Small but perfectly formed

There was an interesting chat on the radio yesterday morning about the number of seasons there are in Sydney's gardening year, and the consensus was that having just four definitely is not enough. Spring, summer, autumn and winter might be fine for the US, Canada and most of Europe, but it just doesn't tell the story of other parts of the world.

A 'four-season' divvying-up of the year is hopelessly wrong for tropical and subtropical zones, and even a place like Sydney, a few hundred miles south of the true subtropics, needs at least six to tell the whole story. (I believe the traditional Aboriginal system for Sydney includes six seasons, so we're on the right track – you can read more about the Aboriginal seasons for Sydney here.)

Right now, according to our radio chatterboxes, we're in 'Sprinter', that time of year in August and September when it's still cool but the new flowers are leaping about in colourful profusion. ('Spring' is late September through to early November, a traditional springtime; it's followed by 'Sprummer', that warm, rainy time of spring when the flowers are fading already, the weather is warming but cold days are still about, all through November especially and even into December;. Then follows a full four months of real summer, from late December through to the end of March.)

Oh, where were we? Sprinter. Every Sprinter, our native orchids appear on schedule, and they're here again, small but perfectly formed tiny orchids about 1.5cm across (that's a bit over half an inch). And some of them are lightly scented, too.

Sorry, can't help with the botanical names
here. This is the deep pink one.

And yes, you guessed it, this is the pale pink
one. To give you an idea of its size, that's a
pod of a 'normal' cymbidium orchid behind it.

In fact, Sprinter is also the time of year when our whitish-pinky
cymbidium orchids appear, so our gaggle of orchids in pots,
which lives at one end of our covered pergola area, is a very
pleasantly colourful scene at the moment.

These two cymbidiums look like swimmers
emerging from the water with their hair wet but
they're just two big, beautiful flowers trying to
open their wings on yet another soggy morning
here in Sydney.

The native orchids are as easy to care for as the normal cymbidiums, which means they are as tough as nails. Normal orchid potting mix for them. They do like a feed, though. I use an organic liquid food formulated for orchids on both the cymbidiums and the natives, giving everything a feed once a month. Every three, four (or maybe it's five?) years, this happy band of potted orchids needs repotting, simply because they grow so readily that they outgrow their pots. While it's said that orchids like to have their roots crowded together, in the long run overcrowding will cut down on the flower shows. 

After repotting, the terrible, shocking problem is that I end up with too many beautiful orchids and not enough pots (or space). On a scale of one to 10 of terrible problems gardeners have to face, this is surely a 0.0005. I have much more weighty matters to bother me, like convincing people that 'Sprinter' isn't a stupid name for this season…

Times a' changing

Should we ever misplace all our calendars, gardeners would always have a very good idea of what day it is simply by looking at what's happening out in their patch. Like this morning, when I wandered outside to discover that it's June right now! Surely. The first of the orchids are open, so it's the first half of June. They always open then. Alas, we're having a weirdo of a year as far as timings go, and things aren't happening when they should. (The fact it's also warm and sunny this morning should have been the big hint that it isn't really June, Jamie.)

Poor old regular readers of my blog. Every June I post a photo
of these cymbidium orchids, as a ceremony to mark the times.
Yet this year this orchid started blooming last week in fact, almost
a full month ahead of schedule.

Much better at time-keeping this year, our street
tree, a pink-flowering gum, Eucalyptus
leucoxylon var. 'Rosea' started its cool season
blooming right on schedule, in early April.
If all goes according to normal patterns (and
that's a big assumption) it should still be in
bloom, feeding the raucous lorikeets, wattlebirds
and clever little New Holland honeyeaters
in mid-September. What a tree!

Lots of other plants are having a weird year here. The frangipani, which should be dropping leaves now, is still full of leaf with a few flowers soldiering on. And the zygocactus (Schlumbergera), which always bursts into bloom in early May, is only now sending out its flower buds, and they'll be lucky to bloom before June arrives.

Of course, the answer to all this weirdness is the weather, as it always is. Summer saw all-time record high temperatures, while this May has been virtually devoid of rain, and we've also got close to Sydney's record for the number of consecutive days with temperatures above 20°C (68°F) for May, our last month of autumn here.

Not complaining, mind you. Wouldn't dare. Just observing!

Yes, spring definitely has sprung

Wow, Huey's laying on a pearler of a first week of spring. Sunshine plus warmth in the 20s every day, and for the next few days it seems. Love your work this week at least, Huey! While all the garden renovations chugg along nicely, the established plants in other parts of the garden where mattocks aren't being swung have all jumped out and, if they could speak, would be cheering loudly. The whole show here is starring, of course, the dazzling scadoxus family, but they're not the only spring bloomers around here.

