The show must go on!

My ginger lilies definitely haven't had a glorious summer and autumn this year, yet I do not abandon hope! Having grumbled about blinking and missing the show only a few weeks ago, it's time to correct the record and say the show ain't over yet folks. However I do confess that I have done my best to sabotage things, but it was an accident, your honour. Let me explain...

Oops! I'm always adding stuff to my tumbler compost bin, and the ginger lily stems form part of the jungle I have to get past in order to get to the lid. A few weeks back I heard the nasty cracking sound of a ginger lily stem snapping as I 'moved' it to one side. "Another one lost" I thought at the time. Sure enough the stem was bent at right angles, a goner. And yet when I ventured out into Compost Land recently, what did I see but a ginger lily flower determined to put on an entertaining show. What a trooper!

This flower knows that the right way up is skywards, no matter where your stupid stem is pointing. And so in a few days from now it'll be show time, starring one very determined little ginger lily flower.

In fact that isn't the last of them, either. Another stem which was growing a bit on the sideways side has tossed up a high-kicking showgirl, who'll no doubt follow in the fine tradition set by the others. I'm proud of them, even if they're probably not all that keen on me.

Blinked and missed it

After a week pre-occupied with the necessary business of making money and publishing gardening magazines, I finally managed to get all the way down to the back of our garden this Saturday morning, only to realise that the show which I thought was going to begin any moment was already over. Blinked and missed it, I did.

This is a soggy goner that probably looked quite pretty sometime mid-week, when I wasn't around. Hedychium gardnerianum to the botanists, ginger lily to rest of us. Looks like a pretty party girl around 3am on a wet Saturday night, with a few regrets in tow. Heavy recent rain came at the wrong time, just as the flowers began blooming. Rats!

This is what Lily probably looked like on Wednesday, when I wasn't there. (This shot is from last year, when I lovingly documented Lil's emergence.)

Lily wasn't alone this morning, either. This is another bedraggled party-goer, with a torn, wet dress.

The ginger lilies have had a good time and they're healthy and happy plants, so I'm not really complaining that much. Lovely tropical greenery still. It's just one of those things. Sometimes you can miss seeing the flowers bloom right there in your own garden.

Not far away from the ginger lilies, I have planted a couple of relatives, two tropical flowering gingers. Both are classified as Costus barbatus, but one has the common name of Red Tower Ginger, and the other is known as Costa Flores Ginger. So far no blooms, but this is their first year here. They were planted last October, and I've been cutting back neighbouring, rampant canna lilies and cardamoms to make room for my flowering gingers to grow, and feeding them too.

All I have to go on, and to show you, are these very nice plant labels. Not sure what I'll get this year, but I will persist. My ginger lilies didn't flower in their first year, and so I won't mind if these tropical beauties don't show up this year. I'm patient. I've read that in Sydney they don't get growing well until it warms up in December, and they often don't flower till late in summer or even early autumn, as it's still very warm and humid now in early March.

But what I really will mind, as in being hugely pissed off, will be if I get busy at work again (and it's a wet week) and I pop outside only to discover the soggy, rapidly fading flowers of these flowering gingers saying "sorry, we tried to hang on, but where were you?"

I've learned my lesson. No matter how busy, always make time for a quick lap of the garden just to see what's happening. It's only 9 metres long and 7.5 metres wide, so it's not as if a quick lap is going to take more than a minute, is it?

Lily's last fling

"Well, it was fun while it lasted, Lily, see you again next summer." Not that I play around much, mind you, but I've been bidding a fond farewell this weekend to three lovely lilies, and my wife Pammy didn't even bat an eyelid, either. She understands my needs.

That flaxen-haired strumpet, Ginger Lily, partied hard all through summer and now all her energy is spent. Hair tousled, still magnificent if a bit frazzled, she's ready for her beauty sleep.

It wasn't so long ago that she looked like this. To tell the truth, each ginger lily bloom doesn't last all that long but this plant seems to organise itself so that one striking bloom follows the other. Like well-behaved chorus girls, no upstaging goes on amongst the ginger lilies.

These are the stems prior to flowering, and remarkably enough this is just one season's growth. A bit later in the year, in the depths of our fairly mild winter, in late July, I'll cut every last ginger lily stem down to ground level, and follow up with a good feed of manure soon after. It will rocket away in rapid growth once more when spring gets underway in September. If I cut them down now, the plants might actually get growing again and send up new shoots – and that would be a disaster come the chills of July.

