Autumn Bulbs (with a special spot in the heart for Drimys maritima (Syn Urginea maritima))

I gave a talk on bulbs to my mum's gardening club last week and got some great feedback. It was timely as the autumn bulbs, responding to that fabulous January rain, are shooting up just now: belladonna lilies (pink ones and white), autumn snowflakes, rain lilies.

My favourite, flowering as never before, is Drimys maritima (Syn Urginea maritime, left): stately, handsome and so welcome in the rather - dry garden.

It's time, too, to pore over bulb catalogues and admire new cultivars, some bred here in Australia and consider buying, or re-potting the capsules of joy.

Colchicum, oddly, have not bloomed yet (they often flower in bone-dry January in the  garden or in a paper bag indoors) and it was suggested that their blooming trigger might be a change in barometric pressure. Fascinating! 

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)

Flora and Fauna

It's pretty special when there's a furry antechinus zooming around the well-watered pots by the front and back doors.  As carnivores, they are munching  the slugs with glee (or is that emotion just mine?) but are they annoying the plentiful brown tree frogs too?

One little frog leapt as high as the washing and may have been regretful when the clothes dried, and I certainly got quite a (pleasant) surprise as I brought in the washing yesterday - `that's a heavy brown leaf on my chest - oh, it's hopping up towards my neck...hmmm.' Over to the cool white lace-cap hydrangeas on the east side of the house, where some cool, woodland perennials are sitting in pots underneath, awaiting the autumn rains (`when are we going to get there?'!) and I brush my new little friend gently onto a leaf where, in the sunny morning warmth, it sits a little while before deciding where to go (down to another pot I imagine.)

My friend, artist, gardener Kay Craig introduced me to `bog pots' (pots with no drainage holes) and my version - stay with me! - a plastic pot inside a plastic bag (carefully pushed down to be unseen) inside an attractive pot of similar size (one that suits all the others) is a way - at last! - of keeping alive primulas, of keeping happy so many of my beloved woodland perennials in these cruel dry summers, and these attract frogs wonderfully. If I move a pot, I need to be very careful not to injure a frog, or 2, or more rarely, three.

Are we alone in not spraying for spiders? Yes, the cobwebs are unsightly here and there under the veranda but they have spiders and catch insects...so it seems that every 10 minutes or so a scrub wren (and other birds) will scuttle along just outside our floor-length windows and look for and catch insects. (And in spring the cobwebs are used in nests.) Our friends who spray (and clean) say that the cobwebs come back immediately so I can be both smugly organic (a mis-used word to mean no chemicals) and lazy.

Meanwhile J bought me a water garden for Christmas. At last I can buy a waterlily, a long-held dream (and a white, deliciously petite one at that); we are watching our flower bud grow to the surface with great anticipation. We've placed the huge bowl near the outdoor table and chairs where we can enjoy the ambience and hopefully wildlife, placing an elegant, curving stick on it to provide a way out for clambering frogs; but it meant removal of the too-nearby birdbath. This sandstone-coloured birdbath was lugged to the herb garden under the dwarf peach outside the kitchen window, under a useful twiggy perch, and the little wild birds discovered it, and started to use it within a day or two. So I'm in the kitchen and I see red-browed scrub-wrens bathing 2m away (I've only seen them in flocks moving through the lawn, eating the grass seed) and oh, at last, I can see what they really look like! Wow! It makes up for the bird bath looking plonked there; the nearby oregano and golden oregano needs to grow around it, badly, and soften that base soon. Maybe a few culinary sage bushes around it will anchor it better.

Domestic fauna - hens - have been pretty interesting too.

Treacle is definitely an emo. Does Treacle miss her old sparring partner Toffee? She mopes; there's no joie de vivre , `no one loves (or notices) me', no laying, `I'm not eating that boring crap', a hunched over apart-ness; surely she'd wear black if she could. An elderly teenager?

Freddie thinks she's a blackbird, sprinting like The Dressmaker's unstoppable Mr Almanac, but forever scratching and seeking food and stopping only to assert dominance.

Gerri is neurotic, jumping at her own shadow, a henny penny if you will. (`J's carrying a ladder - panic - now!', `there's a goshawk! - oh, OK, maybe a leaf flapped particularly strongly', and so on. She's like the other light Sussex girls, with an unfortunate whingey call and bad eyesight, having trouble hopping up her perch if she leaves it too late. Our other pretty bantams are golden and silver wyandottes - as bantams they have very small eggs - and are clucky quite often but don't whine...unless they were brought up amongst the flock; the youngest wyandottes learnt a whining-sounding call from their aunts.

