J's Birthday: The Garden Celebrates!

 

Every year the garden lights up lilac candles atop giant stalks. Always, reliably, from mid-May onwards, so by today it's dramatic & spectacular, a ring of tree dahlias (above) 6m across and about 4 or 5m high.

Now, I say that this is the garden wishing J a Happy Birthday. But J is an indigenous-plant-loving man...so he doesn't agree. More shy chocolate lilies than hydrangeas; or dainty climbing apple-berry (Billardiera scandens) over...roses.

It's not just that, with my bad eyesight, I can see roses from the kitchen window; it's also trying to create a garden that's photogenic (I can dream).

I'm fond of apple berry, (obliquely & literally, above) actually. There's the palest green flowers, hanging, dainty, tubular with elegant flaring tips, rather like tiny tutus. They provide nectar for many petite avian visitors. Green, sausage-shaped fruit are edible, and we must try them. We have a plant of this shy climber on the wiry orchard fence, slowly greening up about 2m of fence. One of those rare climbers that don't take a mile when given an inch! I'm tempted to call it by another of its common names, apple dumplings, which shows its roots as a traditional bush tucker plant: when purple, the fruit can be eaten raw, I'm told; but if picked green they require roasting.

But I also like the Latin moniker, named for French botanist Jacques Labillardiére, who published the first (Western) flora of Australian plants, between 1804 and 1807.

Being a white person who grew up in the 1970's, it seems surprising that Joseph Banks (who named Botany Bay), who sailed on James Cook's Endeavour expedition (1768 - 1771) wasn't the first botanist to publish an Australian flora. But Banks was notorious for collecting, but not cataloguing, the masses of plant material he...amassed. (Of course I was taught that Cook `discovered' Australia, ignoring 60 thousand years of local inhabitants, with the oldest living culture. That, thankfully, has changed.)

No, it was Labillardiére who published the first work, including exquisite prints of Australian plants. Whatever you think of dismantling books, it has been done, and I have been a lucky beneficiary. From one (hopefully, a late edition) is a print that J gave me for my 30th birthday; and it's of one of my - our - favourite indigenous plants, butterfly flag (Diplarrena moraea, above). It's not just that it's a pretty, white irid (iris relation); it's not just that the flowers hover like butterflies nearly 1m above the ground in spring; it's also that when we bought our piece of heaven (5ha/ 13 acres of bushland on the edge of Melbourne), butterfly flag, along with pink trigger plants, were prolific and flowering in the grassland below where we'd build our cottage. That area is now orchard-and-septic and most of these wildflowers are long gone. But I love a meadow, and flowers amongst the fruit trees, too. We Must grow some of these sweet spring bloomers from seed collected on our `block' and plant them in the orchard.

This is a planting scheme we are both passionate about!

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.jillweatherheaddesign.com.au)

Autumn Trees

A friend asked me about `small trees with red foliage in autumn'.

I pointed out my dogwood just outside, a small tree aflame - although with quite a few green leaves amongst the rather drooping branches of bonfire-red (below). Some garden designers might `tut' at this lack of commitment by the tree, but I think (and hope) that the show will last longer, which is fine. A naturalistic look, too, which I like.

I didn't get a chance to show him a spring photo of the dogwood flowering. Cornus `Eddie's White Wonder' is one of the best of the genus, with large bracts around the insignificant flowers, pure white and prolific (above). Autumn began dry but my dogwood is as fiery as usual; and I'm in the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges so a tree that colours up well here is a gem.

It's good to wander the garden season by season and think how to better the plot. Autumn tints are a joy as the nights cool and I'm reminded that plants which hold onto the autumn leaves for a long time are special. One such is Enkianthus, a shrub not often seen, and I've been wanting for, oh, a couple of decades. I need to search it out and squeeze one into the garden! Somewhere near the house so I can enjoy the sealing-wax-red on rainy days; and enjoy the flowers in spring, too.

New deciduous trees could be planted to the west of the house or a seat so that I can enjoy the effect of the neon sun behind, backlighting the jewel leaves.

For my friend I suggested that I make a list of trees: Acer (of course!), Fothergilla, one of the medium-size crepe myrtles, Nyssa and many more. I'd plant them all in my plot if J agreed.

But that's another story.

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.jillweatherheaddesign.com.au)

Five Seasons

`Five Seasons, the Gardens of Piet Oedouf', is a film I saw yesterday. (It's playing at Belgrave Cinema today, too.)

