Good for the soul

I just love gardens so today was “right up my alley”! We visited the Hunter Valley Gardens. The gardens were opened in 2003 so are very new when compared to many of the large famous gardens to which tourists will flock. Our visit happened after all the rose trees had been pruned and all the deciduous trees – which actually is most of the trees – are still bare of leaves and buds are barely showing. In spite of that the gardens were beautiful. This photograph shows the formal garden and was taken from an elevated platform.

There are a number of different (very different) gardens within the 16 hectares of garden.

A little train is an excellent way to get the first taste of the garden and the train driver gives a running commentary as the train passes the different features. Anyone who is not so nimble will still be able to see most of what is in the gardens this way.

There are many topiary shapes that are really eye catching and even some that are shaped like animals! They are very clever!

The storybook garden is full of fascinating sculptures that would appeal to the child in anyone! This is more a garden of sculptures than a garden of flowers.

The time passed too quickly in the gardens but there was another interesting place to go and visit so we clambered aboard our mini bus and made our way to Singleton and to a convent where we were greeted by Sister Monika and given a fascinating look into the life of nuns in Australia. A little video was shown to us that gave the early history of the Order of the Sisters of Mercy and how the order started in Ireland before spreading across the world. Our guide had spent most of her life in this Convent and she was able to answer any questions we asked on any aspect of life as a nun.

Life has changed dramatically for nuns – they no longer wear the black habit and live in seclusion – but we were shown a Spartan room that showed how a nun’s bedroom (cell) used to be.

 

In the grand old buildings there were many beautiful stained glass windows. These have been repaired and strengthened without compromising their beauty. This is one of the glorious examples taken in the large dining room.

Just before we left the convent we were taken into the chapel – and this was definitely the “piece de resistance” The interior of the chapel is exquisite. The altar is Italian marble and breath-taking in its translucency and form. This is a very special place and I found out that I shouldn’t really have been taking photographs of it – but who could resist? I certainly couldn’t.

I felt so privileged to have been able to see this amazing convent, one that is still inhabited by nuns, albeit a small number of aging nuns, and to learn something of the contribution these ladies have given to Australia.

AJ

Colour after the rain

The soil is so wet that walking on the lawn covers shoes with liquid mud but Colin had told me that the little piece of frangipani that he brought home for me seven years ago had flowered and I just HAD to go and see for myself! Although I stepped slowly and very carefully I had to remove my shoes before I could get back indoors! But I saw it – the most startling deep red, almost a plum coloured bunch of florets.

 My photo actually does not show the true colour, it is darker than this. If I had made the flowers as dark as they truly are you would find the picture to be less striking. It is so beautiful. Now that it has flowered this first time it should now grow and have lots more flowers next year. I hope so!

Once outside in the garden with a camera in my hands I could not return indoors without finding a few more blooms to capture!

This little bush of blue daisies has been flowering non stop for weeks. I don't do anything to it but this rain has made it grow even taller!

For some strange reason the daylilies that come out in November have started flowering again.

I have several of these yellow and red daylilies out at the moment, rather than take the usual shot from above and looking down at the long pollen covered stamens I opted for an “under the lip” shot! The three corner palm stands in the middle of the garden and is providing the pattern of leaves in the background.

Since the rain the dahlias have taken off. It is not long since I cut them all back and had not had the time to lift the tubers, they are all very bushy and healthy and one has surprised me by producing a different coloured flower.

I thought that all of my dahlias were dark red – the same colour as the frangipani. But one is a pretty salmon colour. I know that I “rescued” a sick dahlia from Bunnings last year that didn't have a tag on it so maybe this is it! Its definitely not sick today.

Seeds that came from plants that grew here last year have produced marigold plants that actually need thinning – one of them is flowering already.

The splash of orange makes an almost luminous glow in the garden.

And finally one of my miniature roses – the rose bush refuses to be miniature but the exquisite flowers are not very large at all.

If you were to make a circle with your thumb and middle finger the rose would fit in there. The leaves are a bis of a mess but the plant is otherwise healthy and has lots of these little flowers – and a few baby grasshoppers too.

I do not use chemicals in my garden at all. We have lots of birds and lots of lizards and I have no desire to kill any of them so I do my best with companion planting and soapy water! Not as efficient as the chemical treatment but it keeps me happy!

AJ

November display

This morning when I looked out of my kitchen window my breath was taken away with the beauty on show by one little garden tree. Yesterday there were one or two flowers on it but this morning it was smothered with them,

The remarkable thing about this particular Tibouchina is that the petals are different shades of pink. This was originally a cutting given to me by a friend. It was taken off a white tibouchina (as was the other cutting which has turned out to be purple). This TIbouchina is Tibouchina Mutabilis - a known hybrid of the genus so why it should have grown from a cutting from a completely different tree I have no idea!!
Here is a closer look (It is worth taking a closer look!)