Yesterday I popped into the hen run with a bowl of food scraps, only to find 2 nests filled up with 3 optimistic girls. Two immediately came out but in the interests of fairness I waited for Gerri; and waited. I stuck my head into the henhouse and showed her the full bowl to show her that I was still waiting - politely - for her. And there was Gerri squeezing out an egg tout de suite, poor girl, then waiting to be sure she didn't harm it. Then she flaps out to join the party (`Wait for me...').

Wyadotte after wyandotte tries to hatch the sterile eggs. Sometimes though, I think it's the appeal of a nice looking boudoir, even egg-less beds are attractive; they need time away from their sisters, time out, away from power games and politics. So then the mean old food lady comes along and tosses them out before real broodiness sets in. No hens are going on hunger strike on my watch. 

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)

Summer Vegetables

The edible garden is behaving strangely this year: sweet corn - usually stunted - is skyrocketing (in 2 beds!) and in an adjacent bed the tomatoes - all of them - are near death, limp and miserable. And we've been watering more than usual, filling up the gravity tank from the dam a couple of times already. What's going on?

Well, I think it's the Warrigal greens (Tetragonia) under the tomatoes, leaping and pirouetting with glee, absorbing every skerrick of water and nutrient to be found. It's a plant I generally like, hardy, fast growing, and the hens just love the flavour - although I don't use it much in the kitchen. (A friend makes a dip with it and I should try making it.) But how I wish it wouldn't self-sow quite so much, or take over quite so well. And now: out-compete the tomatoes, too. That's a step too far.

We take tomatoes seriously in our family. Not quite `Looking for Alibrandi' - serious (alas), but serious never-the-less. I've been listening to my family joke for years about who has grown the first tomato of the season; who has picked one before Christmas (in a good year)...and my brother-in-law makes a very nice tomato sauce, too. In cool-temperate Emerald, Mum loved to be the first, potting up little tomato seedlings early and popping them in her glasshouse to give her the edge. (I was a very young gardener when we first visited WA and met a couple from Perth who told me - and I was incredulous - that their tomato season finished before Christmas.)

Here we are in January with barely a green tomato. Oh, the shame. So out I go to pluck out every Warrigal green from the tomato plot (flinging them to the appreciative hens), and water and mulch heavily and maybe feed, too. The henhouse floor needs cleaning...there's my mulch and feed in one foul (sorry) swoop.

The beans are growing like Jack's fabled vines with purple pods which are easy to see - and find - when they're young and delicious. Am I alone in finding the alchemy of deep amethyst to jade when cooking disappointing?

The courgettes are small and sweet but the odd zucchini gets missed completely and turns into a marrow - which the hens devour. I love the sense of no waste. A friend has many plants - just for the flowers, for stuffing and frying; decadent; the joys of a large country garden. (Once you have the edible garden bug, you just want the garden bigger and bigger.)

I need to look after the sweet corn. Bush rats come into the garden and devour the delicious cobs most years. Some sort of wire, or fly-wire, around each cob is probably required...I think I'll bring out my ultrasonic possum deterrent gadgets instead; much less work! I hope they'll do the trick. 

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)

Bird Bath Activity

 

Checking the CFA fire danger ratings it's our first `Extreme' fire danger day of the summer season so we've checked our hens and watered the vegie patch and left early for the safety of the suburbs.

But not before filling up the bird baths. It's been so hot and dry, and today will be windy, and the little birds need the water.

They say to have shallow water that's not too deep for the little birds that I love so much - do they think they will drown when they drink or bathe? - but a wonderful pottery bowl I have in the garden, made by my mother-in-law when she was a pottery teacher, is rendered shallow by the placement of a central large stone. The little birds love it: blue fairy wrens, scrub wrens, Willie wagtails. Occasionally silver-eyes and tree creepers. Yellow robins splashing as they take a bath early in the morning.

Before the wallaby-proof fence gave me my garden: Ms wallaby supped from this bowl too; now, heavy with joey (so appropriate, one feels, in the week before Christmas) she must detour to the dam and drink there.

As the lawn browns off, quickly, the last of the grass seed is taken by re-browed finches moving through the lawn while the fairy blue wren couple still (!) are constantly admiring themselves in the window (not like the fighting of years ago); how do they find time to forage for food?

Honeyeaters seem to be in an endless quest for nectar, darting from flower to flower; salvias in particular. I'm not sure if many native plants are blooming for them just now - other than the lovely tree, Victorian Christmas Bush (Prostanthera lasianthos); but a lovely lemon Phygelius planted by the rusty treble clef `statue' brings in these birds and - luxury - they can perch on the structure as they sip the flowers; planted, by chance, outside a window so I see the shenanigans.

