Waiting for Good-o

 

It's hardly rational, but I always manage to have moments of silent panic each year when my Louisiana irises start to bloom. I blame the blue ones, because they show up early. Too early in fact. About two weeks before the white ones.

And I really love the white ones. So, every year, there's a two week period when I manage to convince myself that maybe I've done something wrong, and the white ones won't appear at all. Silly boy. 

Double delight this morning, two white Louisiana irises.

It was only few days ago that I wondered 'had I accidentally thrown out the white-flowered plants' rhizomes last year while repotting?' No, surely not. 

But I am keen enough that, every now and then, just for a few nano-seconds of self-doubt, I allow these thoughts a subversive whisper in my ear.

 

That's all history now. Last year I had to repot my Louisiana irises, as they had multiplied so much they had totally outgrown their pot. In fact, I had to set up a second, smaller water garden pot to cope with the overload. Even then I still had to toss out some excess rhizomes, simply because I had so many. These things are really vigorous growers, but I must admit it's a nice problem to have. 

Louisiana iris flowers telegraph the colours to come a few
days in advance.

It's hard to be there for the actual moment the flowers open,
but these guys are sooo close.

Then, next thing you know, they're open and if you could
talk to them they'd say they've been open for ages. Where were you?

Of course the thing that makes my white irises so special to
me is the green bits. A totally all-white iris with no green stripey bits would be a pale imitation of the real thing. 

There are tinges of green deep within each bloom, but it's the stripes that really get me. They look like they're hand-painted with a slender brush.

The whole glorious flower show will all be over two weeks from now. That'll be it for another year, but the wait for Good-o has been worth it yet again. 

However, when you factor in the two weeks of glorious blue irises prior to the white ones, it's a month-long, very delightful way to announce to everyone that spring is well and truly here. 

Doing our bit to help the bees

While pottering around our inner-city garden, there's always some kind of background noise, whether it's merely traffic, neighbours talking, or local birds calling to one another. But the sound I enjoy the most is the hum of bees. 

A native blue-banded bee closes in on an eggplant flower.

Not only is it a happy sound but it's also a vital signal that our backyard garden is a safe place for bees and other insects to go about their work, and make a living. Doing the right thing by bees isn't rocket science. There's just two steps.
1. Plant bee-friendly flowering plants (and there are lots of them)
2. Stop using harmful insect sprays that kill bees and other beneficial insects.

Bees go mad when our lemon tree flowers, which it will do soon.

As spring is upon us here in Australia, and gardeners everywhere are thinking "what can I plant now", it's the perfect time to put in a plug for becoming a bit more bee-friendly, whether you're a balcony gardener, own a rambling country estate or, like Pam and me, have an ordinary suburban backyard.

Our poppies are blooming now, and bees almost bathe in the plentiful pollen.

Now, I've done numerous postings about bees over the years, and this latest one has been prompted by an email I received from Taronga Zoo (for out-of-towners, Taronga Zoo is Sydney's largest and oldest zoo, situated on the edge of Sydney Harbour — visiting Taronga is a part of most Sydney childhoods. It was certainly part of mine, with countless visits there). 

It might come as a surprise to some to know this, but Taronga Zoo cares for its bees in the same way it does for all its other creatures — with loving devotion. This Sydney winter has been very dry indeed — there's a drought on — and so flowers are fewer and life is tougher for Taronga's bee population (and all other bees in Sydney). One simple reason for looking after bees is that Taronga has its own vegie patch, to provide food for its animals, and as every vegie gardener knows, bees play a vital role in pollinating all sorts of crops.

Taronga's beekeeper inspects one of their hives.

What Taronga would like everyone in Sydney to do is simple: make your garden friendlier for bees. So here's some very basic tips on how to get started, but before I do that, I have to include this next photo, just to show you how popular beekeeping has become in Sydney. 

About 200m from my house, the roof of this corner shop in Marrickville is
very probably what my busy backyard bees called "Headquarters". And so
in doing my bit in the inner-city, I'm helping gourmets to be happy. 

Apart from following guideline number 2: "don't use harmful sprays", following guideline number 1: "plant bee-friendly plants" is very easy to do, because there are so many great plants to choose from. The basic rule is this: if it produces a flower, the bees will find it.

Flowering shrubs: lavender probably tops the list, but all daisies are fabulous, too. Shrubs such as abelia and buddleia are famous bee-attractors, but on a small scale little alyssum (sweet Alice) and nasturtiums do a great job, and so do my poppies. But all annual flowers are great for bees, and probably the perfect choice for smaller gardens and balconies. 

