The 10-Year Rewind – Part 9 – Friendly natives

Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 9 is this one — Friendly Natives — from April 2009. It's mostly a look at our front garden, part of Garden Amateur land that this blog rarely visits.

After enjoying the challenge of the desert island plants a month or two ago, I've found a new blogger's photo challenge involving native plants in our gardens. I came across the challenge at several other blogs, in my case Phillip Oliver's Dirt Therapy blog and Grace Peterson's blog although I believe the people responsible for starting the whole thing can be found at Gardening Gone Wild. 

It's a simple thing: just send them a photo of a plant native to your area, growing in your garden. Pictured below is the one I sent, but I'm a bit of a rule-bender (as I was with the desert island plants 'rules' too). So here's my photo of three of the Australian natives growing in my Australian garden, and below that several more detail shots for good measure. 

Here they are: in the left foreground, my gum tree, Eucalyptus leucoxylon 'Rosea'. Spilling over the fence in the middle ground is a just barely prostrate form of the Cootamundra wattle, Acacia baileyana, and in the background is a native without a common name, Correa alba. They're all worth a closer look, so I thought I'd post a couple of close-ups as well.


The Acacia baileyana in the foreground has wonderful blue-grey foliage. It's meant to be a prostrate groundcover but in its tightly confined space it rears up about a metre off the ground in places. The silver-leafed correa behind is due for yet another trim. I keep it clipped into a dome shape most of the time, but as it's flowering now I'll wait until that's over before its next trim.


As well as being a lovely colour the foliage of the Cootamundra wattle is delicately ferny. While it is producing some tiny flower buds now, it won't unleash its pretty little yellow pompom blooms until later, around June or July.


The flowers of the Correa alba are modest at best and not the reason I grow this plant. Well, to tell the truth, the reason I grow this plant is that Pam chose it, and a very, very lovely choice it has proven to be, a beautiful foliage plant. And our neighbour's tabby cat loves sleeping under it, too!

Our street tree, the Eucalyptus, has just started blooming this week. It's late this year, as it usually starts in early April. It will stay covered in blooms till September at least, and all sorts of native nectar-eating birds will be squabbling for territory in its branches for all that time, notably the wattlebirds, the New Holland honeyeaters and the rainbow lorikeets.

The gum tree's flower buds are full of colour now and very decorative in their own right.

This photo shows nicely how the flower buds open. The little conical cap on the underside of the bud loosens under the pressure within the bud, then pops off suddenly, allowing the pink tutu of blooms to pirouette across the stage. Traa daaaa! 

But to finish this little photo blog I thought I'd toss in a bonus garden native photo. Pictured above is my fully-recovered Grevillea 'Superb' in my backyard, after its brush with death last December. But thanks to the application of a spray which killed off the fungal disease which was causing its woes, it's happier and more floriferous than ever. (For Australian readers, the product is Yates Anti-Rot, which is made from phosphorous acid, and it certainly was a Christmas miracle worker for this grevillea).

Stop press – someone at the door! It's Greek Easter this weekend, and my lovely neighbour Katarina knocked on my door a few minutes ago, wishing Pam and me a very happy Easter, and bearing an Easter gift of traditional Greek cakes, pastries and dyed eggs. So happy Greek Easter, everyone!

The time-lapse bush

I mentioned in my previous posting that my Grevillea 'Peaches and Cream' is flowering its head off at the moment, and the way it bursts into bloom all over is almost like time-lapse photography. Wherever you look there's a bloom in one of the stages of opening, and so that's what I thought I would record here. All these photos were taken this weekend.

Fully open and two-toned, the only thing Peaches and Cream lacks is subtlety.

I can't imagine a garden full of two-toned blooms – one bush is enough, but my Pammy fell in love with a Peaches and Cream in a house nearby and she wanted one. It has taken me a while to also really, truly love this plant the way she does, but it's growing on me. Certainly it's a hit with the honeyeater birds who visit it every day. As you can see from this photo there are blooms in every stage of opening up, so let's take a closer look.

Stage one – the flower pokes its head out from the foliage.

Stage two, the unfurling begins, from the base of the flower head.

Stage three – more unfurl, all a pleasing, pale limey-green colour.

Stage four – the flower grows from the base, more stamens (is that their name?) unfurl.

