A minor milestone

This minor milestone of mine – my 300th posting - will be an easy one to remember, because I did it on Good Friday, 2011. Now, for some people such as Helen at Patient Gardener, or Allison at Life in a Pink Fibro, both of whom keep up a steady beat of one very good posting per day, a mere 300 postings will be notched up each and every year. For me it has taken almost three years to get here, but I'm sure because I am so long-winded for any regular readers you've probably read as many words here as you would have at someone else's blog with 3000 posts to their name.

Anyway, to celebrate my 300th posting, I thought I'd just do a completely ordinary posting about what I did in the garden this morning. It's a fine, autumnal warm and sunny Good Friday here in Sydney, and I'm afraid folks I didn't go to church today, but as usual I did get closer to nature, my own personal place of worship. Let's start off with the first job – filling a gap.

Sadly, this is the gap before it was a gap. You'll see the gap a few photos down. The problem with this lovely lemon-scented pelargonium is that it was a shocking bully of a plant, and a wimp at the same time (isn't that always the way with bullies?). This plant would monster everything near it, then blow over in any strong wind and look like muck for weeks on end while it regrew itself after the storm damage was trimmed off. Pam has never liked this plant all that much, and so we decided to get rid of it and replace it with something better behaved, a steadier chap.

Time will tell if this is the 'steady chap' we're wanting to recruit. This is a Plectranthus 'Mona Lavender' a small-growing form of plectranthus which reaches 80cm high and 60cm wide, says the label. The label also reassures us that it doesn't spread and self-seed like other plectranthi do. It's a shade-lover, or a semi-shade lover, and the spot we have in mind for it is classic dappled semi-shade. It will also have to survive the competition from our old olive tree's roots, so all I can do with this plant is wish it luck, and plant it.

These are the Plectranthus's blooms, which start in summer and continue into autumn. They get the seal of approval from Pammy, and I am sure a painting of them will be in our house one of these years, if the plant proves to be a success.

Aren't gaps unfortunate looking things? All bare leaves and ugly bits. Nothing can be done about a gap, apart from waiting for time to put on growth and fill the space with foliage and flowers. To help the plectranthus settle in, I raised the soil level a few inches by adding stacks of home-made compost and digging it through the soil, then planting into that. Behind the plectranthus is my sole bonsai plant, a Port Jackson fig which must be more than 10 years old. Finally, after many years, its trunk is thickening up nicely. This poor plant was a bullying victim at the hands of the pelargonium, and if bonsai could speak I am sure it would muttering a few 'good riddances' this morning.

Over the other side of the pathway, I'm plugging some more gaps. These are the two rows of Shirley poppies which came up from seed and seem to be getting on with life. The trouble is that there were three other rows where I sowed seed but which are still bereft of success, and so I decided to call in the rescue squad.

Iceland poppy seedlings, two punnets, enough to fill the three bare rows. Shirley poppies are notorious for being hard to transplant, so you have to grow them from seed sown directly where the plants are to grow. There's no such fussiness with Iceland poppies, which grow well from seed or seedlings. The Icelands are slightly smaller plants than the Shirleys, but that won't matter. By late June Pammy should have poppies galore, which is becoming a colourful winter tradition for us.

Elsewhere, flowers are appearing. The three wall pots under my covered pergola haven't been a huge success so far. I tried impatiens there but they were wilty and high-maintenance, and so when it came time several months ago to divide some 'pups' from one of my potted bromeliads, I decided to give them a go in the wall pots. And they're starting to send out flowers. They've been easy-care there, and so they might be the answer.

About two months ago I trimmed the living daylights out of my 'Peaches and Cream' grevillea, and it's starting to flower its head off. Grevilleas are a bit 'beat me, whip me' in personality, real masochists which love the discipline of a good, hard pruning. It's covered in blooms and flower buds, and should be at its peak in a few weeks, by late autumn.

While photographing the Grevillea, I noticed behind it another of my neighbour Nick's plants popping its head over the fence to say hello to my plants. Not sure what this is, but it's a wonderfully colourful effusion of hot pink that's a very welcome visitor here. Thank you Nick!

And so that's it for posting number 300. According to my Sitemeter people-counter thingy at the very bottom of this page, I have a bit over 77,000 people to thank for dropping by to read my ramblings and peek at my photos. So thank you very much for your interest and your comments, they're much appreciated. I guess my next blogging ambition is to make it to 500 postings, something which at the current rate will occur in 2013. See you then!

Scratch and sniff

The internet might be a wonderful thing that can convey so much information – I love it – but I'm glad that it hasn't got a chance of conveying a sense of smell. Let's keep that one for the real world. I was thinking about this issue the other day while pulling out a few weeds from my succulents, and as I did so I brushed up against my rosemary bush and immediately the air was filled with that wonderful scent. Rosemary, mmmmm.

