The natives are restful

 

Pammy sees to it that the interiors of our house are always brightened by flowers in vases, whether they're picked from the garden or bought home from a florist's shop.

And in the last few weeks it has been gorgeous natives — lots of them — that have been filling the house with their beautiful blooms. I find the effect quite restful.

Flannel flowers, my favourite native flowers. While everyone naturally thinks of them as white, I am also captivated by their subtle greens that feature not only in the centre, but are also flecked on the petals, especially as they start to fade. And besides, they look like soft fabric.

How come all the native beauty? Pammy has been running a series of weekend art classes (all sold out, the series finished last weekend) at two venues in Sydney. Pictured above is a shot from her class at Acquire@Design in King Street Newtown.

Run by dressmaker and fashion designer Karen Kwok, Acquire is a designer store selling original fashions, plus a skilfully curated, eclectic selection of designer homewares. And it has a big, long, wide dressmaker's table in the centre, where small classes can relax and learn watercolour skills following Pammy's expert tuition. 

Pam's other weekend courses are conducted at Connie Dimas Jewellery in Dulwich Hill. Connie is an innovative jewellery designer, and she also has a big table to cater for a variety of art classes for small groups.

To finish off all the plugs, I'd better tell you where to find Pamela Horsnell the artist and art teacher online. She is on Instagram at @pamelahorsnellartist, and her website is at pamelahorsnell.org 

Onto the flower show!

This is Banksia coccinea, commonly called the scarlet banksia, and most commonly a scarlet-red flower too. But there are orange forms like this one, and it's such a good cut flower for vases. This specimen is two weeks old and still looking good.

Not sure what kind of wattle this is, but it's pretty while it lasts, which unfortunately is not that long. But when seen as part of a huge shrub in bloom in gardens, it's a show-stopper.

With this yellow-flowered eucalyptus, you get spectacular gumnuts which, when their browny-red lids pop off, reveal outrageously big, yellow blooms. Nectar-eating birds can spot them from a mile away.

Kangaroo paws come in many colours, but I always remember driving along narrow coastal roads in Western Australia in springtime, with yellow kangaroo paws six feet high forming a big beautiful golden wall on both sides of the road, the way tall grasses do. It seemed other-worldly to be in a sea of kangaroo paws.

Like the Banksia above, this pink waratah is two weeks old and still going strong. For overseas readers who might not be familiar with waratahs, each bloom is up to five or so inches across, and in the wild each waratah shrub in bloom can have a few dozen of these stunners. They're the official state emblem of my home state, New South Wales, where they grow in abundance in our cooler zones, such as up in the mountains.

Speaking of wild waratahs, the closest we can get to that is the bunch of waratahs grown by our friend Lou on his South Coast property at Bermagui. Unlike the waratahs sold in florist's shops, which stay tightly packed for quite some time, Lou's native versions opened out within a few days of arriving.

When you mention native flora it's not just all about flowers. There's gumnuts, and these come in so many captivating sizes and shapes that any good display of natives in vases should include some gumnuts. These little ones (that look like they are dusted in icing sugar) will be going back to Connie Dimas' jewellery store, where Connie will use them as templates for some new creations.

The gumnut leftovers of a yellow eucalyptus flower show. And did I mention that eucalyptus leaves are just as varied, beautiful and desirable as gumnuts?

Another gumnut pic to show you, with a flannel flower on the side.

Beloved of florists, Geraldton wax seems simple at first glance, that is until you peer into what is going on inside each bloom...

A vase of flannel flowers will brighten any room, soothe any aching soul.

These bottlebrush flowers might not look that spectacular, but go easy on them: they're just tough street kids fending for themselves. The streets in my area have countless red Callistemons (bottlebrushes) in bloom right now, an excellent street tree.

And last but not least, a big 'thank you' to our friend Jolanda, who allowed Pam to pop around to her garden, secateurs in hand, and trim off a selection of grevillea blooms, gumnuts and eucalyptus foliage for use in her native flora art classes.

Heading for the mountains

I hope you like looking at photos, because that's what I have in store for you this posting. Lots of photos (taken by Pam and me) of flowers, foliage, lichens, water cascades and more, all of them a highlight of our wonderful day spent with friends at the Blue Mountains Botanic Gardens at Mount Tomah.

This is our 'cool climate' botanic garden, as it does get very chilly (and occasionally snowy) in winter up here in the mountains. The spectacular spring flowers are mostly South African proteas of various kinds (although there is a NSW Waratah as well among our pix). Pam's camera kept on heading for the lichens (I expect to see some paintings of them in coming months), while I gave my iPhone a thorough battery-flattening during our post-lunch walk. At the end of the post I have a few notes on how to get there, etc. And whatever you do, book a table at the restaurant there. It truly is fine dining up in the hills. 

Finally, one of my infamous pan shots courtesy of You Tube, looking over the gardens on what was a beautifully warm but unfortunately hazy day.

Here's the details.
Blue Mountains Botanic Garden is on the Bells Line of Road, which runs from North Richmond/Kurrajong over to Lithgow. The Gardens are a few kilometres past Bilpin. It took us a bit under two hours to drive there from Marrickville, and I do suspect that October and November, when all the spring blooms are out, is one of the two peak seasons (the other is in April and May, when the autumn colour is on show). 

The restaurant there is truly a fine dining experience, not cheap, but as good as you'd find anywhere in Sydney, and all the produce used in the restaurant is locally sourced. If your budget is tight, pack a picnic basket, as it's a super picnic spot.

