Asleep at the wheel

 

Spring has a way of waking you up like no other season. It brings you outside, don't forget the camera, "oh look over there that one is flowering too". You know the kind of thing. For a gardener it's called excitement.

And so this morning I spent the first hour of daylight wandering around the place capturing the morning glow. So come take a walk with me around our little Marrickville garden — all 7m x 10m of it — and say hello to the first of our spring flowers.

Our Scadoxus patch is steadily increasing in size. I could only fit in nine of the 11 flowers we have, and down at ground level there's another dozen babies doing well. Too small to flower yet, they'll eventually flower at some stage. Not sure when. That's half the fun of growing these things. I barely know what I am doing, but it's working.

This wobbly pano shot shows where the Scadoxus live, under the big old frangipani (that's the ideal place for Pam to hang her forests of Spanish moss that she loves). This is a super shady place in summer but it's well lit in winter once the frangi drops its leaves. To the left of the birdbath those strappy looking things are bromeliads, and they love it here too. I never touch them and they're happily thriving. 

While we're under the frangipani tree, here's another flowering bulb from South Africa (as is the Scadoxus). This is Veltheimia, given to us by our good friends John and Liz, so it always reminds us of them.

The final South African residents happily multiplying under the care of the big old frangipani tree are the yellow clivias. Their flowers should pop out any day now, so the combination of yellow clivia trumpets and dazzling scadoxus fireworks is well worth seeing, and waiting for each year.

Speaking of yellow-flowered people, down the other end of our garden, near the house, the Mardi Gras style blooms of the native Sydney Rock Orchid, Dendrobium kingianum, are in full glory right now. The miracle of this performance is that last year these plants were being attacked by orchid beetles, little chompers that love to dine on unopened flower buds, and so the shows weren't as good as previous years, or this year. These beetles are impossible to control with organic sprays, and I'm not prepared to buy or use the bee-killing commercial sprays (containing Carbaryl) that can control these beetles. So I don't know why the beetles haven't attacked this year but I'm glad they haven't.

I couldn't decide which Nasturtium flower to show you so here's two: there are dozens of them and no two seem to be the same, although they come in all possible combinations of yellow, red and orange, maybe a bit of black trim. Pam and her watercolour art students absolutely adore nasturtiums as a painting subject, and as a gardener I do appreciate the way that nasturtiums suppress other weeds, but they do like to spread out and bully every other plant they come near. I cut them back every few days and they just merrily bounce back without a care in the world. They never complain, they just grow back each time.

We grow our Italian lavender in a pot and it likes it there. There's also a white-flowered type that Pam asked me to get, and it is slower off the mark and probably won't be in flower for another month or so.

One of the hardest flowers to photograph is this thing, a hellebore. That's because the flowers point down to the ground, and I'm too old to take photos lying on my back, so I hold up the flower's foliage with my hand, quickly take a snap and then edit out my finger from the photo. 

I'll finish off with two "panorama" shots of our small inner-city garden, just to give you a bit more context for what I have shown you already. To see the "pano" view, just double click on the photo itself and it will show the much wider shot (hopefully).

This first pano shows the left side of the garden looking out from the back of the house and its covered pergola. 

And this second pano is of the right side of the garden with lots of succulents in pots, more bloody nasturtiums trying to take over. The largish round white pot on the centre right is a native flannel flower bush that flowered beautifully last year and we are hoping will do so again this year too.

Finally, I actually have a couple more blog postings waiting to go. Our front garden is looking lovely but it has not worked out as I had intended, not at all. I'll fill you in on that bit of gardening fun next time.

Greetings from Locked Down Sydney!

 

It's been a long time (April 21) since I posted anything here in my gardening blog, which is semi-retired, just like me.

But as I finished this morning's final phase of the "weed then mulch" marathon, it occurred to me that it might help pass the time, maybe also provide some inspiration for gardeners who are cooped up at home due to covid lockdown restrictions, if I posted something here.

So what I plan to do every few days is to post something from my garden that I hope might of be interest, and maybe even motivate you to get out in the sunshine, which is good for both your mental and physical health (if you wear a hat!).

For starters, I'm starting off with a pair of panoramas of my freshly weeded and mulched garden, as it always looks very nice after new mulch has been spread around. 

