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September 21, 2014

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Animal pests, Diamond python, Fruits for shade, Garden trees, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Satin bowerbirds, Weeds

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Blood on the mulberries

This means war! Or at least a humanitarian mission with military elements.

Just when you’ve been lulled into a false sense of security by their generous assistance with your passive solar, suddenly the bowerbirds turn against you. One minute they’re giving the liquidambar a light trim, the next they’ve descended on your mulberry tree and stripped it bare.

Growing

Gone

Mulberries are perfect backyard trees. They’re easy to grow, fruit without chilly weather, and produce berries in spring before the fruitfly really get into gear. Kids love to eat them: the Halloween themed blood-stained hands afterwards are a bonus. You can feed them to silkworms which sorts out any number of school projects (and if you’re that kind of person you can weave your own scarves or caftans). Chooks happily clean up the spoil. And you never ever see mulberries in the shops – when they’re ripe they’re so soft and juicy they’re unshippable. You have to eat them warm, straight off the tree.

And if that’s not enough, they also make a great spot for a diamond python’s mid-morning nap.

There’s not much you can do wrong with mulberries, or so they say. You’ve gotta love trees about which it can honestly be said: “you cannot kill them”. You have to prune them for new growth and berries, but hacking randomly does seem to more or less work, though the outcome might be described less as “a classic open-centred vase shape” and more as “an ugly mess”.

The only bit of advice that people regularly give about mulberry trees is to avoid planting them near paths “to avoid stains”. Given the chaotic state of our garden, I smiled smugly at this. And then planted mine right next to the washing line. Oops.

Mulberry and Hills Hoist. Not a good combination.

I know, I know, my Hick’s Fancy should have been netted against the birds (given that they can be weedy, this is probably a good idea for ecological as well as harvest-maximising reasons). But the bowerbirds haven’t stopped at the mulberry. They’ve also had a good go at the grapes up the granny flat wall and the kiwifruit vines on the “solar pergola”. Exclusion netting is all very well but short of getting a great big net dropped from a helicopter to drape over the whole house and yard, there’s only so much you can do. Thinking about it, that actually sounds like a lot of fun. All I need is some air support.

Nibbled kiwifruit

Nibbled grapes

Sad looking proto-grape bunch severed from the vine

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September 19, 2014

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Backyard chickens, Diamond python, Gardening, Native animals, poisons, Predators

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Bluetongue’s back

There’s was something in the woodshed when I went down to feed the chooks this morning. A scaly tail sliding out the door. At first I thought Snakey was back, since the woodshed was a favourite haunt of hers (conveniently close to a regular supply of breakfast eggs). But it was someone else warming up in the morning sun.

Something in the woodshed…

This time it’s a bluetongue

I reckon I’ve seen that face before.

After spending a disturbingly long time counting and colour-swatching scales, I’ve come to the conclusion this is the same bluetongue, way back in 2011.

Documentary evidence of a skink psychologically scarred by a standoff with a chicken. As I recall, there was a lot of awkward staring – the bluetongue blinked first.

Apparently blueys can live for 20 years or so. Since our place is rich with “habitat” – that is, great big piles of rotting sticks – the guy (or gal – apparently you have to dissect them or set up a fight to find out, thanks to the male’s insignificant hemipenes… *snigger*) may have been hanging round the whole time. It’s a nice thought.

I had attributed our pleasing lack of slugs to vigilant chickens but maybe lizards have been doing their bit as well. This sort of thing makes being an organic gardener seem less like a sequence of indecisive moments in the “slug bait” aisle of the hardware store and more like a practical pest management strategy.

The chooks seem to have a remarkable diffidence towards reptiles. They were completely uninterested a couple of years back when Snakey took up residence in the chook run. The sight of a snake in this position in my bedroom would freak the hell out of me:

No worries mate

It seems this is much scarier

But the gals toddled off to sleep, completely unfazed. It was a different story on the day a white goshawk drifted into the trees above the chook house. The hens bolted into the undergrowth and were very very very quiet. Gorgeous as this bird is – the only pure-white raptor in the world – even I found it quite menacing as, in Bond villain style, it flexed first one set of claws and then the other, gazing intently around the yard.