Stage five – the first blush of pinky orange appears.

Stage six – all the buds are opening now.

Stage seven – red-tipped antennae send out signals (sorry, I'm not a botanist, not sure what these thingies are really called).

Stage eight – almost there now, pink blush growing, not quite fully open though.

Stage nine – birds start feasting on these now, a lolly shop for honeyeaters.

Stage ten – a fully mature flower, pinky peaches and yellowy cream.

The bush itself is about 2m high and wide, but it would grow bigger (maybe 3m) if I left it to grow to full size. But sorry, Peaches and Cream, that isn't going to happen in my tiny backyard. Besides, my brutal trimming seems to suit this bush beautifully. It thrives on being pruned, and that's how things are hopefully going to be for many years to come.

Christmas comes early

My Christmas Bush insists that the biblical scholars have got it all wrong. It says Jesus was born sometime in mid-November, not in late December. But my Christmas Bush is a strange little thing. Most of the other native Christmas Bushes here in my home state of New South Wales do their 'blooming' in December, when most other people agree Jesus was born. But not my ornery little bush. It's a non-conformist. It's a November flowerer.

Here it is this morning, just starting to colour up. Its formal name is Ceratopetalum gummiferum, which is why everyone calls it Christmas Bush, because it's easier and it is when this thing usually flowers. That blush of pinky colour belongs to the bracts around the flowers, which are white and tiny. In that sense it's like bougainvilleas, in that it's not the flowers which put on the colour show, it's the bracts around the flowers.

Maybe the reason my Christmas Bush's timing is all out of whack is that it's growing in a pot, not in the ground. Could be. But it has long been one of my 'hospital patient' plants, a struggler for its first few years and misshapen now in its adulthood. Pam has been nagging me to get rid of it and buy a nicer shaped plant for years, and I always agree and then do nothing about it. So it's hardly a handsome plant but it's my patient and I love it when it flowers. And this year's dense covering of tiny white blooms promises that in about a month from now it will be a glorious red-coloured thing. (Perhaps mine celebrates the Russian Revolution of November 1917 and is actually a Communist Athiest plant? That could explain a lot...)

The pinky tinge that is dotting itself here and there all over the plant gets redder and redder as the weeks go by.

As well as being a native Australian plant, it's also a local from here on the New South Wales coast, where I live, so it's no wonder it likes it here. I love this transitional, colouring-up phase the most, to tell the truth. When it's in its colourful Christmas/Communist red glory it has lost the delicacy it possesses right now.

Speaking of colourful glory, this is a shot from last year, to give you an idea of the colour that the bracts develop into. This isn't 'full bloom' either – with all those white flowers still waiting to redden up, it's only half-done at this stage.

In December the florist's shops are full of Christmas bush sold in billowy bunches to be popped into vases for a brief few weeks around Christmas. And then the show is over until same time next year. Pam is one of our local florist shop's best customers, and she always comes home with armfuls of Christmas bush. While it looks wonderful it's not the greatest cut flower, as it doesn't last all that long, so I'm content with my revolutionary dissenter's season of glory, which lasts about five or six weeks, from these pink-blush beginnings in late October until its decline at the start of December, the time when all the true-believer capitalist market Christmas bushes are just getting into their stride.

Little miracles

A few blog postings ago I mentioned that there are several plants in this garden which are very much Pam's, and here is another one.

It's her air plant, a tillandsia, and unlike the various other 'Pam' plants here, this one really is hers in every sense. I am not allowed to touch it. I can talk to it, but it's Pam's job to mist it with water regularly. And look how happy the little person is! Pam's tillandsia is in beautiful bloom at the moment. The flowers are quite tiny, just half an inch or so in length. But what a lovely colour they are.

Pam has always loved tiny flowers, and she's the reason we have native orchids in our garden, too. This tillandsia bloom won't last long in the garden, but its short stay is imprinted in our memory, and we'll look out for it next year. I love it when Pam bustles into my office and says "get out the camera, my tillandsia is looking great. It won't last long." And it's not the only flowering tillandsia we have, either. In November, we should see the other one do its thing...

And what a tiny little thing it does! Some readers will know of the plant known as Spanish moss or Old Man's Beard, a trailing tangle of fine strands. Well, it flowers too, and these minuscule blooms appear later on in spring, around November.

