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.

Lots of flowers? Must be spring!

"Hey, come and have a look at this," said Pammy, ever the eagle-eyed spotter of all things newsworthy in our garden. We had to get down on our hands and knees, and be up very close, but there it was — the complex, gorgeous mini bloom of our potted succulent. I think it's a graptoveria, but as a succulent amateur I am at all times willing to be corrected on these things. Doesn't matter really, it's the wonderful mini other-worldliness of tiny blooms that had us both captivated.

It's a bit orchidy, this succulent flower, with its red-wine flecks on pearlescent petals.


Even I could spot the next of our spring awakenings — a huge spray of not-quite-yet-open yellow dendrobium orchids.


This spring show has been a few years in the making, as this plant has never flowered before. Over the last few years I have tried my hardest to be nice to it, but without any success. It has always lived with all the other orchids, which manage to flower their heads off like clockwork. But the dendrobium? Nah, sorry. Once all the flowers open fully, I will no doubt do another posting.


This next pink one, a climbing pelargonium, is one of the success stories of my "recovery ward". I bought three plants, put them in a hanging basket in a sunny spot, where they then proceeded to do very little, then started to die off. While I can accept that the fault is all mine, what bugs me is that I didn't have a clue what I was doing wrong.

So I rescued the final, barely surviving plant, repotted it into a smaller, normal pot and it has been keeping my orchids company in a more sheltered spot for the last year or so. And now it's looking happy again. Should I attempt to move it back to the hanging basket? Well, that is why I bought it ... but I am beginning to see that as the "hanging basket of doom" and I can't quite work up the bravery to try it yet.




Next in the spring slideshow is good old, never-fail, grow-them-every-year poppies. Pam loves them. Pam cuts them for vases in our house. And this year we have yellow, white and orange poppies. Lovely.



It's nice to be appreciated. The deal is, if I am nice to my lemon tree and scatter lots of chicken poo under the tree and water it well, the lemon tree produces lots of flowers, and a few months later, lots of fruit. So far it's all going according to plan. 


Even though evergreen Sydney springs aren't quite as spectacular as they are in colder climates, they're still a delightful time to be a gardener. As well as the flowers I have posted here, yellow clivias and vivid orange scadoxus aren't far off blooming, and the native orchid flower buds are all jostling for a good spot ... but I'll call a temporary halt at this stage. Lots to look forward to!

Good mornings

All the gardening gurus in the Southern Hemisphere will tell you what a lovely thing it is to have a "north-facing" garden. And they're right. Yes, you get more sunshine if your garden faces the sun, and for lots of plants, especially flowering plants and quick-growing vegies, a sunny garden is a little patch of heaven.

Our garden doesn't quite manage heavenly, pure-north-facing perfection, but it does face north-east. It leans towards the morning sun and tends to shy away from the afternoon sun. I'm just the same, myself. Love the mornings, hate the afternoon heat, too. It's nice to be simpatico with your own patch of ground ...

And so as I looked out the back door this morning, the first thing to catch my eye was the way the morning sun was lighting up the first of this year's Iceland poppies.

It really is the prettiest time of day to be here, and as the early mornings are almost always a time when it's just Pammy and me here in our garden, we are constantly delighted and dazzled by sparkly little details backlit by morning sun.

Everything here looks good in the morning sun. Even the washing drying on the clothesline – well, if it's a few tea towels and some of Pammy's colourful cotton blouses – looks like a painting.

Every year I plant poppies for Pammy, and when there are several up in bloom all at the same time, she brings them inside and pops them in a vase. Nice tradition, bringing the morning sunshine inside ...

The 10 year rewind — part 2 — Desert Island Plants

Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 2 is this one — Desert Island Plants — from January 2009, where I dream up a garden filled with fantasy plants, most of which would never thrive here.  

After dropping in to visit Patient Gardener's Blog I came across a lovely little activity started by Shirl at Shirl's Garden Watch, picking three 'desert island plants' to take with you. Rules are: no food plants, don't worry about climate, it's perfect. So here are my choices, with just a tiny bit of rule-bending in the middle there – as well as the shameful use of images sourced at Google images to illustrate the selections.

Desert island? I'll need shade, so I'll make it a poinciana, Delonix regia, please. These are all over tropical Australia, but they struggle along in temperate Sydney and never look so nice as they do in up north in Brisbane, Broome and Darwin. I want one!

In addition to the stunning flowers, the feathery foliage casts gorgeous shade, and the tree itself spreads very wide. You could easily fit a feasting table underneath one of these.

Here's the "rule-bending" bit. Can I nominate poppies in general? For starters, on the hilltops of my desert island I'd love to see fields of Californian poppies. I love the dense, clear orange colour of these poppies, one of my favourite oranges.

And in a freakishly cool part of the island I'd finally be able to enjoy the blue of the Himalayan poppy.

And while I'd have no interest in harvesting an opium poppy for its toxic nectar, at least I could have the satisfaction of growing something both illegal and pretty.

However, down closer to the beach shack, I'd have lots and lots and lots of Iceland poppies to pop into vases to bring inside. All colours please, and did I mention I wanted lots? And PS: if the judges say "sorry, no rule-bending" I'll just go for lots and lots of Icelands, thanks.

