Fading to brown

Anyone who has grown the fussier Australian native plants knows how it goes. One week it's apparently healthy and green, defying the experts who said it'd never last. Then one morning you notice just a hint of brown here and there. Oh no! And few days later the browns have taken over, and then this morning, this...

After four years of loyal service, our Acacia cognata 'Limelight'
has lost its glow, and is on the way out. This is one of Pammy's
plants and so I'm under strict instructions to go get another one.
She loves this plant, so do I, and it's a bit of a mystery why it
has curled up its toes now. Maybe the long, hot summer and the
humid hot start to autumn was too much for it? 

Across the pathway is another picture in brown tones, but this
is exactly how Sedum 'Autumn Joy' is meant to look. It started
out pale pink several weeks ago and slowly but surely it has
faded to these rather pretty browns. In a garden full of greens,
grey-blues, reds and more greens, this patch of brown pom poms
has been an eye-catching delight for me every morning when I
look out from the house to the garden. I never thought I'd like
a bit of brown the way I do now.

Call me a glutton for punishment, but I'm off to buy our next Acacia cognata 'Limelight' this morning. The first one was planted back in April 2009, so for this notoriously fickle native, a career of four years is pretty good going. As for the Sedumn 'Autumn Joy', its next stop is to die off in all its deciduous glory, withering down to the ground for a winter sleep, then awaking to do it all again next spring. 

In a garden, life always goes on, even though beloved plants come and go.

Autumn joy

I'm never sure whether its plants' in-built thermometers which tell them autumn's cooler days are arriving, or whether it's their in-built light meters which tell them that the daylight hours are getting shorter. Probably it's both, but whatever the mechanism some of the plants in our succulent patch are getting rather joyous and colourful now that autumn is upon us. Without a doubt, the star is the well named Sedum 'Autumn Joy', the wearer of the pink pompoms pictured below.

Its formal name is Sedum spectabile 'Autumn Joy', and this is
definitely the best it has ever looked. Formerly confined to a pot,
it's loving setting up home in the patch's light, sandy ground.

And the extra-nice thing about this pink person
is that it was a gift from a wonderful friend of
ours, Amanda, who lives in Kyneton, Vic, where
this plant really thrives, due to the cooler inland
climate down there. Amanda gave it to us when
we visited her several years ago, and in the years
since then it has proven its toughness by surviving
well enough, but it wasn't until it went into the
ground that it has shown what it can really do.

The whole plant is abuzz with activity now, as there are bees,
ants and flies crawling over every flower.

This plant is so glam that even the flies are pretty; these shiny
metallic bronze buzzers are zipping nervously everywhere now.

 It's not just the one plant flowering now in the succulent patch. A few others are in flower, including the Echeveria 'Topsy Turvey' which I blogged about recently, and in the last few days another echeveria has burst into bloom.

These are the flowers of Echeveria 'Black Prince'
a beautiful dark-leaved form of echeveria.

Here's one of them sending up what will
become another flush of flowers. For most
of the time it's a low-growing rosette in
the usual echeveria format (but not the
usual colour), yet when flowering time
comes around it sends up a hi-rise
column of leaves, topped by flower heads.

Several days from blooming yet, this is the infant flower spike
of a little Crassula perforata. This is the first positive sign with
this plant since I planted it last year. It has gone nowhere and
done nothing much since being removed from its pot and plonked
into the ground. I think it's been sulking, but maybe it's just a
slow starter after being transplanted. I've always been very fond
of the little pagoda-like format of its leaves rising on the stem,
so I hope it will forgive me my sins and settle in happily now. 

The change in the succulent patch since we renovated it last September has been wonderfully rewarding – our plan has worked! Well, it has mostly worked. We had to guess what sizes plants would get to when mature. We've guessed correctly in most cases but the one where we've got things most spectacularly wrong is our star turn, the Sedum 'Autumn Joy'. It's overshadowing some of its neighbours at the moment (but they're hanging in there), and it should die down in winter, so we might move it to the back of the bed then, when it's snoozing. In the meantime we're just enjoying the show.

If you're new to this blog and want to see what we did to renovate the soil and the patch itself last year, check out this September posting, and this follow-up in December. 

Cubist flowering

"Hey, come outside and check this," said Pammy, "Cubey Guy is flowering."

Cubey guy?

"In the succulent patch... Cubey Guy... I don't know its name, but it's flowering," she replied to my quizzical look.

Indeed she was correct: Cubey Guy was flowering.

After never knowing its name for years, recently with the help
of Lithops aficionado Ngeun, I now know that this blooming
cubist person is Corpuscularia lehmannii. You can see where
Pammy got 'Cubey Guy' from, though. And with Corpuscularia
being one of the harder-to-remember, if not forgettable, names
in the already difficult world of succulent botanical names,
I fully suspect that Cubey Guy is Cubey Guy from now on.

There are only about five flowers on the whole plant and each
is small, just 1cm or so across, and shy, palest pink.

Growth has been slow but steady in its new home; in fact I had
to check an older photo taken last spring to confirm that, yes
indeed, Cubey Guy has grown a fair bit in fact.

STOP PRESS! Hold on a moment, folks. I posted these photos above of Cubey Guy this morning, and this afternoon the sun has come out strongly and guess what? Cubey has really burst into full bloom in glorious style. It has all happened in just two hours, so here are three hot-off-the-press pix of Cubey in his full yellow, sun-worshipping glory!

Hope you don't mind the dramatics, but I just had to set the record straight. Now, we resume normal transmission.

Cubey's neighbour doesn't have a nickname but it is in bloom
now, too. This is Echeveria 'Topsy Turvey', a most unusual
member of the popular group of succulents which a lot of
readers would know as 'hen and chickens', the rosette-shaped
echeverias with the grey-blue foliage.

Topsy Turvey is a magnificent weirdo, the kind
of plant that you'd be likely to see on an alien
planet, or at least standing in as an extra in the
background on a Star Trek movie.

When it isn't sending up spectacular flower stalks in February,
'Topsy Turvey' is still quite a remarkable looking plant, as
this photo taken last December shows. You can kind-of, sort-of
see a bit of echeveria family resemblance there, but only just.

Nearby in the succulent patch, this plant isn't flowering yet, it's
just warming up before it bursts into bloom in autumn. This
is Sedum 'Autumn Joy', and if all goes according to plan this
could be covered in a vividly colourful mass of either red, pink
or pinky-brown blooms. I'm not sure what colour it will be and
so until then Pammy and I will just have to live with the suspense.