Frangipani dreaming

Some excellent news for frangipani growers here in Sydney: don't lift a finger! That's right, don't do anything. Don't water them, don't feed them, just get up close every now and then to inhale the flowers' oh-so-sweet perfume (just to show you care) but that's about it for frangipani-growing tips in Sydney.

I'm a classicist. White frangipani with a yellow centre for me.
Others go for the red 'Rubra' variety but there are many others
to choose from. I just like the yellow one.

No, it's not a cake decoration, it's just perfection doing its thing.

Grown from a cutting (thanks Krissy!) taken earlier this
century, our frangipani tree was a slow grower for the first
few years, but it's now settled in to its new home, and
is growing better than ever, thanks to a judicious lack of
'helpful' interference from me.

The same growing tips of "do nothing at all" apply equally to the
other champion plant of Sydney gardens: Murraya paniculata.
However, the murraya's scent is nothing like the sweet
frangipani's, so getting up close isn't something a lot of people
like to do. In fact the murraya's scent comes over to you, it
seeks you out whether you want its company or not.

And right now, here in Garden Amateur land, the murrayas are flowering and so too the frangipanis, and I didn't lift a finger to make it happen. They did it on their own.

Home wrecker!

I'm not proud of this fact, but I am a serial home wrecker. As far as our resident paper wasps are concerned, I am an Aussie Attila the Hun, wreaking havoc on their village then riding off into the distance.

Yesterday, I accidentally wrecked another wasp home. It's not the first time, either. In the 23 years we've been here in Marrickville, I might have temporarily ruined their lifestyle about half a dozen times. The wasps have built their beautifully constructed homes under the eaves of our pergola area, under our outdoor dining table, in our grevillea, amid the leafy clusters of creeping figs and, as I discovered yesterday, in our over-sized murraya hedge.  

Here's yesterday's wrecked home, pictured some hours after
they abandoned it once my hedge trimmer had done its worst.

The moment my powered hedge trimmer lopped
off a foot or so from the top of the growth, a
frightening cloud of annoyed yellow and black
wasps swarmed up in the air, looking for culprits
to administer a sting to. I scarpered, and after
the hullabaloo died down I snuck back to see
if I could find the nest. Here's the last few occupants
wandering around, looking home-wrecked. Using
my longest rake I moved them well away, and
continued on with the sadly necessary task of
cutting our overgrown hedge down to size.

This is the "Before" shot, of the murraya hedge at least two
feet too high. It was so high it was blocking the low winter
sun reaching our vegie patch, so it had to be trimmed.

And this is the "After" shot. Normally I would feel OK about this
job, but by coincidence I found a photo of how our hedge looked
eight years ago, in 2006, and now I'm dissatisfied. I might have
to trim the hedge a whole lot more (see below)...

This is how the hedge looked back in 2006. Much better!
I couldn't believe how much I had let this hedge grow over the
years, but it happens. Hedges do tend to "creep" up in height
unless you're very careful about your hedge trimming, which
I am not. Pammy's art studio looks so much prettier here.

Finally, while I'm discussing the business of
pruning and trimming murrayas, I also tackled
the overgrown monster murraya which is the
bookend to the eastern side of our covered
pergola outdoor dining area. Though it is under
an olive tree in a fair bit of shade, this thing
just grows and grows. So it was time for not
just a trim, but a full "boy prune".

Have you heard of the expression "boy pruning"? It was one
of the favourites at my old magazine/TV show, 'Burke's Backyard'.
And it was a term equally used by male and female staff.
"Boy pruning" can be done by men or women, but characteristically
it's more likely to be done by a bloke (hence the term). It is simply
very, very, very radical, deep, heavy, shocking, awful pruning.
Pruning that looks like "you've overdone it this time, buster."
This murraya loves it. This is the third time I've done it since we
planted it many years ago. It'll look this awful for at least six
weeks, then a month later it will be a wall of young green leaves.

Finally, though, I am sorry, wasps, that I wrecked your home. I know you'll quickly set up shop somewhere else in the garden, as you always do. 

I have nothing against our wasps, either. They're a welcome presence here. The only time they have ever stung me, and it was just the once, was the day I was pruning back our grevillea without knowing that they had a nest in there. They soon let me know I was getting too close!

