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!

anemones at last

I decided a while back that one of my planned additions to the garden were white anemones (also called Japanese windflowers).  They're just so graceful and charming in the autumn garden after the heat of the summer has passed.  But I didn't realise just how hard that would be to achieve! 

Garden shops tend to sell plants like this when they're in flower so they're more appealing.  So as I saw the anemones flowering in my neighbours' gardens I starting asking about anemones in my local garden shop.  It took them a few weeks before they got them in ... and they were pink.  I've got nothing against pink flowers in general but to me, pink anemones just don't have the magic of the simple, clean white ones.  So I looked around at other garden shops.  Pink.  I checked back at the local.  Still pink.  Bunnings?  Pink.  I had a chat at my local and found out that they'd called every one of their suppliers, and only one had white anemones and they weren't yet big enough to sell!

So with atypical patience I asked them to put down my name and waited for my anemones to grow in some distant nursery somewhere.  Every weekend for about a month I'd stop by, just to check if they were in yet.  At last, just before Easter I got a message on my phone that started with "now don't fall out of your chair, but..."

At last they'd arrived!  As soon as I could I stopped by and sure enough, there were the little baby anemones.  And also some big, beautiful two-year-olds covered with perfect white flowers.  Now usually I'm patient enough to buy the small plant and wait a year for flowers, but not this time.  I'd waited long enough.  They weren't cheap, but they were mine!

Here's the "before" picture of where they went, in the back western bed. 

And here's the after - one on each side of the vitex bed (it's hard to see the one farther from the camera).  I took out a few more tufts of the liriope; it's a tough little plant and a good contrast but boring and worth sacrificing for these beauties.  Next year they'll grow even higher, their flower heads dancing in the breeze.

I'm really starting to be happy with this corner of the garden.  The vitex is growing incredibly quickly and the hydrangeas are powering along slowly but steadily.  The Japanese maple is doing so much better in its new home and the brunnera "jack frost" (just to the side of the nearer anemone) is happy too.  I'm amazed at how big the elephant ear colocasia has grown in that back corner, so it's obvious that the two small ones at the corner of the square bed are going to have to move soon.  And I've let some wild violets take seed behind the vitex to give the dichondra "silver falls" some competition.  The marigolds and ageratum will die down over the winter but they're still going strong for now.

Now I couldn't just let you go with only that distant view of the anemones, could I?  I've been playing with my new smartphone recently and having a ball with a camera program I downloaded that lets you set all kinds of old-fashioned filters on your photos.  So here's a whimsical photo of the anemones to finish on.  I hope it captures for you the beauty that attracted me to these simple, pure, white anemones.

west bed updates

Now that the mess from the flood has (mostly) been cleaned up and summer is quickly turning to autumn I thought I'd update on how things are looking.  The gaura needed to be tied back so they don't flop all over, and the lavender got its autumn trim.  The geum is doing ok, it wilts if it gets too dry and probably wouldn't survive one of our hot summers.

This side of the west bed is thriving.  Look at the size of that colocasia in the corner, it's huge!  It's much happier there than the maple tree ever was.  The vitex has really surprised me with how quickly it's growing, too, hopefully by summer 2012 or 2013 it'll have spread enough to cast some shade around.  It's got lots of flower buds but they haven't opened yet.  The dichondra "silver falls" has realy taken to that bed, although it doesn't seem to want to spill over the front as I was hoping it would.  Some wild violets have seeded at the back of the bed and I've decided to let them stay, they form a nice dense green ground cover and love shade.  Some "weeds" can be very helpful.

The Amazon Queen colocasia is going crazy too.  It makes this whole bed look very lush which I love.  The hellebores have held out well over the summer heat (the crowns can die back completely but mine manage to hold on), the plectranthus cuttings are really growing along and the ajuga "black scallop" are slowly spreading.

Overall, not a bad effort.

a big swap for a little maple

My sad little Japanese maple has now survived two summers in its spot in the corner of the back garden.  The first summer was brutally hot and dry and it barely survived.  This summer was a lot more mild, but it still looked a bit rough by the autumn.  I'm not one for babying my plants and it obviously doesn't like where it lives.  So once it lost its leaves I decided it was time for a change.
This is what the back garden looked like before.  I've pulled out the marigolds and nasturtium for the winter.  One of the statice died a while back, the other was looking shocking so I pulled it out too.  There on the right is a taro plant, a very tough root-based plant that seems to be thriving on neglect.  It's even put out two little babies.

I decided that the maple would prefer the spot where the taro is now.  It's on the south side of a tall fence, sheltered from the hot summer sun.  And it's a higher spot, rather than being completely hidden in that far corner.

This is the corner where the maple lived.  I carefully dug it up, trying not to tear the roots and getting as much of the root ball as possible.  The roots actually looked very healthy, they'd spread out quite a bit in the last year or two.  Very shallow though, as these trees tend to be.  I trimmed off the dead twigs - yes, more dead twigs, it seems to be shrinking rather than growing - and hoped that I didn't need to trim off any viable twigs.  You're generally meant to do that when you transplant, because you always lose some roots and the roots can't support the same amount of foliage.  But since it's still early winter, I'm hoping I can get away with it and rely instead on frequent doses of seaweed solution to nourish the roots. 

Here's the taro in its new home.  It'll get a bit more sun here than it did in its old home and I'm hoping it really takes off.  They can get even bigger than this, so if anything it now has even more room to grow than in its old home.