Here's the scene of the inspiration: Succulent City in the foreground, and the rosemary bush hugging in close.

Sometimes you just get lucky at the garden centre and you buy a plant that, for some reason that really doesn't have anything to do with your gardening skills, turns out to be a belter, a wonder plant that not only thrives but has magical qualities. My rosemary bush is one of those special plants. It just drips oiliness, it is such a fragrant thing to be near. The only trick in the kitchen with it is not to use too much – it's strong stuff! I've given it away as cuttings to friends, and one of these days we plan to aromatically conquer the world.

Basil is another plant that's lovely to be near. And that's what I've noticed about aromatic foliage – you tend to come across its delights while working – when you're weeding, harvesting or pruning. Aromatic foliage is a working gardener's secret, ongoing pleasure.

Coriander foliage rivals basil for scented foliage, and as basil is happiest in summer and coriander does best here in Sydney in winter, they complement each other nicely with a similar, but very different role at opposite ends of the year.

As an aside, this year's coriander crop has been the best in several years (and for Australian readers, it came from the ordinary packet of Hortico seeds I bought for hardly anything at my local Mitre 10 store – so much for gourmet seed suppliers.) So, I am letting a few of my coriander plants flower and set seed, and I'm going to harvest those seeds and keep them until April next year, when I'll start up the next cool-season crop of coriander. This stuff isn't worth growing here in summer, as it becomes seedy in weeks, but it stays nicely leafy for months in winter here.

Mint never fails to be a pleasure to be around. It has a lovely scent that you can even smell when you water it in the morning.

While I never hand-water my sage plants – they thrive on our natural rainfall and need little help at all, apart from hacking back in late winter – these smell delicious when I bump into them while doing a spot of weeding.

Until now this blog post seems to have been all about aromatic herbs, but these plants, my lemon-scented pelargoniums, aren't of any use in the kitchen. I planted them for two reasons: they have strongly scented foliage and they thrive in this semi-shaded spot under my olive tree. These plants have proved to be very easy-care. Each is in a pot but you'd never know it by looking at this wide 'bush'. They were horribly bashed up by an autumn storm and lost half their foliage back then, but if anything that made them grow even more vigorously. Just by standing around like an innocent bystander, I learned that these are one of those 'treat em mean, keep em keen' type of garden plants.

Right now, they're flowering, but not exactly spectacularly. Small pinky-white blooms appear in spring, but at all times it's the foliage which is the star here. While I tend to 'accidentally' come across my other foliage plants in the course of gardening work, I deliberately brush up against this scented royalty just to enjoy what it has to offer. The lightest touch fills the air with the spicy, lemony scent.

The last of my scented-leaf plants is a slightly different story. Work close to this plant and you smell nothing. It's the taller one here in the background – cardamom. (The upright-leafed thing in the foreground is a pineapple lily putting on its burst of new spring growth.) I've had this cardamom plant here for at least 15 years, and it's as tough as old boots. Mind you, it has never flowered once, but it has always been leafy and green.

The secret with the beautifully aromatic foliage of cardamom is that you have to either crush it or cook it to release that spicy scent that is such a familiar part of so many Indian and Sri Lankan dishes. (It doesn't flower here because it's not consisently hot enough, by the way, but the plant itself loves Sydney). An Indian-born friend of mine, Rema, now grows her own cardamom here in Sydney, but for several years when she visited my place she used to take home a small harvest of cardamom leaves. She'd then make up a batch of milk-based sweet dessert balls, wrap each in a cardamom leaf, them steam them, with the leaf flavouring them as they cooked. The result – wow!

With aromatic foliage you just have to be there. It's much, much nicer to enjoy it by accident, than by deliberate design. Going outside and deliberately sticking your hooter into a plant just doesn't have the same pleasure as accidental discovery offers.

My suggestion to gardeners is simply to add some aromatic plants to your garden then go about the normal business of weeding, pruning and harvesting, and as a special treat for the hard-working gardener, you'll get to experience that sensual thrill of a delicious scent wafting around. Think of it as a pleasure that is your reward for being a gardener. I do.

Backyard CSI

I love the chance to be the amateur detective and do a bit of backyard CSI when a perfectly good plant suddenly gets crook. It happened recently with these cheery people, pink pelargoniums in a hanging basket. The problem is that this is how they looked last spring. They were a happy family back then. This spring they were on the slab. Something was doing them in, and it wasn't pretty.

Let's start with the victim, back in the days when it was a healthy hanging basket of pelargoniums. The problem was, where it hung out, it was a sitting duck.

It was a mugging, a gang mugging. 17 culprits – count them – 17 curl grubs munching on the roots of my pelargoniums. These plant muggers can be found everywhere – under lawns, in pots or in garden beds – they're not fussy. They're the larvae of the common black garden beetle and they're very widespread here in Australia.