Our wasps are Australian native paper wasps, and they are beneficial insects in the garden, catching caterpillars to feed to their larvae. Given the terrible way that I manage to blunder in on them, wrecking their homes every couple of years, they are also remarkably peaceful and tolerant creatures.  

Betting on hedges

My wife Pam and I have a code word which we use to announce to each other that the morning newspaper is here – "thud" – because that is what happens most mornings here. Our newsagent, Nathan, is a pretty good shot, landing each paper with a thud on a narrow path that's edged on both sides by hedges. With a 95% accuracy rating, Nathan could throw newspapers for Australia at the Newsagents' Olympics. But it's the 5% of his throws which don't result in a good, solid 'thud' which have prompted this little posting about hedges and front gardens

Here's what happens sometimes when Nathan misses the path. Like a javelin waving around after it has landed, the Sydney Morning Herald occasionally sits there poking a hole in our hedge. For some reason, a fair percentage of Nathan's misses end up in this hole, when he misses to the right.

When Nathan misses to the left this is the usual result. The hedge on this side of the path gets bit more sunshine than the other one, and so is a bit more dense, and tends to hold the paper rather than let it through.

There are a few different hedges out front. In the foreground is a newspaper-catching lilly pilly hedge. The plant's cultivar name is cute – 'Tiny Trev' – a native Aussie lilly pilly bred for hedging. In the background is a Murraya paniculata, one of Sydney's best hedging plants. This tough specimen is in full shade for four whole months in winter and never complains. Then over summer all it gets is blazing hot afternoon sun every day. A wondrous plant.

This is another of our short-but-sweet, three-metre-long Tiny Trev hedges, just after trimming. You can see a couple of dents and hollows here and there where Nathan tossed in a particularly heavy edition of the Herald complete with bonus shopping supplements that I don't read. The holes will slowly fill with new growth, and the best I can manage with this hedge is a neatly trimmed shagginess.

But here's the real nemesis of Tiny Trev, the psyllid, a tiny, sap-sucking insect that creates lots of ugly little pimples in the plant's new leaves. Infestations can get bad, but regular trimming plus follow-up sprays of a non-organic spray product, Confidor, keep the problem under control quite well. The only organic solution would be to rip out all the Tiny Trev hedges and start again with psyllid-resistant plants, and right now that's just too much work!

In between the hedges I have planted foliage plants of different hues. In the foreground is a groundcover native Cootamundra wattle (Acacia baileyana prostrate form) and behind that is native Correa alba, which I regularly prune into a dome, for a shape contrast against the square hedges. The Correa produces lots of small white flowers in autumn, but it's really just a foliage plant. The groundcover wattle is a lush, wild, almost untamable beast that spills through the front fence and either delights or terrifies all passers-by. It does produce golden ball flowers in winter, but not that many. Again, it's the lovely blue-green foliage which is its best feature.

Here's a cross-section style shot of the different foliage colours out front. Tiny Trev foreground, wattle in the middle-ground, and grey-leaved Correa alba behind.

In winter and spring the new growth on the Tiny Trev lilly pilly is a lovely, rich red colour that adds to the picture, and complements the other native plant we have out front, our eucalyptus street tree.

The street tree's formal name is Eucalyptus leucoxylon 'Rosea', but another name for it is the pink-flowered form of the yellow gum. It's a wonderful flowering gum, starting its blooming each year in autumn (very early April) and continuing all the way to spring (late September). It's still in flower now, and native lorikeets and honeyeaters are constantly jockeying for feeding rights on its branches. It'll still be in bloom in October.

Though a gorgeous, long-flowering and fairly small tree (around 5-6m) it's a shocker of a street citizen, dropping leaves and twigs all over the footpath, and turning any car parked under its branches into a sea of gum nuts, twigs, flowers and other detritus overnight. Add to that several dollops of bird poo on the windscreen, and maybe even a bonus of the evilly black and smeary poo of the fruit bats which feed in the tree at night, and every local in our street now knows not to park there! But aside from being thoroughly anti-social, it is the loveliest tree in the street.

And so that's a quick dip into my front yard. Spring is in full swing out in the backyard now. Predicted maximum today is 33, which is seriously warm for spring. Everything had a good drink this morning, there are plenty of jobs to do, so I'd better stop blogging and get down to the real reason I am here on this planet – to do some gardening!