Mid August and both the frangipanis are asleep, so it looks a bit bare. In the foreground the bonsai curry leaf tree has enjoyed the winter, and in the right foreground the strawberry patch is flowering and looking promising. That's Pam's nasturtium patch middle-left, and middle right is the hardest working part of the garden, the pots of rosemary and thyme.

On the right ride of the garden is another of Pam's nasturtium patches, while behind them the Geranium 'Big Red' patch continues on its merry spreading way. The only care it needs is cutting back. Right foreground, the remains of our two very productive broccoli plants. The stumpy/stalky one on the right looks like that because this week we cut off all the leaves and cooked them up, Southern USA "collard greens" style — and they were delicious.

So that's your introductory guided tour. In coming days I have lots of spring flowers to show you, plus some garden jobs to do now, lots of problems in the succulent patch, South Africans at their glorious best, Pam's mum's garden refugees, crops on the go, garden critters, and I am sure several more things that I'll come across as spring warms up.

Hang in there locked-down gardeners! If you have a garden, even if it's just some pots on a balcony, they're the perfect project to take on now. Spring is well and truly in the air, the temperatures are rising so any effort you put into getting plants to grow will be rapidly — and beautifully — rewarded.

Good morning, everything!

It's a little habit of mine that started so long ago that I can't remember when, but each day when I open the back door that leads straight out to the garden, I always say "good morning everything". And I mean everything. Even the earthworms, the aphids, the flowers and weeds, birds and the bees. Everything. No use in discriminating, is there? We're all equals.

And on this only moderately chilly July morning, the middle of our winter, with the temperature at 10°C and likely to soar up to just 17°C by early afternoon, we had a touch of overnight rain and the garden was just lovely to behold and be in. No jobs to be done at all, just a wander around our pretty little patch here on Earth.

The first of the cinerarias decided this was the day to come out. These things will now flower for a few months, in colours so bright that lurid is the most honest way to describe them. These are here to do a job, not so much to be looked at directly, but to be looked at in a mirror, attached to the shed wall, by someone standing at the back of the house. That's the plan.

Now, the nasturtiums are Pam's plants, but this is the reason why I so readily gave in and planted something which I consider to be an invasive weed. Ahhhhhh, raindrops on nasturtium leaves in the morning...

Speaking of raindrops, for some reason they always look like a watery gel, rather than mere water, when they accumulate on these succulents.

If plants were a doggie which could wag its tail with happiness, this pelargonium would also like to press its cold wet nose up against my face while it wagged its furry tail.

Of all the vegies I grow, I like the look of parsnip foliage the best. I know there are some glam contenders out ehre (thinking cauliflowers, kales, cabbages and curly parsley for starters) but the light and cheerful green of the parsnips just seals the deal for me.

On a Sunday morning, where there isn't much gardening to be done because Huey the Rain God has sent down a shower overnight, there's only one thing to do, says Mitchell, our Librarian Gnome, and that's read a good book.

Good idea, Mitchell.

(Looking for something new and totally different to read? I'm loving the book I am reading right now, 'Leo the African', by one of my favourite authors, Amin Maalouf, a wonderful Lebanese writer. I cannot recommend Maalouf highly enough. Beautifully poetic and dazzlingly exotic in the way he brings another, completely different culture and time to life, a good one to look for and start with is 'Samarkand' but 'Leo the African' is winning me over as being every bit as good as my favourite so far, Samarkand.)

First Day of Winter

"Come outside," the love of my life beckoned to me, "and bring your camera, too." I was thinking a rare winged visitor had flown in perhaps from the tropical north and I was needed to record the historic ornithological event. Alas, no. Pam was just excited because her second nasturtium plant is producing yellow flowers. "Do a blog on it," she helpfully suggested.

"But I just blogged about your nasturtiums a few weeks ago, darling. They're nice but they're not that fantastic." Admittedly, this yellow one is really nice (much nicer than the orange one) but I let that observation glide by.

"I know what I'll do," I helpfully ventured, "as it's the first day of winter, and a warm and pleasant one too, I'll do something on that topic and include your nasturtium again." Deal done, here we go.

Traaa daaa, Pam's yellow nasturtium, in flower today, June 1, the start of winter here.