Natives: all the flowering native shrubs are brilliant bee magnets, but top choices would include hardenbergia, grevilleas (which come in all shapes and sizes), bottlebrush, westringia (coast rosemary, a very good hedging plant), and native daisies (Brachyscome). 

Herbs: most people think "foliage/leaves" when you say "herbs", but all herbs flower well and bees love them. Basil is terrific (and now is the time to plant some), but oregano, marjoram, sage, rosemary, mint, coriander and lemon balm all do a great job attracting bees. Borage is probably the star of the bee-friendly herb garden, as bees adore its plentiful blue flowers.

Flowering vegetable crops also attract (and need!) bees, especially tomatoes, eggplants, potatoes, zucchini, cucumber, pumpkins, watermelons and squash. So my tip is to plant some low-growing flowers next to your vegie patch, such as alyssum, petunias, low-growing daisies, etc. It's what "potager" gardens are all about: mixing flowers, herbs and vegies together so they attract bees. And besides, potagers just look better.

My citrus trees (lemon, Tahitian lime, Thai lime) all attract stacks of bees, and spring is a great time to plant one, and it's also the perfect time to fertilise them. All other fruit trees are magnets for bees when they are in flower, so if your garden design needs a small tree, think about a fruit tree next time round.

While the name of this thing is a "birdbath" nobody told the bees they can't
visit, so I always make sure there is a gently sloping rock in my birdbath so
bees and other flying little guys can take a drink, especially on a hot day.

So there you go, head off to the garden centre on a "bee-friendly" mission, and help maintain your local honey supply. 

Finally, you can also test out my favourite bee theory: no matter where you put a flowering plant, bees will find it. Go on, plant something in an out-of-the-way spot and keep an eye on it. Once it starts flowering, our little busy, buzzing hard-workers will soon be all over it. That's what I love about bees ... they are so good at their jobs!

Lots of flowers? Must be spring!

"Hey, come and have a look at this," said Pammy, ever the eagle-eyed spotter of all things newsworthy in our garden. We had to get down on our hands and knees, and be up very close, but there it was — the complex, gorgeous mini bloom of our potted succulent. I think it's a graptoveria, but as a succulent amateur I am at all times willing to be corrected on these things. Doesn't matter really, it's the wonderful mini other-worldliness of tiny blooms that had us both captivated.

It's a bit orchidy, this succulent flower, with its red-wine flecks on pearlescent petals.


Even I could spot the next of our spring awakenings — a huge spray of not-quite-yet-open yellow dendrobium orchids.


This spring show has been a few years in the making, as this plant has never flowered before. Over the last few years I have tried my hardest to be nice to it, but without any success. It has always lived with all the other orchids, which manage to flower their heads off like clockwork. But the dendrobium? Nah, sorry. Once all the flowers open fully, I will no doubt do another posting.


This next pink one, a climbing pelargonium, is one of the success stories of my "recovery ward". I bought three plants, put them in a hanging basket in a sunny spot, where they then proceeded to do very little, then started to die off. While I can accept that the fault is all mine, what bugs me is that I didn't have a clue what I was doing wrong.

So I rescued the final, barely surviving plant, repotted it into a smaller, normal pot and it has been keeping my orchids company in a more sheltered spot for the last year or so. And now it's looking happy again. Should I attempt to move it back to the hanging basket? Well, that is why I bought it ... but I am beginning to see that as the "hanging basket of doom" and I can't quite work up the bravery to try it yet.




Next in the spring slideshow is good old, never-fail, grow-them-every-year poppies. Pam loves them. Pam cuts them for vases in our house. And this year we have yellow, white and orange poppies. Lovely.



It's nice to be appreciated. The deal is, if I am nice to my lemon tree and scatter lots of chicken poo under the tree and water it well, the lemon tree produces lots of flowers, and a few months later, lots of fruit. So far it's all going according to plan. 


Even though evergreen Sydney springs aren't quite as spectacular as they are in colder climates, they're still a delightful time to be a gardener. As well as the flowers I have posted here, yellow clivias and vivid orange scadoxus aren't far off blooming, and the native orchid flower buds are all jostling for a good spot ... but I'll call a temporary halt at this stage. Lots to look forward to!

The 10-Year Rewind – Part 12 – Gone Troppo

Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 12 is this one — Gone Troppo — from January 2010, another traveller's tale, this time from one of our favourite destinations, Darwin in the Northern Territory. We've been there three times and would love to go there again.

