Wild Blue Sun Orchids in Spring

One of those many, many reasons that I love living in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne is the countless spring wildflowers, and the blue sun orchids are maybe the pinnacle (along with other wild things like our rather-too-friendly marsupials). Thelymitra ixioides is also known as Spotted Sun Orchid and it makes me smile for another reason...when it actually opens, that is, and pollinates with other flowers in the species, when it's very sunny (otherwise it self-pollinates).

I smile because it grows on my bushland property (High 5!) and was identified by my botanist mother when we bought our patch of paradise 20 odd years ago...and she said (with some sort of pride, I think), that we had the rare unspotted form (High 5! I guess).  But J and I don't want to seem to boast, especially about this, and (until now!) have kept quiet about this piece of luck. (This blue sun orchid is spotted and I photographed it near home, when orchid hunting with friends - a surprisingly enjoyable pastime each spring.) Besides, it becomes a burden of responsibility, doesn't it - to keep out neighbouring cattle or horses, for example, to preserve the species (or subspecies) along with other people who own bushland (and appreciate it) and National Parks - if heavy-footed foreign creatures are kept out. One day we might put a covenant on our bushland with Trust for Nature to protect it forever, which will still allow us our cleared (non-bush) area for garden/ animals etc.

I forget exactly, but I think we've found 16 species of orchid in just 13 acres/ 5 ha (including an albino beard orchid). That's sure worth protecting. Forever.

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)

Ode to a Little White Hen

 

Our Light Sussex bantams are the prettiest birds imaginable; John's choice, if memory serves; they are flashy, bright white and banded black, firm of beak and fast of wing.

My choice, I think, were the softly coloured wyandottes, feathered with darker lines; with names like Toffee and Treacle, you can imagine the colouring.

Five years ago we started off with 2 of the Light Sussex bantams and I called them my Blondies, so (of course) they were called Debbie and Harry. (I love punk music, and pop music of the late `70's.) (Later joined by blond-tressed Gerri (Hall. Remember the `Let's Stick Together' video? Coolest model ever.)

All my girls have been raised from day-old chicks which makes them darn special. We've seen them learn to roost, learn to find the very best nest box, learn that I'm the Food Lady. Even learn my cough from the bedroom - which brings on a `we want pizza' sort of call. They've decided that Warrigal greens is their favourite of the greens. We've cracked it when they get clucky.

When the favourite (mercury-coloured Freddie, friendliest Freddie) got sick, we crossed that threshold, and took her to a vet. A few days of a chatty chook in a box in the house - boy, did I enjoy that, oh yes - a daily pill popped into the struggling beak and voilà, we have a happy layer again. Money well spent thank you.

So today was a bit different. Debbie had been a little off colour; then she couldn't get up to the roost at night (but that day was a public holiday);  today she was having trouble walking. Off to the wonderful bird vet. Is it infectious? (Hopefully not.)  Is it easily fixed? (Sadly, no.) Is she suffering? (Well, maybe, and not for any time longer.) Euthanasia please.

 

The wonderful vet goes to organise her things and this gives me time to stroke Debbie's white rump and those fabulous black feathers at her ruff.  It's a quiet chance to say good bye, it's peaceful, sweet, even.

Do we want to bring her home? Yes. She gets a pet's burial, of course, under a special shrub that will never be disturbed. And I have a white David Austin rose in a pot, bought when on a nursery visit with my sisters, that needs planting. (Rosa `Windermere', a creamy rose with `a strong fragrance with a hint of citrus', that reaches 1.2m and flowers forever.). Perfect.

I dig out some belladonna lilies and `plant' them both (pet then shrub) at the back of a border where there's lots of grey leaves (large-leaf Lamb's Ears; an unusual Ballota) and white, pink and purple flowers.

I have some black mondo grass in pots, too (from Mum's garden). They'd remind me of Debbie's beautiful ruff but...would they look nice or...I suspect, awful, under the rose. Packets of `black' and white tulips can look great, but it's a powerful combination which should be used with care, maybe amongst lots of green, and not permanently, like I'm proposing. Hmmm. I think Geranium phaeum instead, or Mourning Widow as it's known, with its little dark flowers over pretty, rounded clumps of greenery would look much better. And if the colours are only meaningful to me? No matter.

