I’m Dreaming of a White… Hydrangea

In Australia, December is the month when hydrangeas hit the shops along with the forced poinsettias. A white hydrangea has been on my Christmas wish list for a long time and this year, when I made a trip to Bunnings (a chain of large hardware stores), I remembered to check their stock and emerged (hours later) with this beauty.  It seemed everyone I passed in the store had something to say about its beauty and lushness and it is truly beautiful and the most healthy hydrangea I have ever seen. Gorgeous isn’t it?

May all your Christmases be white.

Sunflowers of Summers Past

Hi there and welcome to a look at some sunflowers of summers past. I recently went on holidays to Victoria to visit my sister and her family and managed to lose my camera on the way back. Thanks to the lady at the Qantas lost property office for her search and a big thanks to the Thrifty car hire office who found it and are posting it back!

In the meantime I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to show you some of the sunflowers I’ve grown in the past. When I first moved in I threw a bunch of seeds around in the spring hoping some would come up. Not much did. The successes were sunflowers, California poppies and nasturtiums. Every year I plant sunflower seeds in the spring but I’ve never had the successes that I had in those early years. Nor have I ever found the seeds for the first bronze shaded sunflowers again.

The next round of seeds were these ‘Giant Singles’.

The photos don’t do justice to the size of these, although you can see the bee on them.

They were about the size of dinner plates and truly fa-a-antastic.

And the last ones were these ‘Royal Velvet’ (I think). Great colours and loads of flowers on a mid-size shrub.

If you’ve got a sunny spot to brighten up give them a go!

Pushing up daffodils

Back in early April I read an article about forcing spring flowering bulbs indoors accompanied by photos which made them look like the next trend in home accessories. At work I sit next to a north facing window (think south if you’re in the northern hemisphere) which seemed to me to be the perfect spot for such a project. With visions of me stunning my work colleagues with masses of flowering plants on the window sill I put in an order for some daffodil and tulip bulbs. When they arrived a couple of weeks later I put them in the fridge to chill for the allotted time frame – 8 weeks for the daffodils, and 12 for the tulips.

I’ve tried growing daffodils before with extremely limited success and only in the first season. I’ve never bothered to attempt tulips - they are nothing but a pipe dream with our warm winters. The successful bulbs that stay in the ground year round in my garden are Dutch iris (still to come) and the lovely delicate Snowflake (flowering now and strangely next to impossible to get a clear shot of).

Sometime, while the bulbs were chilling, I rethought my original plan of growing them in my office. There were a lot of bulbs for one thing. And even though I’d ordered up some miniature daffodils for the purpose of filling a pot that had been lying fallow next to my desk since the languishing plant in it had finally turned its toes up a couple of years ago, the bulbs weren’t actually smaller than normal. I resigned myself to the fact that my amazing home dec accessory was not going to happen.

Not to worry, I planted three straggling fronds of Boston fern I dug up from the garden into the planter on my desk and made fun of them before anyone else had a chance to. Fingers crossed they will thrive and prove my credentials as a gardener after all.

Traditional wisdom has that spring flowering bulbs should be planted in May. I fretted that the chill time would mean they would go in the ground too late to produce. I needn’t have worried. They grew like topsy and five weeks later they were flowering – superb!

In my daily inspection of their progress I note that these may be only a portion of the bulbs that were planted. There is actually another batch coming through now, so these are the early season varieties, the miniatures and the ‘Harbingers of Spring’, with the Langley daffodil still to come. I have only just planted the tulip bulbs but I note one has some growth poking up. Fingers crossed… although I’m not very confident of them – they were looking a little waxy by the time they were planted.

As a note: I highly recommend the miniature daffodils. They are prolific flowerers and would do really well as a part of your interior décor *wink*.

Happy gardening

The end of Autumn

Lamarque

Depending on how you count these things we are either at the start of winter now or coming to the end of autumn.

The Crimson Glory Vine has great autumn colours even in Perth

And it’s been a warm dry autumn here in Perth with the temperatures only now starting to drop, along with the leaves.

I can’t rave enough about the performance of Duchesse de Brabant

I got my camera out and have taken some photos of what’s in bloom around the garden.

A Darcey Bussel bud starts to open

With the warmth the roses are still blooming well

My Camellia in flower

William Shakespeare

Iceberg with a few hips

Young Lycidas, still only a young plant, is putting on a good display

Bold seduction

Sharifa Asma

My new rose, St Cecilia

The truly gorgeous Abraham Darby

Floribunda Bridal Pink in bud

And full flower

And that’s it – happy gardening!

Hedges

Two-tone hedge in a nursery in the Adelaide Hills

It’s still summer here in Perth and still hot, although (surprise! surprise!), we’ve had some decent rain recently and for a week or so it was very cloudy and warm (well hot really). I was expecting powdery mildew to become the order of the day, but no, following that everything has put on new growth like you wouldn’t believe.