The Scadoxus are at their peak right now, after taking
more than a week to fully open.

This year there are four of them, last year three.
They're at their best in the late afternoon, when the
low sun catches the tops of the flower tips.

Talk about photogenic! These scadoxus
are superb in the early morning light,
gleaming like neon adverts while all
the greens around are slowly waking up.
In the afternoons they catch fire. They're
the first thing you see when looking out
from the house, and you'd think I'd be over
the sense of 'wow' after a week of this,
but no, every 'first glimpse' gets me.

The largest of them seems to be making babies while
still blooming. Ever the optimist, I am hoping this is
a good thing, the beginning of a scadoxus empire,
achieved without much help from me, I might add.

If there is such a thing as a ridiculous amount of
flowers on the one plant, then my lime tree has a
ridiculous number of flowers on every twig, branch,
stem: you name it, it doesn't just have a flower on it,
there's a cluster jostling for a bit of bee action.

The hum of bees is the soundtrack to being out here
right now, and it looks like these baby lime-ettes
indicate that a bee has paid a welcome visit here.

When limes flower profusely, lemons flower too, but
not quite in such abundance, and in a different colour
scheme, too. Both have a lovely fragrance to be near.

Reliable as ever, the pinky-white cymbidium orchids
make their September appearance with aplomb.

And the most popular flower with visiting native birds
is working its way up to an October peak, but it is
already filled with blooms. This is Grevillea 'Peaches
and Cream' a modern hybrid that, like the Robyn
Gordon and Ned Kelly grevilleas to which it is
related, blooms most of the year anyway. The native
birds actually squabble over visiting rights, sometimes
quite noisily, but they all get a good feed every day.

As the garden is being renovated now it isn't quite as filled with flowers as it usually is at this time of year, but the old regulars are still a delightful bunch to have around. This really is the nicest start to spring that we've had for several years – may it continue this way for as long as possible, I say.

The lost spring

"We're going to miss out on spring this year," Pam said this morning, and she's mostly right, as we'll be travelling while many things will be bursting into leaf and bloom, and we won't be back until after they have finished. And so this afternoon I did a quick lap of our small garden to look for signs of spring, and I found plenty. On with the show.

Only one-third of the way to full bloom, and already the Scadoxus are stealing the show again. The wonderful thing about this year's blooming is that it's earlier than in the two previous years. I was sure we were going to miss out on seeing anything from them, and what do you know! They must be mind-readers and took pity on us.

This is the first time all three bulbs have bloomed, and the good news is that the oldest bulb is sending out a little 'pup' of a new bulb forming at its feet. Who knows, in 10 years we'll have a clump!

Very pleasing to see the first leaf burst out from the Turkish Brown fig which we planted in late autumn, when it was just a bare stick.

I've seen our pinky-white orchids bloom in late September every year for the last 20 years here, and so I can imagine how lovely they will be very easily.

Our rosemary bush is just starting to flower now, and it was a beautifully fragrant place to be when I brushed against its leaves to take this snap.

These buds belong to our NSW Christmas Bush, and it will be touch and go whether it will still be in flower when we return in early November.

The angel wing begonias always get a bit sad and tatty looking over winter, but they've turned the corner of the season now. I fed them a week or two ago and every pair of leafy 'angel wings' is opening to to make space for a rose-pink tipped baby new leaf to emerge.

Every year the flowering weeds like this heartsease (viola) reappear without any encouragement from me.

Another flowering weed, the primulas have been in this garden ever since we moved here two decades ago. In our first year we foolishly asked the garden centre for something that flowered in shade, and so we brought home primulas and impatiens. I have eradicated the impatiens, but the primulas always come back.

At least these darker coloured primulas offer a bit of a variation on that pastel pink.

I shouldn't complain about the primulas, it's not as if they're giving the parsnips a hard time. By the time we get back the parsnips should be OK to harvest.

And speaking of harvesting, I really should harvest all the cumquats and turn them into marmalade, but I have so many other things to do right now before we leave, and marmalade-making doesn't make it into the top 100!

Routines and ruts

The other day I had an enjoyable chat with a friend about the difference between routines and ruts, and as a result I concluded that Pam and I have many happy little routines here in our patch, without the awful feeling that any of them constitute a dispiriting 'rut'. The difference between a routine and a rut is simple. You like your comfy little routines and you hate ruts to the point that you really want to get out of them (but, sometimes because of circumstances outside your control, can't).

I'm in my late 50s now, and I think I'm acquiring routines as quickly as I am losing hair from my ever-shinier head. Pam and I like to drink champagne on Friday nights. We love to see as many movies as possible every year, but two flicks on a Sunday, with yum-cha in the middle for lunch, is a heavenly indulgence we look forward to each time the chance arises. I ride my motorbike to work on sunny days. I love these routines.

