Colours of Autumn

 There’s chill in the air; we’ve had a few nights around 3°C and the garden is definitely winding down for winter. But the garden is still full of colour (surprisingly pink in fact). Some plants are throwing a late party (dahlias), some have just arrived (fungi - honorary plants, I guess) and some have only just germinated (broad beans, lettuces, peas and mustard greens seedlings).

Dahlias started their long flowering season in early summer and I started by growing only dwarf, sunny yellow (years ago), then dwarf white as well, perky plants to barely 45cm requiring absolutely no staking – a strict rule – for dahlias, anyhow. But recently Dahlia `Bishop of Llansdaff’ (left) with dark, smoky leaves and rich, velvety red flowers has made its way into the garden – in pots, for now. Reaching over one metre (so far) what stands out is that there is still some flowers now in May on tall, firm un-staked stalks; truly a fine plant. The dwarf ones require lifting and storage over winter (our soil is wet, wet, wet) but I’m hoping just to move my 3 pots of Dahlia `Bishop of Llansdaff’ to a dry spot during this time. Mid-spring might see me unpacking the biggest pot: that is the time to split your dahlia tuber clump, just before replanting.

Over summer I planted a favourite annual: cosmos (above), a handsome daisy which blooms in autumn. I prefer the tall ones but this year has exceeded expectations with 2.5m triffids towering over nearby salvias (deep pink and mauve ones) and roses (soft pink and white ones); while they’d look great in a vase, I can’t bear to rob the garden.

Roses are still flinging out a bloom here and there. Crimson. Pink. White. Yellow. Delicious shapes and scents.

This and last month were exciting for seeing the first blooms on some new roses – always a fantastic experience.

Rosa `Princess Alexandra of Kent’ flowered last week: placed to contrast with white `Wisley’ (rather strongly) it’s a most perfectly shaped bloom and, as with other recently bought roses, has a strong perfume, said by David Austin’s handbook of roses to have “a delicious fresh Tea fragrance which changes to lemon, eventually taking on hints of blackcurrants”.

A tall sage the colour of an English summer sky, Salvia uliginosa, still bobs up with a colour so pure that – luckily the bed is deep – you can forgive its wandering and unsteady nature. I just banish it from the front foot or 2, or about 50cm: the `neat’ zone for bulbs, bugle (Ajuga) , clumps of white tulips and short blue salvias.

Spirea and dogwoods are flaming up in hot leaf colours – virtual bonfires here and there – but the plant that still surprises each autumn is a perennial, Tweedia caerulea; possibly known best for its starry little flowers of porcelain blue in spring. Completely herbaceous, the leaves turn butter-yellow before the perennial dies down for winter; an additional charm, outweighed a little by the need to cut back the stalks soon afterwards.

Yes, it’s chilly but there’s plenty to see.

Jill Weatherhead is horticulturist, writer, garden designer and principal at Jill Weatherhead Garden Design who lives in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, and works throughout Victoria (www.jillweatherheadgardendesign.com.au)

Mystery Rose

`If it looks like a duck and it sounds like a duck and it walks like a duck...then it probably needs longer in the microwave’ (anon). (Yes, I am still a vegetarian. Thank you for asking.) Or it is a duck.

Let’s face it, my rose in a pot by the back door, flowering on a long stem flung out, searching for the sun, is possibly that gem, `Jude the Obscure’; it looks like it and the fragrance is equally wonderful (“a very strong and delicious fragrance with a fruity note reminiscent of guava and sweet white wine” – David Austin’s handbook of roses) (although this rose is 2m so far, not 1.2m high). Did I forget I bought it? Really?

The rose by the back door (first image) was – I thought – a dead red rose (a present, oops) with a shoot from the rootstock. I have been watching this stem elongate with some fascination.

I don’t have many roses and would surely remember buying a pale apricot coloured rose – which is usually not my thing. The rose has finally opened, however, into a round shape with incurved petals like some of nicest David Austin roses, with a heavenly and strong scent, like the best DA roses – could this possibly be by accident? It seems unlikely. Me forget something? Very likely! But what a lovely surprise, and now to attempt to identify this ring-in...and maybe plant her near `Teasing Georgia’ (a lemon-yellow rose with lovely fragrance).