January's almost half done and not a single blog posting! Well, this marathon bunch of holiday snapz will make up for that. Pammy and I have just got back from a week of foolish fun spent paddling about in the middle of the wet season in Darwin, in tropical far northern Australia. To cut a long story short, we want to go back! But as this is a long photographic story, it's on with the pix (as always, click on the photos to make them bigger) ...

Typical southern tourist me, wearing the new Panama hat Pammy gave me for Christmas, posing under a variegated pandanus tree. And that was one of the themes of this holiday. "You can't grow these in Sydney, Jamie, so if you like them you'll just have to come back for another visit, won't you?" Yes, mam.

More forbidden delights – the Bismarckia palm. These stately grey-leaved palms are everywhere in Darwin.

It's a good thing these cannonball trees aren't everywhere, as they're dangerous to stand under. This one is in the Botanic gardens and it's the only one we saw. It's a big thing, at least 25m tall.

. 
The cannonball fruit are like small coconuts and they are said to fall from the tree at any time, clonking passers-by on the head in the process. It's not an Aussie tree – it's a native of Guyana in South America, but it thrives in Darwin's tropical climate. Fascinating weirdo.

These tall, thin Indian Mast Trees are another import which are everywhere in Darwin. Growing to about 10m tall, they're just a metre or so in width, with elegant droopy green foliage. First time you see one you tap your partner on the shoulder and say "oh look at those".

However, my gardening discoveries weren't all of the "you can't grow these at home in Sydney" variety. We visited Jenny's orchid garden in Howard Springs where countless numbers of both bromeliads and orchids were on display, and some of these bromeliads could probably be grown in my garden (hopefully, fingers crossed, maybe).

Bromeliad flowers are nothing if not varied, and at times outrageous.

By comparison to the spotty space alien before, this yellow fellow is almost plain.

Ornamental gingers were in bloom everywhere. While I have seen many photos of beehive gingers before, none of them prepared me for the fact that the blooms poke up just a couple of inches above ground level. I had always envisaged these as being atop stately stalks.

This is another ornamental ginger, not sure what sort, but it's useful to include just because it shows how varied ginger blooms can be in both colour and form.

The heliconias were in bloom too, and like the gingers there are many colours and forms on show. This is the popular and striking crab claw heliconia.

Many other heliconias look more like this, in an assortment of colours, often red, orange or yellow, or a combo of any of these colours.

Foliage plants are the backbone of tropical gardens, and these crotons seem to do a lot of the technicolor heavy lifting in many tropical gardens.

Not sure what these spotty people are called, but they're pretty typical of many foliage plants here, which wouldn't dare limit themselves to just plain green.

One vivid exception to this 'not just green' rule is the ornamental sweet potato, a fast-growing groundcover that is so tough that it's used to fill in traffic islands on highways. Just looking at it is like enjoying a cool drink.

Of course palms are everywhere, and gardeners in Darwin seem smitten with these red-stalked beauties known as lipstick palms, for obvious reasons. And no, you can't grow them in Sydney, Jamie.

Speaking of Sydney gardeners on holidays, here is me in my Panama hat about to smile, but not quite managing to, while visiting Jenny's orchid garden. As well as the bromeliads pictured above, this remarkable spot is, of course, filled with orchids in bloom. 

In many sections organised simply into a series of tennis-court-sized enclosures, Jenny's orchids are hung in long rows of wire baskets, not planted into soil of any sort.

Everywhere you wander the orchids are festooned with air plants, tillandsias, better known as Old Man's Beards or Spanish Moss. Makes a nice, spooky forest, it does. 

The variety of orchids here is amazing, but they don't all bloom at once. Many plants were about to come into bloom, or had obviously finished blooming a few weeks ago. They just bloom when they want to bloom, and with the sheer number of plants grown here there was no shortage of pretty things to see, such as this one.

Or this one...

Or this one...

Or this one.

Some orchids were growing in pots, but the pots were just of gravel. Drainage, excellent!

If I lived in the tropics, I think I'd grow a lot of orchids.

But if I lived in the tropics I'd also spend a lot of time enjoying the weather there, too. We arrived at the same time as a monsoonal low pressure system did, and for the first three days there it rained and rained and rained, and the wind blew the rain into sheets that fell sideways – no escape for pedestrians! The constant rain dropped the daily max down to 29°C (84°F) – nice and cool – and we settled in well. To get around, all you had to do was wait for a squall of rain to pass, then walk about on the rapidly drying footpaths in the 20 or so minutes between the next squall. I found wandering home from restaurants late at night in balmy 25°C (77°C) air the really addictive thing about tropical living. Loved it. 