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)

White Flowers (and Other Colours in the Garden)

Yes, colour (or its absence) in the garden again.

I've just been chatting to an enthusiastic gardener - Merryn Maher of Banool, who I interviewed for Country Life Yarra Valley and Ranges, and found that roses were not her favourite plants, as I'd been led to expect, but a more subtle effect. No, as the weather warms, and her (large) garden becomes another room to live in, the hydrangeas begin flowering and she has white ones including oak-leaf hydrangea (H. quercifolia) and Hydrangea arborescens `Annabelle', planted in masses in beds designed by renowned designer Paul Bangay. These are her favourite plants - in her favourite time of year. White flowers under large shady trees; a garden of green and white. (And her favourite rose? A David Austin rose, `Abraham Darby', which has large cupped flowers of pink-apricot, which she loves for its rich fruity fragrance. Like other roses and flowers near her front door, it's chosen for its colour, its likeness to the honey-colour of the old stone house. `Abraham Darby' has a long flowering season, and the first flower has just come out on the sunny spring day I visit. Merryn picks a flower and we both inhale deeply with appreciation.) 

After the interview we reminisced about our favourite British gardens and discussed Hidcote Manor (the first serious garden of colours, and a great example) and then "The White Garden" at Sissinghurst Castle - and the importance of green (and lots of it) and structure in a white garden. (Should anyone else try a white garden? Now that's a whole extra story.) 

Unusually this gardener is keen on interesting plants (Paris, Trillium) yet employed an outstanding designer too, for structure and for plant palette too (and `masses, large numbers for quick effect').

Coincidentally she tells me of her love of white flowers just when my own garden has been filled - surreptitiously, it seems, by a glorious surfeit of dazzling bridal blooms (I notice when I get home) - the heavily-fragrant Mexican orange blossom (Choisya), the snowy Viburnum plicatum (top) and the dogwood laden with large flowers of purity, named - unfortunately - `Eddie's White Wonder'. There's the last of the Narcissus too (the Poet's daffodil, N. poeticus - why does this always make me think of the northern England's daffy-down-dilly, Wordsworth's daffodils, which are probably N. pseudonarcissus? The wildness, the simplicity, or the fact of being a species? Or just a love of very local common names; and they don't get much better than daffy-down-dilly).

Grey leaf campion (Lychnis) has white flowers just beginning its spring season; it's a sweet, subtle little plant that seems to be perennial for me, and self-sows so prolifically that it could easily become a weed - but I don't let it get a firm foot hold in. (There's the very pretty rose campion with deepest pink-cerise flowers but once you have that in your garden - it's there forever, and for me, when it's next to orange flowers, the effect jars badly; the flowers are swearing at each other. No, I may have very few red or orange flowers in the garden, but only the white form of campion for me, thank you. Just in case.)

Pure white are the first of the bearded iris, too (above), which have just unfurled their flags; these came from my sister. I love them.

(There's still lots of blue too: bugle (Ajuga (left) - covered in orange butterflies), Spanish bluebells (Hyacinthoides hispanica) and the first of the iris: mauve Pacific coast types, deep purple ones and a tall lilac iris, delicate-looking, tolerating the damp soil well and oh-so-pretty by the soft purple front gate. Along the front path, amongst the bugle, are windflowers (Anemone coronaria, so hardy) blue and white and single, my preference, and the last of the white tulips.)

So I'm looking at my white flowers, and my garden, with a fresh eye, which is always useful. For some people white is a non-colour, I know, and a let-down. But think how they (the flowers, not the people) emerge at dusk with a flourish, a `Here I Am' as the other colours recede.

For the lovers of green-on-green gardens, any flowers are a distraction; and if they're exotic flowers then lovers of native gardens - still so in vogue - will be against so many of them, which seems such a pity. (Indigenous is different, to me. There's a meaningful purpose to an indigenous corner of a garden, making it a wildlife habitat, perhaps, if plants are chosen carefully; but native gardens of plants from all over Australia? (Including plants from deserts and rainforests.) And no other country? Why? By the way, I use Correas and Scaevolas in my designs - because they are great plants - I am not averse to native plants of course.)