If you were to click on the picture you will be rewarded with a larger image. So much easier to see.
The individual florets have distinctive angular stamens. The wild birds do not show any interest in the flowers nor have I noticed many insects of them either. Maybe the pollination is done by the wind.

I have two other Tibouchina varieties in my garden and neither is showing signs of being as covered with flowers as this one - of the other two, one is the dark purple variety and the other a rich pink.
I thought that Spring was an exciting time for colour in my garden but this month which is the end of spring, is proving to be just as exciting.
AJ

Keeping "at it"

The garden bug has bitten hard - I find that I just HAVE to get out there and dig!
The garden bed beside the front steps is always in shade so plants that suit those conditions have been put there and have done very well. So well in fact that the area was completely overgrown.
Over the top of my fleecy jacket (the mornings are still quite cool) I pulled on my garden shirt. This is a workman's safety shirt that was stolen from my son's wardrobe! It keeps me reasonably clean!
Fortunately the house is not on a main thoroughfare so no one ever sees me in the garden!

The aluminium plant is a good filler but it had become more than prolific - it had buried almost everything. There is a strappy leafed plant that has dainty little white iris-like flowers that also multiplies energetically and needed pulling out.
It was a bit like working in the "Secret Garden" - I was finding all sorts of plants underneath the overgrowth!

These are new Daylilies struggling to be seen. Now I know they are there!
By the time I had finished pulling stuff out I had a heap of rubbish to be turned into compost almost as big as the heaps I had created yesterday!

The wooden planter box was against the steps and contained a leafy climber but it the climber is too difficult to control so I scraped the tendrils off the brickwork and trust I have managed to remove it all! The planter disintegrated when I pulled it from the position it had remained in for years! (It had a black pot inside that contained the plant - you can just see it among all the rubbish!)
Now the garden has been cleaned up I can plants other daylilies to join the ones that are there already. There are also clivia and bromiliads and a couple of azalea bushes in there - oh yes, and a "prince of orange" which is quite showy when in flower. All shade lovers.
AJ

Creating a mess

It has been a while since I have added anything to my blog - so to rejuvenate things I have changed the appearance of it. I have become rather annoyed with the  black background and the small area in which the text is displayed. I hope that this new appearance is more appealing - both to you and to me!
Changes are happening in my front garden too. Everything grows very fast here in the subtropical area of Southern Queensland. Trees especially! I have plenty of shrubs in my garden that seem to have "taken over" and swamped the smaller plants and ferns so yesterday I went out with shears and snips and created havoc! Good fun! (I can hardly move this morning, though.)
When I stepped outside and saw the mess that I have to clear up I took my camera out with me. I can show you the disaster zone!

So you can see what I have to do this morning! The plant in the top picture was actually quite easy to prune - the stems or branches are easily snapped so I found it much quicker to put one hand at the place I wanted to break the branches off and with the other hand, pull the branch or collection of branches, towards me. It didn't take very long at all. Putting the stuff into rough heaps took longer!
We have a pretty shrub that is called a "snowball bush" that loves to be pruned and will grow thicker and much more attractive when cut severely. This is where the secateurs came into use and why my hands are quite sore today!
When plants grow so easily it does make me wonder why most of the gardens in this city are devoid of them! The majority of gardens have only lawn and a couple of trees or shrubs. I love colour and the best gift from a visitor is not a box of chocolates, but something I can put in the garden!
AJ

Recovery in the garden

It is now a week since those pesky little bugs invaded my garden and I am sure there are a few of you who are wondering just what sort of devastation is left behind. The pictures I will include in this post will show you that all is well. The dahlias and ground plants have made an amazing recovery - they are still producing flower buds and fresh leaves so I knew that I would not have to wait for very long before I saw an improvement. The crepe myrtle tree had a few little buds that avoided the jaws of the voracious beetles and have provided a faint tinge of colour to the almost stripped tree. This is what it looks like today.

I just wish that I could show you how wonderful it looked before the insects arrived. It was a mass of colour and you couldn't see many of the leaves. Never mind. at least the bugs did not arrive as early as they did a few years ago (they do not swarm like this every year, I have been living here 30 years and this is the third time they have come) That time the flowers had only just appeared and the tree was about a third of the size it is now. This time around we had enjoyed the flowers for about a week and it was when they were at their peak that the bugs arrived.
The dahlias - well I have pulled off the eaten leaves and cut off the dead heads so there is no evidence of their trauma left at all.