Finally, I'd like something to remind me of home here in Australia, so I've chosen our most unusual yet beautiful gum tree, the gungurru, formally known as Eucalyptus caesia but most well known these days by the name it's sold under, 'Silver Princess'. It's a weeping gum tree, a slender thing that looks undernourished when there's only one of them to behold. I'd need a good stand of them somewhere to do the fantasy justice. The 'Silver Princess' name comes from the white coating on its branches and gumnuts.

Its flowers are very big, not the biggest of all the gum flowers, but much larger than average.

Its bark is sometimes underrated, as is the bark of many gums, but I'll be looking forward to that show on my island, too.

After the flower show ends the gumnuts have their turn at stardom.

However, the best way to fall in love with this tree is to see it in bloom, with its weeping habit and the ghostly white pallor to its trunk. There are a few of these trees scattered here and there in Sydney, but none are healthy. This tree belongs in a much less humid climate than Sydney's. It's a native of Western Australia, which has cool, wet winters and hot, dry summers. I guess if I can dial up the climate to keep a Himalayan poppy happy, it should be easy enough to set the dial for one section of the island to 'Perth, Western Australia' too.

(Again, I have left any identifying tags in place on photos to credit a few, but all pix have been downloaded off Google images, hence the patchy quality).

Mardi Gras in the rain

In Sydney it has always been true that it doesn't rain, it pours. Yet we also seem to have another pattern going lately — drought or flood. July was dry and cool, rain-free, then it has done nothing but rain all August. Guess what? Another wet day is forecast for today (but at least it's a sunny start!). 

Yet out in the garden one team of plants is having its own little Mardi Gras in the rain. The poppies are still popping, and though I posted something about them just a month ago, here's some more popping good cheer to enjoy.

Pop!

Pammy likes poppies. I like poppies. And poppies are so easy to grow. They flower in the middle of winter, they sway on long slender stalks, the unopened flower buds look like stubble-haired punks, and they put on a nice show in all sorts of colours. 

And that's why I plant poppies every year. Growing tips? Toss seedlings over your shoulder and walk away. The poppies know what to do…

OK, that's a slight exaggeration, but these Iceland poppies really do love life, and I can't begin to tell you how much it makes me smile and feel colourful inside, just to see them again.

The morning show

There's one special advantage of having a garden which faces the morning sun; as you open the back door on a clear and sunny winter's morning, such as today's was, you are greeted by glowing colour as the sunshine radiates through the open flowers.

I love poppies for so many reasons. The crepe paper texture of the flowers is one. The colours another, so too the hairy heads of the unopened buds. And the collapsed chaos as the floppy ones keep on flowering while too delirious to stand up just adds to the sense that there's a party going on here.

Every year I grow Iceland poppies for Pammy, but I love them just as much as she does, and they're definitely at their best when they do the morning show, as pictured here.

A minor milestone

This minor milestone of mine – my 300th posting - will be an easy one to remember, because I did it on Good Friday, 2011. Now, for some people such as Helen at Patient Gardener, or Allison at Life in a Pink Fibro, both of whom keep up a steady beat of one very good posting per day, a mere 300 postings will be notched up each and every year. For me it has taken almost three years to get here, but I'm sure because I am so long-winded for any regular readers you've probably read as many words here as you would have at someone else's blog with 3000 posts to their name.

Anyway, to celebrate my 300th posting, I thought I'd just do a completely ordinary posting about what I did in the garden this morning. It's a fine, autumnal warm and sunny Good Friday here in Sydney, and I'm afraid folks I didn't go to church today, but as usual I did get closer to nature, my own personal place of worship. Let's start off with the first job – filling a gap.

Sadly, this is the gap before it was a gap. You'll see the gap a few photos down. The problem with this lovely lemon-scented pelargonium is that it was a shocking bully of a plant, and a wimp at the same time (isn't that always the way with bullies?). This plant would monster everything near it, then blow over in any strong wind and look like muck for weeks on end while it regrew itself after the storm damage was trimmed off. Pam has never liked this plant all that much, and so we decided to get rid of it and replace it with something better behaved, a steadier chap.

Time will tell if this is the 'steady chap' we're wanting to recruit. This is a Plectranthus 'Mona Lavender' a small-growing form of plectranthus which reaches 80cm high and 60cm wide, says the label. The label also reassures us that it doesn't spread and self-seed like other plectranthi do. It's a shade-lover, or a semi-shade lover, and the spot we have in mind for it is classic dappled semi-shade. It will also have to survive the competition from our old olive tree's roots, so all I can do with this plant is wish it luck, and plant it.

These are the Plectranthus's blooms, which start in summer and continue into autumn. They get the seal of approval from Pammy, and I am sure a painting of them will be in our house one of these years, if the plant proves to be a success.