It's mid-spring - and the plants seem to know it. The Mexican orange blossom is so laden with blooms that the branches are arching over in a way I've never seen before, the Viburnum is dazzling and the dogwood (below) is cascading with its unusual flowers, each with 4 white bracts, more than ever before. Do I say thank you to the copious rain that never seems to stop?

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 Generosity of Gardeners

The generosity of gardeners is a special thing. Sure, many plants grow and spread, a little can be divided off, but it's more than that, it's a sharing of something you love, 'here, have some, I want you to enjoy it too.'
I may have written before about my friend J who is probably as passionate about her plot of plants as I am, and enjoys looking around mine, and for whom I really like heaving up a bit of this or that perennial. But I can't walk around with a spade - then she says `I can't admire anything or you'll just dig it up' (my prerogative, surely?). No, a little trowel works better. J relaxes, she gets smaller pieces of plants, and...is there pride involved? Guilt? It's such a shame.

And yet I know how she feels. I am in a garden club and have known one of its members for nearly 25 years. V has been gardening longer than me and, let's be honest, is a better gardener, too. (She doesn't get put off by mere headaches or tiredness, she does this thing called Looking After her Plants.) It just so happens that V and I love the same sorts of plants, share the same tastes, like the same colours. Too often, I seem to fall in love with one of her treasures and beg a piece...and we've both realised that we share a very similar taste, and she knows I don't bother other people (or admire their choices) half as often! So...I try to limit my enthusiasm (I don't want to be 'grabby') and if I think I have something special, I'll try to give a piece to V as an occasional thank you.
Recently I wrote an article in `Country Life Yarra Valley and Ranges' about a really lovely native garden; its owner propagated plants and whenever I visited she gave me little plants (like a native Libertia, delicate, white, sweet); so generous from a lady I didn't know. I think society is richer for these acts of kindness.
I visited a new garden-design-client this week who not only gave me a bunch of sweet smelling sweet peas, shell-pink, but, so generous! - gave me 2 fat tubers of Gloriosa rothschildiana (top) as well. She couldn't know that I have two metal tripods (hexapods, really), centred in each cut-flower bed, on which I grow clematis (beginning its spring show right now), but I've long thought that Gloriosa would look, well, glorious, on these, too.

This gardener turned out to be as passionate about plants as me, which was a likeable meeting of minds. It was simplicity itself to offer her some of my handsome variegated Solomon's Seal (Polygonatum odoratum  `Variegatum' (just starting to bloom), below) - which probably needs dividing. I popped by the next day with some - before I forgot.
Gloriosa is from Zimbabwe; it's also known as the African Flame Lily, with flowers somewhere between claret and crimson, with a gold flame along an edge of each petal. I planted them this morning, one under each hexapod, hoping that the weather isn't too cool for doing this in my area. As with so much gardening, time will tell; you may have messed up, or happened upon a great new success - if you remember what you did!

And then you enjoy your choice plant, and remember the lovely donor.

And the act of kindness.

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)

 

Choice Perennials in Early Spring

 

Bright spring sunshine has coaxed my favourite little perennials into fresh new growth, leaves, and now flowers as well. Barrenwort (Epimedium) in pink, white, yellow; semi-double bloodroot (Sanguinaria 'Tennessee Form', above), a blue Hepatica (below) and a gorgeous petite white meadow rue (Thalictrum minus if memory serves, grown from seed from the UK, third pic), all white flowers and blue-green maiden-hair foliage, barely 15cm high. A small Omphalodes with unusual lilac flowers and a Corydalis with copious sky-blue flowers over grey leaves tinged purple (some variant of C. flexuosa, second last pic).

I've just found a sweet little perennial, Uvularia sessilifolia varigata, with tiny yellow flowers, in the shadehouse and rescued it, and popped it near the front door where I can enjoy seeing it every day.

Somewhat taller, is Lamprocapnos  (formerly Dicentra spectabilis alba, below), white `bleeding heart' flowers on arching sprays as I watch it's new brother, `Valentine' (left) push up red-tinged leaves and extraordinary flowers of red hearts seemingly dripping white blood.

In the garden, romping away (says J) is a handsome variegated Solomon's Seal (Polygonatum odoratum `Variegatum'), spreading slowly over many years, happily surviving the wet winters and dry summers.