And there on the right is the maple tree in its new home.  It looks so much taller when it's actually at ground level!  And I discovered that the soil in that corner is pretty much pure sand.  Not a single worm to be seen.  I dug out a fair bit of the sand and instead dug in some more of that super-rich manure/soil mix I still have from months back, chock full of worms.  No fertilizer though, don't want to burn the roots. 

You can't really see in the photo but there's another impromptu new addition.  Where the statice used to be are two baby taro plants.  Full-grown they'll be way too big for those positions, but I reckon they've got a year or two of growing first.  After that I'll find them another home.  And in the long term, the vitex in the main bed will eventually grow to be about two metres tall and spreading, shading a lot of this are (I hope!).  The oakleaf hydrangeas in the narrow beds will start to fill out too.  This part of the garden really is still a young work in progress, which in a way is far more exciting than the established plants at the front.

the side yard is done!

Before the horrible weather this week, we finally finished the latest big project, the side yard.  Here's a reminder of what it used to look like.

The big trick this weekend was to try to find stepping-stones to match the others in the yard.  After several trips around over the course of a few weekends, I ended up going back to the hardware store and getting something "close enough".  Bloody annoying effort.

Once we had them though the rest was pretty easy.  First we lay down the weed mat (yes, it is Dreaded Black Plastic which I railed against last year, but it's just going under rocks) and set out the step-stones.

And then we just had to fill in the pebbles.  We had heaps, both from digging them out of the fish pond and me digging them out of every single raised bed in the garden (now THAT was a pain in the #%@$!).  But how much better does this look than before?

All in all, a satisfying job DONE.

update on the side yard

I'm making serious progress on the side yard project.  Not long ago it looked like this.

And now it looks like this!

I have Tom to thank for the latest flurry of activity.  It took me forever to try to shovel out the first third of dirt to make it level; those buckets were heavy!  He finished the rest in about 10 minutes.

I already have the weed-mat and the pebbles.  Next step is to buy some step-stones, then lay them all down and we're done! 

new plants in flower

My new taro and camellia must be happy because they're blossoming!  I don't usually get to see my camellias blossom because the possums eat the buds, but maybe because these bushes are new they didn't get nibbled.  What a lovely blossom!  "Paradise blush" is an appropriate name indeed.

I've never had any of my other taros put out a flower before.  And to be honest they're not exactly a stunning flower, but it's interesting to look at.  I wonder if it blossomed because it was slightly stressed by moving; it did go from a pond to the dirt.  Sometimes plants won't flower unless they're stressed slightly.  But otherwise it looks like a healthy plant so I'm not worried about it carking it.

And finally, an old plant in flower.  I planted these marigolds back in January to add some colour and attract bees to the back veggie patch.  I thought they'd have died out by now but they just keep flowering and flowering!  I just love them.  Oh and if you look carefully in the top-right corner of this photo, you'll see little sprouts.  It turns out the marigolds are self-seeding; we'll see if they survive the winter but they may be spreading on their own.  I have a feeling it's because I try to pluck off the dead flowerheads to encourage them to keep flowering ... except I can't always be bothered to throw the flowerheads into the compost and so I just drop them on the barkdust.  Surprise!  Some of those flowerheads had seeds in them!

the pumpkin is dead ... long live the pumpkin

I went out this evening to take a photo of my pumpkin vine.  It had been getting more and more diseased lately, first with powdery mildew and then with aphids.  But they sometimes do this at the end of their life so I wasn't worried.  But I did want to make sure the pumpkins themselves didn't get diseased, so I was going to ask some advice of my favourite garden forum.

I needn't have bothered!  It went from diseased to DEAD in just a day or two!  Definitely time to harvest the last little pumpkins.  They sure ripened up quickly compared to the first batch which apparently they do later in the season.  But they're a little bit smaller than the first batch which I don't mind.  They're still cute!

Oh and you know how I was recently praising how tough elephant ear plants are?  Well guess what I found growing up from underneath the dying pumpkin vine.  It's a little elephant ear I now remember I tried to pull out when I first planted this bed, months ago.  But I didn't dig down deep enough.  And now, here's the little fighter trying again to grow back.  I think I'll reward it this time by digging it up this weekend and planting it somewhere I won't be planting things on top of it.

i didn't intend to buy plants today...

...it just somehow ended up happening!

I've got this narrow strip of garden bed next to where I'm planning to put in rocks and step-stones.  It's got three almost-dead nandina, two liriope (one is almost dead) and a third liriope already died.

I'd already planned on planting elephant's ears (colocasia esculenta, aka taro) as one of the plants in that bed.  Because there's one of them in the corner near the rhododendrons in constant shade that never gets watered, and it's survived the heat wave.  It just died back and re-grew when the weather was nicer.  Any plant that can thrive after this summer is worth planting again.  It's meant to be a water plant, but turns out it'll also do just fine in the soil, retreating down to it's root when it gets too dry and over the winter when it gets too cold.

In any case, I didn't know what I wanted to pair with the elephant ears so I wasn't in a hurray to re-do that bed.  But whilst at my favourite garden centre I asked what they'd recommend for this dry, shady spot and the lady recommended hellebores.  I'd assumed that hellebores needed lots of water but it turns out they don't!  So how could I resist buying a few?  I don't even know what colours they'll be, it's a lucky dip of mixed varieties. 

They had elephant ears too, including exactly three types called "Amazon Queen" with black stems and bronzy leaves - absolutely stunning.  So I snapped those up too and here's what it looks like now.  It's still quite "thin" because the hellebores are still small but they'll grow up and out a bit to fill in between the elephant ears.  And when the elephant ears die back in winter, the hellebores will be blooming!

I'm pretty happy with that.