The first time I came across these blooms I didn't actually notice them on the plant, they are so tiny. I detected them as little green dots on a photo I had taken. So I went outside, had a very close-up look and found these itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny little flowers. Now we're on the lookout for them every year.

As I mentioned earlier, it's Pam who is responsible for adding various native orchids to our garden, although these are my responsibility when it comes to feeding, watering and care. They are sending up their flower stalks now and should be in bloom in about a month from now, sometime in September I guess. This lovely little bloom is half an inch wide, from wingtip to wingtip, and it has a sweet scent, too.

Pam is forever teaching me all sorts of things in her own quiet, persistent way, and out in the garden a love of tiny flowers is definitely one of the most important and valuable things I have learned from her. In fact it isn't just tiny flowers which I now love and appreciate, it's all tiny things as well. If you bother to stop and look, there is just so much happening in each and every square inch out there, and much of it is both fascinating and beautiful.

Quiet achiever

There are several plants in this garden which are, essentially, Pammy's. It's my job to care for them, but they're Pam's plants. Pictured below is one such plant, looking good.

One day early last year Pam came home from an art course at the Botanic Gardens in Sydney and said "I want an Acacia cognata - it's really cute, very hairy, just like a pet animal." There was a nice specimen growing at the Botanic Gardens and so I had to find one, grow it so it was just as nice and, for ever and ever, keep it alive. (In ye olde days of yore way back when, brave knights rode out to slay dragons for their fair maids. These days, with dragons an endangered species, dragon-slaying is definitely out. And so I have to ride out and grow fussy natives.)

Fussy natives? Well, I only discovered this 'fussy' reputation after I read up on them, and then spoke to one of the gardening experts with whom I work, and the conversation went something like this...

Jamie: "I've just bought an Acacia cognata for Pam. Any tips?"

Expert: "Good luck."

Further enquiries revealed that this plant needs excellent soil drainage, light feeding, steady watering but never too much, and probably some nursing during humid weather (which it hates, and of which we get stacks in summer). Knowing all this, I decided that it would almost certainly die if I tried to grow it in the ground, so I opted for keeping it in a pot as its best chance of survival. Pots aren't perfect, but you can control soil drainage better with them, and you can move a plant to a safe spot during terrible weather.

This is how the new guy looked on Day One, early April, 2009. The first job was to put it in a better pot.

The potting mix was a specialised native potting mix, combined 50:50 with coarse propagating sand. A few weeks later and, in its new pot, it's putting on good growth. In fact this good growth continued all through autumn, then really took off again in spring last year, and by late spring I was sure it looked like it was getting too big for that pot. (What's all this 'fussy' malarky – it's a weed!) Nevertheless, concerned that it might grow too much and get pot-bound in mid-summer, I potted it up into its new (and current) larger, white pot.

And here it is this morning, green and long-haired with good health. So far so good. I think it likes me! This white pot has its own built-in pot feet, so the base sits off the ground by about 2cm.

So why call this post 'quiet achiever'? Well, this plant doesn't flower. It's just a foliage plant. It doesn't do much else. As it gets bigger the foliage should just keep growing all the way down to the ground. There's one form of Acacia cognata marketed as 'Cousin Itt', named after the very hairy character from the 'Addams Family' cult TV show from the 60s. So you get the picture. Apart from being cute and hairy, that's all it does. (Edit: this one is called 'Limelight', by the way.)

Well, its other trick is to put gardening knights in shining armour on permanent watch. Any moment, any time, it might just sag, then sigh, and say "I feel sick, mystery illness I'm afraid old chap, I think I'm on the way out." Until then, there's really nothing to worry about. Growth is good, foliage green. What could possibly go wrong?

Accosting passers-by

Out the front of our house, a mugger lurks. Like a yappy little dog it's not really a danger to anyone, but some people in our street occasionally get accosted by it, if they're not looking where they're going. The mugger is our 'groundcover' plant, a prostrate form of the Cootamundra wattle, Acacia baileyana. At is has once more begun its sporadic little midwinter flower show, it's the right time to point my camera at it and celebrate one of the real personalities in our garden.