I'd assumed - wrongly - that I lived amongst this wealth of bird life because I live outside Melbourne and I am lucky enough to live amid a couple of hectares of bushland. But chatting to - I hope - new friends at a party last weekend - residents of Melbourne - has disabused me of this notion. We chatted about this and that bird that we were lucky enough to have visit our gardens; kindred spirits. (And she like frogs, too.) Then she mentioned feeding magpies - those larger birds of great character - with mince meat. Turning to J: `we can't do that can we?'; rhetorical; we're vegetarian. `Cheese works' we were told and while I love the idea there's problems. Apart from the arguments about feeding wild creatures (and the problems they face when you go away) J points out something very obvious about upsetting our present, pleasant balance: don't encourage big birds which will scare away (or eat) all the sweet little birds I love so much.

And we do see big ones, actually, sometimes: goshawks and eagles in the sky, tawny frogmouths in the gum trees, ducks visiting the dam, powerful owl hooting some nights.

So I won't feed the magpies but I rather wish they'd come down and pounce on the blackbirds - imported from Britain - scratching mulch from one end of the garden to the other.

And the hens? They have virtual air-conditioning. We have 2 baths (yes, baths) of raspberry plants in their run, well-watered, and underneath them is a very cool spot for our girls to sit the hot hours out. But please, girls, when laying, please don't get clucky today.

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)

Clematis, Iris and Metal Wigwams

 

The roses may be nearly over but Japanese iris - purple ones near the purple gate (a happy accident) - and clematis are flowering profusely.

Some of the clematis I bought last year were in 20cm (8-inch) pots and they romped up their supports like there was no tomorrow. I'm delighted with these supports: 2 metal wigwams, each placed centrally in a cut-flower bed, with a very simple design to link to the rough teatree tripods within the adjacent edible patch. Something fancy would have looked out of place.

Some of the clematis are C. viticella hybrids: dainty, sweet.

Nearby, I've added a Clematis viticella cultivar, a pale one, to my chicken run, too, to give my girls some summer shade, and discovered something 25 years late. I worked in a retail plant nursery a life time ago for nearly a year and well-remember tying up climbers: I was taught not to trim them, but to loop them and tie them up. Well, I've finally bought one just like this, unravelled the vine carefully and dang me, I've got a 2m high climber already (that's taller than me!) and while a lot of the vine is woody, to my surprise I didn't harm it when I untangled it; no, I have a healthy, instantly tall plant. All those years of doubt...answered. Now to remove the last of the woody, dead and oh so enormous kiwi plant (not my choice) which blankets the run - now a skeleton, it waves metres above the run.

As usual the clematis plants in the cut-flower beds were carefully chosen for colour: pink and whites on one hexapod (amid pink and white cut flowers - white Narcissus and pink and white lilies etc), and blues and white for the other (amid bluebells, yellow Narcissus, white belladonna lilies).

To complete it, there's a row of huge, silver-leaf plants of globe artichokes behind each bed; I love the look of these when they're in full leaf. My problem is I like even my cut flower beds to look good all the time - it's a tall order, isn't it? 

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)

An Intriguing Scent in the Air; White Flowers at Dusk; Blood-red Lilies

A hot, late-spring day and I'm watering my pots by the back door in the early morning. I'm nowhere near any roses but suddenly there's a sweet scent in the air and I have to find out where it's coming from. I'm getting warmer, then colder...could it possibly be the hydrangeas (no), Thalictrum (no), Asiatic lilies (unlikely, and no)?

I'm sniffing about like some half-crazed blood hound until I track it down: metres away are that tough-as-old-boots evergreen shrub, mock orange (Philadelphus (named for `brotherly love') coronarius (Syn. Philadelphus mexicanus) below), many of them, all suddenly covered in down-turned cream cups exuding sweet perfume. Who knew it could waft so effectively?

What a great moment to discover, or rediscover, a creamy-white flower in the garden; I've been contemplating white flowers: I love the way they gleam at dusk.

Near the dining room door is a dwarf mock orange with sweet white flowers just now too. And beyond this is a new bed where I've been replanting dwarf white dahlias from a new path area, need to plant a dwarf white Gladiolus (a seedling of `The Bride' that I spied at Kallista market), and had that dreaded thought, what if I had a white (and green) garden. Noooo!

My brother-in-law would call this `Little Sissy' and quite right. How easy to fall into the trap of mimicking that sensational, beloved garden room at Sissinghurst Castle, the White(-and-Green) Garden where Vita Sackville-West thought aloud, so to speak, via her newspaper articles, as she planned it in the 1930's.

I'll never do it 1/10 as well as Vita and I refuse to try. And yet, the mind wanders...

I love the way white flowers come alive, and glimmer and shimmer at dusk, as all the colours recede. And this bed is between the pink-and-crimson roses and the blue-and-yellow cut flower bed (with just one other bulb bed between them as well). White separating them seems like a good idea, if a little harsh.

