Angry Summer, gentle rain and Shakespeare

A night of drenching, down-pouring rain has surely ended our so-called Angry Summer. It was a season of heart-breaking drought, bushfires, floods, cyclones and other fierce storms, and it marched on into autumn, past the equinox [we had a severe fire danger day just a few days ago] outstaying the party rather like Jack Point or an ugly sister.

`Weather events on steroids’ was another description for the record number of record weather events including the hottest Australian day since records began (32.32 degrees on January 8^th, bizarrely breaking the 40-year record made only the day before).

Just a few days ago the fiercely hot, dry summer bored on and on; it wasn’t just the gardeners and farmers in the south who were desperate for a break. Barely 2 states away were floods 8m high (again) while here were bushfires weeks old waiting for rain. As was all my pitifully dusty `country’, my area, my land.

The big dry meant that we filled up our birdbaths as often as we remembered; and when our sweet resident wallaby (she who eats expensive plants like so much brioche) came near the house, how could we repel her?

Delicious rain has fallen, almost the only drops (let’s ignore one other March night’s rain) since early spring’s September. Soon – I hope – Ms Wallaby will have greenery again outside the garden fence (altho’ I suspect that, even for the macropods, the grass is always greener).

And here I’ll bore you with my theory that Shakespeare must have travelled to the Mediterranean:

`The quality of mercy is not strain’d;

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath; it is twice blest…’

(Portia, `The Merchant of Venice’.)

We in Melbourne live in a so-called Mediterranean climate and understand that gentle rain is a precious gift. But visit England (my parents homeland) and it’s an all-too-frequent pain in the neck; do the English appreciate and really understand these lines?

Today the rain is not gentle but that’s all the best for healing the parched earth and filling the tanks. And today is blissfully cool. Is autumn really here? I hope so.

Ambivalence

Two months of dry have torched and scorched the garden, the bush, the land (south of the Black Stump); but tangerine tiger lilies thrust up sturdy stems, flung open petals, and laughed at the weather. These bulbs were from my (botanist and gardener) mother’s garden but (conservationist) J doesn’t like their spreading habit arising partly from the tiresome production of little black bulbils up and down the stems. Tenacity is their middle name: I’ve tried to dig them out and no doubt will do again – but just now they are so very nice and it comes to me that they are the equivalent of the mid-winter flower to most people (those with a normal internal thermostat, who enjoy summery days over 25 degrees when I hide and huddle in misery); and I look out my window at dry lawn, buttery leaves cascading gently, constantly, from the Robinia; and sparse herbage with leaves like parchment; and the spirit does a little skip seeing that not all the garden is beaten into submission, disheartened, or rather, hibernating (we hope). Autumn weather will come. Blessed rain will come. And like hellebores (“winter roses”) they can be my least favourite colour; at this season I just say thanks for anything. (The colour of fire is least welcome this bushfire season but conversely this over-bright orange is good at waving about and saying here I am with a grin on its clown face.)

Now it’s late afternoon and the lilies are in shade; the cool (the `coolth’ I like to think as I luxuriate in the welcome balm) has enticed some wildlife into the garden: a honeyeater, primrose-cravated, seeks nectar amongst the blooms. So I will wait another week before the axe falls on these questionable beauties.

Christmas bush blossom

Christmas bush blossom is spangling the creeks, airy above the tree ferns, littering the ground with pieces of crepe. It may be (relatively) cool and wet; we seem to be having another La Nina year (thank you nature), but again the Victorian Christmas Bush (Prostanthera lasianthos) began flowering early – 3 weeks early? – in late November. Liking a little shade and moisture, it’s a small tree that  grows along our creek and gullies under stringybark and peppermints.

This is very late but I wish you all a festive holiday season and a wonderful 2013. May your garden grow as well as you wish and provide you with too many veggies, herbs, flowers and – often underrated – lots of summer shade.

Crimson rosellas and other cheeky creatures

Red-browed finches, robins with wide saffron cravats and cerulean (`superb’) fairy-wrens dance about the lawn, the garden, on branches; its part food-finding, I think, and part pairing again. It’s hot but wet and who doesn’t want a second clutch of eggs?

Crimson rosellas in courtly hue visit when the lawn is long. I find it hard to look at these parrots without remembering a late summer day when an English cousin visited my home in the hills for the first time. She paused at a picture window, instantly transfixed by an apple tree covered in these awkward squawking creatures of scarlet and blue (`oh, they are always there’ we said). My sister immediately went outdoors and picked the ripe apples but I was quite happy with the clumsy performance; I’d been too tired to harvest the crop and this was a better than expected alternative.

