Blinked and missed it

After a week pre-occupied with the necessary business of making money and publishing gardening magazines, I finally managed to get all the way down to the back of our garden this Saturday morning, only to realise that the show which I thought was going to begin any moment was already over. Blinked and missed it, I did.

This is a soggy goner that probably looked quite pretty sometime mid-week, when I wasn't around. Hedychium gardnerianum to the botanists, ginger lily to rest of us. Looks like a pretty party girl around 3am on a wet Saturday night, with a few regrets in tow. Heavy recent rain came at the wrong time, just as the flowers began blooming. Rats!

This is what Lily probably looked like on Wednesday, when I wasn't there. (This shot is from last year, when I lovingly documented Lil's emergence.)

Lily wasn't alone this morning, either. This is another bedraggled party-goer, with a torn, wet dress.

The ginger lilies have had a good time and they're healthy and happy plants, so I'm not really complaining that much. Lovely tropical greenery still. It's just one of those things. Sometimes you can miss seeing the flowers bloom right there in your own garden.

Not far away from the ginger lilies, I have planted a couple of relatives, two tropical flowering gingers. Both are classified as Costus barbatus, but one has the common name of Red Tower Ginger, and the other is known as Costa Flores Ginger. So far no blooms, but this is their first year here. They were planted last October, and I've been cutting back neighbouring, rampant canna lilies and cardamoms to make room for my flowering gingers to grow, and feeding them too.

All I have to go on, and to show you, are these very nice plant labels. Not sure what I'll get this year, but I will persist. My ginger lilies didn't flower in their first year, and so I won't mind if these tropical beauties don't show up this year. I'm patient. I've read that in Sydney they don't get growing well until it warms up in December, and they often don't flower till late in summer or even early autumn, as it's still very warm and humid now in early March.

But what I really will mind, as in being hugely pissed off, will be if I get busy at work again (and it's a wet week) and I pop outside only to discover the soggy, rapidly fading flowers of these flowering gingers saying "sorry, we tried to hang on, but where were you?"

I've learned my lesson. No matter how busy, always make time for a quick lap of the garden just to see what's happening. It's only 9 metres long and 7.5 metres wide, so it's not as if a quick lap is going to take more than a minute, is it?

A long wait is over

I had posted something earlier this month here about the troubles I had last year with little rotters munching on every last one of my ginger lily flowers. Adopting the "try, try, try again" motto of the determined fool, today I have much better news – blooms!


This morning's happy scene, with the ginger lily, Hedychium gardnerianum, in full bloom atop its 1.5m long stem.

The reference books say that these flowers are fragrant, and they are, but merely slightly and only when you deliberately set your nose the assignment of finding some scent. It's not a scent that seeks you out (unlike my strongly sweet frangipani and murraya perfumes). However, the red and yellow flower colours are just a bit richer and lovelier than my camera can capture, and definitely the highlight of beholding this beauty in bloom.

Being tall, the ginger lily's flower spikes rise above the dense murraya hedge which screens off my untidy potting/composting zone, so we can enjoy the sight of the ginger lily in bloom from the kitchen and Pam's office/studio.


The development of the flower spikes is all part of the plant's drama, taking three or four weeks to develop then flower. There are seven stems to the plant this year and only one is in bloom so far. Five others have flower spikes in some stage of development, and the last one so far hasn't produced anything, despite looking perfectly healthy otherwise.

Once the flower spike gets to size, it then takes about a week or more to slowly open out to this shape. I am sure its opening would be a marvel to watch in a time-lapse sequence. The flower's unfurling process has a decidedly mechanical quality to it, with the arms folding out and down into position and, once they're at the right angle and locked into place, then growing a bit more in length, prior to sending out a few thin red tongues of stamen first, followed by the yellow petals and the rest of the stamens.

Standing back a few feet, here's the cramped jungle in which the ginger lily thrives. To the left the glossy green leaves of the murraya hedge, to the right the crinkled broad fronds of a native bird's nest fern. As I mentioned earlier, the ginger lily's stems are about 1.5m tall, and red patches mark the spot where each leaf joins the stem. All in all a handsome thing perfectly suited to the dappled light under the olive tree.

I had to laugh when I looked up one of my reference books to find out more about this plant. Apparently it's regarded as a weed in the North Island of New Zealand, so that superb temperate climate tells you something about its ideal growing conditions. Many, many garden plants are capable of becoming a weed somewhere on this planet. All they need is ideal growing conditions and a lack of the various predators/competitors that keep them under control in their home range. This ginger lily apparently comes from the Indian Himalayas, so it's a long way from home, but it seems happy enough here in Sydney and looks set to become a highlight here every summer.