Bang on schedule

Last year I posted some photos of our "false cardamom" (Alpinia nutans or Alpinia calcarata) which bloomed for the first time after 20 or so uneventful years in our garden.

At the time it occurred to me that this might be a once-in-every-20-year bloomer, but no, it's not. It's in flower again, and I think it's looking better this year, too.

The wonderful red-speckled golden mouths are much more colourful and prominent this year, while the white surrounds are almost pearlescent before they fade to a coppery brown. 

And there are more flower stalks this year, as well. 

It remains a mystery to me why this tropical plant has waited so many years to bloom for the first time, and is now blooming away right on schedule (almost to the day) like it has been doing it for years. It's on my list of questions to ask of the Great Gardener in the Sky, should I ever make it up there at the end of my brief term down here on Mother Earth.

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.

A cardamom-flavoured surprise

When a surprise comes in the form of flowers, it's always a welcome one, and this week we have been watching a surprise floral show from a plant which has been in our garden almost as long as we have — that's 24 years — and has not flowered before.

Here it is, photographed this morning, our dwarf cardamom is in bloom. As far as my Googling tells me, this is known as Alpinia nutans, but I have also seen it listed as Alpinia calcarata. Either way it's an ornamental ginger with foliage strongly scented of cardamom. 

In fact, that's why I bought it in the first place. It came in a little pot and the label said "cardamom". Naively, I believed it was real cardamom for many years. The fact that it didn't set pods didn't bother me. I just thought I was too far south of the tropics for it to set pods. But no, the real answer, which I learned a few years ago, is that this plant is sometimes also called "false cardamom" (as well as dwarf cardamom). And so it will never ever set seed pods, because it's the wrong plant.

A week or two ago we got quite a surprise when we noticed that it was in flower towards the back of the clump, and that in a much handier position for photography, a new flower was rising vertically from one fan of tropical foliage. 

I love the way flowers form buds and slowly open, and our dwarf cardamom took about a week to go from this peek through the curtains to being fully open.

Yesterday morning it was almost there ...

And this morning, after some light overnight rain, it's a bit of a mess — not a textbook bloom by any means — but it's open and putting on a show.

Further back in the clump, up against the fence, there are a few other blooms, such as this easily visible one and the barely visible pointed spire of another new bloom just to the right.

It's a delightful mystery as to why this plant has decided to burst into multiple blooms now, after so many years of merely seeming to be a foliage plant. I can't think of anything I've done to make it flower, as I never fertilise the clump of foliage, nor do I ever water it. The only maintenance I perform is to cut it back, as it loves to spread, and its leaves often become brown, shredded at the edges and generally very scrappy looking. The new, young foliage is far more tropically lush and lovely to look at. But as for what made it decide to flower now, after so many years, I haven't a clue.

You can use the cardamom-flavoured leaves of this  dwarf cardamom plant in cooking. An Indian-Australian friend of ours has occasionally taken several leaves from it. She makes up milk-based sweets, which are then wrapped in the cardamom-flavoured leaves and steamed, to produce lovely dessert treats spiced gently with that cardamom scent.