Two tubers of these dahlias were given to me by my next door neighbour four years ago and I have lifted them and planted them out each year after giving them time to rest and now I have hundreds of them - if you can see the slope of the path in the background of the top one of these two pictures (click on the photo to make it easier to see) you may be able to see plants beside the post and tree and bush - I have planted even more tubers down that edge of our block. They were planted much later so they will be flowering after these ones in the foreground have finished.
What happened to the rose?

The rose was pruned below the damaged area - it is on the right of this picture, at the front, it has since had two new flowers and you may be able to see the red new growth appearing just above my signature. So the rose has recovered too.
I did despair of my flowering gum. It certainly looked as if the bugs had climbed right inside the cups that hold the flowers and eaten everything - but one branch managed to escape the invaders - incredibly the swarm was in a distinct strip across the garden and some plants were totally unaffected while others were ruined (or so I thought.). Here is the surviving flowering branch of my gum tree (Eucalyptus).

So, with a lighter heart I wander around my garden - there is still the odd beetle to be seen but I am not one to use sprays and the birds and lizards and frogs and things are working hard to keep the garden looking good. We have recently added a huge white crane to the birds that check out my flowering part of the garden and I would imagine that he would eat plenty of bugs and nasties! He would stand as high as the shoulders of my seven year old granddaughter! What a magnificent creature!
AJ

Heartbreak in my garden

This morning when I was having breakfast out on the veranda - as I do every day - I gazed around from this high vantage point to admire the colour that is in my garden. My spoon dropped into my dish as I spied the crepe mytle. Beside the driveway the crepe mytle was in full bloom, better than it has ever been before - smothered with the deepest cherise coloured flowers. This morning it was brown! A layer of petals lay on the gravel below but not one petal remained on the tree. I left my breakfast and rushed down to take a closer look. Sure enough the flowers had all gone and there was no evidence as to why - until I looked down to the flowers below. Resting on all the green leaves were the culprits - small orange beetles (with very full tummies).
There is nothing to be done. There is no point spraying when the damage is done.
I walked across the drive to see if any of the flowers over there had been touched. This is what greeted me.

The first thing I noticed was one of my miniature roses - it has decided to be a large rose and has grown quite vigorously and now is about waist high but still with miniature roses on it. The grubs obviously like the sweet soft wood of the growing tip as well as the pretty roses. Click on the photos to see the damage more clearly.
Then I looked over at the big dahlias that are creating such a dramatic splash of colour in the garden and they too look a real mess. Here are a couple of photos of two of them - I wont upset you by telling you how many flowers are like this.

I was so mad that I went inside and grabbed a can of flying insect spray and sprayed the flower heads. One squirt made the outside insects drop straight away and twice as many that were deep in the petals came crawling out to escape. I know that I am not solving the problem at all - there are more insects in the trees and grass and the entire garden but I took real pleasure in attacking these ones! I do not normally use any insecticides on my garden - I rely on nature to provide the control so I have plenty of birds, insects and lizards and spiders and so on that do no harm at all and I do not want to destroy them. I shall be back outside tomorrow with a pair of secateurs to cut off all the dead flowers to make sure that they do not continue to poison the insects!
Just before dark I decided to take a look at another part of the garden - I remembered that there was a small crepe myrtle that I had grown from a cutting of the first one by the drive. Sure enough, no petals on that - but the horrible little invaders were smothering the leaves so I just had to call out the rest of the family to come and take a look. I dashed inside for the camera but had to use flash since it was almost dark. Take a look at these beasties.

They were as thick as this throughout the garden - so you can see how pointless it would be for me to try and spray them all! I hope that they do not stay very long now they have cleaned my garden - do you realise that they have even started eating the geranium flowers?
I had a sudden thought. What about my pink flowering gum? I looked up. NO! They had eaten those too.

The bugs are still inside the cups of the flowers so by morning there will be no colour left on the tree at all. So now I am feeling very sad. I put all this effort into creating colour and what do I do? I attract not only the birds that enjoy the nectar in them but the horrible little creatures that destroy everything in their path. My garden will look like everyone else's by morning. Just green. Sigh.....
AJ

More colour from my patch of garden

I must be doing something right this year! My garden is really rewarding me with colour. I suspect it is my industrious husband's doing - he is out every single day with the hose, watering my seedlings and providing me with trailer loads of new soil. Tomorrow we are off to see if we can purchase some sugar cane mulch direct from the farm! My garden is really "spoilt"! I think it gets more attention than we do!

