Once there were six

...and now there's only one tree fern left. These have always struggled against their giant neighbors (silver birch and elm trees), and now it seems the drought has delivered the final blow.













Fortunately the birds nest ferns, ginger and hibiscus are still doing well, just adjacent to the remaining tree fern.









Recently in a guest post on Stu's Gardening Tips 'n Ideas blog I had photos of some of the water harvesting things we've installed in the garden. One we've had to replace already, it just wasn't robust enough, and for $7.50, what did we expect. So here's the replacement, which takes water from our washing machine out to the garden. We have switched to an enviro-friendly eucalyptus based washing powder (makes the laundry smell great!), and move the hose around to different plants.

Today is, aesthetically speaking, a beautiful autumnal day in Melbourne, but we would all give anything for it to be bucketing down with rain now.

Japanese Garden in San Francisco

Today I thought I'd see if I would run into the same difficulties as Alice has been having uploading and keeping photos on her blog.

So I've just selected a few photos from our trip to San Francisco last year, and thought I'd use Blog This from Picasa. Much to my delight I've found that it now uploads more than one at a time! The format isn't the greatest, they're all rather scrunched together, but I think this is better than using the "Hello" system which is a bit fiddly. (Don't ask!).

This photo was taken after the Man Who Cooks had dropped the camera on that very hard surface. He is looking suitably abashed.














Here we are on speaking terms again.












And below is us having tea in the tea house overlooking the gardens. Ah, I just noticed that 2 photos have been "lost"... Now for the Publish button!! Had to add the last two photos in via Blogger. Is there a 4 photo limit when you blog photos from Picasa?



One hour later...Hey guess what! The first 4 photos I uploaded via Picasa have disappeared, and only the ones I uploaded manually via Blogger are there. So now I have to upload them manually... Sheesh!

Yee har! Rain!

Little did I think that a day and night of rain would bring so much happiness. It has soaked everything. We didn't have to get up this morning (Sunday) at six a.m. to water the garden. And we won't be watering during the allowed evening hours tonight. The rain has also brought cooler temperatures - very refreshing.

The lake at the Wilson Botanic Garden, Berwick.



Yesterday we went to a wedding held in a beautiful park in an outer Melbourne suburb. The Wilson Botanic Park reminded us a bit of the park the MWC and I got married in 35 years ago. Even though it rained gently throughout the ceremony yesterday, I think most people there were happy to stand under their umbrellas to watch the couple take their vows of commitment to each other and would have felt that the ceremony had been blessed by the rain.

Techie Son has been reporting back fairly regularly from California, and is surviving the cold snap they're having there. Meanwhile I have rearranged his room to accommodate a couple of house guests, and in a couple of weeks Dad will stay there on his annual visit. Then I will see about fitting it out as a craft room. I think it's got great possibilities! (Don't worry, Ben, you'll have a room when you get back!)

I have been creating a book incorporating all the little bits and pieces of things you bring back from a trip: maps, brochures, tickets, labels etc, and have sewn them together with hemp, using a stitch I taught myself. Each of the folded pieces of construction paper has a brochure, such as the one from the Buena Vista, sewn inside it, which allows you to open it out to read. I still have to decorate the cover, probably with a map of San Francisco.

The Buena Vista is an important San Francisco institution, as it's the home of the Irish Coffee. You can read about it here. When Dad and I were leaving for Hawaii last November, we discovered that there was a Buena Vista right in the airport. Unfortunately we didn't have time to have an Irish Coffee before boarding, and they don't sell any to take away. So when the plane we were sitting in waiting to depart was declared "not ready", we were only too delighted to deplane and head straight for - you guessed it - the Buena Vista. Dad's not much of a photographer, but here's me drinking an Irish Coffee. This is how I would look if you had drunk too many Irish Coffees.

Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat.
Alex Levine

Hedgely Dene Gardens revisited

Today was just too beautiful to stay indoors, even though it was a rare opportunity to have the house to myself. I was going to visit a garden in the Dandenongs which has beautiful specimen trees, but the cost of petrol made me think twice about driving all the way up there on my own. I decided to go back to the much closer Hedgely Dene Gardens to see how autumn (on the left) was changing them from when I saw them in summer (on the right).

