2015 - The Gardening Year in Review

As far as years go, I'd be the first to admit that 2015 has not been a "biggie" in the scheme of things. We didn't set any growth records, we didn't redesign the garden, storms didn't destroy it, bumper crops were not harvested ... in fact it proved to be a perfectly normal year all round. Phew!

Yes, there were successes and failures, lots of fun with plants and plenty of fascination with nature, plus a little sadness, and so there remains but one more thing to do before we pop the champagne and declare "Happy New Year" to friends and neighbours: and that's to hand out some awards to the deserving. Now, if Pammy could hand me the envelopes, let's begin the 2015 Garden Amateur Awards!

Plant of the Year/Blog of the Year

And the winner is a happily resettled refugee! Pam's former potted office plant, this delightfully spotty Begonia maculata, was forced to move from its original home simply because it had outgrown the space. It has now settled in superbly into its new outdoor home under the murraya bush (still within view of Pam's office), where it shares the moist shade with other former residents of Pammy's verdant office, some maidenhair ferns. The big suspense surrounded the begonia's chances of surviving its first winter outdoors ... and it not only romped it in — it kept on growing. 

Now, this begonia is a bit like those Hollywood blockbusters that take out all the prizes on Oscars night, because as well as winning POTY (Plant of the Year) it also took out the prestigious BOTY (Blog of the Year) award for the most-read blog posting here at Garden Amateur. It seems lots of people wanted to know about what does well in a shady spot.  

Wildlife of the Year

The winner of WOTY (Wildlife of the Year) is Mr and Mrs Native Paper Wasp, pictured here building their new creche just outside our kitchen window. Much maligned by the ill-informed anti-insect crowd (the Taliban of nature lovers), paper wasps are beneficial insects which are nowhere near as cranky as the Taliban says they are. 

Idea of the Year

Turning little punnets of supermarket sprouts into crops has proved to be a runaway success, and deserving winner of the IOTY (Idea of the Year) award. Pictured here is the chervil sprouts loving life as thriving crops, and elsewhere in the garden the same idea has produced great crops of both flat-leaf parsley and coriander. 

Crop of the Year 

Though they are small in size, the little Lebanese zucchini takes out the 2015 Crop of the Year (COTY) award through its production of healthy flavour in good, steady numbers. These tasty little fruits just keep on coming, despite the fact that their foliage growing overhead looks like a hospital ward of powdery mildew disasters. Doesn't bother the little workers down at ground level, they just keep on producing.

Surprise of the Year 

After more than 20 years of being quietly green and very fragrantly leafy, our false cardamom plant decided it was time to be flowery, which makes it the standout choice for SOTY (Surprise of the Year). However, big questions remain to be answered in 2016 (which might put it in line for Suspense of the Year): Will it flower just once every 20 years? Will it flower every year from now on? What in the hell prompted it to start flowering? Does it know something about climate change that we don't know? Stay tuned...

Fish of the Year 

This special one-off award has been inaugurated purely to honour the passing of our little goldfishy mate, Paul, who passed away late this year, just a few days short of his sixth birthday. Most little goldfish never achieve much in the way of internet fame, but at least Paul has been read about by hundreds of readers of this blog, and he also has been immortalised artistically in this lovely painting by his honorary mum, my slightly biased pick for Artist of the Year (AOTY), Pamela Horsnell. RIP Paul, you did great.



And so that's it for our 2015 Awards Show here at Garden Amateur. Pammy and I and all the regulars here at the Garden Amateur blog would like to say a big "thanks" to everyone who has visited our blog, left a comment or just accidentally found us while looking for something else. We'll be back in 2016 but in the meantime, have a happy and safe New Year and we look forward to continuing to share our love of gardening, nature and anything else that we fancy all through the coming year.

Scratch and sniff

The internet might be a wonderful thing that can convey so much information – I love it – but I'm glad that it hasn't got a chance of conveying a sense of smell. Let's keep that one for the real world. I was thinking about this issue the other day while pulling out a few weeds from my succulents, and as I did so I brushed up against my rosemary bush and immediately the air was filled with that wonderful scent. Rosemary, mmmmm.