Here's the mugger at work, spilling over the front fence. I'm constantly cutting it back, as it very rapidly makes its way through the fence and down to the footpath. It's advertised as a 'prostrate form' groundcover, but confined by hedges on all sides it rears up a metre high in all directions and fills the front garden with its lovely, feathery, blue-green foliage.

The first yellow puff-ball flowers appeared only two days ago, and they're always a delight to discover, but as our front garden faces south-west and is almost completely shadowed by the house for the three months of winter, its flowering is never spectacular. At best it's sporadic but it still attracts all the regular passers-by, many of whom stop and touch the blooms as if they were a little pet to pat.

As mentioned earlier, the foliage of this plant is sublimely beautiful, delicate and of a very Australian colour. If I saw this blue-green anywhere in the world I would think of home.

While I'm out the front of the house for a rare blog visit streetside, I might as well introduce you to our chubby little hedge, a lilly pilly by the name of 'Tiny Trev'.

Most of the year, Trev is a rich, deep green colour, but every winter it always puts on a delicious flush of new growth blushing a much redder colour than at other times of year.

It's a shame the red foliage doesn't last all year – wouldn't it be lovely to have a red hedge! But a few weeks from now the party will finish and the sensible greens will take over duty as Mr T. Trev, the little hedge man. It's only then we'll give the hedge its next trim. For the meantime I'm happy for it to be a red-faced and chubby-cheeked member of the pack of native plants which accost passers-by in this ordinary suburban street.

From little things big things grow

"You're not going through with this thing?" Geoffrey asked in a not particularly encouraging way. "Maybe, maybe not" I said, trying to sound inscrutable and wise, while secretly feeling just a little bit foolish. What prompted his doubts was my success in getting some Gymea lily seeds to come up. Yippeee! But Geoffrey is right in a sense. It will take this plant eight years to flower, and as he pointed out "It's an enormous plant, where will you put the thing?" What do you mean 'an enormous plant?', I have three of them! They'll be three enormous plants. As the great song by Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody says: "From little things, big things grow..."

Here's the reason for all the excitement. A baby Gymea lily (Doryanthes excelsa). I sowed the seeds back on February 25 and blogged about it here. The first glimmer of success appeared last week, roughly seven weeks after sowing.

I had no idea how deep to plant the seeds, so I sowed six pots: two with seeds almost sitting on the soil surface, covered by a scant 1mm depth of potting mix, two with seeds about 6mm deep, and two with seeds about 12-15mm deep. It turns out the shallow option is the way to go. In this photo, the seed on the right has come to attention, pushed up by the teeniest, tinyest little white shoot underneath.

Since the first guy came up, two more have done the same, and they seem to be growing well so far. So that means one of the 6mm deep seeds has also made it to the surface.

Not that I'm blaming her, but it's all Pam's fault. She brought this seed pod home from one of her botanical illustrating courses and casually suggested I might have a go at growing them. The chances of me saying "oh no, I couldn't possibly do that" were zero, zilch, nil. Not a chance, baby. But I have shocked myself by actually getting the things to grow. Seed-raising is always such a fresh, new thrill, each and every time.

This is the bit where Sensible Geoffrey does have a point. That clump of spiky leaves (in a local park) is about 1.5m tall, and the flower stems often reach 3m tall, and the biggies go to 5m or more. And did I mention that with seed-raised plants you have to wait eight years for flowers? These plants won't be flowering for another month or three, as a huge flower head 30-40cm across, chockers with lilies and nectar, is yet to form atop the stalks.

Fortunately, there's no rush with my seedlings. It's not as if they're going to become unmanageably huge this year, or even next. Maybe even sometime soon I'll come across a friend with a large, bare garden who wistfully says they'd love at least three enormous clumps of spiky leaves topped by three-metre-tall giant lilies. People are often saying things like that, aren't they? Whatever, the seeds are up, I am aglow with delight, and I have time on my hands until the troubles begin.

Showers of colour

There I was mid-afternoon sitting by my outdoor table under the covered pergola, enjoying a pot of tea and a quiet read of the Saturday papers. It was a pleasantly warm, cloudy, very humid day cooled by regular light showers of rain. The lazy slob that lurks deep within my soul was quietly cheering at the prospect of doing no sweat-drenched gardening in this dreadful humidity, and I admit I was on the slob's side, too. However, instead of reading about the appalling level of executive salaries (my annual wage in a day!) my eyes kept on wandering out towards the garden.