A nice quiet spot

Painting a picture with window coverings

We love the look of Japanese interiors, and when we saw these shojii style blinds we knew they would be perfect for one of our living areas. The entire wall is floor to ceiling windows, looking out onto the garden. We can have some or all raised or lowered to various heights, to keep sun out, or let light and warmth in. Even when they're lowered completely they give such a nice backdrop to the room, and let in enough light so that it isn't claustrophobic. Now that the sun is getting lower in the sky and temperatures are milder, sitting in those chairs is blissful. But it's sometimes nice to have just the one blind up, framing a snapshot of the garden and highlighting the hibiscus and birch tree.

Stu's gardening meme (I've been tagged!)

Stu from Gardening for Dummies has made up a meme. The idea is for people he's tagged to answer these questions. His answers are on his blog (linked from above), and I tag one or more people at the bottom of this post to answer the questions in turn. It's a good way to find out more about a person. Also, I had not had any brainwaves about a post this week, so this comes at a good time.

If I was only allowed to keep one plant in my garden which would it be?
The crepe myrtles (we have two so I think that's allowed as the one plant). They have a long flowering season with a magnificent color; even without leaves and flowers they still show off their beautiful bark; and as they are at the front of the house, they create a great entry to the property.

If there was only one thing invented in the past 100 years that I was permitted to keep, what would it be?
The automatic washing machine. Without that life would be too dreary, and you wouldn't have enough time to do other stuff.

Name 3 animals you saw yesterday (excluding cats and dogs).
1. dozens of ducks on the university campus where I work
2. the head and hind quarters of a rat one of my cats killed
3. (heard) a heron flying overhead

Which season do you like the most?
In Melbourne it has to be the autumn. The weather is very stable, still warm but with a hint of the changing season. And it means the footy season is back.

Name the person who inputed the most wisdom into your life?
My parents: Mom because she showed me the importance of family life, and Dad because he made me look at alternatives to what I thought were preordained paths for me to take.

I'm tagging the Other Val again.

Hedgely Dene Gardens

This is a collage I made of photos I took at a nearby public garden, right in the middle of suburbia. I used the collage feature that comes with Picasa2 (a freebie!).

Just discovered that after you've clicked on the photo to enlarge it, THAT photo will have a square icon with arrows pointing outwards. If you click on that icon the photo will be enlarged again, and I am rather impressed with the detail that comes up, given my shaky camera work. I guess you all knew about that already though...

Ginger plant flowering

The ginger plants are now in flower and the scent is wafting onto the veranda. I wish there were a way to make a file of aromas so you could click on a link to smell the flowers, just like you can upload voice and video files to hear and watch...

These flowers are about 30 cm (12 in). We've had the plants for more than 30 years. They were in our first garden, and we brought rhizomes with us to each new garden. Gives a very tropical look. You can also see a birds nest fern on the left, and a (struggling) tree fern on the right. Too much competition from the 40 year old elm!

Having a planty tanty

First an explanation of tanty: it's the Aussie abbreviation for "tantrum", so you "throw a tanty". Well, if Tom Jones can have a panty tanty as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald a few years ago, then I'm allowed a planty tanty, just a minor rant about modern garden trends.

What is happening to gardens these days? Is it happening only in Australia? And I find it doubly bad that it's happening here in Victoria, which used to be known as The Garden State.

Gardens are under siege from 1) the drought (can't do much about Mother Nature), 2) the modern trend to build big houses that extend practically to all boundaries, leaving little space for gardens, and 3) another trend to multiple plantings all of the same type, in straight lines no less. Boring! And downright silly too, when they trim bushes to have little pom-poms on top, like a head on a stick-like neck atop a roly poly bush. Ridiculous! These "gardens" are done by landscaping companies that buy the plants in bulk and just fill the space. And that is the extent of the "garden". Soul-less.

Having fewer trees to shade houses, very important in the Australian sun, is made worse by modern houses having no verandas, eaves or other type of overhang, making people even more reliant on using air conditioners to keep cool.