Here's the scene of the inspiration: Succulent City in the foreground, and the rosemary bush hugging in close.

Sometimes you just get lucky at the garden centre and you buy a plant that, for some reason that really doesn't have anything to do with your gardening skills, turns out to be a belter, a wonder plant that not only thrives but has magical qualities. My rosemary bush is one of those special plants. It just drips oiliness, it is such a fragrant thing to be near. The only trick in the kitchen with it is not to use too much – it's strong stuff! I've given it away as cuttings to friends, and one of these days we plan to aromatically conquer the world.

Basil is another plant that's lovely to be near. And that's what I've noticed about aromatic foliage – you tend to come across its delights while working – when you're weeding, harvesting or pruning. Aromatic foliage is a working gardener's secret, ongoing pleasure.

Coriander foliage rivals basil for scented foliage, and as basil is happiest in summer and coriander does best here in Sydney in winter, they complement each other nicely with a similar, but very different role at opposite ends of the year.

As an aside, this year's coriander crop has been the best in several years (and for Australian readers, it came from the ordinary packet of Hortico seeds I bought for hardly anything at my local Mitre 10 store – so much for gourmet seed suppliers.) So, I am letting a few of my coriander plants flower and set seed, and I'm going to harvest those seeds and keep them until April next year, when I'll start up the next cool-season crop of coriander. This stuff isn't worth growing here in summer, as it becomes seedy in weeks, but it stays nicely leafy for months in winter here.

Mint never fails to be a pleasure to be around. It has a lovely scent that you can even smell when you water it in the morning.

While I never hand-water my sage plants – they thrive on our natural rainfall and need little help at all, apart from hacking back in late winter – these smell delicious when I bump into them while doing a spot of weeding.

Until now this blog post seems to have been all about aromatic herbs, but these plants, my lemon-scented pelargoniums, aren't of any use in the kitchen. I planted them for two reasons: they have strongly scented foliage and they thrive in this semi-shaded spot under my olive tree. These plants have proved to be very easy-care. Each is in a pot but you'd never know it by looking at this wide 'bush'. They were horribly bashed up by an autumn storm and lost half their foliage back then, but if anything that made them grow even more vigorously. Just by standing around like an innocent bystander, I learned that these are one of those 'treat em mean, keep em keen' type of garden plants.

Right now, they're flowering, but not exactly spectacularly. Small pinky-white blooms appear in spring, but at all times it's the foliage which is the star here. While I tend to 'accidentally' come across my other foliage plants in the course of gardening work, I deliberately brush up against this scented royalty just to enjoy what it has to offer. The lightest touch fills the air with the spicy, lemony scent.

The last of my scented-leaf plants is a slightly different story. Work close to this plant and you smell nothing. It's the taller one here in the background – cardamom. (The upright-leafed thing in the foreground is a pineapple lily putting on its burst of new spring growth.) I've had this cardamom plant here for at least 15 years, and it's as tough as old boots. Mind you, it has never flowered once, but it has always been leafy and green.

The secret with the beautifully aromatic foliage of cardamom is that you have to either crush it or cook it to release that spicy scent that is such a familiar part of so many Indian and Sri Lankan dishes. (It doesn't flower here because it's not consisently hot enough, by the way, but the plant itself loves Sydney). An Indian-born friend of mine, Rema, now grows her own cardamom here in Sydney, but for several years when she visited my place she used to take home a small harvest of cardamom leaves. She'd then make up a batch of milk-based sweet dessert balls, wrap each in a cardamom leaf, them steam them, with the leaf flavouring them as they cooked. The result – wow!

With aromatic foliage you just have to be there. It's much, much nicer to enjoy it by accident, than by deliberate design. Going outside and deliberately sticking your hooter into a plant just doesn't have the same pleasure as accidental discovery offers.

My suggestion to gardeners is simply to add some aromatic plants to your garden then go about the normal business of weeding, pruning and harvesting, and as a special treat for the hard-working gardener, you'll get to experience that sensual thrill of a delicious scent wafting around. Think of it as a pleasure that is your reward for being a gardener. I do.