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.

Gifts from friends

At long last, and I mean after waiting 18 months, a bulb given to Pam and me by our friends John and Liz has finally flowered. That's it pictured below. "What is it?" you ask. Its formal name is Veltheimia bracteata, but forest lily is its other, common name, and as it's another flowering bulb from Africa we have planted it in our little South African patch sheltered under the shade provided by our frangipani tree.

Like our Scadoxus bulbs and our yellow-flowered clivias, Veltheimias do best in a shady spot. Normally, they flower in late winter and early spring every year, but as we planted John and Liz's bulbs in autumn last year, they promptly went into a sulk and for a while I thought that they were gonners, as their leaves died down and disappeared. But no, during late summer they started to poke out their new set of deep green, wide leaves from the broad bulb, and hope was restored that we'd get a show this year. 

As Veltheimias come in a few different colours, notably pinks, greens and yellows, we didn't know what to expect, but once this flower head was forming in July, we knew it'd be pink.

John and Liz gave us two bulbs (this was in an exchange suggested by John, who wanted some of my blue-flowered Louisiana iris in exchange for one of his white-flowered Louisiana iris. He tossed in the Veltheimias as a bonus.) And I think I got a wonderful deal, as his white iris is a stunner. I'll be doing a posting on it some time in October, when its show is on. Here's how the plants looked in July, with the stalks about 30cm then, but now they're closer to 60cm high.

And as it turns out, one plant is a bit healthier and happier than the other (this year at least) but both are basically looking pretty good. I haven't got a clue whether baby Veltheimias will ever appear (as they have done with the nearby orange-flowered Scadoxus) but judging from the slow progress with the Veltheimias over these first 18 months, I don't think there'll be many newbies to cope with.

And so here's the last addition to our garden, yet another plant that reminds us of good friends. We have so many plants here that have come from friends as gifts, and they really do help you to think of those people more often that you might normally would. 

So, if you're stuck for an idea for a gift to give a gardening friend, you can never go wrong with a plant, especially one that's a bit interesting and unusual, like this forest lily.