole pruners and my neighbour, Frank, who loves the tree as much as I do, we keep on trimming it so it stays clear of the precious ugly wires. So far so good, but I've steeled myself not to get upset if I ever hear the brrrpp-brrrrp of the trimmers' chainsaw firing up, about to hack into our beauty. It's a street tree, and not my property. I have no rights, nor, it seems, does the tree. Only Telstra and cables have rights. Should the tree ever be butchered, the main losers will be its main occupants, the wattlebirds, the rainbow lorikeets and the New Holland honeyeaters, who all camp out in the tree, eating nectar, for six months of the year.

Beauty can have many highlights, and with our gum tree its wonderful green-blue leaves are another source of year-round delight. This photo was taken recently and next year's flower buds are forming rapidly already. Unfortunately, gum trees being gum trees, they do drop their leaves with monotonous regularity and replace them with new ones, so the lawn on the nature strip is a carpet of fallen, slow-decaying gum leaves. And any poor car which parks under the tree is also soon covered in fallen leaves and gumnuts.

The visitors to the tree don't stop at sunset, either. Fruit bats, which are plentiful here in Sydney, like a bit of this delicious flower nectar too, so it's common to see mysterious, large black shapes with wide, pointy, pterodactylish wings swooping off into the moonlight when disturbed by passers-by. (And in fact the fruit bats represent the greatest peril for parked cars. Their huge, black guano blobs really do splatter most spectacularly!)

Many locals stop to talk to me about the tree and say how much delight they take in seeing it in bloom each year, although all my nearby neighbours and I laugh with each other about the fact that the messy car parking spot under the tree is always the last one to be occupied by any of us. We've all wised up to its perils.

As well as being pretty and long-flowering, trouble-free and wearing magnificently coloured foliage, a food source to beautiful native birds for fully six months of each year, our gum tree also gets my vote for doing a dreadful job not found in nature – being a street tree – in a truly classy, admirable way.