Ideally this mystery rose – colour-wise - would be planted by `Comte de Champagne’ or `Crocus Rose’ (second picture), not lemon `Teasing Georgia’, but space dictates otherwise and, importantly, `Comte de Champagne’ is in a row with other roses: deep gold at the centre fading to soft yellow at the ends, all at the same height (in front of a green hedge). A tall apricot rose would spoil the picture terribly – a picture that – may I say? – looked very pretty last spring with several clumps of deep blue Siberian iris at the feet of the roses.

My mystery rose will be near my definite (named) `Jude the Obscure’ too and where I can let her spread those large prickly wings but somehow where I can easily and often get a whiff of these glorious blooms.

Jill Weatherhead is horticulturist, writer, garden designer and principal at Jill Weatherhead Garden Design who lives in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, and works throughout Victoria (www.jillweatherheadgardendesign.com.au)

Our Parrot Tree

We seem to have a new tree, one which is blooming prolifically this year.

You won’t find it in the books.

The large flowers are bright red with touches of blue and they bob in the breeze. Actually they move when there’s no wind; the flowers also squawk and when I come near, the flowers drop from the tree (and fly away)...of course I’m talking about my avian visitors - perhaps 20 at a time - crimson parrots feasting on the apple trees close to the house.

What on earth, I hear you ask, am I doing with un-netted apple trees? Well, life gets busy, and our heritage, dwarf apple trees are not as easily managed as we’d expected, or hoped.

But I’d rather look out at a `parrot tree’ than pick bushels and bushels of apples – and anyhow there’s still plenty for us to eat and share.

Jill Weatherhead is horticulturist, writer, garden designer and principal at Jill Weatherhead Garden Design who lives in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, and works throughout Victoria (www.jillweatherheadgardendesign.com.au)

The Birds and the Bees (and butterflies too)

Sometimes the hens surprise me.

They pounce on old or damaged red tomatoes with glee so I thought I was about to give them a huge treat when I pulled out a large tomato plant laden with ripe yellow cherry tomatoes (so I could use the bed to plant peas and bok choy seedlings and sow seeds of broad beans, ruby chard and various kale, thank you for asking) and flung the vine into their run. But not so. No interest. Nothing. Zip.

Well, I thought, the colour yellow, here at times verging on yolk-amber, is very different to red; didn’t we all think so when these tomatoes first appeared on the market, what, 2 decades ago?

And birds, evolved from the same ancestor as the lizard cohort, are of course, extremely different to us.

What (and how) do they see?

Birds see red tomatoes sharply, that’s for sure! And it seems that red flowers are the ones they often pollinate (although honeyeaters come to salvias in all colours (and lemon-coloured Phygelius, still!) in my garden).

By contrast, butterfly-pollinated flowers tend to be large and showy, pink or lavender, often with a `landing pad’; and frequently scented. A plant I love for its extraordinarily high ability to attract butterflies is Pratia which I’ve seen escape a garden bed and completely infest a wet lawn over horrid clay in the Dandenong’s. Spring brings tiny starry flowers of pale blue sprinkling the sward and above them an astonishing cloud of orange butterflies – an unforgettable sight. (The soil was naturally moist at flowering time – spring; the owners said they never irrigated the lawn in summer.)

But it seems that in Australia, as elsewhere, native bees have determined the colour of our native flowers (The Age, 12/6/12) with more influence than other pollinators like birds and butterflies.

So what do bees see?

Two colours it’s claimed. Bee-pollinated flowers have variable shapes and sizes but their colours tend to be yellow or blue, often with ultraviolet (which we don’t see) nectar guides. Rewards for these pollinators may be nectar or pollen.

Bumble bees, I read, `sonicate’ so they can shake pollen from those flowers which have anthers releasing pollen internally. No wonder they are such effective pollinators.