Perennials are just so...splendiferous, at this time of year. You do nothing, zilch, zip, zero, and up they come with fresh growth, leaves that may be wonderful (pleated Veratrum, feathery Astilbe, maiden-hair Aquilegia and Thalictrum, ferny Dicentra. The leaves of Hostas, Sanguinaria and snow poppy (Eomecon chionantha) are just too beautiful to describe); and flowers, too, from tiniest Epimedium `Spring Wedding' (last pic) to peony roses, lush and richly coloured.

Many are rhizomes, like my pale pink lily-of-the-valley, Trillium, Anemone nemerosa and many iris; they are diageotropic (grow perpendicularly to the force of gravity), which is all a fancy way of saying that the thickened roots grow horizontally.

The dahlias - tubers - haven't shown a spark of life yet but that's fine; they are heat-loving creatures of summer. I'm enjoying the spring show, the early perennials that follow the bulbs, the daffodils and tulips. It's like the first act has started and I'm bouncing in my seat with anticipation, knowing all the later perennials are still to come, and humming along to the first movement of my favourite symphony. (The poets daffodils, fragrant, the last ones, are still blooming; and the tulips are still flowering, too: white pink, plum, 'black', so beautiful, I almost gasp as I look at them. Really.)

It doesn't get much better than this.

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)

Springtime, Football, Planting Tomatoes and Rainbow Rights

 

Melbourne is my city yet I'm not remotely football-mad - but heck, it was good to see the underdogs, the Bulldogs, the team from the west suburbs - win against Sydney. (After 62 years!) I hate myself for it, but it seems I'm hopelessly parochial after all. Even the garden was barracking for my home team: amongst the white tulips and blue Anemone coronaria a red tulip popped up, unbidden, to bestow the right colours on the day (then the rogue was pulled out pretty darn quickly).

They made the sun shine (for a day)! Spring came roaring in the day after the AFL Grand Final: bright sunshine, warm gusty winds, temperatures above twenty degrees at last. And then again on Thursday. And maybe, who knows, this weekend too. Perfect for tomato planting.

We threw off the second doona and I'm out to check out the garden. The early bulbs are over but a few late daffodils are still softly lemon and white; tulips pink and darkest plum; hellebores gently green.

It's time to plant tomatoes, classically, in the Emerald city - Melbourne - between Grand Final Day and Melbourne Cup Day.

Call me crazy, but my new, fourth veg bed - dug over after moving the pretty little hens onto the next-door patch of Warrigal greens and spinach - is a chance for planting an edible patch in another colour scheme. (My first was pink, purple and green; the next orange and red with black kale; the most recent, and already quite colourful, is lemon, yellow, gold against (again) darkest kale. All these were winter (edible) flowers and vegetables. It's so much fun.)

This is my first summer bed since starting to experiment and play with colour in the culinary beds. I felt like having a rainbow; partly to fit in all my tomatoes, yellow, orange, red, purple-black, and purple beans; and partly because I want to toss rainbows everywhere, in a joyous show of solidarity with the LGBTI community as we - maybe - inch towards a plebiscite on marriage equality, and if so, unleash hate speech like never before. I'll be wearing rainbows, and planting them, and thinking them. I'll make rainbow flower chains. Rainbow cakes. (Maybe wearing rainbow hair. Hmmm.)

My rainbow veg bed is like refracted light, I like to think, and I am looking for dwarf white English lavender to have at the `start', on either side of the path. Next are some lemon-coloured French marigolds I've planted, while I've scattered seed of more. Behind the path edging of low edible flowers (marigolds, pansies, calendulas, nasturtiums) are taller plants, and vegetables, beginning with tomatoes `Wapsipinicon' (`Yellow Peach'), then orange `Sunrise Bumblebee', red `Periforme Albuzzo' and `Sweetbite' (J's favourite) culminating, at the end, with `Black Cherry' and `Black Russian' (my favourite). Yellow zucchini , red capsicum, purple eggplants - they'll fit into the rainbow. A rainbow for rainbow rights.

So I seem to have started with masculine football and ended somewhere different, and political (not for the first time, see posts 8/7/13; 27/9/15).