Maybe its not a simple matter of scales good-feathers bad. I’ve yet to see the chooks handle serious snake action, despite the occasional sightings of a red-bellied black by the neighbours. The potential for reptile-avian dinosaur show-downs is definitely not exhausted. For more updates, I’ll certainly be tuning in to the upcoming episode of Bluetongue Encounters on tomorrow’s Chicken TV.

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September 16, 2014

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Death, Garden trees, Gardening, History, natural history, Ornamental gardens, Plants and what I know about them, Seasons

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A fossil in the garden

Gardens are time-capsules. I don’t just mean the odd, poignant occasion when you dig up a bone carefully buried, long ago, by a dog you never met. I mean the fashions in plants that date gardens just as surely as winklepickers, blue eyeshadow or shoulderpads date photographs. As you walk round the suburbs you’ll see jacarandas arching over Californian bungalows, rows of red cordylines hemming eaveless McMansions, 70s brick veneer hidden behind shaggy bottlebrushes and rambling grevilleas. Social history has roots in the backyard.

Our place was built in the late 1950s, and I reckon a few of the bigger trees date from about that time. The largest hibiscus I’ve ever seen, entwined with an ancient honeysuckle as weighty as a strangler fig, reaching up above the roof of our neighbour’s two-story house to catch the light, speaks to me of post-war dreams of expansive America, a Hawaiian fantasy. The liquidambar and the Japanese maple – a yearning for colour in the fall.

A fossil in the garden

Until today, I put the tallest tree in the yard in the same category – I figured it was a swamp cypress, native of the Everglades, happy knee-deep in water (and, with enough water, they do grow knees!). Like a larch, it’s a deciduous conifer, needles turning copper in the autumn, then returning, fresh and feathery green in the spring.

But I was wrong. It’s not an imposing American, though it is a cousin of the great sequoias. It’s Metasequoia glyptostroboides, a dawn redwood: living fossil from the “dawn of time”. It’s the Wollemi Pine of the 1940s. An expedition to a remote village in Szechuan province in 1946 discovered a giant living Metasequoia, a species known from fossil evidence to have existed for 100 million years, thought to have been extinct for at least two million more.

Late autumn sequoia with bird enlarged 2

Metasequoia (“sort of Sequoia”, “Sequoia-ish”) was something of a sensation in the late 1940s. In 1948 Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens, along with arboreta all over the world, received seeds and commercial nurseries in Australia began growing them for sale the same year. With seeds both easy to collect and propagate, the dawn redwood, George Seddon says, was a big money spinner and the trees are are now common in parks and gardens all over the world, from the subtropics to Alaska. It’s proudly grown as a street tree in China, though it is critically endangered in its only location in the wild, Metasequoia Valley, not far from the staggeringly huge Three Gorges Dam, a hydro scheme so big filling it slowed the rotation of the earth.

Now of course, I want more lazarus taxa – more trees returned from the dead. Gingko with its maiden-hair leaves, a clear yellow in the fall. Okay, it has fruits that smell of vomit and its edible nut is toxic. Who cares! It’s a dinosaur tree, over a hundred million years old! As is the Wollemi Pine – three clumps of genetically identical trees discovered in a deep, remote canyon in 1994 – weird looking, self-coppicing, lusted over by others in possession of dawn redwood, it seems. Although John Benson of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney advises against hoarding this fossil: “people who put them in their backyard will soon have no backyard” (Seddon, 2005, 100).

A fossil in the garden

My neighbours say every winter they look out their window and think, hearts sinking, that the redwood tree we share has gone and died. Perhaps I should reassure them that it will live for more than a hundred years; that it is Lazarus, come back from the dead; that it has been around for a hundred million years.

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September 14, 2014

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Animal communication, Animal pests, Anthropomorphism, Backyard chickens, chicken diet, Death, Gardening, Rats, Recycling, Waste, Weeds

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Death, hot compost and chicken addictions

Something weird happened today. With a self-important summons to the other chooks, Treasure sped over the large disgusting vat of compost tea lurking under the tumbler and took a long, luxurious drink. After a good sup, she briskly trotted away with the kind of dirty stain on her snowy chest that speaks of an all-absorbing gastronomic experience. Is this a chicken version of the breakfast long black?