A venerable designer in the Dutch wave or New Perennial movement, Oedouf designs gardens with a matrix of grasses with perennials in, often, blocks as opposed to naturalistic meadows. Tall perennials must have good structure and features, like attractive seedheads, so that the winter months have subtle beauty with texture in tones of brown and grey. The perennials and tall grasses are mown down in late winter.

Oudolf began his garden style in the 1980s when he and his wife Anja opened their nursery, in Holland. His early work with perennials consisted of block-type groupings based on structure and texture. More recently Oudolf's gardens have developed into a more naturalistic look, often using blends of species, with the `change in style...described as a shift from a painter's perspective to one informed by ecology'. Oedouf is probably best known for designing the plant matrix on New York's The High Line (2006), the ex-train line converted to a long raised garden, high up in the city.

Oedouf's work reminds me of Wolfgang Oehme & James van Sweden who began a somewhat similar love affair with tall grasses and perennials in the late 1970's. Inspired by American prairies, their the `New American Garden' style developed as a reaction to the anodyne lawns to be found in much of the US, and the ubiquitous box edging and roses.

 

I left the cinema and ran into a gardening acquaintance. `Are you going to change your garden?' he cried, moved more than me by the cinematic experience, which had lovingly lingered on the brown stalks of hibernating perennials, directing our gaze to the subtle beauty of Oedouf's plants. (Successfully - I challenge anyone seeing this film to not be moved by grasses with delicate cobwebs, perennials rimmed with frost and seedheads touched by snow.)

Well, no. But I feel so much better about the untrimmed Sedum (above; see post 17th March also) which have been bugging me. I loved my pale pink ones through much of the garden but I didn't think that the flowers retained their soft pink for long enough. They turned pink-red for a short time (and I really dislike pink and red together (and detest the similar salmon; we're all so different!) in the garden) then deep brown - all too soon. Was this plant worth it?

 

 

Moreover - I'd planned to trim the perennials before today's Mother's Day visit from in-laws (who have a neat and tidy garden-and-house aesthetic). A few untidy perennials (like sprawling obedient plant (Physostegia; if only it was!)) and old belladonna lily stalks got tidied up; good. But I haven't started on the sedum nor the tall stalks of Drymis maritima (Syn Urginea) (although I've cut down a few of the latter to collect seeds).

Snow is very rare and we don't get much frost here in Selby. Will the perennial seedheads, deteriorating over winter, look silly or beautiful? (The eye of the beholder - just J and me - is fine.)

I'm reminded of the gorgeous meadow you see as you enter Great Dixter (UK; above) where owner Christopher Lloyd overheard visitors exclaim that they weren't paying to enter the garden because `he hadn't even mown his lawns'! (Maybe I need to escort visitors around the garden and explain the new strategy.)

Professor James Hitchmough (my favourite lecturer at Burnley long ago) grows meadows of annuals in the UK with skill. (And remember the sweep of annuals, including sunflowers, near Fed Square, so beloved of Melbournians a couple of years ago?)

Oedouf's gardens are less naturalistic than Lloyd's meadows, and less subtle with large sweeps of high grasses and tall perennials; a different aesthetic and quite different result.

An aesthetic that doesn't rely on flowers (alone).

Brilliant.

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.jillweatherheaddesign.com.au)

Late Autumn Bulbs & Seeds

April departed, leaving us reeling with a meagre 16mm of rain (down two thirds) after a hot summer, dry in the latter half. And now - glorious rain.

Despite the dry start to the season, some autumn bulbs are growing well: Cyclamen hederifolium (above)and some crocus (top); while the nerines (pink, red, white (N. flexuosa alba, below)) still have that magic touch - from Mum's green thumb. Nerines have never flowered well here, despite a sunny spot and letting the bulbs crowd together near the surface - but the ones rescued from her garden (we left most behind for the new owners) are still, after 2 years, somehow, doing much better than ones I've grown for a decade or two. I'm not sure how this is happening, but I'm sure as heck not complaining.

 

What seems unique this year is the prodigious production of fat, round seeds on the belladonna lilies (Amaryllis belladonna) and blood lily (Haemanthus coccineus, last pic), both in the Amaryllidaceae family. Has anyone noticed that deep pink belladonna lilies produce deep pink seeds, darker than usual?

 

And yesterday the Mexican tree dahlia flowers started to peep out.

As we Game of Thrones tragics like to say: `Winter is Coming'.

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.jillweatherheaddesign.com.au)