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.  

Snow in summer

When I glanced outside early this morning it looked like we'd had a dusting of snow overnight. The paving was white and all the nearby plants were flecked with 'snowflakes'. Then, when I opened the back door and stepped outside the powerfully sweet (some would say sickly sweet) subtropical scent of murraya in bloom seized me by the nose.

It's not an alluring, classy gentle scent like a frangipani's – murraya has a cheap scent, too abundant and too strong. Yet it is one of the scents of summer here in Sydney, and this year's murraya flowering has been the best in many years. Everywhere I go around town right now these big, glossy green shrubs are covered with fragrant white blooms, and they're at their peak here at our place today. 

I know many of my friends in the USA and UK
are having a terrible time with bitter winter
winds and snow drifts piling up against their
doors, so sorry if my mention of 'snow' is as
welcome as yet another snowstorm, but that
was my first thought on seeing this scene today.

The bush has been building up to this little
avalanche of white petals for several days.
This is a weekend cluster of buds straining
to be set free – one of many.

And this morning they've been allowed out. It'll all
be over in a few days, which is a good thing,
as the scent is very strong, but as I know it's here
for just a couple of days I do enjoy it.

Standing back a few feet, this is the shrub in its awful spot.
I really do need to point out that this murraya is planted at
the foot of a large olive tree, gets nowhere near enough sun,
its roots are cramped and competed with by the olive. It's
a pretty horrible spot for any shrub yet that's the beauty of the
murrayas in Sydney. They'll grow almost anywhere. The level
of flowering on mine in well down on the ones in full sun,
which are evenly coated in white blooms. 

This part of the murraya, above the pergola roof,
gets more sun and so flowering is a bit better.

You don't see a lot of bromeliads dusted in snow, do you?
While I was taking this photo I was being steadily showered
with fragrant, falling white petals. The coating of the pergola
area's paving will eventually be so thick that I'll be scooping
up many whole dustpans full of them in a few days' time.

Out the front of our house, the murraya hedge is as blandly
evergreen as ever. Murrayas are a very popular hedging
plant in Sydney because they grow so well here, but the price you
pay with murraya hedges is that they hardly flower. When I looked
closely there were about a dozen flowers on this whole 3-metre
long hedge right now. The regular clipping hedges need cuts
off the flower buds, and with the rate of growth of murrayas
in summer, they do need clipping back quite often.

I've blogged about these plants before, and I've mentioned previously that murrayas are one of those plants that are so successful and so popular that they are frowned upon by many a 'serious' Sydney gardener. As if being too easy to grow is a bad thing anywhere. Maybe it's that tacky cheap scent that's the turn-off? Fortunately for me I'm not all that serious about gardening, I just love it, and so there's a spot both in my garden and in my heart for these evergreen performers that can even produce a bit of snowy magic in summer.

Too easy

Unless you're gardening in Antarctica or the Atacama, there are usually a few plants which thrive marvellously well in your district, and yet no-one calls them weeds, because they're not. Here in Sydney there is one plant which is ubiquitous in this way – Murraya paniculata. It's everywhere, and I have eight of them growing on my tiny property, in various spots (seven trimmed into hedges, and one trimmed to fill an awkward space). This is my problem-solver plant, my "go-to" shrub. If I have a nasty assignment for a plant, the murraya gets the gig. Predictably enough, various friends who are professional gardening writers here in Sydney sneer at murrayas. "Too easy" they cry!

Here's the biggest of my murrayas, magnificently filling the role of "please won't something grow under that big olive tree and give a green backdrop to our outdoor dining area". I had tried a couple of other things there in the early days but they all struggled in the shade and the root competition from the olive. "Step aside folks, let a murraya show how it's done." It's been here for years now, and this is it pictured this afternoon, aglow with fresh young foliage following its routine cut-back a month or so ago.