If flower pollination is a guide, then birds see red and infrared (we don’t see the latter) although some flowers they visit are colourful; the flowers generally have a lot of nectar.

It seems that red and orange – the very 2 colours I least like, and place, if at all, at the furthest reach of the garden – should be near the house where I can see the avian visitors – which delight so - most.

So is the garden for visual beauty, or for birds and wildlife; is it for vegetables and herbs (herbs currently taking over my pink patch); is it to recreate nature; is it art (yes!); is it just a plant collection (no!)? (Fortunately honeyeaters visit the pink, blue and purple salvias near the windows constantly.) I love playing with colour – floral colour – but a delightful bonus is the birds which also come through with about 10 (10!) red-browed finches at my bird bath yesterday in the afternoon sunshine.

I am reading `What are Gardens For?’ by Rory Stuart who cites Dean Hole (author of various gardening books circa 1900) who asked that very question to receive varied answers: `strawberries’, `tennis’, `botanical research’ and `for the soul of the poet’.

I always wanted beauty as the overriding criterion for my garden but now it’s getting complex.  

Since hearing Professor Louisa Jones speak about Mediterranean-style gardens (year-round interest for the 5 senses, see post 6/ 10/ 2013) I’ve looked at my garden very differently.

Certainly I am enjoying changing the garden – slightly! – into a Mediterranean-style garden which is experienced, not just looked at: scent, touch, taste, the feeling of enclosure here and there, then opening to our outlook across the valley, the sound (and sight) of birdsong. (My newest David Austin roses are heavily scented: deep burgundy `Munstead Wood’ and sublimely-perfumed soft yellow `Teasing Georgia’. Providing shade, too, is a new element for our garden.)

It’s still a journey of creation.

And after 40 years - I was looking after the family’s chooks when I was 10 – I am still learning about hens, too.

Jill Weatherhead is horticulturist, writer, garden designer and principal at Jill Weatherhead Garden Design who lives in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, and works throughout Victoria (www.jillweatherheadgardendesign.com.au)

A Flight of Fancy

Stand aside Lizzy Bennet, Heathcliff’s Cathy, and Jane Eyre.

I want be like Sookie Stackhouse of the True Blood series. No, I don’t want to date a vampire, or have witches stay with me, but dang, to have a fairy great grandfather wish upon me a magical garden where the plants suddenly grow as if on steroids, flowers unexpectedly bloom prolifically and the tomatoes are heavy on the bushes. (And the lawn grows fast, but every blessing is mixed.) Sookie doesn’t enjoy the minutiae of gardening – and I’m with her there (weeding and mowing are mentioned) – but when weeding she uses an iron trowel and uses it in self defence against a fairy – who is susceptible to iron and lemon juice, of course. (`Did you really kill a fairy?’ ask her vampire friends admiringly.) OK, it’s only her garden I want, not all the adventures.

Sookie’s garden in Louisiana had been battling the climate (dry summers are implied); mine has battled soggy winters, bone-dry summers and my bete noir (apologies to any regular reader out there who may be tired of this topic), wandering wallabies. 

Now I feel a little like Sookie – but without dating a vampire, alas.

The garden has grown for nearly two seasons. It’s pretty exciting. Five months have passed with growth unimpeded by munching marsupials, now really respecting the garden fence. (Some rain during summer has been terrific too.) Is it too good to be true? If crunching critters don’t laughingly leap over the fence when the grass is certainly greener, during summer, then I think it is a success. After 20 years, I have my garden, and I can plant tulips (their favourite snack) with confidence. At last!

Some plants survived the depredation over the years with wire baskets or plastic prisons. Now it’s time to fling off the corsets and gussets and upturned hanging basket guards. They kept some roses and treasures alive – just – through the years when we had an old, large male wallaby here, who seemed very much at home. With his good memory, he’d return to graze on the same plants repeatedly. About 6 years ago – after his demise no doubt – a sweet little female moved in and we watched her raise a joey each year; each seemingly more bold than the last. But a turd by the front door mat (under the veranda)? That’s just bad manners.

