Season of Slow Senescence

Autumn has been hot and cold, dry and now wet. Confusion reigns in the garden as spring flowers throw bouquets of white May (Spiraea, above) amongst the bedraggled flaming leaves, Mock Orange (Philadelphus) sport perfumed blooms near dogwoods with sanguine foliage (turning ruby when the sun peeps out) and even a tall evening primrose shows some of its delicious lemon colour.

Most of the tiny bulbous treasures of autumn are over now but Cyclamen cyprium continues to toss up its sweet little near-white blooms with swept-up petals over white-splashed leaves; and creamy white hoop petticoat daffodils herald the winter months.

Salvias continue the display of soft purple, deep blue or velvet-palest pink (`Velour Pink’) with `Anthony Parker’, darkly blue, coming into its own.

Autumn regulars arrived last month: lilac Spur-flower (Plectranthus, a great plant for shade); dainty apple-blossom, candy-pink and ice-white Nerines were joined by sparkling engine-red (`Fothergilla Major’) and sweet daisy-faces of grape-purple Easter-daisies and snowy cosmos. Kaffir lily (Schizostylis), fierce red or pale pink, never rests, but I find the white form much less hardy.

But it’s mostly just a flower here or there. Most satisfying is, still, my sun and sky bed where, at the moment,  blue salvias – deep blue and azure – mix with golden Gaillardia `Mesa’, lemon Phygelius and Goldmound Bidens; all are backed by the glossy leaves and perfumed white flowers of Mexican Orange Blosssom.

It seems almost too early to have winter flowers of palest pink Thryptomene let alone spring treasures: sweetly pink Erodium, some deep blue bugle (Ajuga, its flowers mostly nestling amongst the leaves), even a few little Forget-Me-Not-like Brunnera blooms in the shadiest spot. Oddest of all, now that it’s so cold at night, is the one Cyclamen purpurescens tuber (below) with 4 flowers of soft lilac-pink, mouths deeper, almost fuchsia-pink, as if lipstick has been applied. Melbourne’s heat makes it flowers well in summer but these are a definite bonus, on the last day of autumn. I suspect it’s a response to the run of warm weather a month ago and I’m certainly not complaining! The garden throws up interesting conundrums constantly and when it’s extra flowers, I believe we should just sit back and enjoy them.

Cyclamen

 Why is it that some flowers appeal, and others do not? The Empress Joséphine is still famous for collecting every then-known rose at the Château de Mamaison, near Paris; local celebrity Otto Fauser grows wondrous little crocus from seed and my friend Peter Leigh has taken winter roses (Helleborus) from England, Japan and other horticultural hot spots and transformed the dullards into duchesses better than any in the world. (His latest catalogue includes the elusive double black (a black prince?): neat, handsome...stand aside!)

Many plants are lovely but my mother – a botanist and, of course, gardener - and my sister Caroline (keen gardener too) probably loved Cyclamen the most. I wonder if my parents property was chosen alone for its potential to have that sweep of little ivy-leaf autumn-flowering cyclamen (C. hederifolium, now popping up in the lawn where ants have spread the seeds); at each leaf fall a delicious sight: lilac-pink petals swept up on 10cm stalks hovering over wonderfully-marbled leaves amongst the dry leaves of the deciduous trees along the drive. (This is no idle surmise; when we looked for land  - for 2 years - at each place I established the probable site for my circle of lawn. My mother was older and had stronger ideas.)

Neither will see the new cyclamen book, alas. Brian Mathew’s (editor) monograph is comprehensive (and big, bold and beautiful); I contributed with a small section about cyclamen grown in Australia. I visited the stunning State Library in Melbourne many times and spoke to some of the most interesting people in the country. The book germinated, I believe, about 7 years ago, and – very bulb-like – flowered after 7 years growth (altho’ the cyclamen is a tuber, like a potato, but let’s not get too pedantic). I saw and photographed catalogues and papers dating back to 1845 and fell in love with these exquisite drawings which seriously rival their subjects.

It’s nearly Mother’s Day and as large cyclamen – giant forms bred of C. persicum - flood into the nurseries I enjoy contemplating their forbears like this one (from a Law and Somner catalogue, circa 1893, top), surely much, much smaller, called Cyclamen persicum giganteum then; now they’d be barely a head turner...depending on that very personal attribute, whether you are a lover of blooms great or small.

Now I like petite flowers.

I like little camellia blooms, and shudder over the largest; same with gladioli, clematis, and so many other plants over-bred – as I see it - in the `50’s. I don’t like cottage gardens much, but at least they brought back near-species gladioli – so sweet – and some smaller dahlias that don’t need staking (what a pointless exercise that was). (Also prickly species roses which don’t flower for long...but rosarians are crazy, we all know that.)

And lately some of the bulb growers seem to be selling species cyclamen which are so hardy here in south-east Oz. Maybe it’s just that I’m a tired working woman – but I love a plant that is:

1.       Pretty

2.       Hardy

3.       Can be tossed anyhow in the ground

4.       Requires no cosseting

5.       Self sows gently

6.       Never needs care

7.       Grow in dry shade under trees

8.       And there are just more flowers – pretty little ones – every year.

Simple!

Cyclamen hederifolium in particular is hardy, and the easiest cyclamen in south-east Australia. Its flowers are slowing as we head towards winter - the mercury plummeting to 2 degrees last night – but in its place I expect, very soon, the chubby C. coum (above, a nice form with silvery `Christmas tree' markings, I am showing to honour my sister born on this special day) to start its seemingly miraculous winter blooms.