This murraya is a summer-bloomer mostly, and gets its other common names of orange jessamine and (confusingly, for Philadelphus fans) mock orange. The scent of these flowers is almost too sweet, as it's every bit as sweet as an orange tree's scent. On a perfectly still summer morning, opening the back door and getting a waft from the murraya is like walking through the cosmetics section of a department store, where those pretty salesthingies spray shoppers walking past as if they're sheep needing a perfume drench. But I digress... Murraya blooms are fairly short-lived, but you can get a number of flushes of blooms from them, usually a couple of weeks after some heavy rain, as happened this time round.

The other seven murrayas I have on site are all hedging plants. This hedge (three plants in all) does a stirling job hiding the mess of the composting and potting area. Surprisingly it has also turned out to be a favourite home and shelter for small birds such as wrens, bulbuls and silvereyes. My other murraya hedge is at the front of the house, in the worst imaginable spot for a hedge. It's the hedge across the front of our building, which faces south-south-west. So this spot gets no sun for about four months a year in winter plus the worst of the hot afternoon summer sun. And yet it's also dense and green, in bloom and thriving, and has been doing wonderfully well there for the last half-dozen years.

One of the things I love about my Murraya paniculatas, though, is the new foliage which erupts after each cutback. It's a lovely young, fresh, vivid green.

One little-known fact about Murraya paniculata – and this will surprise many Australian gardeners – is that it's listed in the native gardener's bible 'Australian Native Plants', by Wrigley and Fagg, as being native to Australia. It's also a native of South-East Asia as well as northern Australia, but the odd thing is that it thrives so well in temperate Sydney, given that it comes from our tropical north. Down here, these plants are not attacked by pests, need little or no feeding, survive on our natural rainfall and grow in sun, shade or semi-shade.

I do have one other Murraya growing in my garden, and I've mentioned it a few times before in my blog. My beloved curry leaf tree, Murraya koenegii. Here's it's foliage, for comparison with its cousin's foliage, pictured just before this one.

The curry leaf tree's flowers are smaller and less conspicuous than the orange jessamine's, and they have no scent.

There are far more berries than flowers on the curry leaf tree at the moment, and this afternoon, while taking a few shots for this blog, I made an interesting find. As I mentioned in my last blog, my wife Pam is doing a botanical illustration course at the moment, and she's working on a piece on the curry leaf tree. For her course she takes in snippets of leaves and berries from her tree, and now some of the people in the course want to have their own curry leaf tree. Where do you get them, they ask?

They're easy enough to find here in Sydney. I bought mine many years ago as a little seedling for sale in a pot in an Indian spices shop here in Sydney. I occasionally see them in garden centres, too, but the fact is they grow very easily from seed. I popped some seeds in a pot a week or two back and the first one is up this morning. Here it is.

However, while I was walking around my potted curry leaf tree I looked down and noticed half a dozen seedlings coming up from berries which have dropped off the tree. I dug them up carefully, trying to take as much soil as I could, and transferred them to some pots of mix. Each seedling had a good little root system going, and so by this time next week we'll know how many have survived the trauma of my clumsy midday transplanting efforts. And by the end of next week the other four seeds which I sowed in the pot should have come up as well. And, with fingers crossed, we should be able to give little memento curry leaf trees to Pam's fellow course members a few weeks from now.

The incredible ease with which the curry leaf tree seeds have sprouted should sound warning bells that this is probably a weed of the future, of course, but whether something is a weed or not is all about climate and soil. When a plant loves your climate and your soil, it grows like a weed. Take it somewhere not so ideal, and it's just another tree.

I can understand my gardening-writer friends who poo-poo the Murraya paniculatas of Sydney. Sure, there's no challenge in growing it, and it really is used so often in landscaping here that it's truly boring. "Oh look, a murraya hedge," is something you'll never hear around these parts...

But I love the way Murraya paniculata can fill a truly dreadful spot in the garden with vivid, lush greenery, unfailing good health and sweetly scented white blooms. Provided it's grown somewhere truly daunting, where many other plants have tried and failed, it's well worth admiring!