Indian Hawthorn (Rhaphiolepis Indica) Hedge

And a close up of the spring flowers

I’m still running through photos I collected in spring. This post actually has photos that are several years old, but as the heading suggests these are photos of hedges that I haven’t grown, just seen.

Heart shaped hedge at Melville Roses, near Kalamunda

I love the formality of hedges although I personally only have one along the edge of my driveway, a lilli-pilli called Tiny Trev. It’s looking a little relaxed at the moment. In the past I have lost plants (and my first hedge) after pruning in hot weather so I avoid it now and hold off till the weather cools down. I tried taking photos of it but they aren’t turning out well so I’ll leave it for this post.

Rosemary hedge

These photos are taken in the garden of a medical centre near where I work. It has a very formal aesthetic with a lot of hedges and ‘Iceberg’ roses everywhere.

Unknown flowering hedge

I love it and had ideas of basing my front yard design along the same lines but my yard layout doesn’t really suit the straight line divisions required for a formal look and I had to give it away.

Plumbago hedge (it only works well where it gets afternoon shade)

I still dream of an all-white rose garden and I may yet plant an all-white rose section somewhere as an area opens up due to the death of a plant. Some Australian natives are fairly short-lived and I’ve had a couple of deaths this summer.

Gardenia hedge

Happy Gardening!

Sue

Self-seeders

Today I’m going to talk about the self-seeding plants I have in my garden, and since it’s November the 11^th, Remembrance Day, I’m going to start with the poppies.

I have bought punnets of Flanders field poppies from time to time (usually available in the shops from late autumn) and I now get poppies coming up willy-nilly in the front yard. This year’s poppy has come up in my newly-created garden bed but often they will just pop up where they can. 

This one is from a couple of years ago. I love them!

The other punnet planted self-seeders are these coastal daisies or erigeron. The design of this bed was actually prompted by a sense of nostalgia, since I had the whole of my side garden area (not a huge area by the way) planted with it at my previous home, with narrow meandering paths weaving their way through it. I like the look – it’s always been my dream to have a meadow and this is the closest, lowest maintenance effect I could find. 

They are perennials and I have irises (in spring), trees, lavender and roses thrown in there as well. So it’s a sort of field I guess. The erigeron has a tendency to smother a lot of plants so it’s difficult to have variety on the same height level because it just gets taken over. I also prune it down in winter to keep the height down a bit. Anyway, what started as two or three punnets has quickly spread to cover the area.

When I first moved in here, faced with the prospect of designing and planting most of the yard, I went for some short-term solutions by throwing in some seeds. 

Most didn't come up or perhaps were eaten when they were too small to be noticeable. 

Nasturtiums did. And every winter they create a sea of green, and then flower in spring. Summers here are too hot for them and they have usually gone by Christmas. 

It’s Spring! (and all about my plums)

The highly fragrant star jasmine was first out

Here in Perth we have had a ridiculously warm finish to winter and start of spring. Out in the garden it has been less of a gradual transition from dormancy back to life and more of a concentrated rush and everything seems to be in flower at once.

One of several apricot trees in flower

Interspersed with the warmish days of winter were enough cold and chilly ones to hit the required chill hours for my plum trees and they have looked an absolute treat this year. Last year, nights were too warm for my medium chill fruit trees and they didn’t flower or fruit as they should have.

A close look at some plum blossom

I’m a big fan of blood plums so I have three trees, a Mariposa, a Ruby Blood plum and a Satsuma. My plum season stretches from mid-February starting with the Mariposa to the end of April with the Ruby Blood plum. The Mariposa and Ruby Blood plum are cross pollinators for each other.

Irises, looking great

The plum trees vary in habit from each other, with the Ruby Blood plum being a more spreading tree and also far and away the heavier fruiter and flowerer. I guess this means it needs less chill hours than the others. When it came to choosing the spots to plant these trees in, I turned to my trusty fruit tree bible: The Complete Book of Fruit Growing in Australia by Louis Glowinski. Louis told me the Mariposa would be a narrow upright growing tree and so I planted it in a tight corner where my pergola meets my garden beds. Luckily he was right and it is probably no more than a metre wide so it still fits. The shape of the Satsuma fits somewhere between the two, more your traditional vase shaped tree.

Elvins putting on a show

Over the winter I planted a standard prunus ‘Elvins’. I bought it (from Guildford Garden Centre) to plant in the centre of a path and I needed a tree I could walk under. It’s a tree I had never seen in real life before so seeing it in flower was something I had been looking forward to with a little anxiety. Luckily it didn’t disappoint me: its branches were smothered in cluster of very pale pink to white blossom.

Wisteria flowers

By far the biggest show stopper this year has been my wisteria which I have growing as a standard against an old Hills hoist clothesline. This was a plant that had been on my wishlist for many years and when the opportunity arose to plant one I grabbed it and here it is…

Spectacular!