garden

Sunshower power

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Tropical storms, fruit splitting, grass growing faster than the wallabies’ appetites, ground squelching underfoot, leeches on the march as soon as I leave the verandah… this is not how summer is supposed to be here.

I am confined to the cabin and the verandah most of the time, and can only peer through the veil of rain at the wallabies keeping the roses stripped. They seem to have lost their taste for oregano, so it’s racing to bloom and seed before they attack it again.

I don’t mind the rain so much, as I must work at the computer every day. So I need power.

And, despite all the rain, I get it. The odd weather creates lots of sunshowers, and while there may be lumps of moss growing on the solar setup, the sunpower keeps charging the batteries.

Convenient magic!

Fruit firsts

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I don’t understand what’s going on in my orchard — or not going on, actually. The bower birds and the king parrots have arrived, as usual, to eat the fruit on the trees that I haven’t got around to netting, which is all of them this year.

I knew the mulberries were coming ripe in stages and have been going over to stand and eat my breakfast’s first course on the hoof, so to speak.  This year I don’t have time to pick them in bulk and turn them into jam or pies —  I need a tribe of children to come and eat them.

But I don’t get why the birds haven’t eaten them yet; the ripe ones are as sweet as they come and all the rain has made them full and juicy.

Assuming the birds will take them all soon, I thought I’d photograph the bounty just to show it can happen.

That’s when I spotted the cherries. In 16 years I have never seen the fruit on my two cherry trees get past a few faint blushes of pink before they disappear. I may have eaten one — once. But the trees are tall and skinny — and laden; far too high to reach easily, but I am thinking of lopping them just to get those gorgeous globes.

Any bird would be mad to pass these up; what is going on?

Heady honeysuckle

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Some vines go crazy here; they used to need keeping in check, to be sure they didn’t take off across the grass and into the forest. The Honeysuckle was one such. But since my open gate policy, the wallabies do that job for me.

The Honeysuckle that drapes my outdoor toilet gets a severe short back and sides trim daily. The only way it can go is up and out.

The mass of woody stems below is not especially attractive, and the overall topiarised head shape is very odd, but the perpetual pruning has encouraged a mass flowering this year. I love the scent of honeysuckle, and it seems to permeate the clearing more than any other – heady indeed.

However, with such a thick crown I am very aware of needing to look up as I round the corner, duck under its fringe and take up the throne. It looks like the perfect python hunting cover to me.

But once I know I’m safe, the view’s pretty good from my doorless loo.

Out-of-reach roses

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This year I have only three varieties of rose in bloom  — all climbing varieties. The others were shrubs but are now mere snapped sticks and stripped stems, some with a topknot of leaves where the wallabies and roos can’t reach.

Last year they all bloomed but the climbing ones were eaten by the possum. Since the quoll seems to have eaten the possum, where these roses have climbed out of reach of the determinedly reaching macropods, they are giving me a fabulous display in this late Spring.

The Crepuscule rose on the verandah is bursting with buds and its ragged apricot blooms are buzzing with bees. This rose has been climbing for about 15 years and its stems are thick and woody and likely to lift the battens on the verandah roof eaves where it snakes around the side, but I can’t bring myself to tell it it stop.

These roses drop their petals fairly quickly when cut, but the other two varieties last well inside. Stuck inside working away on my book, I don’t get outside much now to enjoy them where they grow, so I bring them in.

I am delighted and awed by their beauty every time I look at them. This delicate old-fashioned shell-pink beauty is Madame Carrìère and she bedecks the rusty shed walls, but only above about two metres.

The densely cupped rich yellow flowers of the Graham Thomas rose on the ‘guest wing’ are right beneath where the possum was living, and its stems were constantly broken as it climbed. Now it arches freely and blooms in profusion; I love the sheer opulence of its fat full cups!

As I never know how long any particular balance will last among the creatures here, I shall enjoy these roses while I can, and hope the macropods don’t learnt to climb.

Blokes and blossoms

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While the wallaby females ferry and feed the joeys, the males do blokey stuff — like fighting. 

I had seen very young males practice-fighting in my yard but these two were old enough and big enough for the real thing.

Given that they chose the grass right next to my shaded glasshouse for their wrestling and kickboxing, I kept imagining a lurch, a crash of breaking glass, as they danced about on their hind legs or balanced on their tails.

But after a while they simply tired of it and went back to eating grass. They vary this with checking for any new shoots on the reachable branches of my mighty Banksia Rose, which they keep stripped bare of blossoms and leaves and looking like a strange fringe to the lush flowering above. They stand on their hind legs to do this too.

Parrot peeps

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The King Parrots have arrived in all their green and scarlet glory, as raucous and belligerent as ever. This means that some of my orchard’s fruit must be close to ready for ruination, even though small and green.

No time for netting this year, so the Kingies and the bower birds will have their best season yet. This one was very briefly perched in a slender — and fruitless — birch tree.

I am grateful that my resident parrots, the Crimson Rosellas, are equally decorative — and much more musical. This one was neatly framed in a section of my less-than-sparkling  bedroom window.

Because it faces into a bank covered by a prostrate grevillea woven amongst hanging rosemary, the rosellas love to squabble amongst the flowers there. If I am quiet and still I can watch at very close quarters.

Wallaby takeover

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As you can see, Eastern Red-necked wallabies rule here. They know it; males, females, joeys — they do as they please in my yard. I simply add more wire netting guards to protect what pleases me. I have resigned myself to the fact that I will not have flowers unless they are specific inedible bulbs, or above wallaby reach.

So I have placed a large pot on my verandah and planted seeds of what I hope will be a deep red nasturtium — pretty and tasty. The seedlings have just emerged.

