Sweet shade

Success has its rewards, but like most drugs it also has its undesirable side-effects. Here in sunny Garden Amateurland, our modest success in growing things in all our lovely Australian sunshine is, ironically enough, lots more shade, and less sunshine.

Avert your eyes from our captivating tresses of Spanish moss for a moment if you can, because in the background you can see our two major shade-makers. In the centre is a lemongrass patch that has grown that big in one season, and on the right is our beautiful frangipani tree, which once was a cutting but is now approaching youthful adulthood. The little patch of straw mulch in front of both was once our garden's sunniest spot, a thriving little vegie patch, but right now it barely gets an hour of direct sunshine each day. It's overshadowed by success and I'm not sure what to grow there.

What to do with the lemongrass is a simple matter of cutting it back a month or two from now, in what was once known as "midwinter". I suspect we won't get much of a winter this year, if our warmest-ever autumn is any guide. However, the lemongrass will benefit from a very savage cutback, but will be this size again, same time next year. It's one of my favourite plants in the garden. It's very pleasantly lemony-scented to be near while I'm weeding, and its many graceful arches look like a green fireworks explosion frozen in time.

As a result of all this shade, I have swapped around the roles of a few garden beds. This is eastern side of the garden, now our sunniest spot.

One little bed is now our salad patch. In the foreground, another row of radish seeds have just sprouted this morning (hello!), next to them some lettuce seedlings are doing their thing, and barely visible, slender baby shallots/scallions are making their usual hesitant start.

Next door to salad-land, in our other sunny spot, that's parsley in the foreground, grown from supermarket salad parsley 'micro-sprouts' (see this older post for more on that), and behind the parsley is Pammy's 2016 crop of Iceland poppies, something I grow for her every year.

As for what to grow in the shadier spots, several different herbs do remarkably well in less than full sunshine. Here's some chervil supermarket mico-sprouts planted just yesterday. Chervil is a herb more people should grow and use in both cooking and salads, and it has the bonus that it is not only good in semi-shade (or semi-sunshine if you like), it actually seems to prefer the gloom. Parsley also copes fairly well with semi-shade, and as I've also planted a whole punnet of coriander micro-sprouts from the supermarket into the semi-shaded spot overshadowed by the lemongrass, I'll soon find out how it goes there. 

As for what to do about our garden's major shade-maker, the frangipani tree, it's a conundrum. It's beautiful, and as you can see here it's not just beautiful on the outside, with its fragrant yellow-centred white blooms. Even on the "inside", the space under the frangipani is a deep-shade mini forest that has a touch of the fairytales about it. It does need to be trimmed a bit, but not too much.

In years gone by the deciduous frangipani would drop all its leaves in June and would only fire up again in greenery in late August. In our ever-warming climate I suspect it will be leafless for just a few weeks every year.

The frangipani is also spreading so wide it's actually growing over the path leading out to Pammy's art studio at the bottom of the garden, so a few branches will be removed in winter so she can get out there without being fragrantly whacked in the face next summer. 

We haven't really made up our mind what to do about the frangipani. In the long run it will grow bigger and it will change how our garden grows. My instinct is to go with the flow and not to be too much "in charge" of everything that happens here. I'm just the gardener. While the odd bit of wayward frangipani might be lopped off, I suspect gardening here over coming years will take its own sweet-scented course.

Right neighbourly

A knock at the door late this morning, and the beaming, lovely smile of my neighbour Katerina shines through the gauze on the screen door. She has a plate in her hand, covered with alfoil. Greek Easter!

Every year Katerina celebrates Greek Easter in style. A keen churchgoer to her local Greek Orthodox church a few streets away, she's a quietly religious saint of a woman who practises all the traditions of this very important time of her holy year, and that includes baking traditional shortbread cakes and giving gifts of them to her neighbours. 

Pammy and I have been enjoying Katerina's yummy shortbread for many years now. As she said this morning of all of us, her and Nick, me and Pam: "Nice neighbours". And it's true, we live separate lives mostly, but we really like each other and help out in whatever little ways we can.

The shortbreads will have disappeared by the end of the
weekend, and Pam will quietly dispose of the Caramello choccy
eggs in her own good time. The dyed eggs are a Greek Easter
tradition, symbolising both the blood of Christ (the red) and
rebirth (an egg). The interesting touch is that the red dye
is traditionally made from onion skins.

It's such a blessing to have good neighbours, and such misery to have inconsiderate or unpleasant yobbos next door. In our case we've had the same neighbours for all the 21 years we've been here. Nick and Katerina on the west side, and Michael and Soula up on the east. Both couples have been the best neighbours, and we've seen their children change from school kids to young adults and, in a couple of cases, parents who bring their beautiful children around to visit, and sometimes stay with, their doting grandparents.

I've mentioned Katerina many times over the years I've been writing this blog. She waters our garden when we're away on holidays, and if I'm not up very early on Thursday mornings, she will have already wheeled our garbage and recycling bins back up the side of our house after the garbage and recycling trucks have paid their weekly visits.

For our part I always think we never do enough to repay them their kindness, to tell the truth. So we talk, have lovely chats and enjoy that simple pleasure whenever the chance arises. Nick's a keen gardener, Katerina loves gardens and deftly influences Nick's choices of what to plant next, so we have a lot in common. 

One of Pam's paintings (of geraniums, which reminds Katerina of her mother) is in their house now. And a few days ago, I had the arborists in to again heavily prune the olive tree which would otherwise rob Nick of the much needed winter morning sun in his productive backyard. He always says "thanks, thanks, mate" because like all gardeners, he knows sunshine is as precious as rain. How could I be a good neighbour and rob my neighbour of sunshine?