Asleep at the wheel

 

Spring has a way of waking you up like no other season. It brings you outside, don't forget the camera, "oh look over there that one is flowering too". You know the kind of thing. For a gardener it's called excitement.

And so this morning I spent the first hour of daylight wandering around the place capturing the morning glow. So come take a walk with me around our little Marrickville garden — all 7m x 10m of it — and say hello to the first of our spring flowers.

Our Scadoxus patch is steadily increasing in size. I could only fit in nine of the 11 flowers we have, and down at ground level there's another dozen babies doing well. Too small to flower yet, they'll eventually flower at some stage. Not sure when. That's half the fun of growing these things. I barely know what I am doing, but it's working.

This wobbly pano shot shows where the Scadoxus live, under the big old frangipani (that's the ideal place for Pam to hang her forests of Spanish moss that she loves). This is a super shady place in summer but it's well lit in winter once the frangi drops its leaves. To the left of the birdbath those strappy looking things are bromeliads, and they love it here too. I never touch them and they're happily thriving. 

While we're under the frangipani tree, here's another flowering bulb from South Africa (as is the Scadoxus). This is Veltheimia, given to us by our good friends John and Liz, so it always reminds us of them.

The final South African residents happily multiplying under the care of the big old frangipani tree are the yellow clivias. Their flowers should pop out any day now, so the combination of yellow clivia trumpets and dazzling scadoxus fireworks is well worth seeing, and waiting for each year.

Speaking of yellow-flowered people, down the other end of our garden, near the house, the Mardi Gras style blooms of the native Sydney Rock Orchid, Dendrobium kingianum, are in full glory right now. The miracle of this performance is that last year these plants were being attacked by orchid beetles, little chompers that love to dine on unopened flower buds, and so the shows weren't as good as previous years, or this year. These beetles are impossible to control with organic sprays, and I'm not prepared to buy or use the bee-killing commercial sprays (containing Carbaryl) that can control these beetles. So I don't know why the beetles haven't attacked this year but I'm glad they haven't.

I couldn't decide which Nasturtium flower to show you so here's two: there are dozens of them and no two seem to be the same, although they come in all possible combinations of yellow, red and orange, maybe a bit of black trim. Pam and her watercolour art students absolutely adore nasturtiums as a painting subject, and as a gardener I do appreciate the way that nasturtiums suppress other weeds, but they do like to spread out and bully every other plant they come near. I cut them back every few days and they just merrily bounce back without a care in the world. They never complain, they just grow back each time.

We grow our Italian lavender in a pot and it likes it there. There's also a white-flowered type that Pam asked me to get, and it is slower off the mark and probably won't be in flower for another month or so.

One of the hardest flowers to photograph is this thing, a hellebore. That's because the flowers point down to the ground, and I'm too old to take photos lying on my back, so I hold up the flower's foliage with my hand, quickly take a snap and then edit out my finger from the photo. 

I'll finish off with two "panorama" shots of our small inner-city garden, just to give you a bit more context for what I have shown you already. To see the "pano" view, just double click on the photo itself and it will show the much wider shot (hopefully).

This first pano shows the left side of the garden looking out from the back of the house and its covered pergola. 

And this second pano is of the right side of the garden with lots of succulents in pots, more bloody nasturtiums trying to take over. The largish round white pot on the centre right is a native flannel flower bush that flowered beautifully last year and we are hoping will do so again this year too.

Finally, I actually have a couple more blog postings waiting to go. Our front garden is looking lovely but it has not worked out as I had intended, not at all. I'll fill you in on that bit of gardening fun next time.

Blink and you might miss it

As we travelled the last few miles at the end of our recent 3500km driving holiday in southern Australia, Pammy said "I wonder what has changed in the two weeks since we left?" She was referring to anything and everything in our local area. "Look, that shop has closed down" ... "and finally they've taken down all the ugly hoarding around that construction site — that new apartment building is almost finished."

No matter how little time you spend away from your home base, in a fortnight something always changes.

And that proved to be true for our little garden. During our two weeks away, one of our garden's best flower shows reached its peak and then quietly faded (just like they do in the forest). New things burst into full bloom, and seeds sprouted. And we weren't here to see any of it. We blinked and missed it all.

Still, it's an interesting thing to do ... leave your garden to its own devices for a while. And so here's what we missed out on over the last couple of weeks.

In the foreground, our usually fabulous scadoxus looked like the stragglers on the morning after a very memorable party. Frazzled, tousled and tired, but they did have fun for a while. In the background, the yellow clivias were in a similar tatty condition.

Poor yellow clivias, they'll be back same time next year, and hopefully there'll be more of them next time (and there'll be an old blogger there to photograph them in all their glory and lavish them with praise).

The one very good thing about the scadoxus section of the garden is that all the baby plants are thriving. In recent years I have been painstakingly raising them from collected seed, and this spring they are growing stronger than ever. There's more than a dozen newbies here and there. I'm just hoping these are not plants that need 10-15 years in the ground before they do their first flowering. I'm not sure if I'll live that long to see all my work come into glorious bloom!