Aren't gaps unfortunate looking things? All bare leaves and ugly bits. Nothing can be done about a gap, apart from waiting for time to put on growth and fill the space with foliage and flowers. To help the plectranthus settle in, I raised the soil level a few inches by adding stacks of home-made compost and digging it through the soil, then planting into that. Behind the plectranthus is my sole bonsai plant, a Port Jackson fig which must be more than 10 years old. Finally, after many years, its trunk is thickening up nicely. This poor plant was a bullying victim at the hands of the pelargonium, and if bonsai could speak I am sure it would muttering a few 'good riddances' this morning.

Over the other side of the pathway, I'm plugging some more gaps. These are the two rows of Shirley poppies which came up from seed and seem to be getting on with life. The trouble is that there were three other rows where I sowed seed but which are still bereft of success, and so I decided to call in the rescue squad.

Iceland poppy seedlings, two punnets, enough to fill the three bare rows. Shirley poppies are notorious for being hard to transplant, so you have to grow them from seed sown directly where the plants are to grow. There's no such fussiness with Iceland poppies, which grow well from seed or seedlings. The Icelands are slightly smaller plants than the Shirleys, but that won't matter. By late June Pammy should have poppies galore, which is becoming a colourful winter tradition for us.

Elsewhere, flowers are appearing. The three wall pots under my covered pergola haven't been a huge success so far. I tried impatiens there but they were wilty and high-maintenance, and so when it came time several months ago to divide some 'pups' from one of my potted bromeliads, I decided to give them a go in the wall pots. And they're starting to send out flowers. They've been easy-care there, and so they might be the answer.

About two months ago I trimmed the living daylights out of my 'Peaches and Cream' grevillea, and it's starting to flower its head off. Grevilleas are a bit 'beat me, whip me' in personality, real masochists which love the discipline of a good, hard pruning. It's covered in blooms and flower buds, and should be at its peak in a few weeks, by late autumn.

While photographing the Grevillea, I noticed behind it another of my neighbour Nick's plants popping its head over the fence to say hello to my plants. Not sure what this is, but it's a wonderfully colourful effusion of hot pink that's a very welcome visitor here. Thank you Nick!

And so that's it for posting number 300. According to my Sitemeter people-counter thingy at the very bottom of this page, I have a bit over 77,000 people to thank for dropping by to read my ramblings and peek at my photos. So thank you very much for your interest and your comments, they're much appreciated. I guess my next blogging ambition is to make it to 500 postings, something which at the current rate will occur in 2013. See you then!

Before the deluge

I'm addicted to the weather bureau's online weather radar, and today the forecast is basically "deluge headed your way". It's one of those big big ones, with about half the continent covered in swirling grey clouds. While this is great news in the long run for our dry rivers and farms, over the next 48 hours it's bad news for delicate flowers, spindly seedlings and people planning outdoor weddings. And so I thought I'd pop out this morning to capture the scene here in Amateur Land, before the deluge.

Yet another of my Photoshopped panoramas, if you click on the photo it should come up much bigger on your screen. While it isn't exactly a carnival of colour, there are lots of things in flower now. I've been a bit distracted with work and other projects these last few weeks, and the garden has largely been looking after itself quite nicely. A few close-up details are in order.

Oh goody, another excuse to show you my Louisiana iris again. Each flower lasts only four or so days at best, but as it fades another bud rises, opens and takes its predecessor's place. I found the plant label in the shed, and this is Lousiana iris 'Gulf Shores'.

Just behind the Louisiana iris, the Grevillea 'Peaches and Cream' is coming back into flower, after a major cut-back two months ago. It's lovely the way the flowers change colour from one end to the other.

All the brodiaea bulbs are flowering now, and while they're too sparse to be spectacular the colour is complex and their sheer unusualness will do me.

When viewed from above you can see the brodiaea's star shape most clearly. If I grow them again next year I'll plant them twice as densely as the bulb packet said to plant them.

Growing close to the brodiaeas, the love-in-a-mist is almost there. All this flower bud has to do is survive the forecast strong wind and rain over the next couple of days. The 'mist' part of its name is of course the fine green 'hairs' which surround each bloom like a veil.

Needless to say the poppies are still popping up daily, now past their fourth month of doing so. The pinky-purple coloured ones on the left are self-seeded 'wild' poppies that always make a welcome appearance in the second half of the poppy 'season'.

We have two wonderful pelargonium plants here, both of which are actually grown for their foliage, but right now they're enjoying a little burst of spring flowering. This pale-leafed pelargonium is a shocking garden bully, muscling in on everything else in the local area. Perversely, it loves being cut back and grows back vigorously every time. It's one of those 'beat me, whip me' kinds of plants.

On the other side of the garden, the lemon-scented pelargoniums are putting on a very good effort at flowering. You can smell the foliage of the plants from a few feet away, and brushing against it while you're weeding or working on a neighbouring plant is like stepping into a perfume shop. But right now it's sending up little clusters of pink blooms which dot the plant, rather than cover it. A major wind-and-rain storm last spring belted the daylights out of this long-stemmed plant, but true to the indestructible ethos of the pelargonium genus, it bounced back, as it will this time if the winds knock it around.

And as combatants in any contest in the modern media like to say, "bring it on" (the wind and rain, I mean). I do enjoy a good storm and lashing rain, and even if the garden gets knocked around, watching nature grow back after a battering is almost as fascinating as watching it basking beautifully in the sun.