Sweet shade

Success has its rewards, but like most drugs it also has its undesirable side-effects. Here in sunny Garden Amateurland, our modest success in growing things in all our lovely Australian sunshine is, ironically enough, lots more shade, and less sunshine.

Avert your eyes from our captivating tresses of Spanish moss for a moment if you can, because in the background you can see our two major shade-makers. In the centre is a lemongrass patch that has grown that big in one season, and on the right is our beautiful frangipani tree, which once was a cutting but is now approaching youthful adulthood. The little patch of straw mulch in front of both was once our garden's sunniest spot, a thriving little vegie patch, but right now it barely gets an hour of direct sunshine each day. It's overshadowed by success and I'm not sure what to grow there.

What to do with the lemongrass is a simple matter of cutting it back a month or two from now, in what was once known as "midwinter". I suspect we won't get much of a winter this year, if our warmest-ever autumn is any guide. However, the lemongrass will benefit from a very savage cutback, but will be this size again, same time next year. It's one of my favourite plants in the garden. It's very pleasantly lemony-scented to be near while I'm weeding, and its many graceful arches look like a green fireworks explosion frozen in time.

As a result of all this shade, I have swapped around the roles of a few garden beds. This is eastern side of the garden, now our sunniest spot.

One little bed is now our salad patch. In the foreground, another row of radish seeds have just sprouted this morning (hello!), next to them some lettuce seedlings are doing their thing, and barely visible, slender baby shallots/scallions are making their usual hesitant start.

Next door to salad-land, in our other sunny spot, that's parsley in the foreground, grown from supermarket salad parsley 'micro-sprouts' (see this older post for more on that), and behind the parsley is Pammy's 2016 crop of Iceland poppies, something I grow for her every year.

As for what to grow in the shadier spots, several different herbs do remarkably well in less than full sunshine. Here's some chervil supermarket mico-sprouts planted just yesterday. Chervil is a herb more people should grow and use in both cooking and salads, and it has the bonus that it is not only good in semi-shade (or semi-sunshine if you like), it actually seems to prefer the gloom. Parsley also copes fairly well with semi-shade, and as I've also planted a whole punnet of coriander micro-sprouts from the supermarket into the semi-shaded spot overshadowed by the lemongrass, I'll soon find out how it goes there. 

As for what to do about our garden's major shade-maker, the frangipani tree, it's a conundrum. It's beautiful, and as you can see here it's not just beautiful on the outside, with its fragrant yellow-centred white blooms. Even on the "inside", the space under the frangipani is a deep-shade mini forest that has a touch of the fairytales about it. It does need to be trimmed a bit, but not too much.

In years gone by the deciduous frangipani would drop all its leaves in June and would only fire up again in greenery in late August. In our ever-warming climate I suspect it will be leafless for just a few weeks every year.

The frangipani is also spreading so wide it's actually growing over the path leading out to Pammy's art studio at the bottom of the garden, so a few branches will be removed in winter so she can get out there without being fragrantly whacked in the face next summer. 

We haven't really made up our mind what to do about the frangipani. In the long run it will grow bigger and it will change how our garden grows. My instinct is to go with the flow and not to be too much "in charge" of everything that happens here. I'm just the gardener. While the odd bit of wayward frangipani might be lopped off, I suspect gardening here over coming years will take its own sweet-scented course.

Lemon grass

"Hey, you can really see that it is a grass now," Pammy said as we both stood out in the garden this morning, admiring the lemon grass clump. It's quite beautiful right now, tall and lush, its longest pointed stems arching over, graceful and green. Get very close to it, ruffle its feathers a little, and it smells both lemony and lightly spicy. 

By rights the clump should be starting to die back a little now that it's autumn in Sydney, but Sydney is still enjoying a record-setting stretch for the warmest ever month of May, including the longest 'heatwave' (of successive days of above-average temperatures), and so our lemon grass is thriving in this most memorable Indian summer of a late autumn in living memory. Climate change, anyone?

The clump itself is about 1.2m (4 feet) tall at
the point where the taller leaves arch over,
and the tallest flower spike is now 2m high. This
was planted as a relatively puny seedling back in
September last year, in a less than ideal
spot which gets half-day sun at best, and yet
it has grown beautifully since December.

Its botanical name is Cymbopogon citratus, and
it is a member of the grass family of plants. It
slowly but very steadily forms a dense clump at
the base, and this has always been my problem
with growing lemon grass in pots. It does really
well for a while, then its clumpy-ness becomes
its own worst enemy as it fills the pot with roots
and stems. It can become pot-bound in no time,
no amount of water ever seems to be enough
for it, once it reaches that jungleiferous stage.
So this time I just planted it into the ground and
it is so, so much happier, and infinitely more
lovely to behold as well. Lemon grass is so
elegant I don't know why it isn't used more often
as a multi-use landscaping plant that adds
architectural form, movement, colour and shape
and can be harvested for the kitchen, too. 

The stems are lightly hairy, red-tinged at the
joints, and the sound it makes in the wind is
the rustling that is such a lovely part of
being near grasses. 

There's so much to say about lemon grass, but
I will leave "what happens next" to later on, as
at this stage I don't know what will happen next.
Yes, this tip looks like it will flower for sure, but
after that, with winter coming on, I don't know.
It's a tropical plant so it's a long way south of
home. It should die back a bit, maybe a lot.
I'll let you know when I find out. I suspect with
our changing, warming climate, it might just
shrug off our winters and keep on growing.

In the meantime there's dozens of uses for this
lemony grass. Here's just one stem, cut off at
the base, laid out on our long outdoor table.
It's the lowest portions of the stem, coloured white
or pale lemony yellow, which are used. I won't
go into all the culinary uses here, other than to
mention words like curries, stir-fries, sauces,
dressings and marinades. But to finish off this
homage to lemon grass, let's savour the flavour
with a refreshing cup of lemon grass tea. 

For the tea, finely chop some lower stem.

I then add the lemon grass to flavour green tea. I find many
herb teas on their own a bit insipid and uninspiring, so my way
is to use the herbs to flavour green tea. Here's the simple recipe...

Jamie’s lemongrass tea

1 teaspoon green tea leaves (or 1 green tea bag)

1 teaspoon finely chopped lemongrass stem

small teapot (for one or two people)

Cut an inch-long section off the bottom white portion of a lemongrass stem then chop it finely with a sharp vegie knife.

Bring some water to the boil, add the green tea and lemongrass, pour over the water and let it sit for 5 minutes.

Pour (using a strainer if your teapot doesn’t have a diffuser).

The flavour is light and delicate, very refreshing.

Tips: this makes a light, mild green tea. You can experiment with a bit more of either the tea or the lemongrass, but we prefer the lighter flavour, as it grows on you while you drink it.