Was it 3 years ago that J enclosed about a quarter of an acre with the wallaby-proof fence (leaving over 12 acres for wildlife) – that quickly became – the somewhat wallaby deterrent fence? We’ve slowly closed off all the gaps including adding 2 rings to our pretty purple gate. Seeing wallabies leap out through the gate was quite a sight.

Last spring saw the last of the incursions; I remember it well. Often when our resident female wallaby has a young joey, last year’s joey is still hanging around. (There’s Gen Y for you.)  J and I call the older one `teenager’ though I am sure a zoologist would be horrified by the nickname. Anyhow, on a sunny spring day in October, `teenager’ was hopping – or scrabbling - under the fence, back and forth, showing younger joey how it’s done. J (a true conservationist) was delighted; I saw red. I had a sore back but went out with a mattock and drove in the last of the required stakes...and it worked!

(J’s been ambivalent about the whole project while I’ve longed for my garden; so it’s a true joy to see the wallabies almost daily now, cropping grass near our gates on one side of the garden or the other, but always on the other side of the fence.)

As if fairy Niall had put a spell on it, immediately the garden started to grow and the most pleasure was, I think, from roses: a pink one near the kitchen window bloomed and bloomed (rich pink `Gertrude Jeckyll’ with her old rose fragrance); and from the living room, in time for a family lunch, was a show-stopping scene of yellow David Austin roses (including `Graham Thomas’, top) under-planted with several clumps of deep blue Siberian iris – such a great colour combination. (Pink roses in the pink-and-burgundy-rose garden were, of course, sporadic. But, oh boy, I am looking forward to seeing them all bloom at once this coming spring.) A few like `Jude the Obscure’ with divine fragrance continue here and there. I can envisage the delight my imaginary heroine feels when her great grandfather Niall `blesses’ her garden; it feels like it’s happened to me.

This autumn I shall rejoice by planting abundant tulips (which hungry herbivores really love to nibble): pink ones, white ones, black ones. Clumps of black tulips amongst the silver shrubs and perennials; pools of pure white along the front path; and in the pink and burgundy rose garden around the circular lawn: pink tulips in all hues from softest powder puff to hot cherry and everything in between – where I’ll see them from the house, even on those wet spring days, as the garden wakes up.

 

Autumn-time, planning a beautiful spring garden. Is there anything more pleasurable?

Jill Weatherhead is horticulturist, writer, garden designer and principal at Jill Weatherhead Garden Design who lives in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, and works throughout Victoria (www.jillweatherheadgardendesign.com.au)

Autumn Activity and Blood-Red Bulbs

These cold autumn nights and cooler days have drawn me into the garden like some siren is calling.

So many potted plants to be popped in the ground, rooted cuttings to be potted on, vegetables to be planted...

But first, the red Kaffir Lilies are flowering and I promised some to a friend – long ago. Seeing the engine-red flowers was a huge relief and while they usually bloom for months – my pink one has -  the red Hesperantha coccinea (Syn. Schizostylis)  lurking in a shady corner have only now waved a bright flag to say `here I am’. These bright perennials will complement her orange and red and – importantly - green garden wonderfully, near an area of orange flowers underplanted with a little blue for a soft contrast.

(Rather like Grass Trees (Xanthorrhoea) being called, in the past, `Black Boys’; and the weedy `Wandering Trad’ or `Trad’ (Tradescantia) which used to be (and still is too often) called `Wandering Jew’ (yuck to both) I read that `Kaffir Lilly’ is similarly disliked – in South Africa (its origin), anyhow. `Crimson Flag’, as its also called, is not quite right to me, as the red is closer to vermillion, but I’ll try to remember the name. `Blood Lily’ sounds closer to describing the flower and is a short, punchy moniker fitting to a showy plant – but it’s taken already, of course, by the worthy Haemanthus coccineus (below, coincidentally flowering right now) Maybe Scarlet Flag?).

