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.

The sound of trumpets

There's an old saying about 'what goes around, comes around' and in the case of clivias, they're back in my garden once more. I planted clivias here 20 years ago, grew them happily enough for about 10 years, dug them up and gave them to my friend and workmate Zora, who then planted them in Wollongong, and I think they're doing fine down there now.

And here I am again, about to plant clivias again. This morning I woke up to the sound of trumpet flowers blasting out a showy springtime tune, but instead of the much more familiar orange clivia colours, these trumpets do their cool thing in a lemon sorbet way.

It took no skill whatsoever on my part to produce these
blooms, as I only bought this plant two weeks ago and
it's still in its pot. But it's worth a blog mention anyway.

Alas, there's no fragrance to enjoy, but the good things 
about clivias are many. They're one of the all-time
 champion plants for shade, and they grow so well here
that you see clivias everywhere in Sydney. Though
not native (they're from South Africa) they grow so well
here that we're its home away from home. Their only enemy
of note here are caterpillars, which attack in swarms in
some years, but usually they don't kill the plants, just
disfigure them. Fortunately, new generation sprays which 
are non-toxic to bees (like Dipel and Success) can stop the
 caterpillars but you need to get in early and quick to
win that brief, destructive little war.  

I bought some coloured (ie, not orange) clivias two years ago at a garden show, and due entirely to negligence on my part one of them died (I planted it in a spot so shady and out of the way I forgot it was there, and it succumbed to the rampant competition). The other clivia planted two years ago is perfectly healthy and happy, but as it was only a baby when I planted it, it still hasn't flowered. The terrible/good thing is that I don't know which colour it will be! Could be red, but I think the other option is a peachy-yellow colour, so it could be that. Next year I should know, as it's now a healthy teenage plant. 

Just to balance the odds out, I'm going back to the man from whom I bought the yellow clivia next Sunday, and I'll get a 'classic' orange one to set up my shady grove of clivia colours. From there, if happy, they should spread and multiply over the coming years, and what went around, then went away, then came back home, will be another colourful little story my garden can tell.

Squeezing in some shopping

Attending garden festivals is always a risky business when you have a small garden. Yes, of course I was going to buy something there. I'm a hopeless gardening nut, after all. And besides, Pammy came with me and she's probably worse than me at these events. So between the two of us we were quite happily doomed to our fate. More plants!

How's this for restraint? Gold star effort from the Garden Shopping Team. Just eight plants. Given that there were one zillion plants for sale at the Florafest, eight is almost too restrained. We should have bought more. But space is tight...

Pam went off in one direction doing her shopping and exploring while I worked on our magazine's stand. During a half-hour break I made a bee-line for the plants I wanted and, yep, Pam and I both bought the same plant – a yellow clivia! We had discussed clivias for one shady corner of the garden a few months back, as clivias are one of the best flowering perennials for shade that you can grow in Sydney. And Pam never forgets a good shopping idea. Clivias usually have orange blooms, but in recent years plant breeders have come up with red, yellow, peach and other colours. And so we now have two yellows and one peach clivia (which has an interesting green throat to the flower). It will take these babies one or two more years before they flower, but after that they should be very easy-care.

The other plants I knew I wanted were some flowering gingers. I really enjoyed watching how my ginger lily flowered last summer (I blogged about it here). These are similar but different plants. As you can see from the plant labels they produce spectacular tropical-look flowers, but it might take a year or two to produce their first blooms (as was the case with the ginger lily). However, September and October are ideal months to get any tropical plants going in Sydney, so they have all of the summer to get established. They'll die back a bit in winter, but if you cut them to the ground completely in late winter, then feed them, they'll roar away soon after in the spring, reaching 1.5-2m tall before flowering. Can't wait!

I recently blogged about my various orchids and, at the time, didn't know the name of my little native orchid. Now I do. It's a Dendrobium, just like this one. I couldn't resist buying another one, mostly because this one had such a beautiful perfume. It's a fair bit stronger than the perfume on my other Dendrobium, and now that I'm back home I'm kicking myself for not having bought three or four more of these in the various other colours on offer. Next time don't be so restrained...

Pam found this little Lithops, or living stones, as they are commonly called, and this will be added to her tillandsias as her collection of easy-care, interesting weirdos grows. (No, I'm not one of her easy-care weirdos. I'm high-maintenance!)

This is a picture of restraint. Tables galore of superbly presented succulents for sale, and I didn't buy one of them. There were lots of succulent growers here at the Florafest, and while I could easily have brought several more cuties home, my little Succulent City is chockers, and I astonished myself by resisting the urge. It's a shame this kind of heroic goodness has no real reward. Maybe I was foolish to resist?

One simple way to resist the urge to shop was to work on our magazine stand. My duties in 'helping out' on the stand were somewhere between light and slight, but it's always great to talk to people who read your magazine, and I enjoyed chatting to lots of them. The main attraction on our stand was the talks by Don Burke, the magazine's owner, who's well known here in Australia for his TV show and radio show, not to mention his books, etc. He always pulls a great crowd, makes them laugh, answers their questions and tells stories. All I did was play 'helpful assistant' to whoever needed assistance. But six hours on your feet without a break sure makes your legs ache!

And so Pammy and I decided to make a long weekend holiday of the little 1.5 hour road trip north from Sydney, staying an extra day or two in Terrigal, a popular coastal getaway for Sydneysiders. This is the view from our hotel room of the beach, with the Norfolk Island pines such a familiar sight for beachfronts along our East Coast.

It was nice there at Terrigal. We easily could have stayed there a few more days, but running out of both money and time, we're back home already. The next task: find a few spots where we can squeeze in our weekend's shopping. There's always room for another one, isn't there?