Echidnas pass through the garden sometimes, and though a ring-tail possum lives in my potting shed, it doesn’t seem to eat garden plants. (Lucky me.) A wombattery on the other side of the creek was abandoned years ago; local wandering dogs must disturb native animals as the area becomes somewhat urbanized. Snakes, too, are no longer seen.

But a real resident was a rustling blue-tongue lizard (Russell) for 2 or more summers, amongst my tall blue Salvia; I couldn’t dig or even garden here, but that was fine. I’m amazed that I didn’t scare him off. I suspect that he liked this spot because it’s near the warm paving, by the house, that skinks find so attractive on a cool morning; kookaburras swoop to catch them too. Skinks eat all the snail eggs and a proportion of slug ones too; as I don’t need to use snail bait in the garden the skinks are welcome twice over.

Iris

Japanese iris have shaken out their crepe petticoats in matching sets of ballet costumes; clumps of each variety spreading with age, floriferous with sunny spring rain, names forgotten with translocation. I suddenly realize that I’ve had these 5 varieties over 2 decades but I actually (somehow) remember the name of one: `Peacock Dancer’ (above, centre) which is the one everyone loves, as do I. It’s graceful, less over-the-top, and the falls – large petals - open like tissue paper, near-white delicately lined by deep purple. Even the name is elegant, and suits the deep blue-violet standards and the somewhat tail-shaped falls.

Earlier in the season clumps of Crested Iris (Iris japonica, above left, an Evansia type from China and Japan) tossed up hundreds of near-white flowers followed by one of those nice surprises: a plant living up to its hype. I respect David Glenn (of Lambley Nursery) but tastes do, of course, differ. Often dramatically. When his plant Iris pallida `Amethystina’ (above right) flowered near my herbs recently I was pretty smitten. It is the softest of mauves; pallid, not amethyst exactly, the colour not wishy-washy but gentle. Unlike nearby Penstemon `Sour Grapes’, a dull creature with some gray tones mingled in its mauve, on floppy stems; bound for the compost heap.

Before now I’ve written (in July) of my pure ambivalence towards Siberian Iris (below, left) and my complete spring love of their deep blue presence (opposed to their messy autumn collapse which – then – I find unforgivable); recently they were pretty showy, at a height, proportion and sheer colour-wattage that just seem so superior to other perennials. This year, though, just as I was reflecting that the show seemed to be over after only 2 weeks or so, I noticed that some clumps here and there of iridescent sapphire Louisiana Iris (below, right) began flowering before all the Siberian Iris had waltzed away.

Louisiana Iris in the glistening truest of blue as well as less showy ivory-white and delicate, palest blue, were dancing merrily (if in clumsy costumes best far from the house and from close examination); and then just as they tired and left the stage, the current ballet of water-lovers began: `Peacock Dancer’ the prima donna (below), the others the chorus, in larger numbers.

Suddenly the front iris bed `works’; visitors heads turn as they arrive and I hope they feel that the garden is welcoming. (Well…no I don’t, precisely; I hope they are impressed as well. Humour me please; wallabies munching most plants make this happen so rarely… I think this is the first time, actually, in 2 decades, that it’s possible. It’s very pleasant.)

Moreover the fortnight of colour has extended to nearly 2 months followed by upright foliage – some evergreen – which has been a great source of pleasure.

 

I was checking one of my bulb books and saw the moniker `the spring garden’ (in Sissinghurst of course, where else? Other than Munstead Wood…) and thought immediately of calling my iris-dominated area just this. A bed of…let’s see, 7m by 3m. So yes, it is fairly much spring-related and yes, I have a country garden, large enough for seasonal areas (although I always swore I’d not do this, that in southern Victoria I can and shall  have flowers year-round in every part of the garden), but why do we like to copy others so slavishly? I laughed at myself after only half a minute (that’s my story, anyhow) and really this area is already part of my `sun and sky’ bed – more of a colour rule – so why change this end of it? I think we imitate when we want a bit of the magic we’ve seen elsewhere and we are afraid that we cannot do better.  Yep, we are unlikely to equal the famed gardens let alone better them but it’s fun to try and far better to create a unique picture than copy, surely. With the wizardry of nature on our side – this plant sulks unexpectedly, that self-sows sweetly – we are not only gifted charming gardens but fleeting images too. Unless you want rows of golden diosmas, that is. I don’t.