Now it’s autumn, instinctively I find myself making a list: sow peas (sugar snap or snow pea) and broad beans; mulch the cut-flower beds; pull down an old sweet pea plant (a lovely `blue’, its seed has been collected (dang that’s a new fun and free hobby which results in such fresh seeds so that germination rates are high)); pull out a low purple salvia that’s just too floppy and replace with cherry pie (heliotrope) and neat culinary sage (I like the flowers); and weed, weed weed.  Then mulch, mulch, mulch.

I’ll sow the pea seeds in pots and toss them in my little glasshouse because I can’t sow them in the ground. This is a dilemma at the start of each autumn (before the soil gets too cold), although dwarfed by early and mid-spring’s quandary: the need to get vegetables going (before the soil dries out too much); but just now I can’t bear to pull out tomatoes fruiting or other mature veg like eggplants – grown for the first time this year.

Mostly for fun, but also thinking I could – maybe – pull out some tomato plants, I arranged a blind tomato taste test the other night. (A strange entree.) Which of the big red toms was nicest, number 1(College Challenger, as it turned out, a plant bred at Hawkesbury Agricultural College in the 1950’s), 2 (Burnley Bounty, a cold-tolerant variety) or 3 (Rouge de Marmande, a French heirloom variety)? Number three! Number 2 was least flavoursome to both of us and 1 was sweetest. Black Russian is still my favourite though; J dislikes the colour while I adore the flavour. (We ate our first sweetcorn that night too; we’re still collecting loads of apples and of course I collect eggs each day, so I felt a little like (an older) Barbara Good from The Good Life (without the snooty neighbour; and similarly (if memory serves) - we’ve found that we can’t eat our old hens either; certainly couldn’t shoot them!).

Now we can concentrate on which tomato plants to keep seed of, which is so much fun (realising the pollen parent may be very different; do we pull out yellow toms, large and small, and tomato Burnley Bounty so that plants from seeds collected later will be great? Yes, I think so) and which plants to buy at Kallista market (first Saturday of the month) next spring in that pretty hamlet in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne.

I am loving the late summer produce and the cool autumn gardening weather. But will someone teach me how to cook eggplants please?

Jill Weatherhead is horticulturist, writer, garden designer and principal at Jill Weatherhead Garden Design who lives in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, and works throughout Victoria (www.jillweatherheadgardendesign.com.au)

A Truce with the Hens.

A peace truce has been called - I surmise.  Or maybe I clarified the expectations of the landlords?

It's early autumn and chook after bantam chook has been seriously clucky: zealously, furiously sitting on sterile eggs, attempting the impossible: a magical metamorphosis from pocket of goodness into chicks (if they think that far ahead).

Take away an egg from one of these frenzy-eyed, peckish creatures at your peril. (I exaggerate of course; I always do. Barely a peck from the girls we’ve raised from day-old chicks (above) themselves.) And who could blame them? Recently I've started picking up the overheated hen and bathing their tummies in cool water - which they seem to like - as well as keeping them in a cooler spot for two days when it happens; it does the trick. Then I check them each night: are they sitting on the perch, or huddled in a cosy boudoir?

Closing off two nest boxes left only 2 and this - somehow - has changed everything. Magically. Ah (they seem to think) they're for laying in, nothing else! Eggs are to be left for collection!

On the perch at night the cool air under their bellies keeps the hens less broody. And the culprits? Mainly the beautiful wyandottes (one silver, 3 gold), of course, and only one (of 3) of the light Sussex bantams (including the Blondies, Debbie and Harry, left). Worst of the lot is friendly little Freddie, but she is a simply gorgeous bird (who always runs madly to the food lady) and I think I'd forgive her anything.

Now they are back to scratching the veg patch and pecking at kale and finding insects; and we are rewarded with 2 to 4 eggs per day.

Does anyone want eggs?

Jill Weatherhead is horticulturist, writer, garden designer and principal at Jill Weatherhead Garden Design who lives in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, and works throughout Victoria (www.jillweatherheadgardendesign.com.au)