Number one picture is another look at my pretty multicoloured Tibouchina mutabilis. With these blooms all close together you can see how they change from white to a stronger pink colour. I prune this bush back once it has finished flowering and that keeps it from getting too big but better than that it develops more flower branches for the next year. Last year this bush was quite open but this year is more dense. Next year it should be even better.

The Agapanthus are out! They really are a majestic plant with their strappy green leaves and tall stems with big heads of blue on the top - they are such a contrast to most things in my garden which seem to be various shades of pink! I suppose I will have to dig some of them out after their flowering is over - they have multiplied so that they take up quite a bit of room. I wont be throwing them away though, when I lift them I shall plant them down the side of the driveway that goes down to the shed in the back. They wont mind being in the shade of trees and come November we shall be rewarded with a fantastic display of blue!

I have only one white Agapanthus and it is a little slower to open than the blue, It also looks a bit lonely but it will have "pups" so that I will have two or three plants next year.

The best bit of all is kept til last - the daylilies start showing off in November! I have about eight different daylilies and, like the agapanthus, they have pups that give me new plants every year so I have clumps of daylilies all through the garden ranging from single buttercup yellow to deep red that is almost brown. I love daylilies and have visited daylily farms - this is where some of my plants were purchased. I have a gorgeous one that a friend brought for me from a holiday and another that I bought from a gardener who had a stall on the side of the road! I will share some more of their beauty with you another time.
Dont forget that to see the pictures larger, click on them!
AJ

Yellow flower

Thanks to Jenny in Western Australia I now have a name for my bright and cheerful yellow flowers!

So for those of you who are curious, this yellow daisy is Coreopsis, It multiplies quite well and can be pulled apart easily and spread around. I started with only a punnet of seedlings so all these plants in one garden plus the plants in the next picture, in an adjacent garden are from those original six. I have not found it to be weed-like. It does not spread wildly appearing all through the garden unexpectedly - plus it is fairly shallow rooted and really easy to pull out should the plants become too numerous.

A friend gave me the pretty flowering shrub (lots of the plants in my garden have a story!). I was told it would be a white Tobouchina but, as you can see it is not completely white. The new flowers are white with pink on the back of the petals and as the days pass that colour appears on the white front of the petals. Because the colours mutate the plant has been called "Tibouchina mutabilis" Which, for me, makes remembering the name so much easier! This same friend gave me four different cuttings from his white Tibouchina but not one of them turned out to be white. The other three are deep purple. The purple variety is known as "Tibouchina austenville" and is the most common of the varieties seen around this area. it will be a few months before the third variety in my garden comes into bloom again. It is a pretty pink colour that does not mutate. The flowers are rather tatty when seen closely but the show created by the masses of flowers makes up for that.
(Click on a picture and you will see it larger, then click on the "back" button to return to the blog)
AJ

Little critters

I must apologise for being so slack about writing in my blog. Just when I think I have my life organised so that it is all mine, I volunteer to help people "do things" and so find I have no time at all! Today I have a little time just for me so here I am again!!!
While chasing around in the garden with the camera in search of "small" things for the photographic topic for Visions I came across all sorts of little bugs and spiders. Some lived to see another day but some have hopped off to another planet.

My first photo is not of a Calendular - a rather large showy flower that is usually a brilliant orange colour, no, this is a much small flower that comes up every year in my garden - I bought the first punnet of seedlings about ten years ago and since then I have split them and moved them around the garden and they flower prolifically for about three weeks. Each flower is about the size of a ten cent piece. No way can I remember the name of it though. Sorry about that!
Now I come to the bugs. There were lots of tiny spiders - I was using a macro lens so those tiny spiders now look quite impressive and a bit scary.

Now this one looks quite fearsome! But when you remember the size of a begonia (tree begonia) flower you then may realise that it is very small indeed.
This is the web of another of my garden inhabitants.

I am not sure if Mrs Spider is inside the funnel or if she expects her prey to get trapped in it. The web covered quite a large area between leaves and must have been newly made because there was nothing trapped and it was undamaged in any way.

The last little monster was really small - the web was stretched between three leaves and the spider was weighting down the middle of it. I thought the spider was transparent until I focused the macro lens on it and saw that rather than transparent it was a subtle green colour. The fancy markings on the spider's body surprised me. With the naked eye I couldn't see it. (Mind you I do need glasses if I have to read anything!!!)
 There are plenty more bugs and critters crawling and hopping around in my garden. There are even some miniature grasshoppers that make lots of little round holes in the Chrysanthemum leaves and the ones I found I photographed and sprayed. I obviously did not manage to find all of them because I have found more "aerated" leaves since.
A little reminder before I close. Click on the photos if you would like to see them larger. Click on the "back" arrow (top left) to return to the blog.
AJ