Now here's something a bit more newsworthy, winter-wise. My frangipani doesn't seem to know it's winter yet. You would have thunk it would be dropping leaves all over the place, as the May which just finished made it into the papers as the coldest May since Elvis died (or was it Buddy Holly?) Anyway, it was some long-distant milestone of time like that.

Not merely content to hang onto its foliage, the frangipani is still sending up flower buds. Perhaps this happened overnight? The minimum of 17°C last night was almost the warmest June minimum for Sydney since Elvis/Buddy Holly days, too, and so maybe the frangipani thinks there's still time to party?

Now here's something that is no surprise at all for the first day of winter, as this is the time of year when my potted cumquat should be covered in fruits rapidly turning a beautiful shade of orangey-yellow, which it is doing beautifully this year (due in large part to some great advice and help from our gardening writer, Elizabeth Swane).

My little pot of dill seems to be enjoying the cooler autumn-winter weather, so from now on I'll confine my dill-growing escapades to this time of year.

The plectranthus 'Mona Lavender' which I planted a few months ago hasn't stopped flowering since then. No doubt the soft accordion serenades of my gnome, Flaco, each evening, have made the plectranthus feel like part of the family from day one.

And finally, just for my Pammy, another nasturtium shot because I know she loves them.

On with winter, so far, so warm!

Casting nasturtiums

Every now and then Pam gets an idea in her head about some flower or plant, and it's my job to go find it, plant it and keep it happy – or, failing that, to talk her out of it (usually with the winning argument that we don't have enough space for xyz beautiful but too-large flowering shrub).

And so it came to pass that we planted some nasturtiums a few weeks ago and, as nasturtiums do without encouragement, they are already thriving. But there's a bit of a 'Mother's Day' theme to this story that you'll find out about by the end of this post, so I guess it's the right time to tell you the story. It goes like this...

Here's the first of the nasturtium flowers, and they're vividly nice things, although appreciating them sometimes means getting down on hands and knees and parting the foliage to find the blooms.

Speaking of foliage, this nasturtium does have a lovely 'splashed paint' look. These are attractive plants, but they do have a major drawback, notably being an invasive weed, but I just couldn't say 'no' to Pam's request for some nasturtiums. She loves them, and very recently nasturtiums came into our lives for a lovely celebration involving my dear old Mum.

This is what started Pam's nasturtium thing. This is a beautiful old, original, Art Nouveau wrapping paper which Pam has in a book that simply consists of bound-in sheets of many different, original Art Nouveau papers. It's a gorgeous book. Pam asked me to scan the paper, as she was designing a special birthday card to commemorate the fact that as of March 8, 2011, it was 100 years since my mother was born. Mum has been in Heaven for over 30 years (Dad joined her there in 1986), but on the night of Mum's 100th 'birthday' Pam and I got together with my brother and his wife for a special dinner to commemorate the occasion. Champagne, great food and no washing up (we went out to a flash restaurant) did Mum and the occasion proud.

Here's the birthday girl herself in a photo taken probably around 1930, sitting on an old, fallen gum tree branch somewhere around Glen Innes in the Northern NSW tablelands where she grew up, or perhaps down on the coast at Grafton, where she met and married my Dad, Neil. Mum's christian name was an unusual one – Zella – and Mum told me Zella was the name of a Gypsy girl who once passed through the town where Mum was born, Tenterfield. Grandma loved the name and so her first child, a beautiful girl, was called Zella.

To mark the 100th anniversary, Pam designed a special card with this photo of Zella on the front, and on the inside are some more photos, backed with the nasturtium paper. My sisters live too far away to be able join us that evening, so we thought making the card and sending it to them was a way of including them in this little celebratory moment of family history.

And so, when Pam, with her big, beautiful eyes looked at me and said the equivalent of "darling, I want to plant a rampant flowering weed", I had no option but to say "I suppose you want the type with the variegated foliage?" then head off to the garden centre to find one. It does look nice in the garden now, but I have fears that when we return from our American holiday later this year the nasturtiums might just have taken over half the backyard.

But the combined, irresistible forces of mother and wife easily win out over the practical boy gardener, and so we're casting nasturtiums here at Amateur Land, with pleasure.