garden

Transplants of the heart

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Back in my old Mountain home, the verandah grew a living green blind each summer, blazed red and pink in autumn, and leaflessly let in the sunshine all winter.

Naturally, I took cuttings of this Ornamental Grape to bring with me.

They survived the trip and the transplant and here they are flagging their first autumn on their new verandah home.

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The other decoration on this verandah are the intricate spiderwebs between the uprights, only visible when delineated by a fine morning mist.

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The spiders do other useful work, such as binding the leaves of the little Nagami Cumquat into a neat parcel.

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With great difficulty I also brought with me my Dad’s Place. It was built by me and my sisters to house his ashes.

Not having been designed to be mobile, it weighed a ton.

But here it is, resettled, its lavender and wormwood plant settings fast making it look less newly transplanted. My grandkids have decorated the steps and verandah for him.

Fittingly, behind it is a terracotta chimneypot from my childhood farm, Dad’s orchard venture. I never saw it on a chimney, but I always loved it and I have carted it about for over 50 years. It lived in the rockery at the Mountain for the last 35.

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Here the southern face of its ferro-cement roof has grown a velvety green moss. I consider this makes up for the ridgeline crack it suffered in the move.

Creekside beauties

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There are many small birds here but they do NOT stay still for photos for me to share them with you. Swallows, Willy Wagtails, honeyeaters, finches… I will have to take to sitting outside and waiting, with camera poised. I think that’s called birdwatching.

Thankfully the flora here is slower moving.

Alongside the small creek is a narrow strip of beautiful remnant rainforest. Yes, there are too many weeds and invasive trees like Camphor Laurel, but looking up to admire one large indigenous tree, just look what I saw.

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When I returned to show friends, the orchid’s flowers had disappeared. So the flora may be slower than the birds, but I’ll have to be fast to catch their stages.

I’ve tried to identify this orchid, but I’m lost amongst the Dendrobiums; could it be Dendrobium monophyllum, also known as ‘Lily of the Valley’? The little finger petals seemed distinctive to me and closer to the drawings of this one than any other.

I have so much to learn about this new place and its inhabitants.

Of bulbs and birches

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After a few days of welcome (if inconvenient for moving house) heavy rain, the bare trees are glistening in the morning sunlight, and the bulbs beneath them are struggling to lift their heads.

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I love winter birches: for their bark and the lichen it attracts, for their bobbles and fine branchlets and twigs and the raindrops they cherish.

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Some of the fat snowflake clumps are flattened…

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…the first shy daffodil heads are about to unfold, and the fallen autumn leaves escape the wind by huddling amongst new iris leaves.

Winter appetites

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As the grass grows more slowly, the wallabies and roos are being driven to eat plants they don’t regularly fancy. 

This wallaby was being very intense about one of the rosemary bushes, which are all grotesquely pruned each winter to leggy topknots.

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Several branches were held firmly together in his paws while he stripped them. Still holding these, he then stretched up to seize yet another with his mouth. ‘Greedy beast!’ I muttered through the window.

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Hearing me, he dropped the branches and turned around with an expression of great innocence.

H-mm. I wonder if rosemary-fed wallaby would be a gourmet dish like rosemary-fed lamb?

Just kidding.

Natural creativity

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When I look closely at the things nature creates, I am very often overwhelmed with admiration.

For example, this side view showed me the superfine and tiny holding points of this bejewelled web, suspended from the possum-chomped twigs of the climbing rose. Like upturned arms, ready to have the wool wound on for grandma…

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I usually only see it from the front, backlit by the early sun, the weavings delineated by overnight dew. How does the spider get it so evenly spaced, so perfect?

The inspiration for lacemakers.

Shrinking pond world

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As in much of Australia, it’s been dry and hot here.

My small dam is really a large pond. Unlike my main dam, it is not springfed, but filled by runoff plus what is collected from my shed roof and piped to it. Both rely on rain of course – and we’ve had almost none.

So the levels in the pond have dropped severely and half of the pink waterlily world at the western end is on dry mud, not floating at all. Their roots would be in deeper dampness, but for how long?

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I am worried about the creatures who live in this water, the longnecked tortoises and the frogs especially. Except in the deeper centre, much of the pond resembles a brown and weedy stew more than cool water.

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As yet, the waterlilies look healthy, as pure and pretty as ever. I see some small plops and bubbles around the dinner dish leaves, so something is lively enough under there.

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I recall the charming little green frog prince I saw here years ago. I go closer, and am delighted to see another. Now all we both need is rain.

Ending at home

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I am so glad to be home for the end of 2013. Since September we have all reeled from one Abbottrocity after another.

I need some peaceful time where the protected Nature here can make me briefly forget how much it is under attack elsewhere, like at Bimblebox.

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So the camper is off the ute and the wallabies have reclaimed it as just another shelter.

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In their usual fashion, the critters here step up their ownership levels if I am away too long. This time it’s the wretched possum.

He’s been taking the odd lemon but now he’s eating my oranges. They’re not ready but I’ll have to pick the lot anyway, or I’ll get none.

His most unwelcome habitation here not only means stains of possum pee on the ‘guest room’ ceiling, but I get no fruit. The parrots leave me enough not to mind their share, but with a possum about…

Not a single Nashi when normally I get hundreds, no peaches, no nectarines.

