autumn photos

I'm alive, I promise!

I was on a wonderful holiday in Turkey for two weeks; three weeks and 500 photos later, I'm only halfway through sorting them all!  So I've been neglecting both my garden and this blog.  Here's a bit of an update.

This autumn has been a real stunner in Melbourne, after a wet summer and a cold snap.  Unfortunately I missed the best of it, by the time I got back a lot of trees were just past their prime.  I missed my crepe myrtle's show entirely and after all the effort, missed the best weeks of my white anemones!  But my little maple put on a real show this year, it's the first autumn it's really shown off.

The time last year I was still referring to the poor thing as the "sad little maple" and it looked like this!

Big improvement, isn't it?  The oakleaf hydrangea is also looking very handsome, I reckon there's more red in the mix this year:

Compared to last year (the leaves did lose their green eventually but didn't gain the reddish hue):

I also had a little surprise come out of my giant elephant ear colocasia.  I've seen the flowers on my Amazon Queen colocasia before, but never seen them do this!  I'm not sure if it was just that the species type was more mature than my Amazon Queen or what, but it made a cheerful bright seed pod that looks a bit like an exploding triffid corn cob.

Finally, a quick snap of my lovely little colmanara hybrid orchid.  I took the advice of the grower I bought it from last year; when it finished flowering I put it outside on the porch.  It's grown several new pseudobulbs over the winter, and doesn't seem to mind the cold or the added sunlight from the low winter sun.  It's getting a few black spots that I hope are not mold!  No sign of new flower spikes though.  I wonder if I'll go to the orchid show again this year, and if I'll take home another orchid from this hybrid family.  The whole family seems to have drop-dead gorgeous flowers, and it seems to be pretty easy to care for.  But the real test will be whether I can get it to flower again!

That's all for now.  It's definitely winter now which in the garden is a time for reluctant maintenance in the cold. I've only got a few winter veg to look after this year so it's mostly a matter of raking up the rest of the leaves and getting through some major winter pruning tasks.  So you might not hear much from me for a little while, but I'm still here!

autumn, continued

What was that I was just saying about spring appearing before autumn ends?  No picture but the day after making that post I found the first of my snowdrops blooming under the fig tree.  A spring flower coming up before autumn has ended.  Although to be fair, that's a good two weeks later than last year when the first snowdrop appeared May 10th.

In any case, here are another few shots of autumn colour.  This is the oakleaf hydrangea that doesn't turn bright red, it turns this dark burgundy colour but the leaves stay on almost all winter long.

My poor little Japanese maple has more colour on it this year than last, when it was almost dead by autumn, but once again it's lost a fair few leaves and some more of the stems are dead.  I think it got some of the powdery mildew going around this corner but it's obvious that even in a good year it's not happy in this spot.  I think I may move it this winter once it's fully dormant.

But look at that shade of yellow-orange!  I hope I can find it a happy home so those colours can really shine next year.

autumn in melbourne

Autumn in Melbourne confuses me.  I'm used to autumn and winter being distinct seasons.  The leaves are meant to turn around September/October (March/April in this hemisphere) and by December (June here) it's officially winter and then the winter solstice.  But because it's warmer in Melbourne than anywhere else I've lived, everything's just a bit off.  Sure you get some "cold" days in March and April, but it's the end of May and the leaves are only now reaching their peak of colour because we've only just had a few weeks of nights around 8 or 10 degrees.  So to me it only now properly feels like autumn, but it's almost winter.  It won't get much colder than this all winter long, and in a month it'll be the solstice and the days will start to get long again.  And I kid you not, in a month or two we'll get the first spring flowers.  When there are still some autumn leaves.  So in one way proper "winter" feels very short because autumn and spring crowd it out ... but on the other hand it feels very long because the temperatures stay in the range of 8ish to 17ish quite steadily for 4 or 5 months. 

That's enough waxing philosophical.  Now for some autumn colour!  Sadly no grape vine this year, I had to cut back the neighbour's vine because it was making the fence lean.  But the birch trees this year are lovely.  The last few years they were stressed and looked more dead than autumnal, I really thought they were going to die.  This year they just look amazing.

Under the birch trees are quite a few mushrooms.  No idea what kind they are but I thought they looked pretty autumnal.

And though I'd never think of the fig tree as being a very autumnal tree, it does look pretty nice whilst it loses its leaves.  It doesn't really turn and then drop them, it's more like the ones on the inside turn yellow and fall, then the middle ones, before the last outside ones take their turn.

I'll post more pictures as a few more plants in the garden take their turns.  In the meantime, autumn also means changing over the flowers by the front door to my favourite winter flowers: violas!

And autumn also means it's time to tidy up some summer-flowering plants.  I had a go at the front corner bed near the bird bath.  I thought I had a "before" photo of this corner but only now realise my last photo was from back in January! 

So use your imagination.  The African blue basil in front of the bird bath was covered with spent flower spikes and overgrowing the path it was so lush.  The blue saliva on either side of the bath was doing exactly what I'd hoped - it had grown nice and tall (almost twice as tall as it is now) and has been covered in blue flowers the entire summer. But they both needed a good haircut so that they can spring back again in ... well, spring.  Oh and I also got a bit over-zealous and lopped off the top of the magnolia there on the left.  It never got watered before I moved in and was quite leggy and the middle bits didn't have any leaves at all.  So I chopped off the top two branches to encourage it to get more bushy. It just might take a few years to reach that same height again ... ah well, I'm thinking long-term here!

more autumn in the garden

My sad little maple doesn't have many leaves to turn colour, but it's doing its best.

And here's the progression of the grape vine over the last week or two.

And finally, a close-up that I've now set as my computer's desktop background.

autumn in the garden

Well it's definitely getting on into autumn.  We had another few days of sunny warmth with chilly nights, but as of yesterday it turned back to cold and rainy.  There aren't too many trees in Melbourne that put on an autumn show, and they tend to get a bit brown and burnt over the summer which dampens the autumn colours even further.  For example my little Japanese maple hardly has any green leaves under all the dead, burned leaves so I don't know if I'll see any colour from it this year.  But I did take a photo of the grape vine along one fence as it's now in that lovely in-between stage with shades of green, burgundy, yellow and flame.  And it should get even more stunning before the leaves fall.

I also swapped over my porch flowers, the salvia and alyssum were looking pretty tired.  As promised, Mari, I wanted to grow pansies but after looking at what they had I decided on violas instead.  In the garden shop they had big pots of both pansies and violas and the smaller violas looked a bit nicer when they were covered with flowers.  I'm really happy with the colours and I hope they put on a good show!

I also bought creeping fig to plant along the fence, but it's so cold and windy today that they'll have to wait.  Same with the onion seedlings I was going to plant out, until I heard there's hail in the forecast and decided against it.

Edit: OK I got up the courage to plant the creeping fig.  Turns out that narrow side yard is a WIND TUNNEL.  Oh my lord it was freezing.  I'm pretty sure I set a personal record for fastest planting.  No pampering, not even any watering, just into the ground (it's going to rain this week anyway).  They don't look like much at the moment but in a few years, hopefully they'll cover the wall.