Nom nom nom

Knowing as I do in the contents of the compost tumbler – innocent things like lawn clippings, comfrey cuttings and fallen maple leaves; but also less pleasing items – mouldy citrus peel, rotten pears and fetid greens, barnhouse bedding weighed down with healthy gobbets of chicken manure, and in consequence a fine array of crawling and creeping things, their offspring and their excreta – the idea of the chickens necking great drafts of the liquid that oozes from this brew is really quite disturbing.

In general, I view keeping chickens as bit like teaching adults (my day job). Kindy teachers have to wipe away tears, give cuddles and clean up vomit, but when you teach in higher education you can more or less rely on students to handle the basics on their own. I don’t like to patronise my chooks – I reckon they have a fair idea of where to hang out, how to spend their time and what’s okay to eat.

But perhaps I’m being too laissez faire. Maybe I should treat my hens more like my children and start policing their behaviour a bit more vigilantly. Possibly letting the girls drink compost tea is the equivalent of doling out supersized glasses of Coke (and a Happy Meal?) to under tens.

What are you looking at??

This is the dark side of the compost tumbler. It seems so sleek and neat, holding its dubious contents high above things that squirm and scamper and gnaw in the night. You spin her wheel and steer her like a noble vessel towards the promised land of super-speedy compost, black gold faster than lightning. And I can say, hand on heart, that after fifteen years of steadfast unintentional cold composting, one bucket of kitchen scraps at a time, with this tumbler, I’ve seen my very first batch of the good stuff, cooked within an inch of its life. While most things (except for teaspoons and the plastic tags on bread bags) will rot down eventually regardless of how incompetently you build your heap or how infrequently you turn the pile, there is something glorious about seeing steam rising from your compost and knowing the nasties – weed seeds and plant viruses and pathogens – have been fricasseed.

Death, hot compost and chicken addictions

But the path to hot compost is not pure. Here’s what I found on the innocuous sounding Soil Forum while hunting out the best compost recipes, the perfect balance between browns (carbon rich things that crunch) and greens (nitrogen rich things that squelch):

“when we say that “anything” can go into a tumbler, we do mean “almost anything”. Whole small animals are OK but I would do deer heads in a separate pile! (Make too much noise flopping around in there!) I do have 20 deer lower legs on hand but they’d create quite a tangle sent through in one batch. However, I may simply saw them in half and run them all through the next hot batch.”

No, that wasn’t a post from Sarah Palin, though I’m sure she could cook up a fine tumblerful of deer-heads if she turned her hand to it. In case you were wondering, deer body-parts would count as greens (squelch). Always put them in the very centre of your tumbler, where it’s hottest. (seriously, in contrast to anything Sarah might say, for rat, health and aesthetic reasons I never compost dead animals – there’s not a lot of corpses going round in a vegetarian household, and any tragedies that do occur are accompanied by a tiny funeral and ceremonial interring)

That said, there’s no getting around it: composting is still all about death and decomposition. An interesting bit of that Peter Greenaway film “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” comes to me. The cook says:

“I charge a lot for anything black. Grapes, olives, black currants. People like to remind themselves of death. Eating black food is like consuming death. Like saying: “Death, I’m eating you”. Black truffles are the most expensive. Caviar. Death and birth. The end and the beginning.”

I quite like the idea that the chickens are engaged in some kind of philosophical act drinking up their ordure-enriched powerade. That it’s not just forbidden pleasure, the subtle piquancy of insect exoskeletons or a health-giving blast of liquidised potassium that holds such appeal, but that they’re drinking deep from the existential heart of gardening.

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September 13, 2014

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Australian natives, national parks, natural history, Plants and what I know about them, Seasons

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Sprinter (not yet Sprummer)

Clematis aristata (I think!). Or is it clematis glycinoides?

Grevillea sericea

Grevillea buxifolia

Eutaxia obovata and boronia microphyllia (I think!)

Clueless.

Gompholobium virgatum ?

Isopogon anethefolia?

