Making beautiful music together

Long ago, when I started out gardening and imagined my spring flower shows to be like beautiful musical symphonies, I discovered that the hardest thing to do is to get the timing right. 

I realised that symphonies were out, and jazz was in. While I'm not a jazz music aficionado, I realised that the way flowers do their thing each spring is much closer to jazz soloists taking their turn on stage while the rest of the band plays along behind them. 

Right now, sticking to the jazz theme, my garden's musical band consists of yellow clivias on trumpets, pretty poppies on percussion and flannel flowers chiming in on vibraphone.

They look great and if only I had special ears that could hear what they're singing, I am sure it'd be a wonderful tune.

The yellow clivias are at their peak right now, and each year the clump is growing, with more trumpets playing for many weeks in spring.

The flannel flowers have been teasing Pammy and me with their "about to open" phase lasting a week now. There's lots of them, all so soft and furry, with pale green tips at the end of each petal.

They're growing in a largish pot and I consider it a job well done to have sheltered them through a whole cycle of Sydney seasons starting in winter last year. These native blooms thrive in light sandy soils, and we definitely don't have that in our garden, so a pot filled with native potting mix is my next best option.

Every year I plant poppies for Pammy, patiently waiting for punnets of Iceland poppies to appear at my garden centre in autumn. The only thing I have learned is to crowd them in a bit closer than it says on the label, and to pinch out any early baby poppy flower stems and fertilise the daylights out of them so the leafy bases of the plants grow big and strong. Then, and only then, do I let them flower. I think it produces a slightly better show.

It's not quite true when I say I grow the poppies just for Pammy. I grow them for me, too. But as well as loving how they look in full bloom, my favourite sight is tired wet poppies in the morning. They look like pretty girls who've partied too hard but had a good time anyway.

And so that's this week's jazz band. Coming soon we'll enjoy solos put on by the Louisiana iris, New South Wales Christmas bush and half a fence full of mandevillas. They all do their own thing in their own good time, and I'm content playing my small part in keeping them happy and healthy, then sitting back and enjoying the show.

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.

Front garden makeover update

 

There's a lot to be said for rainy mornings. For one thing it means the gardener gets the morning off from hose-pointing duties, as Huey the rain god turns on the heavenly sprinklers for a few minutes.

And so it was this morning, but in addition to thanking Huey for the favour, I was reminded yet again that the best thing about rainy mornings is how nice gardens look when they are wet. 

This November morning I enjoyed the perfect type of rainy morning: showers. So it rains for a few minutes then it stops raining. That means you can go outside and not get wet but you can enjoy the garden, maybe even take a few photos of something that catches your eye. 

So here we are in Garden Amateur blog land, checking out the latest photos of our front garden makeover. Lots of unexpected flowers, lots of colour and lots of pleasing progress. 

In the foreground, the creeping thyme plants are spreading rapidly and joining up. It's hard to know how far apart to plant them, as "online research" only confuses you with all the options. Some say 60cm apart, others 80cm, a few say 100cm, the full metre. I chose 80cm, and as the plants are already joining up, I should have gone for the metre!

There are three varieties of creeping thyme in the garden. Of them, the "common" creeping thyme (8 plants) is flowering its head off very nicely, while the other two varieties are growing well but showing no signs of flowers. I'm happy to let the mystery be on that one.

By far the star of the show at the moment is the Australian native violets, Viola hederacea. These are remnants of the old front garden, where they thrived in the shade of the wattles and ferns. Impossible to dig out or control, they have merrily spread themselves throughout the new garden and are flowering so prettily. A very unscientific straw poll of comments by neighbours passing by agrees that the native violets look wonderfully pretty, and that the mauve creeping thyme flowers are the perfect complement to the native violets' white & purple blooms. I didn't plan it that way, honest. Just a happy accident.