The very day they did, I happened to hear an odd thump on the verandah steps. I looked up and there was a youngish wallaby looking at me from the top step. My first thought was ‘cute’, my second was ‘not a good idea’ — thinking of the nasturtiums to come. So I went out and shooed it back down the steps.

I had assumed it was a more inquisitive wallaby than the others. But it came back several times in the next few days — definitely the same young female — and I reprimanded her and sent her back down the steps.

I finally realised the appeal when I caught her eating the new shoots of the ornamental grape vine. At ground level they have already done so; I’ve been meaning to get around to putting netting across them or I won’t get enough summer shade.

Now I might have to put a gate across the verandah, or I’ll get neither shade nor nasturtiums. Quolls, possums, pythons, black snakes, lizards, bush rats, antechinus and the odd nesting bird have all taken advantage of my verandah. It’s bit much if the wallabies want to make a takeover bid too.

Spring surprises

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The extremely slow-to-bloom (16 years!) white wisteria is now fully out and it is so beautiful in form and colour that it deserves a follow-up post. For some reason, its delicacy makes me think of Japan, where I’ve never been. Perhaps the decorations on geisha hair combs in paintings?

The weeping habit has given my verandah view such added beauty that I am quite awed. And just look at the all the reddish new leaves on the climbing and possum-less rose!

Thanks, quoll.

The other spring surprise has been that the bird-sown Pittosporum tree in my garden has also blossomed. There are two indigenous varieties here, one more sweetly scented than the other, I believe. So I have been wondering which this one would turn out to be.

Perhaps I still don’t know, not having the two to compare, but mine definitely has a sweet perfume. It will do me. What a treat!

The bees seemed to think so too.

Signs of Spring

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It’s September, so it must be Spring, but at this altitude we are often some weeks behind in flowering times.

I shudder to think what the wallabies will do to the tender green buds of trees like this birch, but at least they can't reach to the top.

I love the way bulbs have naturalised and thickened into clumps over the years — and I love that wallabies don’t find them tasty.

The winter snowflakes and the jonquils of several varieties, both white and yellow, look perfectly at home around such deciduous trees.

The abundant yellow jonquils like these above may look like mini daffodils but they lack the stateliness as well as the size.

My daffodils only bloom with Spring here, so for me they are the true harbinger. And they have arrived!

Only trouble is, if Spring is here, can snakes be far behind?

Our place

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I know that the wallabies truly feel at home in the yard now by the way they sleep here in the warmth of the late winter days, letting me walk past so close to them. Some of the very newly outed joeys are skittish but they soon learn I’m no threat.

This mother is so unconcerned that she is fast asleep, not even pretending to keep watch through half-closed eyes, as they often do.  Note the well-stripped rose bush behind her!

The joey stays close, in physical touch with mum. This endearing joey is, I think, the first one I made eye contact with, when it was a pouch-dweller. It often has one floppy ear.

I mildly regret the roses and all the other plants they eat, but how can I not be delighted that such beautiful and gentle creatures now think of my place as as ‘our place’?

This what a Wildlife Refuge ought to be — a place of trust, of safety.

Wallabies at home

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The wallabies took very little time to adjust to my moving back in to their domain. There are lots of mothers carrying young in pouches. Some of the joeys are very small and pink, and some, like this one, are really too big.

It is so cramped in that low-hanging pouch that you can see that its hind foot is protruding, but it stayed inside where it was warm. After all, it could reach grass and milk from there, so why not?

The mothers seem most trusting of me. Some of the others look at me quite imperiously, ears pricked, as if to say, ‘ So who are you, and what is your business here?!’ 

I have no idea why they haven’t eaten these self sown greens — as they hop in and eat the parsley in this old tank that I need to fill to be a raised bed for root vegies. Unfortunately, since it’s really a compost heap at this stage, a red-bellied black snake moved in at the end of last summer.

But if I can overcome my disappointment in the wide range of my once-treasured garden plants they are eating, they are a treat to have around to watch.

Only… I just noticed that they have started on the citrus trees! Now that’s going too far.

An old garden’s treasures

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The quaint Rosebank cottage where I stayed ( courtesy of Mary Delahunty and the Victorian Writers’ Centre) was surrounded by introduced trees and garden plants – and did have a bank of roses.

The king of the garden was this giant oak, whose bark was dappled blue with lichen and whose branches reached 15 metres in every direction. A tree to inspire awe, but not for the many immature Crimson Rosellas who daily raided it for acorns. The generous oak dropped shiny acorns, knubby caps, brown leaves and endless twigs for kindling.

Rosebank’s old garden added two new plants to my botanical knowledge.

The first was  a tree bearing a strange sci-fi fruit, with its pronged antennae. It turned out to be a Medlar, Mespilus germanica, a fruit popular in mediaeval times, able to be eaten only when soft and half rotten, a process known as ‘bletting’. Then it is like spiced stewed apple — reputedly best accompanied by port. I had no port, but wasn’t keen on the fruit’s texture. However, medlar liqueur sounded tempting.

The other plant was a tall and wide shrub with arched and drooping slender branches, bearing only a few autumn leaves, but masses of trailing bunches of small hot pink flowers with orange centres.  Close up, I saw they were more like pods, beginning as quadruple pockmarked globes that split to show the four orange ‘seeds’, which were also rough-skinned like mini cumquats.

When the Woodend nursery identified it for me as Spindle Bush, Euonymus europaeus, I learned that the pink is the fruit and the orange are the seeds, and that they are poisonous. The flowers were described as ‘insignificant’ so I need not regret missing the Spring for them. Common in the Northern Hemisphere, it was named for its hard wood, used for making spindles because it can hold a very fine point.