Hakea salicifolia

Glossodia… minor? major? Some kind of

Lysinemas? Is that even a flower?

No idea

Pretty.

Sprinter (not yet sprummer)

Phlebalium? Or something?

Eriostemon australasia (probably)

Tim Entwhistle from the Royal Botanical Gardens suggests we add two seasons to the European standards: starting out with the clunkingly named Sprinter, to describe late winter and early spring when most things seem to burst into flower. He reckons non-Indigenous Australians can’t handle the complexity of the diverse seasons observed by Kooris, Murris, Nunga, Noongar and all the first people of this place.

He’s probably right. The D’harawal calendar – from people south of Port Jackson – says roundabout now is the time of Wiritjiribin – cold and windy. I think I saw Acacia floribunda blooming today, so that fits. But maybe, since its getting warmer, it’s closer to the time of Ngoonungi, the time of the gathering of the flying foxes? “They come in from the north-east, the north, the north-west and the west, and swirl over the Sydney area in a wonderful, sky-dancing display just after sunset”, says the D’harawal calendar on the BOM. No signs here at least, in Dharug and Guringai country, of flying foxes yet.

Let’s face it: I’m clueless. I’ve got no idea about the local wildlife, know nothing of how you might live off the land, can’t even figure out half the Latin names of the flowers in our neck of the woods – Muogamarra, Berowra National Park, Lane Cove.

Ok, I’m cheating. Lane Cove is miles away, but I took some nice pictures there yesterday. And it is (mostly) on Hawkesbury sandstone. And they have a great website for the local flora. Which is important because this is what our plant identification book looks like:

All in all, I think I’m only up to Sprinter.

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September 7, 2014

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Brassicas, Climate change, Edible flowers, Fruit, Greens, natural history, Seasons, Vegetables

Flowers of the Frozen North

Something new in the garden today: hazelnut flowers. Our filberts have been in for about three years, and have produced a few catkins, but I’ve never seen these before. They are very very tiny, though, so maybe they were there last year and I never noticed.

Autumn catkins

Today’s red blossoms

The miniscule red blooms are all on one tree – Ennis, “preferred variety for all markets”, Daleys boldly asserts. Lucky Ennis. “Hall’s Giant” sounds so much more magically productive but it’s mainly a pollinator, dangling those catkins.

Will we get some nuts this year? It seems unlikely. The raspberries, our little Stella cherry, three neglected high-chill apples, the Hayward kiwis, and the hazelnuts, all planted with foolish optimism. Okay, Sydney is subtropical and all these plants require a hundred plus chilling hours … that’s a hundred or maybe a hundred and fifty hours below 7 degrees C while in Sydney’s chilliest month, July, the average minimum is 8.1 degrees…. but we are at 200 metres elevation! maybe we’re in a frost pocket! What about those chilly south-westerlies?

Our mighty leader, Anthony Abbott MP, confidently claims that “climate change is crap” so perhaps we are, as my hirsute medallion-wearing neighbour asserts, heading towards a Snowball Earth scenario: the Pacific Highway to Hornsby will be lined with snowpoles and we will be skating, not taking the ferry, across Berowra Creek. All my eccentric plant selections will be vindicated.

While I’m waiting for a glacier to form in the Sydney Basin, or at the very least for a small crop of hazelnuts, at the bottom of the garden the winter veggies are flowering.

Daikon radish flowers

Daikon

Flowers from above

The daikon is too tough to eat now, but the flowers are lovely and I’m planning to save the seeds. The winter’s chinese greens are also in bloom. The leaves are getting smaller, stringier and slightly bitter though I’ve still been picking them. I’ve got a feeling these may be the mutant offspring of my favourite – red bok choi, an F1 hybrid.

The process of creating the F1s is like something from “Game of Thrones” – ten generations of in-breeding to produce a pure-blooded weaking, that is then matched with an inbred of a different tribe, to produce children with renewed vigour, sharing little with their spindly parents. These muscular cross-breeds are frustratingly incapable of passing on their all-conquering qualities to the next generation (an appropriately Machiavellian outcome that keeps gardeners in the thrall of the Plant Wizards of Monsanto). It’s kind of cool to save the seeds of the F1 hybrids not just to give the multinationals a crinkly mouth but also to see what sport comes up in the next generation. And the next. Who knows, perhaps eventually some robust throwback will thrive in the endless Winter?