An email from a sister seems to set the seal on the plan: ` Do you want white bearded irises, I want to get rid of some. See you Sunday.' (I reply: ` I'd LOVE some white bearded iris, thank you. Would you like belladonna lilies, hellebores or obedient plant (tall, mauve)? I am enjoying the garden so much. Roses! Iris! Did I mention roses? And would you like some eggs?) (Please remember that my roses have never flowered before, kind reader. The munching marsupials have access, now, to only a dozen of our 13 acres. But not my ½ acre garden any longer. Hurrah.)

White iris...

My imagination takes flight far too quickly. I'm peopling the bed: peonies, poppies, Plectranthus, pansies even. All white.

This will be no grand plot but a little patch of evening glow. Let's add Bouvardia for perfume, too.

Maybe some scattering of seeds: tall perfumed Nicotiana; Cleome and cosmos for autumn; most of all, that flower I met in the Mediterranean 5 years ago, Orlaya grandiflora, with flat Queen Anne's Lace-heads unusually dappled with their outer ring of larger tear-drop petals. (I have Orlaya near the front door and must collect seeds of this exquisite ephemeral, top.)

Add bulbs like winter snowdrops, and winter and spring white daffodils, and spring and summer lilies to extend the season, all arctic white. Even Galtonia candicans, that elegant bulb, with tall stalks of clipped bell flowers, bridal-white in mid-summer; these were blooms in my sister's wedding bouquet, I believe, in the 1970's. Or so Mum used to say; I like these family stories. (I was 10.)

Suddenly my mere dozen square metres are stuffed full. I need to take some plants out again - quickly.

It needs lashings of green and so for edging, along with white cranesbills I might plant white Scaevola, neat, green with a sprinkling of small flowers which don't overwhelm. And dwarf greenish Nicotiana, below, maybe; almost invisible by day, but beaming light at dusk; extraordinary.

But...I've already planted a pale pink Thryptomene in the centre, perfect for its height and width (that sounds dreary) and its so-elegant arching branches of little myrtaceous flowers. Perhaps I'll add pale pink flowers to the white plants; a link to the adjacent pink rose bed; and hope my pale pink Astrantia (currently in pots) will like this hot sunny spot. 

No, I think a touch, just a touch of burgundy as well, amongst all the baby-doll-pink and white will lift the bed enormously. Maybe Sanguisorbia `Red Thunder' with little heads of strong hue held on wiry stems - nearer burgundy than red, I hasten to add (like too many misnamed plants). I think this will work really well.

Unlike...I too often mention my silver and raspberry bed, perhaps, expanded now with blackberry and cherry and strawberry colours to become a summer pudding kaleidoscope. It's given me a lot of pleasure this spring and I expected cherry-coloured Asiatic lilies to continue the joy. But Oh No! Blood Red! (Below.) They clash and look hideous against the raspberry Salvia, against the black (blackberry) hollyhock, cherry Nicotiana, and the various other pinks. Out they'll come tout de suite. (Maybe they need their own bed. And may the odds be ever in their favour.)

 And then I'll be back to enjoying again the plume poppy (Macleaya) in particular at the back, tossing its gorgeous silvery leaves in this breeze. (I've been longing to grow this perennial for a score years or more. (Wandering wallabies found it delicious.)) With the lilies gone I'll assess the pink-lilac Centaurea: great foliage, silver, and so perfect here, but are the flowers too mauve? Let's wait a few days to evaluate that one. 

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)

 

Spring Wildflowers and Our Garden In the Bush

 Our bushland has erupted in orange, yellow and white (and a touch of blue).

Two orange pea flowers are blooming (including Dillwynia, below), lemon paperbark (Melaleuca) and Goodenia (below) have little yellow flowers and teatree is showy with masses of pure white myrtaceous flowers.

And my all-time favourite, butterfly flag (Diplarrena moraea, above), like white butterflies hovering at about 1.2m high: lots of them this year, and we've planted some near our front path and little purple gate, inside and outside the wallaby-proof fence. There may be tiny blue stars, too (top).

Then you enter the garden and it's yellow and blue (at first) - but the flowers are bigger, so it's a bit of a shock...or is that expected of a garden?

What's more, it hit me this week, that our garden is a little clearing in the forest (or bushland). Odd, I hear you say; how can you not know that? Well, our garden is fairly open and looks across the valley to a forested hillside (lucky us). But where there was no trees between us and the property (not garden) gate above us, just `fill', we've allowed too many native trees to grow, and grow too tall. Suddenly they're triffids, battering on the garden fence, it seems. But benign, if a bit sun-robbing (in winter) and giving us privacy and - all of a sudden - a feeling I like, that we are miles from civilization, in a cocoon of gentle nature (yes, rose-colored glasses), away from the hurly burly of city life, at a slower pace. The garden is still open on the downhill side, so ducks can still swoop in to land, easily, on our dam, but now there's bushland (bush I was taught to love, not fear, by my English (botanist) mother, as a child) on every side, all around the garden.           .

Perfect.

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)