And here in my gardening blog, right on schedule, I'm blogging once more in early June about the first of my cymbidium orchids popping out into bloom. I don't seriously expect you to do this, but go back to June 2010 and 2009 and you'll find postings about these orchids, too. It's one of the wonderful things about nature, and gardening, when you are witness to the seasons coming, going and returning once more with their own steady, deeply earthy heartbeat.

Haven't got a clue as to this cymbidium orchid's cultivar name. It was a gift in one florist's pot several years ago, and now it's a pretty plantation in half a dozen pots.

Say "aaahhhhh". If I was an insect I wouldn't go in there.

As it's also in flower and only two feet away from the orchid pots, I thought I'd shake up the routine "aren't the orchids pretty?" early June posting with a word from my newish bromeliad in a wall pot (who wasn't here last year). It thinks it is far more tropically dramatic and handsome that the marooney-pinky-browny cymbidium orchids, and wants equal blog time.

The riposte to the brom's claims from the orchids is that they have the meagre four bromeliad blooms outnumbered by several dozen orchid flowers to one, so could we please just focus on the orchids, projectionist?

OK, so here's another angle on the lovely show that is starting up now, and which will keep on going for well over a month or more. Pam will cut stems of them, as she does every year, and pop them into vases indoors, where they always last an astonishing amount of time as well.

Enjoying the orchids is one of those delightful routines which I hope we'll be maintaining many years from now. Each time they appear there's a freshness not only to them but also to our sense of delight at their appearance.

I hope I never weary of delighting in orchids, or gardening. I occasionally come across older people who are sick of life and would like to pull the plug now, if they could. I think that is partly because their own bodies are letting them down, but I also think it's partly because they don't have enough interests in life to keep them going.

But I also know one 'older' person in particular who's into her 80s now. Her arthritis is bad, particularly in her feet. Walking is becoming more difficult with each passing year, and you wouldn't blame her for losing interest in life. But no way! She's still a nature lover, a party girl, a music buff, theatre-goer, and interested in everything new, including politics, art, movies and theatre.

"More champagne, over here, waiter!"

"Oh wow, look at those camellias, that's the best they've been in years."

"That was a great jazz band last night, I wanted to get up and dance."

"It was a fantastic show. There's so much great young talent around. They amaze me."

She's my role model. She's Pam's mum.

Stirrings

Wakey, wakey little garden. Well, that's what I've been whispering in its ear for the last week or so, and I think it can hear me now. Spring is stirring early, as it always does here in the mild coastal zone in which I live. Several plants are on the rise, forming flower buds, sending out new leaves, offering promise of some old razzle dazzle in just a couple of weeks. First up, the Scadoxus are sending up their remarkable torches, which I am hoping will burst into a blaze of colour before August 22.

Here they are this morning (I'll do the weeding on the weekend – promise). Four weeks ago they were just bulbs poking out of the ground, then whoosh! Up they come. I'm hoping for flowers by August 22, because that's when our great mate Amanda is coming up for a visit from Kyneton in Victoria. She's as nuts about gardening as we are, and so it would be nice to have something in bloom when she gets here.

I can only hope this year's lot will look as good as these Scadoxus flowers did, when I photographed and blogged about them last year. It would be especially appropriate to have them in bloom for her visit, as Amanda is originally from the same country as the Scadoxus, whose common name is the Natal paintbrush. Amanda's not from Natal, but she is from South Africa.

If I can't persuade the scadoxus to bloom for Amanda, hopefully these Cymbidium orchids will oblige. These are lovely big pinky-white ones, and once they start blooming they'll keep on looking gorgeous for weeks.

OK, so these aren't blooms, but they are cute and the first signs of true happiness with the nardoo, the native floating fern, in my potted goldfish pond. The nardoo has grown and spread since I radically cut it back in May, but the leaves have taken on a coppery hue over the chills of winter. So I'm hoping these little nardoo heads herald a return to a more grassy green covering for the goldfish to hide beneath.

While I'm down at the goldfish pond there are excellent signs of life from my Louisiana iris as well. All the long, strappy leaves went yellow and died back during June and July, but a few weeks ago stacks of new leaves just erupted from the surface. The books tell me that I should expect to see blue iris flowers on tall 75cm high stalks in October. Whoever said waiting isn't exciting obviously isn't a gardener.

And so there are glimmerings of spring everywhere at the moment, without a lot of truly colourful action yet. Driving around the streets of Sydney the many deciduous magnolias (which can be found in virtually every street here) are in full bloom now (mostly the pinky-white soulangeanas). When I see those magnolias I always think to myself "spring is four weeks away". Hope I'm wrong. Hope it's sooner!