This is the classic curl grub mugging scenario. Hanging basket with an outside light nearby. You'd think a light would provide some safety, but not from curl grub muggings. In fact, the beetle mum is attracted to the light at night, finds a patch of soil conveniently nearby, and she lays a clutch of eggs. The eggs hatch in the soil and immediately start eating the roots of any plants they find. They're not fussy; they'll eat just about anything. They love lawn grasses, but pelargonium roots will do just fine if that's all that's on offer.

After I removed all the poor little emaciated pelargoniums from the basket they were all virtually bereft of feeder roots. Just the more stout tap roots and nothing much else.

Here's a close-up of the curl grubs. They're usually white and curled up like this. They look like sleeping babies but that's just a front when they feel threatened by bright sunlight. It's OK to handle them with your bare hands, as the hairs aren't nasty, as they can be with some caterpillars.

I dispose of the grubs by tossing them onto the roof of my shed, where the local magpies quickly swoop down for the free feed. In fact, if Aussie readers/gardeners ever see our native magpies standing on a lawn looking a bit odd as they turn their head sideways as if listening to something under the soil, that's exactly what they are doing. They're listening for grubs such as curl grubs munching and moving just beneath the soil.

My pelargoniums were so sad that I bought a punnet of three identical seedlings and planted them into new potting mix, but I trimmed up the best of last-year's plants and planted them in between the seedlings. Hopefully they'll recover and belt along like they did last year.

And so a more optimistic photo seems the right one to finish with!

As a general tip for gardeners here in Oz, if you have a potted plant which used to be doing fine but is now struggling, despite all your best efforts at watering and feeding, think 'curl grubs' first and foremost. There's only one way to check for them: unpot the plant completely. Go through the soil with your hands very thoroughly, as the grubs will probably be numerous and everywhere, from the top of the soil down to the bottom, along the sides and in the middle.

If your 'problem' pot is somewhere near an outside light of any sort, that's the curl grub's classic MO (love the detective talk). Book em, Danno!

Bit players

While various garden plants are making a pleasing exhibition of themselves in a way that no visitor could ignore, others quietly go about the business of being beautiful in a more demure way. These are the plants that you might miss altogether if you're in a hurry, but in a backyard small as mine all you need to do is take your time as you wander around, explore a bit deeper when you spy a splash of colour, and even the shy guys & gals can't hide.

Take this wild creature, for example. It's a kind of poppy, a chance seedling that came up amid all the Iceland poppies which I've now posted about a few times. Short-lived, a darkly mysterious personality, there's only one of these in bloom.

This is an eminently missable flower, but it's a very pleasing sight nonetheless. These are the extremely tiny blooms of the NSW Christmas Bush (Ceratopetalum gummiferum). This is one of those plants, like the bougainvillea, whose 'insignificant' flowers are followed by colourful, dazzling bracts which most people in the street would describe as 'flowers'. Given its name, the bracts are at their best in December. This pleasing little display of flowers simply says "I'll be putting on a great show in a few months – stay tuned". But get up close to the supposedly 'insignificant' white flowers and you can see tinges of pink here and there, as well as a delicate prettiness that reminds me of some of my favourite herb flowers.

Above and below here are some helleborus blooms. These face down towards the ground, so you need to get down and dirty to photograph them. I'm surprised these flowers have appeared, as these poor plants have been transplanted three times in three years. I really ought to apologise to them for the maltreatment, but at least I've learned one thing. I've often read that helleborus 'sulk' for a year after transplanting and refuse to flower, so mine must be very thick-skinned and resilient personalities.

Helleborus photo number two. Even on the one plant flower colours and markings vary. Hopefully I won't be moving them anymore for the next 20 years, and they'll keep on doing their thing. Their common name here is 'winter rose' but mine always seem to be an early spring bloom, rather than a winter flowerer.

Another pair of photos of the same plant. This shrub is a new baby, just to the left of the all-singing, all-dancing poppy festival, and with just a few blooms on it this first spring, the grevillea tends to get overlooked. Its name is 'Peaches and Cream', due to its two-toned colouring that also changes as it ages.

There's a more mature 'Peaches and Cream' a few streets away, whose unopened flower buds are almost lime green. Mine are showing a more metallic green colour right now, so hopefully that will change as the shrub grows. It had a bit of a sick childhood (turned out to be an iron deficiency) but it's looking healthy now. It should grow to about 2m high and wide.

And finally, here's another so-called 'insignificant' flower, on a lemon-scented pelargonium. Yep, they're smallish blooms (about 2cm or one inch across) but they're very pretty if you bother to stop and admire them, as I like to do. However, I do admit that I didn't plant these for their flowers. The foliage is superbly fragrant, and I do love scented foliage plants every bit as much as I like scented flowers – maybe even a bit more sometimes, I suspect.