Here's a link to the Gardens' website: http://www.mounttomahbotanicgarden.com.au 

Looking up, for inspiration

Easter might be a time when people contemplate the heavens for understandable and very profound reasons, but I found myself gazing upwards while forced to spend a few hours reading, indoors, on this rainy Easter Monday afternoon. Here's the scene I encountered, a rather pleasant one.

You might think you see flowers here, and if you're familiar with Australian flowers you might even say "nice waratah ceiling" – and you'd be right. It is a waratah-patterned plaster ceiling dating from around 1916, when the house was built. This was a time when Australian nationalism was enjoying its early years, when all over Sydney houses were being built in the 'Federation' style that celebrated our nationhood (which goes back to 1901). This nationalism expressed itself in many forms, but architecture has a way of hanging around for centuries, a most commendable virtue. Now, I don't grow waratahs in my my backyard as they are devilishly difficult to grow for a variety of reasons, and so I can't, at this point, slip in a lovely shot of my own backyard waratah.

Instead of Googling up and pinching one of a dozen or more outstanding waratah photos available there, I thought I'd do the Australian thing and plunder our State Government's stock of online waratah graphics (as it's our State floral emblem). As a taxpayer I've paid for my pixel's worth of this image, which illustrates for those readers not familiar with waratahs the lovely big flower in question (Telopea speciosissima). When in flower in the bush they can stand anywhere from three to five or more feet high, usually, and each shrub will have several blooms, each about six or so inches across. They are a wonderful, indeed stunning, sight, definitely at their best in a natural bushland setting, too. While they have been hybridised lately into white and yellow blooms, the natural reds are the most beautiful, as far as I am concerned.

The only waratah which blooms in my backyard is my lovely Mambo waratah shirt on washing day. However, wash days for this fine garment are rare, only because I wear it just once or twice each year, at Christmas time (lovely red and green theme, don't you think?)

While it would be nice to grow a backyard waratah, this is not an easy plant to grow here near the coast. The soil is too heavy, the humidity too high and it's a bit too warm, too. It's more of an inland or a mountain plant (the best ones I've seen in the bush have all been mountain plants), and so although my living room's waratah-themed ceiling suggests "go on, have a go at growing one" I still don't think I'll give it a try. Besides, I have other rooms and ceilings to choose from, for garden inspiration!

Moving one room down the hallway, to my home office/study, the ceiling there is not of an Aussie native plant at all – it looks like sunflowers to me. Most Federation houses have some sort of ornate-pattered ceilings, but most home-owners are content to paint them in 'ceiling white' paint. I've been into houses where hippies with a lot of time on their hands have started to 'colour-in' their ornate ceilings with the 'correct' colours, and you might be shocked to hear this, but it's not a great look, especially when it's half-finished and abandoned when it all got too hard, man. However, out in the garden, sunflowers I can do (as can a child, admittedly).

Last stop down the hallway, the bedroom, and the plant overhead was a bit of a mystery to me for a while, but I think that's an acorn in the centre of the motif, and that we're looking at is an oak tree. And so our architect who designed my house was having a bet each way. Lying back and thinking of England in the bedroom (botanically speaking, that is) but quite proud to be a native Australian, albeit fully clothed, in the living room. As there was a war on at the time, it was probably not a good thing to be seen as too disloyal to the Mother Country. And so my house's ceilings are a little window into the politics of the time. But my interest, which sparked this somewhat formless, meandering posting, was originally gardening. So let's get back to that.

It's too late for sunflowers this year. But next spring, I have a spot for them in mind, and if I'm really organised I'll bring some home-grown sunflowers into my study, too. And in honour of the waratahs I'll buy a few bunches from the florist next spring so we can at least have them in the living room at eye level, and all the way up at sky-level, too.

Post script: the one nice little bonus anecdote about our lovely ornate plaster ceilings concerns the people who preserved them so well – Jim and Angela, a Greek couple, the previous owners of our house.

We got to know Jim and Angela in the brief period between when we bought the house and they packed up and returned to their native Greece, to be with their daughter. Our suburb is a major Greek area in Sydney, and when a great many practical, home-maintenance-loving Greek men saw those ornate ceilings they collectively said "what a nightmare to paint and maintain" – and so they ripped them out and replaced them with plain, flat ceilings. In the process, many Federation houses lost a lot of their charm, and while that saddened some Aussies it pleased a lot of Greek homemakers who were too busy making babies and building a new life to worry about sanding back and painting stupid waratahs!

However, Jim and Angela had a different approach. They believed they were moving to Australia to make a new life in a new world, and when they looked up and saw the house's ornate ceilings they loved them straight away, saw them as a symbol of their new world, and left them, and most of the house's architectural features, intact.

For a very long time a lot of Anglo Aussies privately sneered at the Greek love of covering lawns with concrete, lining up mini-Parthenon-style white columns to form front fences, pulling out timber windows and replacing them with aluminium ones, and replacing ornately decorated ceilings with plain ones. The Anglos saw it as being nothing but vandalism. But times and attitudes are changing, and now our local council has recognised a distinct class of architecture here under the name of "Fedeterranean" – Federation houses renovated in the Mediterranean way. These Fedeterranean houses usually also have big, comfy, shady outdoor living areas – something all the Anglo Aussies have now learned to appreciate and copy in various ways.

I'm Anglo-Celtic and I love our Federation architecture, and fortunately there is an enormous amount of it well preserved here in Sydney. And I love my Greek neighbours too, they're wonderful people who really know how to enjoy life. But I'm glad I have my beautiful, ornate ceilings to enjoy, even if they're more likely to inspire my choices at the local florist, rather than at the garden centre.