In other pleasing baby news, all the flat-leaf parsley seed which I scattered in a few spots a few weeks before we left have sprouted up through the sugar cane mulch and seem to be powering along. This year all I did was open the seed packet and shake it here and there in the mulched vegie area, then say "you're on your own, kids; good luck". I think this has been my most successful seed-sowing method yet for parsley.

Upon our return we were greeted by some new blooms, including these little mint bush beauties ...

... and all our hanging baskets of pelargoniums perked up in the spring sunshine. 

But the flower show which impressed us the most was this (next) unexpected one ...

Our broccoli patch was in its full glory as adult plants, and the loud humming of the bees all around the broccoli's yellow blooms was a clear signal from the bees to me to "leave our broccoli flowers alone". 

They're perfectly correct, of course. While we grow broccoli with the mindset of "food/vegetable" and tend to look upon these flowers as a signal to replace the crop, the bees adore this plant's flowers, and so until all the flowers fade our broccoli plants are staying right where they are, as a bee temple.

So that's my little report on how our little garden looks after a few weeks of slight neglect (although our wonderful neighbours Nick and Katerina did their usual great job watering the garden for us).

Oh, so how was the holiday? Great! 

I'm still sorting through the thousand or so photos that we took along the way, and once that's done I'll show you some of the highlights, especially the lovely gardens we visited and the new people we met (hi Kerryn in Kyneton!). 

Boing!

One of my favourite experiences in our garden is simply to step out into it every morning, to see what's happening. In Spring I'm guaranteed to find something new every day. Just like me, it's alive and breathing (but unlike me it's young and pretty and growing fast). Oh well, I'm happy to settle for "it's great to be alive".

And so here's a photo-driven little posting of just some of the lovely things I found in our garden this morning.

I think we're at "peak native orchid" today. The show has been brewing for a few weeks but this morning all of them are on song. 

Pammy wants me to send her this close-up of a tiny native orchid bloom, taken with the camera about an inch away from the small but perfectly formed bloom. I think she can sense a watercolour painting coming on ...

Speaking of small but perfectly formed blooms, the first of our purple mint bush blooms made an appearance this morning. As I have three bushes and each is covered in flower buds, these are the first wave of what promises to be a few thousand more. Can't wait ...

And to finish off our purple patch, our potted common sage, the kitchen garden herb, has started to do its thing.

Just a few feet from the sage, also growing in a pot, the Thai lime plant is making good use of all the spring fertiliser I fed it with a few weeks ago. The young "double" leaves are the freshest green, every nook and cranny is filled with bum-like blooms and all is good in the fragrant, spicy Thai flavouring department.

A much quieter chap, the Turkish Brown fig looks such a treat as the morning sun shines through its new green leaves every morning. After its winter repotting, I am hoping for good things this summer. No pressure, though ...

Our Westringia 'Elizabeth Bough', covered in light pink blooms, cuddles up close with the astonishingly capable geranium 'Big Red', which flowers pretty much all year round.

And last of all, in a deep, dark corner of the garden when the sun doesn't get much of a look in, the yellow clivias have decided the time is right. I love how they know this stuff.

Made for the shade

Just like me, our garden is slowly ageing, but unlike innocent old me, our garden is getting shadier ...

Our major shade-spreader is our frangipani tree, and as it’s so beautiful and fragrant we’re enjoying letting it grow. By midsummer, once its canopy fills out, there’s a lot more shade in our garden than there used to be.

The frangipani is one of “Pammy’s plants” and it’s a favourite child of ours because we have raised it over many years from a single cutting taken from a friend’s garden. So it has a history that makes it even more special.

So, with major cutbacks off the agenda, we’ve decided to take it easy and grow more shade-loving plants in a our increasingly shady areas. Such as these yellow clivias, which love life under our frangipani tree.

Yellow clivias? Yep. The usual ones are orange or salmon-orange. The other colours (most commonly pale yellow) cost a lot more — they’re twice the price of orange ones in our little local garden centre — but they are becoming more available, and I prefer the yellow to the orange. We bought our yellow ones at a garden show, and they weren’t outrageously overpriced.

Clivias are yet another happy South African migrant to our shores, they’re everywhere in Sydney and that’s because they’re easy to look after. Over the years they’ll form bigger and bigger clumps.

Eventually, and I mean after several years, the flowering of the clumps might slow down due to overcrowding, so you will need to dig up the clump, divide it into several smaller plants, replant them, then put your feet up for another decade. Well, that’s how it works in heaven.

We had orange-flowered clivias growing here in the early 1990s, and they thrived back then, but I decided to get rid of them in one of our occasional garden renovations, gave them all to our good friend Zora (sister of Krissy, our frangipani cutting supplier, so we’re going full circle here, folks), and they’ve been thriving at her place ever since. These plants really do love East Coast Australia.

As far as caring for clivias goes, I almost don’t. Never water them, no nothing. Apart from being included in the annual Aromatherapy Garden Festival called “The Casting of the Chicken Poo”, which always takes place on a day when rain is forecast in late winter (this is as close as my life gets to religious festivals), the clivias just have to fend for themselves.