How I miss my possum-eating quoll.

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I am grateful for the flowering plants that neither the wallabies nor the possums eat — so far — like the Chaste Tree, the hydrangeas and the waterlilies, but my fruit and vegies are for eating, for sustaining my life here.

So how about the vegies, you ask? Well, I found that the bush rat has burrowed under the vegie garden netting and uprooted large parsley plants and lettuces and gnawed the turnips.

All minor annoyances, I know, compared to what others are threatened with.

I can only hope that 2014 will see the awakening of more people to the permanent damage the Federal and state governments are doing to their people, the land and water, and the planet.

These ‘leaders’ have become so extreme and blatant that one can only hope they have enough rope to ………………

Bring on the next election.

Seeds of promise

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The leaves have fallen from many of my garden trees and vines, so the seed pods are spectacularly visible. This White Cedar tree is a rare deciduous native, Melia Azedarach, often called Persian Lilac for its flowers, but also Bead Tree, for the now-obvious reason. They are indigenous to my region, amongst many others.

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I have just pruned back the vines on my verandah, to reduce the build up of woody old growth (for bushfires), to promote new growth in spring, and to let in maximum winter sunlight. Before I did, I captured some of the masses of seed pods.

These are from the Chilean ‘jasmine’ (which it isn’t), Mandevilla laxa, whose scented white trumpet flowers produce hundreds of paired long skinny seed pods, now ‘popped’ apart and bursting with tiny feather-winged seed darts. They obligingly self-propagate.

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These papery extra-terrestrials clawing skywards are from my very tall white lilliums.

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The fat velvety brown pendulums of the White Wisteria do the opposite, hanging heavy, pointing to the soil where they want to land and grow. But these I will collect and attempt to aid the process in my glasshouse. The flowers are so ethereal I want more.

This weird and wonderful world

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I finally stole half an hour to pull out some old tomato plants and onions add a bit of compost to the vegie garden — and look what I uncovered. Damn, I thought, more plastic that got into the compost and didn’t compost.

But I couldn’t recall what on earth it might have been the framework of… and then I twigged.

I rushed inside and checked my fungi book; yep, incredible as it seemed, this was one of the really weird fungi. Of course the next step was to go to my website and click on the link for ‘Gaye’s fungi.’

Once there I clicked on her ‘White without gills’ category, scrolled down past some rather disgusting looking other fungi, and there it was:

Ileodictyon gracile (Smooth Cage) a stinkhorn fungus. 

Gaye gives a very detailed life story for it, with photos from egg (yes, egg!) to final free-rolling lattice or basket form.

Who would dream up such a strange organism? I am still having trouble believing it.

Red-bellied Houdini

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Just when I thought it was cold enough for any sensible snake to have gone to sleep, so had relaxed my vigilance around the house yard…

Out of the kitchen window, I spied my old mate, looking quite spry and healthy and not all sleepy. It was sniffing around the tankstand overflow pipe, which is open-ended there on the short grass.

‘Hope it doesn’t try to go up that’, I thought. ‘It’d never get back out!’

No, it turned about and came down the hill a bit. I thought it was curling up to sleep in the sun. This is one of the few parts of the yard that I have mowed in the last year, so it’s nice and open.

But the snake uncurled — and began to disappear. Its long body seemed to be sliding straight into the ground!

Yet I’d mown there a hundred times; I knew there was no hole…

Then I remembered having run over the end of the agricultural drain pipe a hundred times too. It’s just ribbed soft black plastic with drain holes, and this is the far end of the one that runs behind my backfilled cabin.

We’d buried it and just let any seeped water run away over the grass. The end is invisible but yes, it’s in about that spot.

I was worried; this was one fat snake. It would never turn around in there.  How would I get it out?? I’d just have to keep checking: could a snake back out?

But next day there it was, sunbaking in its front yard. As the day clouded over and chilled, back indoors it went.

No wonder I’d seen it around the house so much this year: it lived here, right under my feet so to speak. But I still don’t know if it backs out or turns around…

Bejewelled bushes

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I can’t help rushing out with the camera on the rare mornings where light overnight rain or heavy dew coincides with a brighter morning.

It can’t be too sunny, or the precious jewels thus revealed will have been dried up.

Then all I’d see would be a spiderweb, miraculous in itself, but more common.

On a special morning like this the web becomes ‘value-added’, enhanced to a collared necklace of great beauty — and value, at least to me. The design is always different, and although the jewels — round as pearls, translucent as diamonds — may be ephemeral, the impression on me is lasting.

Bu the way, the lichen-tufted arrangement of sticks on which the necklace is displayed used to be a living rose bush; it’s one of the many victims of perpetual wallaby pruning!

Lofty Lilliums

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Each summer these powerful plants re-shoot, sending up thick stems metres into the air in a race to the roof with the Glory Vine. I do have to tie them to the verandah railings before they become top heavy, as dozens of burgundy pods explode into these elegant blooms.

Beautiful as they are in cream and pink and yellow, they all used to be pure white, which only one plant now produces.

To see them I have to go outside and walk below to look up into their dripping throats — in between keeping an eye out for leeches looping their way up the side of my gumboots.

There is only one small ‘window’ in the verandah’s summer greenery where I can poke the camera through and see over the tops of the Lilliums, but perhaps the best view is from underneath anyway — despite the leeches.