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)

 

Garden of Birds

A Mecca for birds? - well, I like to think that my garden welcomes all the little ones: fairy wrens that take cobwebs for their nests (a win-win all round); yellow robins following me as I dig in the veg garden; and red browed finches and white-browed scrub-wrens that hop through my little circle of lawn seeking grass seed. Not to forget tree creepers and the honeyeaters that come to the salvias throughout much of the garden. They all bathe in the numerous birdbaths, skipping through the upended wire hanging-basket baskets (that keep out Mr Blackbird) with ease; the tree creepers seem to walk in backwards.

There's also the pretty bantam hens, just starting to lay well again.

But there's also an avian theme in the garden which is, of course, not there by chance. I really do love birds. (They say you don't miss what you've never had; but I have darn bad eye sight. How I wish I could see birds in flight, especially the little ones! They are just grey spots to me. But planting the right plants and adding birdbaths brings many birds near the windows, so I am not complaining.)

In the garden we are lucky enough to have a sandstone kookaburra (made by Folko Kooper, before he became famous), surrounded by a big evergreen shrubby Garrya with its pale jade tassel-flowers in winter and double white hellebores at her feet. (Oddly, my sandstone kookaburra has no name but `kooka'. I think she was my present from J when I turned 40; I love those milestones!)

In 2013 more birds flew into the garden - and roosted. For my half century J gave me a wonderful patinated repoussé copper creature, flying, twirling, almost duck-like, we call Lucy (above). Lucy is a creation of the wonderful artist Daniel Jenkins - she has delicate ribbons in place of mane, wings, and tail; silvery, fantastical. Turning with the winds, she is somehow perfectly reflecting, almost replicating, rippling grey leaves of our nicest nearby gums, the silver grey gums. (Daniel made a sculpture – only superficially similar - that my parents enjoyed in their garden for over 20 years. As they called theirs `Leunix’ (a pet name combining a phoenix and revered cartoonist Michael Leunig), so did we until she was ours and then...she was shortened, of course. Ours is arguably more aquatic and is delightfully curly - but I think of her as a bird.) (Read more on post 13/4/13.) Lucy usually has salvias under her (hiding her spike) but this second picture of her (below) is from one or two years ago when I decided to paint the tree dahlia circle, after the cold weather had cramped their style, into `blue poles'.

Soon afterwards I gave J a crazy flying duck windvane (below)(which I have called Luigi; J hasn't agreed to this name); a  magnificent duck, out of control; most of all he is handsome and, important to J (I think), in the subdued colour to be expected of copper. Sculptor Jim Curry makes pieces of great charm and whimsy (read more on post 9/6/13), and our smirking duck is near our entrance, along with many pots, and probably way too many features (like my red-high-heels-and-Echeveria-plants). But Luigi was more than just a present to J; it was also a tribute to my darling sister Caroline who would, I think, have loved it.

Luckily keeping this garden colour palette to yellow and blue flowers, and structured with a row of paired vegetable balls, so to speak, has simplified this area...a little. I have planted Pittosporum tobira next to Luigi's metal post to disguise it, the perfect height, and we'll enjoy the perfume of the spring flowers...but I'm impatient with its understandably slow growth in the clay soil. So I'm going to add two clematis to train up the pole: C. macropetala `Pauline' (double blue flowers in spring) and golden-yellow C. tangutica (lovely single flowers from late summer to autumn) - the latter a plant I've been given by a friend.

 

Large birds may scare away the little ones; and sulphur-crested cockatoos - those nibblers of cedar houses (like our cottage) - are not welcome here; but it's hard not to feel affection for kookaburras - real ones - with their likeness to their diminutive relations, the kingfishers; their jovial, raucous call; and their head on one side as they listen hard for prey to find and wolf down (if they are a raptor, they're probably my favourite). Maybe too, if you grow up as a child in Australia - and, importantly, visit the bush (and leave the screens behind!) - you encounter that laugh along with gum tree leaf fragrance and either can bring you to tears if you've been gone away too long.

 

So a kookaburra landing on Lucy was a welcome sight. I'm still planning and planting ever more Correas (native fuchsia) for the cool months and Salvias for the warm months for honey eaters (above) by the house. And right now I'm off to find an old hat - J has thrown out his precious old hat-nest that the white-browed scrub-wrens nested in, by the back door last spring. This one I will try to make a little more robust in spring gales and husband tidy-ups.

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)

 

 

 

 

Tree Peony Developments

The circus has come to town; the brass band is playing its jauntiest tune. The big fat cymbal-clashing trumpet-blowing moment has come on a windy sunny bright spring day, all gusts and blustery and warm sunbeams...you get the picture, I was pretty excited that a metre-high stick was alive (alive!), sprouted leaves and now covered in luscious white blooms. We're talking Mum's tree peony again (Paeonia suffruticosa, or Moutan (or Mudan (which means `male red' in its home of China where it's been used in gardens since around the 4th century but in medicine for longer)), and counting the annual growth spurts, it's about 35 years old. But I'm still pinching myself that this huge branch (with its little rootball attached) has not just survived the move - luckily in the cool months - but thrived, developing 9 fat buds with these five fine satin-sheen flowers opening on a day warm enough to be Melbourne Cup Day.

Mum loved to sit in her comfortable chair and gaze at her flowering peony (as elderly Chinese gentlemen were wont to do, gardening legends have it), its silky milk-white petals opening to show the crimson blotches, lordly, not ugly little marks like the blemishes on most Cistus, but lovely, proportional features rendering this aristocrat ever more elegant.

Maybe I need to pop a chair near this magnificent plant...and sit...with gratitude.

 

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 Excitement

 

It really, truly is spring. Wattles are flaring gold against the green (those Olympian colours) flagging spring throughout bushland and my home of the Dandenong Ranges; it's gold riches, promises of sunshine warmth.

Daffodils are nodding and tossing wilful sulphur heads in the garden.

Culinary garden plants are moving again: purple peas, crimson-flowering broad beans, broccoli (purple, chartreuse), kale; and those edible flowers: calendulas (pot marigolds or, as I knew and grew them as a child, African marigolds (my first garden: collecting the moon-shaped seeds and forever re-sowing and growing the plants, with the cheerful yellow and orange daisy-like flowers)), pansies and nasturtiums. Rocket has flowered, brightest-spring-sunshine-yellow. Peas are mainly purple, a few fruiting, odd to see; with glorious pink-and-purple flowers (below). `Are they sweet peas?' I'm asked.

Hens are starting to lay again and take dust baths in the sun. 

There's fairy-floss-blossom on dwarf fruit trees near the kitchen, pink and white bells on correas, and delicious fragrance from the white daphne, too small as yet for cutting for a vase. But I've been picking Narcissus for vases for several weeks (mostly perfumed `Erlicheer' - what a great cultivar).

I glance amongst my pots and there's a nicely aged terracotta pot bursting with special hoop-petticoat daffodils (Narcissus bulbcodium obesus) from a friend (above - with my latest bit of fun. By the way, these shoes are too tiny to wear - even for me. (Thank you St Vinnies.) The succulents are a reminder of Attila Kapitany's interesting garden (bought not stolen) from the weekend).

Most exciting of all, is the tree peony from Mum's old garden, a 2m monster heaved, really, as a side branch from Mum's large plant when Dad left the house, and popped vertically into a large pot with a large dose of optimism. It lives! It grows leaves! It has 9 fat buds (below)! Back to earth...

There's even a leaf coming up from the crown of my dwarf waterlily in the water garden.

Now that's warmth.

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)