Orchids large and small

I sometimes wonder where plants get their reputations from, especially when that reputation is not remotely close to my experience of them. Take orchids for example. Lots of people seem think of them as being gorgeous but tricky-to-grow plants. Well, if I knew nothing of their reputation and was asked to describe them after growing them for the last 18 years, I'd say they're tough as old boots, indestructible, trouble-free. The only part of their 'reputation' that I'd agree with is that yes, they are gorgeous.

Right now there are two very different types of orchids blooming in my garden. One is large and lovely, and the other is a tiny, dainty little native orchid, and I'm excited because it's the first time my native orchid has bloomed for me.

This is the big one in bloom, a common cymbidium orchid. These make the most extraordinary cut flowers for vases indoors, where they last for several weeks. Pammy swoops on my orchid pots, secateurs in hand, ready to cut off whole branches of blooms, as soon as she sees them unfolding. I always have to make sure that she leaves enough behind to decorate my outdoor room, too!

As well as this white/pink one, which blooms in September, there's a maroon-brown one which blooms earlier in winter, around June. Both of my orchids came into my garden as potted gifts, and since then each plant has thrived and been divided every few years, and now I have about five pots of each. Picking the ideal growing spot for them was easy. The previous owner of our house, Angela, also grew cymbidium orchids (which were lovely), so all I did was put my orchids in the same spot where Angela grew hers. For the record, it's in brightly lit shade against a side fence, but oddly enough this spot does get an hour or so of direct overhead sunshine every day of the year. I've been told a bit of direct sunshine is good for orchids, and so it has proved. The plants are grown in pots, in orchid potting mix and they're fed monthly with orchid plant food, applied via a watering can. That's it.

While I'm pleased to see our cymbidiums in bloom again, I've become a bit complacent about their trouble-free reliability. Pictured above is something that's genuinely exciting. It's our first-ever native orchid bloom. It's tiny, just 2cm (3/4 inch) across from wingtip to wingtip. By comparison, the cymbidiums measure 9cm (3.5 inches) across. But it's dainty, pretty and, as they say about babies, small but perfectly formed.

To take a few photos I dragged the native orchid pot from its usual spot in orchid land, plonking it on a chair on the pathway. As you can see it's not exactly covered in blooms, but as these are the first blooms we're not bothered by that. Unfortunately we don't know its botanical name (correction! now I do – it's a Dendrobium orchid). Pam bought it at the annual Marrickville Community Street Fair one year, where they close off the main road and set up music stages, food stalls and well-organised mayhem for a happy, multi-cultural community day of celebration. We're not even sure how long ago Pammy bought the orchid, but it's probably three or four years ago. I think one of the reasons it hasn't flowered is simple – I hadn't fed it enough. The general rule with Aussie native plants is that over-feeding can kill them, and feeding them the wrong stuff can kill them, too. So I was timid. Then one day I asked our resident horticultural guru, Geoffrey, about feeding them and learned that the orchid food I feed the cymbidiums is fine for our native orchids, too. Bingo! Flowers in the first year. Thank you once again, Geoffrey.

In the process of moving the pot out for photography a few bits just fell out. As they had roots attached and as I've learned that you should never give up on orchids, I've potted them up.

Hardly the most impressive sight but it's a beginning. I always have a bag of orchid potting mix on hand, as I also use orchid mix when repotting bromeliads (a job which I plan to do very soon and blog about). In nature, orchids don't even grow in soil – they're ephiphytes which grow on rocks, in the crotches between tree trunks and branches, etc. In pots, all they need is a very, very free-draining medium to hold them upright and provide somewhere for roots to go. My orchid potting mix is mostly chunky bark bits.

There are several other native orchid blooms yet to make an appearance, and hopefully next year there'll be even more. This plant had been growing and getting bigger over the last few years, but it just wasn't flowering. While it was almost certainly the feeding which promoted the flowers, there's a chance that it also didn't start flowering until its roots filled the pots. I'm not sure how true this is, but I have heard several people say that orchids bloom better when they're crowded in their pots. So, I have a simple plan for this one. Leave it alone! It will keep on getting its monthly dose of liquid food, but that's it.

Maybe this last comment is only really relevant to people in mild, temperate climates such as mine, but if you have a garden which gets only a bit of sunshine during the day, cymbidium orchids are something well worth trying. They are tough plants, and they flower so spectacularly and for such a long time. As cut blooms indoors it's really special to be able to say "yes" when visitors ask – "did you grow these?"

Cymbidiums are a perfect fit for so many inner-city backyards. They're the easiest and least fussy of the orchids and the colour range is enormous. And finding a good one is easy. Just buy one you like when it's in bloom.