Just as the current fashion for edible garden is actually underpinned by a concern for carbon miles, so does much of my garden have underlying ideas. Only not, often, in the veg patch. Nor, too often, political. As garden critic and feminist Germaine Greer says, `Gardening can be – should be – conceptual, which is simply a way of saying that gardens should have ideas in them and the ideas should be perceptible.' I love gardens with themes and ideas, making the garden experience richer, like other art forms. Read more at http://www.nurseriesonline.com.au/garden-design/contemporary-garden-design/

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)

 

Impossible Plants

I have gotten myself in a pickle.

It seemed so simple - dig up a couple of seedlings for my nieces - `the one plant they wanted to remember Granny by' said my sister - the Forget-Me-Not. (It was autumn and I was digging up a couple of tiny plants in Mum's garden for my sister, just after Dad sold the place.) I potted up 4 little plants, they all grew and one has put out stems with pale blue flowers - flowers that produce numbers of seeds, sticky seeds that attach to clothing, move to other locations...the perfect weed, in other words.

(And J works in...conservation.)

So why did Mum grow these? She loved the haze of soft blue they'd confer around the bulbs and above the old bulb foliage right through spring, in the front half of her country garden, on the outskirts of Emerald in the Dandenong Ranges. She used to say that they were easy to pull out and they were...but there were always legions of seeds in the soil, ready to germinate, so they were...pesky if you didn't want them. And her neighbour didn't. They were separated, rural-style (happy-days!) by a rough fence of wire (chicken wire?) so the seeds spread madly, of course. When the neighbour moved, it's not too surprising that the new one erected a suburban-style paling fence which gave privacy and would - whether they knew it or not - stop progress of weed seeds considerably.

But with paling fences, neatness, and that relentless cutting down of gum trees and the like, why, oh why, do the Dandenong's continue to become ever more suburban?

(Warning! Soap Box! Gum trees just aren't neat - accept it! (But they're so often the beautiful manna gum with snow-white trunk above a rough base; grey gum with smoky-ghost trunk or, as we have, those silver-grey gums with mature foliage so silver-blue that they're just - sensational.) Stop raking!

Must we clear every bush, raze every tree, trim every grass - or - there's 2 options: accept our natural beauty and take precautions; or move (back) to town. I have read people proposing, ludicrously, that every gum tree in the hills should be razed! - and I say: where do the lyre birds go to live?

I admit I've got that frequently seen human gene to try to be neat - but I limit it to the house and the garden (to a point - while still trying to commit to Mirabel Osler's `Gentle Plea for Chaos' (1989), too. I want my garden to look closer to a meadow than a series of plant specimens). The bushland needs mess or where do the insects live? - those insects that birds need for their protein intake. OK, off the soapbox.)

Completely different - in a terrific way - were the gardens around a group of houses in Castlemaine I saw recently, designed by Sam Cox: gently native - only occasional large domed stones reaching out from the soil, local plants, and wattles all gold. What I admired most were the lack of paling fences despite the normal, suburban size of the properties; privacy was conferred by plantings of shrubs giving a delicate look, and a taller effect to boot. And I fell in love with Nodding Blue Lily (Stypandra glauca) (another rare, true blue)! I was also impressed with the lack of nature strips - Sam discussed this with the shire, and created a couple of gravel spaces for car parking, with the result being more garden. Grape vine pergolas, gravel areas for sitting, vegetable patches (and only one small patch of lawn) were common themes. But other than productive plants, native plants seemed to be de rigueur.

Forget-Me-Nots would probably not be welcome here.

Nor at my home.

What to do? 

I asked my Dad, who is 92, and pretty darn clever: do I give these plants to my nieces (upsetting J) or other plants Mum loved (maybe hellebores)? `Both!' he says without hesitation.

But I can't do it.
I hide the little plants of Forget-Me-Nots so when I'm giving my sister the plants I dug up in Mum's garden and potted for her - Solomon's Seal, nerines in 3 or more colours, lemon wild iris (Dietes), black mondo grass, a columbine and a foxglove - I cravenly Forget-Me-Do (sorry) - and feel a bit guilty for approximately 12 hours - and then, miraculously, I'm let off the hook. I go to stay with my sister, give a little garden advice, and darn it, she has a Forget-Me-Not growing in one of her pots - that I haven't given her.
It may be weedy for her, but it will also give her that haze of porcelain-blue in spring. (From it she'll all-too-quickly get offspring for her daughters.)

 

And remind us of our mother's garden - all too well.

 

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)