Wait till the neighbours see the orange-blossomed dwarf gum tree spring into bloom this summer! The healthy little thing is covered in several of these missile clusters ready for launch. This is one of "Pam's plants" that are highlights in our garden. With certain plants she makes "I want one" style comments and I am happy to oblige. In the back garden Pam's plants include frangipanis, flannel flowers, Spanish moss galore and a white hydrangea – happily all doing well – and now out the front there's a dazzling dwarf gum tree to entertain passers-by. 

So that's it, the front garden makeover is looking great right now. The harsh reality of a hot and humid Sydney summer lies ahead, but right now in a warm, moist yet sunny spring in this lovely climate, gardening seems, dare I say it, almost easy.

Small change, big difference

 

These YouTube videos are making a lazy blogger of me!

Yesterday, for reasons unrelated to gardening (ie, I was changing where I parked my motorcycle in the backyard) I ended up moving my potted Thai lime tree from the spot it has occupied for the last five years to a new spot just four or five feet away.

And this morning, when I stepped out into the backyard I was taking in a much more colourful, flower-filled view of Garden Amateur Land than I have ever enjoyed before. The spring flowers no doubt help, but moving a "blocker" from the foreground has worked wonders.

And the only thing that prevents me from changing my name from Garden Amateur to The Lazy Garden Blogger is that I am too lazy to make the change right now. It's sunny, 27°C, light winds, perfect picnic weather, and a 30-second video is all I can muster the energy for right now. 

https://youtu.be/ihNpO2ohP0o

Sydney's first pops of spring

One of the great things about gardening in Sydney is that winter is still a time for growing things, planting and enjoying a few pretty blooms that like to flower in the cooler months. None of that cliched bleak snowy winter malarky down here!

Then again, we still do get the best of both worlds, in that there's a genuine burst of energy that accompanies the longer sunshine hours and warming temperatures of spring. So here's just a small selection of what's blooming here right now.

I can't show you all of them because I have postings lined up for later in the week about Pammy's plants, some of which are flowering now. And there's also a posting on the plants belonging to Pam's lovely old mum, and they're flowering too. 

Our Australian native Dendrobium orchids are flowering their heads off this spring, and it's with a real sense of relief that I say that — because they didn't flower at all last year, and that was because an awful orchid beetle was chomping everything it could find. Such rotten timing, too, you rotten little orchid chomper!

The rotten part about the orchid beetles is that when I looked up in my garden pest reference book, it seemed there was little I could do, especially if I'm dedicated to organic methods. Bugger! So this year as the flower buds swelled I was out there, not sure what I was looking for, but I was out there anyway! Maybe I scared them off? One of the side effects of this lockdown season is a lack of haircuts and beard trims from my barber, so maybe I was just so scary looking that the beetles snuck away?

There was no need to worry about chomping beetles tucking into our Pieris japonica blooms.

This little potted plant is a fighter. It does best in cooler zones (my friends Eric and Jane up in the cool Blue Mountains west of Sydney have glorious big Pieris hedges.) But down here on the humid coast the Pieris struggles through our summers. I have it growing in a pot so I can move it from here to there as the seasons change. Right now it's getting all the morning sun it wants. Later on, I'll give it more shade as summer's intensity ramps up. 

Look carefully at this photo of one of our hellebores. Yes, it's a bit blurry, so I was about to go outside and take a better one, but then I noticed sitting on top of the big green leaf was the hellebore plant's resident spider, the concierge, wanting to know what the hell I was doing. I'd been there for more than an hour weeding and mulching, and he had just about had enough of me. So, I decided that he was perfectly entitled to photo-bomb me!

Here's the fruits of a rare venture in online plant shopping: baby hellebores looking quite healthy and happy but no flowers yet. Maybe next year, but nice to know the kids are all right.

Finally, two plants which have admittedly been flowering all through winter and are still looking fabulous in spring. Now I am not certain exactly what type of bromeliad it is. Its botanical name is Aechmea fasciata, and it came to me via a lovely neighbour who was moving house. He came across to my place several years ago, told me he and his husband were downsizing and so they couldn't take all their plants with them. Would I like this one? I've never repotted it, fed it, cared for it or anything. As it's next door to my potted lime tree which I water often, the bromeliad does get watered often, and it loves life. I think it actually started flowering last autumn ... but time is getting very blurry around here. It just goes on and on and on ...