Mind you, Sydney gets a fair bit of rain every year, so if you are somewhere that gets less rainfall, you might have to point your garden hose at your clivias occasionally.

Also doing very well in our shady spots, New Guinea Impatiens have a good future here. We planted some two years ago and they’re still doing OK. Being from New Guinea, they don’t love Sydney winters but they do survive them, and once summer comes on they’re happier again.

The first batch we grew came in a punnet of seedlings, and the only problem was the flower colours: too many reds and pinks for our liking, and only some white.

This time we’ve bought larger potted plants, with the rich salmon flower colour than Pam and I prefer.

Our brilliant plan is to take lots of cuttings of the salmon-flowered plants over the coming months, and slowly but surely turn our shady patches into little seas of green new Guinea impatiens foliage topped with a mosaic of salmon and white blooms, with our cuttings-grown plantings.

Yes, cuttings are a great way to save money but they’re also the ideal way to make sure you are getting (and multiplying) the flower colours you want.

South African belles

Hey, the Scadoxus are in bloom again, so it must be September. In fact it's the sixth September these South African beauties have blazed away with their hot oranges in early spring (or 'Sprinter' if you read my most recent posting). I planted them in April 2009, they bloomed in September that year, and the good news is that they're producing babies this year, as well as blooming right on schedule.

Who, what? Scadoxus, or Scadoxus puniceus if you must, but
it also answers to Natal paintbrush in some valleys.

In 2009, three blooms appeared on those long green stalks, and
since then a fourth has grown to adulthood to join them.

This year each bulb has started to produce
a set of bulblets around its base, creating a
little forest of future beauties. However,
everything Scadoxus happens rather slowly,
so I'm not expecting our fifth torch next
September, although I'm willing to be surprised.

I did mention last year (or was is the year before?) that I was trying to harvest some Scadoxus seed and get them to germinate, but there's no sign of any seedlings anywhere. Apparently the seeds need to get into moist ground fairly quickly, then stay moistish under mulch, and even then they take months to come up, but only if the planets line up and I've been a good boy, etc. As we've had some very very dry months this year, I suspect it just wasn't the right year for them (although I've been very good – just ask Pam – but it didn't do any good). So I'll try again this time round, but won't hold my breath.

Finally, the next door neighbour to our little
forest of Scadoxus is finally producing its first
flush of flowers. It's a yellow clivia, and the
shy little thing has stage fright. It's been looking
like this for more than week now – forever
'about' to flower, without going 'traa-daaaa'.

I'm prepared to wait until it's good and ready, as it's the beginning of what I hope will be an ever-expanding clump of them over coming years, much in the same way that my Scadoxus family has settled in here so well. 

As both Clivia and Scadoxus come from South Africa, I really like the fact that they not only flower together but they live side-by-side as well. Maybe I should barbecue some boerewors or bake up a batch of bobotie to make them feel at home?

Making the bed

So much work and so little to show for it, but that's making the bed for you. Garden beds, I mean. It's a classic piece of 'behind the scenes' work, much the same as all the scraping and sanding that precedes a decent paint job.

My garden is so small that I need to do things in a certain order, due to a lack of space. Today was 'prepare the beds where the gardenias will go' day. This is the bed I showed in my previous post, where the mother-in-law tongues once lived. Over the 22 years I've been gardening here this poor bed has hosted a range of different, grumbly and troublesome grevilleas; a totally out-of-control monster rosemary bush; and the potted curry tree, plus various others. 

The last time I tested the soil pH there was when I moved in 22 years ago, and it was mildly alkaline (7.5) back then. 

What a difference 22 years makes: now
it's acid, pH 6. Glad I checked!

It took three hours of hard yakka to
get the bed right. I made the mistake at
some stage of thinking a pebbly mulch
would look nice, and over the years the
pebbles had worked their way down
deep into the soil. There were far too
many of them, so out they came, one
by one. Then I added three bags of
cow manure, and numerous handfuls
of lime, to help correct the pH level.
Dug over, raked over, watered well,
it now has a week or two to settle in.

One good bit of news is that I scored a
nice plant this morning. I went down to the
local Marrickville organic vegetable market
(on Addison Road, Sundays 8.30 to 3), which
is well worth a visit. As well as all the fruit
and veg and other foods on offer, it also hosts
all sorts of people with stuff to sell, including
some very good little plant stands. I ordered my
Tiger grass from one plant stand and on the way
out spotted another one selling orchids, clivias,
bromeliads and lots more. The orange clivias
are the common ones, and don't cost so much,
but the other colours, such as the yellows and
reds, usually come with a hefty price tag.
$30 isn't a super bargain but it's a good price
and the plant looks very healthy indeed.

I hope that Radox stuff works its magic on my poor old back. At some stage today I used every heavy-duty garden tool in the shed: mattock, spade, fork, rake and gave my back quite a workout. Combined with yesterday's heavy lifting of all those bags, I am waiting to see what tomorrow brings when I attempt to get out of bed in the morning!