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September 5, 2014

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Anthropomorphism, Backyard chickens, Chickens as cultivators, Garden trees, Natives for shade, Plants and what I know about them, Possums

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Possum pruning and chicken lawnmowers

I seem to spend a lot of time talking about animals behaving badly. Or at least, animals doing sensible, survival enhancing things I don’t 100% approve of. That means you, Treasure! You can’t hide – I see you eyeballing that rocket!

“No one will see me here…”

Treasure and the lawnmowers

But it’s not only the bowerbirds that do useful nibbling. The chickens also make great lawnmowers. Although, describing our patch of grass as a “lawn” is stretching the definition considerably. I can’t say how delighted I was to read the advice recently from the RSPCA that “a weed lawn rather than a monoculture lawn is recommended for free range hens”. Anyway, thanks to the very dry winter, this year the backyard hasn’t turned into the Somme – we’ve got at least some grass and not just vast stretches of mud – and the chooks are keeping the grass down just fine.

The same happy thoughts about animals as horticultural helpers come to mind when I inspect my NSW Christmas bush. It has gorgeous pinkish red new growth which the possums seem to enjoy as much as I do, though their appreciation is expressed through the medium of chewing. Every now and then they pop down and do some tip pruning for me.

Ceratopetalum gummiferum is mostly famous for its flush of red “flowers” in December (in fact these are sepals – the real flowers are smaller and white and arrive in late spring or early summer). The consensus seems to be that if you lop off branches for festive decoration the tree will “flower” all the more enthusiastically the following year. Vindicating the view that if you give an inch, people will take a mile, some even claim you can cut them way down low and they’ll come back. Eventually. I’m not planning anything as brutal as that, though I don’t really want mine to hit five metres and mess with my view. Regular snipping is the go but since I’m secateur shy, how kind of the possums to do it for me.

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August 31, 2014

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Australian natives, Fruits for shade, Gardening, Natives for shade, Ornamental gardens, Weeds

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Ornamental manoeuvres in the dark

I’m hip to the food forest concept but there’s only so much food you can grow in the shade. Naranjilla, tamarillo, monstera, babaco, finger lime, warrigal greens – ticked all those boxes. But at a certain point, you’ve just got to give up the dream of a waving field of wheat outside your kitchen window, and actually plant something that’s going to grow there. Even if it means going over to the other side, down the slippery slope towards… the ornamental garden. The garden you can’t eat but which ameliorates the existential despair of staring down at yet another sinkful of dishes. Gardening in the terrain between utility and futility.

Orchestral manoeuvres in the dark

Just now quite a few of those spirit pleasing plants are in bloom. Libertia Paniculata has made me very happy: a lovely native that flowers in the shade, and is even named after a female botanist and mycologist, Anne-Marie Libert (or Marie-Anne, depending who you ask). Okay, you can’t eat it, and you couldn’t describe it as flowering copiously in its sheltered spot under the pittosporum (also blooming now). But the delicate white flowers when they come – some in May and again in August this year – linger, picked out in the odd beam of light that makes its way between the ferns.

Plecanthus argentatus alongside a kangaroo skull from Kangaroo Island

New frond on the elkhorn

Plecanthus argentatus

Plecanthus argentatus has been a stalwart too, sprawling a bit unless snipped back now and then, but you can’t have too much silvery-grey foliage in my view and it’s a rarity in shade-loving plants, so sprawl away, I say. It copes well with dry weather and even produces small sprays of tiny white flowers in autumn. I’ve had less success with indigofera australis which I hoped to plant alongside it – one cheap but sickly plant finally croaked recently after sitting there rather miserably for a year or so, and I failed to get any of the seedlings I sparked up from seed bought online to survive in the garden. But I’ve noticed new growth on a second plant, put in last year, so I’m hopeful I’ll see some of its purple flowers eventually.

