Morning light

Of all the times of day I love being in my garden, mornings are the best. It's the morning light, low and clear and, compared to the shadows, as bright as the sun itself. As the garden awakes from sleep, dull colours shimmer brightly, dark greens become pale and young again, and honeyeaters come to enjoy their breakfast of nectar as I enjoy my coffee. (As always, click on the photos to make them bigger).

Here's the scene this morning. My garden faces north-east, so the morning light comes in from the right. There are a few bare garden beds here now, as I've just pulled out my tomatoes and zucchinis. And the birds are happy. Covered with mulch, these 'bare' beds have suddenly become a wormy, insecty feeding ground for blue wrens, magpies and wagtails.

Perched atop a grevillea, this perky little New Holland honeyeater checks to see what's going on before enjoying another lick of nectar.

A young wattlebird ponders its favourite grevillea before darting there for breakfast.

As well as the red one providing food to the New Holland honeyeater pictured earlier, this 'Peaches & Cream' grevillea, a young plant just two years old, has come into its own this summer and, flowering well, is now the delicacy of choice for several different native bird species. Maybe it's multi-flavoured, as well as multi-coloured?

As the sun rises all the lower-growing colours get a glow on. In the foreground are my zinnias, and that's blue salvia behind. The spiky grass on the left is my new pot of lemongrass enjoying its sunny spot. Far right, the basil and baby curry leaf trees catch the sun.

Against the dark background of our murraya hedge, the frangipani's leaves are X-rayed by the sun.

So too the hollow shallot leaves. Sometimes I think they'll just spontaneously burst into flames, so aglow they are with light.

I had originally chosen about 20 'morning light' photos for this blog, as everything here looks wonderful at this time of day. But mornings aren't a time for excess. It's a gentle, beautiful time of day and I never miss the chance to be there if I can possibly manage it.

Some like it hot

There's one sure-fire way to turn me into a lazy lay-about on the weekend, and that's heat, and today there's just the right dose of it – 30°C (86°F). I managed to score one garden brownie point this morning before I wilted - I trimmed the hedge which screens the composting area. But then my inbuilt, generations-old Celtic heat sensors went off and said "it's a wee bit tae hot for thee laddie" and so I have downed tools until late afternoon at the earliest, maybe for the day. And with a cup of tea to cool me, the fan on and a bit of blogging to catch up with, I thought I'd admire some of the plants which, unlike me, actually enjoy the heat on a day like today.

In the background is the crisply trimmed hedge with which I earned my brownie point this morning, and in the foreground is our frangipani, which can take any dose of heat Sydney cares to throw at it. Sydney has the ideal climate for frangis, they're everywhere in this town, and the ones doing best are usually the most neglected. I try my best to neglect mine at all times, so the regime here is simple: no fertiliser, no water except rain. Nothing. It's working so far.

I only planted this zucchini seedling two weeks ago and this morning it's having its first babies. Outrageous behaviour! Zucchinis love sun, but not the humidity that comes later on in January and February, so I am going to let this crop like mad from now until New Year then call it quits. Besides, we're 'zucchinied-out' by then.

My Beaver Lodge Slicer tomatoes are belting along in the heat. These are meant to be rapid-cropping 'cool climate' tomatoes suited to Canada (the seedlings were planted on October 3, six weeks ago). I thought I'd try them as a fast-cropper before all the summer bugs arrive to chomp our tomato crops. So far so good, but I was in roughly the same position last year with other varieties, just weeks before most of my crop succumbed to a mystery disease. Boo hoo! Glutton for both punishment and home-grown tomatoes, I am.

My wife Pammy asked me to repot into a much bigger pot this, her favourite pelargonium with the dark leaves and the salmon-pink flowers, as it is rapidly getting bigger in all the heat and sunshine. The trouble is that I repotted it only a month ago, and that was about a week after she first brought it home. This plant really loves the sun, but something tells me I had better keep this plant happy and healthy at all times, as it is her favourite child.

Our New South Wales Christmas Bush is in full sun-loving 'bloom' right now. In the same way that a bougainvillea's colourful 'flowers' aren't really flowers and are in fact coloured bracts, so too the NSW Christmas Bush. Its flowers are white and small, but the bracts are a ruddy pink, lovely and plentiful. It's a bit early for Christmas, but it always colours up at this time of year for us.

If I'm celebrating sun-lovers I have to slip in at least one succulent photo. Needless to say all my potted succulents are thriving in the sunshine.

Finally, I thought I'd finish off with high hopes for my favourite sun-loving flowers, blue salvias. I've just planted a batch of seedlings a few weeks ago and they're all still small but are growing well, loving the heat and sunshine, as salvias do. As this sparse patch of mulch dotted with tiny seedlings is hardly the prettiest way to end a celebration of sun-lovers, I thought I'd dip into the archives and drag out a couple of shots from last year of what I am hoping for again from my beautiful, sunny salvias.

Essentially this: pleasing light green foliage and spires galore of cool blue flowers.

But get up really close and a salvia blue is as cool and refreshing as an ice-cube.