Towards the end of our stay the weather returned to the more normal wet season pattern of a hot, humid day (max 32°C or 90°F) with a spectacular thunderstorm around sunset to cool things off. Those tropical cloud formations are a nice thing to behold with a cool drink in your hand.

And of course the big thing about the wet season is water. Lots of water. This is the Florence Falls in Litchfield National Park, about 2 hours drive from Darwin. The sound of the falls greets you from far off, but nothing quite prepares you for the sheer force of water roaring over the edge. It's such a shame that the word awesome has been hijacked to now mean anything fairly impressive to a bored teenager, as these falls really did produce a sense of awe in all who stood on the viewing platform, feeling thoroughly insignificant in the presence of Mother Nature running her bath.

And so that's our holiday snaps. Or should I say "Pam's holiday snaps". Most of these photos were taken by Pammy, and she did a great job capturing our holiday in the steamy tropical north. And we're going back for more, too!

The 10-Year Rewind – Part 9 – Friendly natives

Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 9 is this one — Friendly Natives — from April 2009. It's mostly a look at our front garden, part of Garden Amateur land that this blog rarely visits.

After enjoying the challenge of the desert island plants a month or two ago, I've found a new blogger's photo challenge involving native plants in our gardens. I came across the challenge at several other blogs, in my case Phillip Oliver's Dirt Therapy blog and Grace Peterson's blog although I believe the people responsible for starting the whole thing can be found at Gardening Gone Wild. 

It's a simple thing: just send them a photo of a plant native to your area, growing in your garden. Pictured below is the one I sent, but I'm a bit of a rule-bender (as I was with the desert island plants 'rules' too). So here's my photo of three of the Australian natives growing in my Australian garden, and below that several more detail shots for good measure. 

Here they are: in the left foreground, my gum tree, Eucalyptus leucoxylon 'Rosea'. Spilling over the fence in the middle ground is a just barely prostrate form of the Cootamundra wattle, Acacia baileyana, and in the background is a native without a common name, Correa alba. They're all worth a closer look, so I thought I'd post a couple of close-ups as well.


The Acacia baileyana in the foreground has wonderful blue-grey foliage. It's meant to be a prostrate groundcover but in its tightly confined space it rears up about a metre off the ground in places. The silver-leafed correa behind is due for yet another trim. I keep it clipped into a dome shape most of the time, but as it's flowering now I'll wait until that's over before its next trim.


As well as being a lovely colour the foliage of the Cootamundra wattle is delicately ferny. While it is producing some tiny flower buds now, it won't unleash its pretty little yellow pompom blooms until later, around June or July.


The flowers of the Correa alba are modest at best and not the reason I grow this plant. Well, to tell the truth, the reason I grow this plant is that Pam chose it, and a very, very lovely choice it has proven to be, a beautiful foliage plant. And our neighbour's tabby cat loves sleeping under it, too!

Our street tree, the Eucalyptus, has just started blooming this week. It's late this year, as it usually starts in early April. It will stay covered in blooms till September at least, and all sorts of native nectar-eating birds will be squabbling for territory in its branches for all that time, notably the wattlebirds, the New Holland honeyeaters and the rainbow lorikeets.

The gum tree's flower buds are full of colour now and very decorative in their own right.

This photo shows nicely how the flower buds open. The little conical cap on the underside of the bud loosens under the pressure within the bud, then pops off suddenly, allowing the pink tutu of blooms to pirouette across the stage. Traa daaaa! 

But to finish this little photo blog I thought I'd toss in a bonus garden native photo. Pictured above is my fully-recovered Grevillea 'Superb' in my backyard, after its brush with death last December. But thanks to the application of a spray which killed off the fungal disease which was causing its woes, it's happier and more floriferous than ever. (For Australian readers, the product is Yates Anti-Rot, which is made from phosphorous acid, and it certainly was a Christmas miracle worker for this grevillea).

Stop press – someone at the door! It's Greek Easter this weekend, and my lovely neighbour Katarina knocked on my door a few minutes ago, wishing Pam and me a very happy Easter, and bearing an Easter gift of traditional Greek cakes, pastries and dyed eggs. So happy Greek Easter, everyone!