In memory of my sister Caroline Clavarino (neé Weatherhead)

25^th December 1950 – 4^th May 2013

Old birds, new chicks and gum trees

As we dodge Avian flu and regular flu and returning blackbirds (which is worst?) we welcome some avian additions to the household, or outliers, and garden.

First is little Nadia. Sick of booting mercurial Freddy off the nest (broody for 9 months!) we popped some fertilised eggs under her. One evening I stole her own egg (not happy), replaced it with two which had a spark of life (a shiver of joy), added another 2 (OK...), another, last egg, for she is a very small Wyandotte (not impressed) and that was her allotment; thank you to our friend Eddie. She concentrated hard and 19 and a half days later, while rat-proofing her enclosure, I found one had started to hatch. Making a very poor midwife, I hastily popped it – eye-glaring and wing-thrusting (the hatchling, not me) - into the nest, picked up Freddy and tossed her in after it. Phew.

Nadia’s father, it turned out, was `inexperienced’ and the other 4 eggs were infertile; apparently now he has favourites. (There’s no good TV is there?)

But from day 2 Nadia – another bantam - would hop up onto Mum like a gymnast and she even found a high bar a few days later. As a child of the `70’s I promptly named her for the perfectly scoring Romanian Comăneci of the 1976 Montreal Olympics. For 6 weeks Freddy taught her all the important life skills: this is how to scratch for food, this is how to scratch for food, this is how...but now they are growing a little more sisterly, a tad more independent...until nightfall. Over 7 weeks and Nadia still snuggled under her eiderdown quilt at night, inquisitive head poking out from Mum’s breast. Then at dawn she leaps up onto the top of the feeder; this is not a problem. (We anxiously watch her tail which looks reassuringly feminine.) And now at 8 weeks: it’s almost avuncular as Freddy can barely drape a wing over the growing one on these cold nights, down to 4°C.

Lucy (top) is our other avian newcomer. Where Nadia is russet and charcoal, fluffy and whirling, Lucy is silvery, metal-hard and...also whirling. More bird (to me) than seahorse or sea dragon - like other creations of the wonderful artist Daniel Jenkins - she has delicate ribbons in place of mane, wings, and tail; fantastical. Turning with the winds, she is patinated repoussé copper somehow perfectly reflecting, almost replicating, rippling grey leaves of our nicest nearby gums, with russet also for the bark.

We’re lucky, here. My English cousin Joe laughed when he visited last year and heard that our patch of bush with its orchids and lizards, wild flowers and little birds, was saved from destruction by its poor soil. Monbulk and other areas in the Dandenong Ranges have mountain soil (and farms), Sherbrooke has superb soaring Mountain Ash (and shade; Eucalyptus regnans (named in 1871) was arguably overestimated by Baron von Mueller (and one or two others) by 100 feet but still reaches an impressive 100m), but we have dumpy Messmate Gums which don’t shade the house in winter. Better yet, we also have Silver-leaf Stringybark (E. cinerea subsp cephalocarpa) which add a further trick to that magical trick of all gums - those round silver-white juvenile leaves so beloved of florists – with brilliant blue-tinged platinum sickle-shaped leaves in spring turning slowly to grey as the season’s progress like some annual witches progress from shimmering damsel to hoary crone. Right now – mid-autumn – there are still some leaves with a dusting of snowy white, most notable on a sunny day.

(It’s part fellow feeling for the heat they endure, but I like these down-pointing leaves, avoiding excess sun, which allow sunshine through to the shrub layer and the understorey with its small violets and fringed lilies, chocolate lilies and milkmaids, and all the creatures they support. You probably need to be born here or transplanted early to get this almost-irrational strong affection for the gum, love its beauty and grandeur, and shed a tear when you are abroad for too long and get a whiff of the scent of its leaf. It’s easy to admire the stately outback ghost gums, the majestic white-trunked manna gums in the nearby forest, the handsome spotted gums near the south east coast (E. maculata, a really great plant), the gleam of copper, olive, cream and metal-grey of snow gums in the high country if you ski amongst them when the trunks shine wetly, and even the scarlet-flowering gums with their extraordinary flower-power in the hottest days of summer; but the native born also, generally, embraces the awkward scarecrows too, the straggly and crooked growth, the fascinating epicormic growth along branches of most species after fire, the ribbons that fall from the trunk of some, the dull leaves of hard olive-green (surely there is a better word for this colour?), its ability to be home to mistletoe, birds, insects, possums and the insect larvae that give the scribbly gum its name. Complete individuality.) 

Whenever we put the kettle the on to boil we gaze out to the north into the garden, out into the sunshine where we have 3 of these big craggy bent-over fellows, sometimes ashen, but mainly gleaming silvery-white, and they distract the eye from the old grey corrugated sheds that we inherited with the property. These trees have been home to possums and owls, but most of all tawny frogmouths which sit all day in pairs, stone-still, with their heads up, eyes closed and mimic stringybark branches perfectly.

Lucy fits like a glove.

Lucy came as a gift from J as I scored my half century, and was a clever idea where I’d proposed a heavier sculpture. Instead she is light and just the right proportion for our country garden. Daniel made a sculpture – only superficially similar - that my parents have loved in their garden (above, with wattles and daffodils) for over 20 years. As they called theirs `Leunix’ (a pet name combining a phoenix and revered cartoonist  of all things innocent and curly, Michael Leunig), so did we until she was ours and then...she was shortened, of course. Lucy is arguably more aquatic and is delightfully curly but I just want her to be a bird.

And just to emphasise the importance of creatures avian, here is a picture of me at 16 with one of my `girls’ circa 1980, with my mother and my oldest niece; I think it’s my favourite picture of Mum. Chicks and chooks, if you will. 

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.