What a modest claim to fame: "Plant of the Century". That's what the label says (see below). It's a real geranium (ie not a pelargonium) and its name is 'Rozanne', voted Plant of the Century by some mob called the Royal Horticultural Society. It certainly loves to flower, and it's been flowering ever since I bought it at our local garden centre at the beginning of winter. And it doesn't look like stopping any time soon. 

There you go, a plant label that catches the eye with sheer modesty

And if you can read the back of the label it says the plant should grow to 50cm high (20 inches) and 60cm wide (two feet). Pam asked me this morning "Is it a groundcover?" because it's still hugging the ground while slowly spreading out in all directions. I await its decision to suddenly shoot up to that lofty 50cm size, but this certainly is the most delightful flowering plant I have met in ages. The deliciously pretty flowers just keep on coming, and coming and coming. If you see one in a garden store, buy it! I should have bought two ...

 

So there you go, folks, our springtime show and tell. It's all happening here right now, beautiful weather this Sunday to be out there in the garden, even if all you're doing is reading a book, snoozing or maybe just thinking "I guess I could do a bit of gardening sometime soon."

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.

Lots of flowers? Must be spring!

"Hey, come and have a look at this," said Pammy, ever the eagle-eyed spotter of all things newsworthy in our garden. We had to get down on our hands and knees, and be up very close, but there it was — the complex, gorgeous mini bloom of our potted succulent. I think it's a graptoveria, but as a succulent amateur I am at all times willing to be corrected on these things. Doesn't matter really, it's the wonderful mini other-worldliness of tiny blooms that had us both captivated.

It's a bit orchidy, this succulent flower, with its red-wine flecks on pearlescent petals.


Even I could spot the next of our spring awakenings — a huge spray of not-quite-yet-open yellow dendrobium orchids.


This spring show has been a few years in the making, as this plant has never flowered before. Over the last few years I have tried my hardest to be nice to it, but without any success. It has always lived with all the other orchids, which manage to flower their heads off like clockwork. But the dendrobium? Nah, sorry. Once all the flowers open fully, I will no doubt do another posting.


This next pink one, a climbing pelargonium, is one of the success stories of my "recovery ward". I bought three plants, put them in a hanging basket in a sunny spot, where they then proceeded to do very little, then started to die off. While I can accept that the fault is all mine, what bugs me is that I didn't have a clue what I was doing wrong.

So I rescued the final, barely surviving plant, repotted it into a smaller, normal pot and it has been keeping my orchids company in a more sheltered spot for the last year or so. And now it's looking happy again. Should I attempt to move it back to the hanging basket? Well, that is why I bought it ... but I am beginning to see that as the "hanging basket of doom" and I can't quite work up the bravery to try it yet.




Next in the spring slideshow is good old, never-fail, grow-them-every-year poppies. Pam loves them. Pam cuts them for vases in our house. And this year we have yellow, white and orange poppies. Lovely.



It's nice to be appreciated. The deal is, if I am nice to my lemon tree and scatter lots of chicken poo under the tree and water it well, the lemon tree produces lots of flowers, and a few months later, lots of fruit. So far it's all going according to plan. 


Even though evergreen Sydney springs aren't quite as spectacular as they are in colder climates, they're still a delightful time to be a gardener. As well as the flowers I have posted here, yellow clivias and vivid orange scadoxus aren't far off blooming, and the native orchid flower buds are all jostling for a good spot ... but I'll call a temporary halt at this stage. Lots to look forward to!

Boing!

One of my favourite experiences in our garden is simply to step out into it every morning, to see what's happening. In Spring I'm guaranteed to find something new every day. Just like me, it's alive and breathing (but unlike me it's young and pretty and growing fast). Oh well, I'm happy to settle for "it's great to be alive".