Something utterly familiar was looking especially lovely, probably the loveliest it has been in quite some time. And I'm sure all the recent rain is the cause of this sudden burst of richly coloured blooming in my grevilleas.

The grevilleas are blooming beautifully at the moment, and as I've done nothing whatsoever to encourage them I can take no credit. It's all their own work, plus thanks to Huey for all the recent rain.

This plant has a bit of an identity problem. The label when I bought it from a specialist native nursery several years ago definitely said it was Grevillea 'Superb', because that is what I was after. And while it looks superb at the moment, it's not orangey-red like a real 'Superb'. Instead, it's rich red, like the very common G. 'Robyn Gordon', which is closely related. And while 'Robyn Gordon' is regarded as boring because it's so common in gardens, it's not at all dull when it looks this good. Maybe I should compromise and call this one Grevillea 'Superb Robyn' and think of it as named accurately after my oldest sister? Much better!

One little thing I love about grevilleas is the way the individual curly needles of colour unfurl from their fuzzy casings, starting at the wide base and ending at the tips.

Across the other side of the path the Grevillea 'Peaches and Cream' is also in its pomp, flowering as it has never done before. This is a youngster only a few years old, and last year I wondered if there was something wrong with it, as the native birds which flock to the 'Superb Robyn' left it alone for some reason. This year no such problem. In fact it's squabbled over at times by different nectar-eaters, so all is now as it should be. As it's only a few feet from our back door, it has brought various native birds much closer to Pam's studio/office, which is a treat.

Peaches and Cream is Pam's grevillea. She saw one growing in a nearby street, took a photo, told me to get one (no, not 'asked me'!) and picked out where it was to be planted. I showed the photo to Geoffrey at work, he identified it, I bought it and planted it, nursed it to good health when it was a sickly child, and it's definitely still Pam's grevillea. She keeps a close eye on its welfare. Should it ever get sick again, I'm in trouble (or at least on duty until it gets well).

Australian natives are some of the most misunderstood plants in our gardens. While they're well adapted to our dry climate and can survive long dry spells better than many other plants, the fact is that they love a good amount of rain, provided the soil isn't gluggy, boggy and heavy.

In fact, Australian natives often look and smell their loveliest on a rainy day. If ever you're planning a bushwalk in Australia and are tempted to cancel it because it's raining, don't. Go for that walk through the bush in the rain. It smells so incredibly lovely, the colours change, many of them to softer hues, others simply to new hues you won't have seen before. But even if you can't quite make it out into the bush, next time it rains in your garden make sure to visit your native plants – they're very likely to be at their nicest then.

New Year, fresh start

This little person is not only celebrating a new year, he or she is just starting his or her first year. Yesterday, junior made his/her debut, perched on our clothesline taking in the unfamiliar surroundings, wondering what in the hell was going on.

You've left the nest, kiddo, start feeding. Unruly, fluffed-up feathers and a bewildered look; noisy squawking as soon as a parent appears, saying 'feed me, feed me' – still just a kid.

But all the parent does is ignore junior, fly to the nearest flowering grevillea and say to the kid – 'you're on you're own now darling, have a taste of this sweet nectar and instinct will kick in'. These native grevilleas are remarkable plants, in flower virtually year-round. Its main flowering peaks are in late spring and autumn, but here it's midsummer and the flowers are plentiful.

As well as the reddy-orange flowered grevillea, we also have this two-toned 'Peaches & Cream' grevillea in our backyard – a plentiful supply of nectar – and here is either Mr or Mrs Wattlebird tucking into his/her favourite flavour. Always feeding and clucking together as a pair, these two birds have been an item in both our neighbourhood and our backyard for several years, but for some reason this is the first time we have spotted one of their babies with them. Maybe it's the first one to survive, or perhaps we just haven't noticed the big event before (but I doubt that, we're out in the garden all the time).

Whatever the real story I am simply glad to see the new arrival. It marks the new year and the new beginnings such an occasion implies very nicely.

Happy New Year to all baby birds, fellow bloggers, blog-readers, lurkers, gardeners and passers-by.