Are these trends happening elsewhere? End of tanty.

Borrowed scenery

Using the Japanese concept of borrowed scenery (what you can see beyond your own boundaries/fencelines), we try to remember to look at and appreciate what others have planted and which add to our own landscape. So far we have been very lucky in that regard, but modern gardening trends do not auger well. This will be the topic of a future rant, but for now, here are some photos of what I took in this morning's gentle light. The photos just don't do justice to what the eye sees - maybe I'll have to upgrade the camera...


First photo: looking west as the rising sun lights up some trees two and three gardens away from ours.

This is the Norfolk Island Hibiscus in the neighbors' garden. It gets these purple flowers which attract the noisy wattle birds (usually before the alarm has gone off). The ground is littered with the husks of the flowers after the birds have finished with them. The last photo is north facing, and the tallest tree in the back neighbors' garden turns lovely colors in the autumn. The umbrella shaped tree just to the left of our garden house, currently with yellow blossoms, is an unknown to us, and creates lots of seedlings (to weed out), but it's mirrored by one in the garden to the east, and they look a treat.

Summer garden

New garden arch, looking towards the house



Looking away from the house towards the street

Chairs facing outwards towards garden



Ourside our bedroom door - nice place for afternoon tea and looking at the garden







garden house and in the last photo, you can just see the screened in veranda

Sacred bamboo - hah!

You'd think that something named sacred bamboo would be a bit more restrained and even difficult to grow. Nope, it grows like a weed, and it once filled almost the whole courtyard which you see in the previous post. We now have that area under control, but on the weekend I removed much of it from around the Japanese maple (so we could see the beautiful trunk) and near the footpath (so the water meter can be read, and even found). As a consequence of pulling out shoots and clipping very thick woody stems, I am feeling a bit weary. But getting that done, plus my zen weeding in the mornings is giving me a great sense of satisfaction.

After looking on the internet for suitable images of sacred bamboo, it would seem that we don't have sacred bamboo at all, but some other type. I should have read this article first!

Zen approach to the garden

When I went on that horticultural tour of the Japanese garden at the zoo last week, I optimistically asked the gardener if there was a modern, 21st century invention that would magically help the home gardener tidy up the leaves, twigs etc without having to get on hands and (ageing) knees. No such luck! His answer was that they used one of those most un-zen-like blowers as well as, yes, getting down on hands and knees.

There used to be a self sown tree in our stone courtyard. In its healthy days the tree had a wonderful lollypop shape that gave us privacy and shade in summer, but was extremely messy, even to the point of spreading around purple berries that discolored the path to the front door. When it gave its last hurrah last March and we removed it, it was the start of a tidier courtyard, but I still needed to do the finetuning that a stone courtyard requires.


So yesterday, inspired by the beautifully maintained garden in the zoo, I made a start at tidying up the debris the tree had left behind, including a zillion seedlings that had started poking their heads through the stones. I think that tree knew it was not long for this world and produced a bumper crop of seeds. Rather admirable really, but out they came. I fell into a quiet rhythmn, maybe zen-like, and it didn't seem to take long at all. Then a final rake-over, and I could look at it with pleasure. This morning when I went out for the newspaper, I stopped to pick up a few more twigs and seedlings, and it was a lovely thing to do in the fresh smelling air of early morning. Will I continue that? Only time will tell.

Mel made this bamboo fence in the traditional manner, tying together the bamboo with rope. These photos were all taken of our front garden. (Mel has just confessed that the rope hides the screws he used!)

Beehive in our garden

A couple of weeks ago we started noticing huge swarms of what at the time we thought were wasps (ugh) forming football-sized clumps in trees. Then there'd be a massive buzzing and swarming and the clumps would disappear for a while. Then a clump formed in a climber which was at eye level, and after calling in an expert it turned out to be a proper beehive. Wearing one of those beekeeper outfits he put the hive into a collector box which he left for the bees to return to at night. He has taken them out to the country to a friend who keeps bees, and it happens to be near where our bush block is. An apiarist often leave his hives in the forest nearby. Supposedly beehives are good luck in Chinese custom.