Speaking of ice-cubes, I think I'll tinkle up something cooler to drink now and sit back in my cane armchair in the shade with a book and do very little for the next few hours, apart from looking up occasionally and watching my garden soak up the sunshine. As far as I am concerned, a garden isn't quite complete without a comfy chair.

Disgraceful behaviour

Lots of gardeners have one or more little patches in their garden which they 'tut-tut' about as being a bit of a disgrace, something they plan to attend to, where unruly plants have taken over and a bit more order is well overdue. I have one of those, right underneath my lime tree, and as soon as this summer heatwave is over I might even do something about it, probably, perhaps. But right now even the weeds are looking good there, so I'll just blog about them, instead of doing any real work.

Pretty blue, the tradescantia flowers, aren't they? A bright blue that lasts one day. This is the ultimate weed. If just one molecule of tradescantia remains in the ground after weeding the area, it will be back. But it's not the main occupant of my field of disgrace and neglect.

Nor is it this lonely, last survivor of the convolvulus plant that enjoyed just one good spring here two years ago. It's just a remnant now, merely part of the problem, without being the problem.

This is the problem, and it's a native plant. Viola hederacea, the Australian native violet. This is every bit as tenacious and ineradicable as tradescantia, yet hardly anyone describes it as a weed (yet!). I've tried to be rid of it several times, but it always comes back. All it needs is one survivor from a bit of neglectful weeding and it's in with a chance, especially if I get busy at work, go on holidays or merely concentrate on other parts of the garden for too long.

The spread of native violets is green and healthy and lovely and lush, rising not much higher than the book my official garden librarian gnome, Mitchell, is trying to read. Its little white and bluey-purpley flowers are out in bloom almost year-round, too. So why get rid of such a great groundcover? It never knows when or where to stop. It's a compulsive invader, quite a badly behaved garden neighbour in fact. However, for the meantime it's too hot to even think about doing much work in the garden, so I've planted some complementary blues to create the illusion that this disgraceful patch of blue is all part of some intentional design.

Across the pathway, blue alyssum loves the heat and humidity.

A few feet away, so does the blue salvia, soaking up the summer sun.

And in pots nearby, the pinky-blue chive flowers participate in the charade.

It's all a hoax, I'm afraid. One of these days, as soon as the weather cools, I will lift once more my Quixotic 'garden weeder' equipment and tilt once more at these weedy blue windmills. Not sure how much success I'll have, but until this scorching summer is over, the uneasy truce continues.

Got the blues, but I don't mind

A lack of flowering plants is always going to be part of winter. Our local native birds are glad of the pink-flowering Eucalyptus leucoxylon var. rosea street tree at the front of our house, and the red-flowering Grevillea 'Superb' in the backyard, both of which flower through winter. These two plants are almost constantly occupied right now by nectar-eaters such as wattle birds, New Holland honeyeaters and rainbow lorikeets. But as for flowers, that's about it right now. So I was organising my iPhoto files yesterday and realised that last spring and summer was quite a lovely little blue period for the garden. So, as a way of banishing the midwinter blues, here's a simple post of my garden during its blue period last year.

Without a doubt the prettiest weed in my garden, these self-seeding 'Johnny Jump Ups' poke up here, there and everywhere from late winter through to late spring. From one punnet sown in innocence at least 10 years ago, these plants have become an established, and only occasionally annoying, flowering weed. I always pull up the majority of them as they appear in unwanted spots, but I always let several grow and flower, too.

A great little annual for spots that get only some sun during the day, torenias put on a good show and are very easy to look after and last several weeks.

One good accidental combo was when a vigorous, groundcovering pelargonium made it all the way to the torenia patch.

In Australia and I presume in other countries, when you say the word 'geranium' most people think of pelargoniums, but here's what they call a 'real' geranium. I bought several geraniums at a gardening show a couple of years ago, and this is the sole survivor. Hot, dry Sydney midsummer days killed off the others. This one doesn't flower for very long, but it's extremely pretty when it does so in spring.

If the geraniums are pretty but don't flower for long, this blue salvia is equally pretty and flowers for ages through summer. Months and months. It starts blooming before Christmas and is still in bloom in April.

I went mad and bought two punnets of seedlings and a packet of seed, planted them all and watched the results. The seedlings were a stouter, shorter plant and the flowers deeper blue; the seed-grown plants were generally a bit disappointing and variable, but they did grow and flower fairly well, but didn't look as good. However, I did get my 'field of blue' look, and it worked nicely.

Blue is always classed as a 'cool' colour, and in the heat of summer I think it does have something of a cooling effect. Although I do love yellows and oranges, too, and these are hot colours, and these balance out the blues.

I guess one of these days I should also balance out a blue-flowered posting with something on the yellows and oranges that I always go for.

I read somewhere a while ago that the best selling decorating colours in Australia, year-in, year-out, almost no matter what the fashionable colours might be that year, are blue and yellow. Maybe that's because of the ever-present natural colours of sun and sky, or sand and surf. Who knows? But it works for me.