And so here's a photo-driven little posting of just some of the lovely things I found in our garden this morning.

I think we're at "peak native orchid" today. The show has been brewing for a few weeks but this morning all of them are on song. 

Pammy wants me to send her this close-up of a tiny native orchid bloom, taken with the camera about an inch away from the small but perfectly formed bloom. I think she can sense a watercolour painting coming on ...

Speaking of small but perfectly formed blooms, the first of our purple mint bush blooms made an appearance this morning. As I have three bushes and each is covered in flower buds, these are the first wave of what promises to be a few thousand more. Can't wait ...

And to finish off our purple patch, our potted common sage, the kitchen garden herb, has started to do its thing.

Just a few feet from the sage, also growing in a pot, the Thai lime plant is making good use of all the spring fertiliser I fed it with a few weeks ago. The young "double" leaves are the freshest green, every nook and cranny is filled with bum-like blooms and all is good in the fragrant, spicy Thai flavouring department.

A much quieter chap, the Turkish Brown fig looks such a treat as the morning sun shines through its new green leaves every morning. After its winter repotting, I am hoping for good things this summer. No pressure, though ...

Our Westringia 'Elizabeth Bough', covered in light pink blooms, cuddles up close with the astonishingly capable geranium 'Big Red', which flowers pretty much all year round.

And last of all, in a deep, dark corner of the garden when the sun doesn't get much of a look in, the yellow clivias have decided the time is right. I love how they know this stuff.

Springing open

It is nice having a full set of senses – you know, smell, sight, touch, taste and hearing – but when it's spring if you were a poor unfortunate down to just one sense or two, you'd definitely know that spring has arrived.

Take smell, for example. It's the worst one to start with because your sense of smell would tell you that this keen gardener has sprinkled far too much chicken poo under his citrus trees, and it is taking days for the farmyard stench to die down. I know this might seem a tad unsympathetic, but bad luck! The limes and lemons need a feed ...

So let's move on that far more delightful sense of sight, and I'll show you some nice photos of spring flowers doing their thing in our garden at the moment.

Now, this one is an official "Pammy plant". It's her potted Pieris japonica, and it seems like the position we have for it in morning sun, with afternoon shade, is just what the Zen master ordered. Though it's Pam's plant it is of course my sacred duty to keep it happy, and so far it hasn't been too onerous a task, even if it remains a heavy responsibility.

A much lighter and cheerier story is the rebirth of our potted New Zealand Christmas bush (Metrosideros), which always flowers months ahead of the baby Jesus' birthday. A year ago this pot plant looked like it was gone for all money, so I cut off the top three-quarters of it, repotted the stump into fresh mix, plied it with Seasol and soothing vibes, and like Lazarus, it's back!

And it's not just a couple of flowers, either. The whole thing is covered in buds, and we're back in the Kiwi flower business.

And yes, my favourite flowering plant in the whole garden is doing its thing again. Last time I did a blog, which was a month ago, it was about this Scadoxus and its little clump of babies, so I thought I'd slip it down here to Page Five of this blog, just so I don't seem too obsessive about them. But the flowers are all about 90% open right now, and the show is on again.

You can always rely on our succulent patch to have something interesting or weird (or both) happening, and right now the yellow blooms of our Kalanchoe 'Copper Spoons' are the star attraction. 

Finally, good old Geranium 'Big Red' is in bloom not quite "again" ... it's more like Big Red never stops blooming, and so it's "still" in bloom. Every now and then it has a pause-ette for a breather but then it's back in action pumping out the red highlights in no time. What a wonderfully healthy, fuss-free, colourful and happy thing it is. 


And so that's an update on the beginning of spring here. I know that I won't be able to resist showing you more of the Scadoxus once the whole tribe has opened up, and the Pieris japonica deserves a posting, too. I'm hoping to lift my current sluggish rate of one post per month back up to a more respectable one per week, but no promises, mind you. I kind of like this "monthly" pace, it suits my semi-retired lifestyle.