Snowdrops, Stylidium and Sand dunes

I went snow-dropping, albeit electronically (sighing over beautiful images of Galanthus) on Saturday. Us Galanthophiles must reclaim the word, debased by knicker-nickers, for lovers of this sweet white bulb of winter (below).

My garden club, the AGS (Alpine Garden Society, Victorian Chapter) flew in British botanist John Grimshaw for a lecture about Galanthus (Snowdrops, and bloody good) but his particular passion is for trees. Half a dozen of us explored the Cranbourne Botanic Garden (above) on Friday where John was interested in anything vegetative that Australia could throw at him, which was, of course, the provenance of all the plant material there. After pointing out a Melia: `our only deciduous tree’...response: `oh yes, they are widespread’ (I’d gnash my teeth if I thought the fillings wouldn’t pour out like sands through the hour-glass); I stayed quiet. I was seriously out of my depth horticulturally, but having a nice time. Cranbourne’s design, following the journey of water, and with its deep red lunettes, is sublime; it touches deep in the bronzed aussie’s breast. Many plants were at their peak too.

Then I spied some Stylidium (Trigger Plants) and as they were going over I first checked that they could still `trigger’: the touch-sensitive column gives quite a thwack while depositing pollen onto (usually) a visiting insect. After asking our visitor if he was interested, I showed him how...just as Mum (another British botanist) showed me long ago. Like most people new to this unusual vegetative and fun phenomenon, he enthusiastically examined the plant. High 5!

(See below: the flowers on the left are untrigged (or have reset) while the flower on the right has its trigger (column) over the flower after an insect has landed upon it.)

Seriously, this cool wet spring seems to be having last year’s effect on Stylidium gramnifolium: they are still enthusiastically flowering late in spring, bright-pink flowers still fresh on tall stalks, and, most excitingly, several shades of pink within the drift above our drive way. I’ve seen white Grassy Trigger Plants west of Melbourne and deep pink ones in the alps but I’m fondest of our own; always a happy (if rare) sentiment.

Spring Wildflowers

A furring of orange along the roadside stopped me, near home, yesterday. Hundreds of deep amber pea-flowers were stippled with red on shrubs just knee-height: Pultenaea gunnii or, to my mind rather misnamed, Golden Bush-Pea.

My handy wildflower book (the incomparable Jean Galbraith’s; published 1977 and bloody useful) calls the flower colour `rusty-gold’ which is neat and accurate. Once stopped I was fossicking, eyes alert behind my multifocals, foraging and finding: Butterfly Flag (Diplarrena moreaea, particularly floriferous this year), its butterflies floating waist-high above the leaves, pure white with delicate markings of yellow and violet; a few bright yellow Hop Goodenia, tall white daisy bush (Olearia) and oh! White Star Bush (Asterolasia asteriscophora subsp albiflora, below), rare and precious, its white 5-pointed stars with gold anthers scattered over the low shrub, not yet its potential of 2m high.

Blanketing other shrubs were swathes of Wonga Wonga Vine (Pandorea pandorana), its many small cream blooms throated crimson, creating bridal panache. I prefer the more subtle local Clematis, C. aristata (below), its 4-pointed stars closer to pure white, and seemingly cascading from shrubs and trees rather than overwhelming them, visually or physically, but it’s not common here. (Hopefully in the nearby town of Clematis there are more.)  

 Prettiest of all: tiny pink-lilac Twining Fringe Lilies (Thysanotus patersonii,last picture), suddenly dozens opening where a day before they’d not been out, gems on the forest floor.

Appearing in the drier patches were some colourful Sun-Orchids (Thelymitra) about to close as the sun descended, pale satin-sheened salmon to shell-pink (T. rubra, below; rubra? What bloke named this Salmon Sun-Orchid for the Latin word for red?) or lilac-blue, stippled violet (Dotted Sun-Orchid, T. ixioides, top); occasional flowers deep violet within, almost closed, tantalizing. If the spring sunshine is not strong enough to tempt the flowers to open, they self-pollinate, oblivious (obviously) to the orchid lovers wandering, heads down, hope in their hearts, cameras clutched in their hands. To the inventors of the digital camera and particularly the digital macro setting: thank you so much.

And thank you to a delightful man, Robin, possibly 2 decades older than myself, who said hello and then showed me a patch of chocolate-coloured Bird Orchids (Chiloglottis gunnii), ground-hugging, beaks agape (the orchids, not my new companion). It’s not often that a stranger of the other gender will say hello and be friendly and discuss what is, admittedly, pretty obviously a common interest with enthusiasm. It couldn’t happen too often in the city and is just one more reason that I love living in this neck of the woods.