Not far from ginger lily's place, her flame-haired cousin, Canna, is also signing off after another great summer. The plentiful spiders of autumn are making the most of the free frames for their delicate webs, and they're welcome to them.

Back a few months ago in the heat summer, Canna was a feast of hot orange that dared the blazing sun to burn even brighter.

Canna is an energetic lass, and even now she has the verve to send up one last blast of colour. Hope she makes it.

And I couldn't discuss Cousin Canna without mentioning her tiger-striped foliage. She's not a subtle thing, our canna. She's show-biz loud and tropically lush and that's why I like her. Like the ginger lily, canna's headed for a midwinter chop-then-feed routine, and she'll be back next year, bigger than ever. I had to halve the size of her clump last year as she was simply spreading too far in every direction. She took this in her stride and put on a pretty good show in this, her first year after the 'Big Division', and I'm sure that next year she'll be in top form again.

And the third of my lilies to be fading away is this little oddity, my pineapple lily. It's a South African bulb with the botanical name of Eucomis. I've had it growing for three years in my garden, and this year was the first time it flowered (in midsummer). As soon as I read that this one had green flowers, I had to get one, and I've been mostly disappointed with it ever since! In its first two years it grew a lot of leaves and grew and grew, and never flowered. This year it bloomed at last, and they looked just fine. Hopefully it will not now wait another three years before performing again...

Finally, a suitably messy scene of devastation and slow decay, made even more grim by my corpse garden gnome (on the right, poor chap murdered by gnomes unknown). I'm letting the pineapple lily's foliage die down, but the rotter is taking months to even get the foliage fading from green to yellow. Fortunately it's almost hidden from view so isn't much of an eyesore, but I'm not a great fan of the way all the bulb-type plants actually look ugly and scrappy in the garden for a longer period than they ever look pretty. I'm sure they're great in big woodland gardens, and of course the bulb life-cycle is a wonderful adaptation for survival in nature, but in very small gardens like mine, I'm not sure if I have room for them. Oh well, one more year and then I'll decide if odd Miss Pineapple Lily stays or not!

A long wait is over

I had posted something earlier this month here about the troubles I had last year with little rotters munching on every last one of my ginger lily flowers. Adopting the "try, try, try again" motto of the determined fool, today I have much better news – blooms!


This morning's happy scene, with the ginger lily, Hedychium gardnerianum, in full bloom atop its 1.5m long stem.

The reference books say that these flowers are fragrant, and they are, but merely slightly and only when you deliberately set your nose the assignment of finding some scent. It's not a scent that seeks you out (unlike my strongly sweet frangipani and murraya perfumes). However, the red and yellow flower colours are just a bit richer and lovelier than my camera can capture, and definitely the highlight of beholding this beauty in bloom.

Being tall, the ginger lily's flower spikes rise above the dense murraya hedge which screens off my untidy potting/composting zone, so we can enjoy the sight of the ginger lily in bloom from the kitchen and Pam's office/studio.


The development of the flower spikes is all part of the plant's drama, taking three or four weeks to develop then flower. There are seven stems to the plant this year and only one is in bloom so far. Five others have flower spikes in some stage of development, and the last one so far hasn't produced anything, despite looking perfectly healthy otherwise.

Once the flower spike gets to size, it then takes about a week or more to slowly open out to this shape. I am sure its opening would be a marvel to watch in a time-lapse sequence. The flower's unfurling process has a decidedly mechanical quality to it, with the arms folding out and down into position and, once they're at the right angle and locked into place, then growing a bit more in length, prior to sending out a few thin red tongues of stamen first, followed by the yellow petals and the rest of the stamens.

Standing back a few feet, here's the cramped jungle in which the ginger lily thrives. To the left the glossy green leaves of the murraya hedge, to the right the crinkled broad fronds of a native bird's nest fern. As I mentioned earlier, the ginger lily's stems are about 1.5m tall, and red patches mark the spot where each leaf joins the stem. All in all a handsome thing perfectly suited to the dappled light under the olive tree.

I had to laugh when I looked up one of my reference books to find out more about this plant. Apparently it's regarded as a weed in the North Island of New Zealand, so that superb temperate climate tells you something about its ideal growing conditions. Many, many garden plants are capable of becoming a weed somewhere on this planet. All they need is ideal growing conditions and a lack of the various predators/competitors that keep them under control in their home range. This ginger lily apparently comes from the Indian Himalayas, so it's a long way from home, but it seems happy enough here in Sydney and looks set to become a highlight here every summer.