Vines are a good bet for shade, since they are usually happy to climb towards the light. I’ve got two varieties of pandorea jasminoides swarming up a trellised fence, entwined with Tecomanthe hillii. The Fraser Island Creeper has done nothing flower-wise, which may well be a good thing, since I’m not wild about the hot-pink colour scheme (it was an impulse buy), although I do like the mauvy-purple of the new shoots. There’s been a bit of action from the “Bower of Beauty”: though it’s decided to set up its bower of trumpet-shaped flowers on the neighbour’s side of the fence (in the sun, dammit!).

Pandorea pandorana in flower

Fraser island creeper making a break for the sunny side of the fence

Pandorea pandorana, the wonga-wonga vine, flowers for a only couple of weeks a year – just about now – but with the occasional bit of cow poo it has done a good job of disguising the shonky engineering of our garage. Having seen “old man’s beard” going the full Ned Kelly in sandstone country up the way, I was a bit nervous about putting Clematis aristata over the car port, thinking the extra weight on the roof might crush our car like a bug. But no – after a couple of years it’s barely hanging on. I suspect that lime from nearby concrete might be the offender.

The correas seem to have done their dash more or less, so no pics. Correa glabra, quite an upright small bush with fresh lime-green leaves and pale yellow flowers, and Correa bauerlenii, with greeny-white flowers in the shape of an implausibly towering chef’s hat, shiny dark leaves and reddish stems, have both grown well and flowered in a gloomy spot, though Correa alba struggled, never really growing much at all and finally giving up the ghost. Another “Chef’s cap correa” did really well for a while out back but succumbed during a very wet February, so drainage seems to be a thing.

The correas apparently attract birds, but the plant growing in the shady front yard that has attracted the most attention, not just from our “house” birds, the red and little wattlebirds who dangle upside down to sip its nectar, but even the occasional beautiful visitor like the gorgeous rufus-chested Eastern Spinebill, is not a native but the abutilon, the chinese lantern.

Chinese lantern

Jonquils – looking good, smelling iffy

I didn’t plant the chinese lanterns, but as time passes, I come more and more to like Val Plumwood’s idea of garden that is convivial – accepting the presence of foraging animal visitors and plants – local, native and imported – as long as they don’t go feral. She was fond of daffodils – in part because the wombats and other critters that visited her garden didn’t eat them, and in part because they didn’t do a runner into the bush. She was a smart lady: you have to respect anyone who survived a death roll with a crocodile.

and more daffs

Daffs

Primroses

Beyond the out-and-out baddies to be found in the noxious weeds list and the excellent Grow Me Instead booklets, it’s actually pretty hard to work out what to avoid if you don’t want to become notorious as the “Typhoid Mary” of the next generation of weeds. I only know not to plant freesia, which I love, because of the fact they pop up everywhere at this time of year – in the wheel rut zone in the drive and the dog poo zone along the street. The smell of murraya is gorgeous and it’s not listed on the plants to avoid pamphlets for around here but murraya paniculata “exotica” is a serious weed in South Eastern Queensland. All sorts of scary things are for sale in garden centres and online, and there’s plenty to be worried about in my garden already (I’m going to have to hypnotise my neighbour if I want to uproot the avenue of seed-shedding agapanthus between our drives). I try to grow local, but if all you can buy are hybridised natives, provenance unknown, perhaps you might be better off with some well behaved, hard working refugees from a South American rainforest or an English country garden.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

August 27, 2014

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Anthropomorphism, Backyard birds, Backyard chickens, Eco renovations, Exclusion pest control, Plants that attract wildlife, Seasons

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Bowerbirds: snacking for solar gain

Before the fall: it’s always sunnier on the other side of the fence

The gang’s back. Loads of satin bowerbirds in the garden at the moment. I’ve seen a couple of mature males, with their glossy blue-black feathers and gorgeous indigo eyes, but most of the robotic whistles, clicks, churrs and cracks in the trees seem to be the “greens” – juvenile males and females, hanging out in a pack.

I’ve heard grim stories about the antics of bowerbirds in the veggie garden. Apparently they like to lull the backyard grower into a false sense of security and then swoop in and devastate your greens. But I’m feeling kind of relaxed on that front. After the brush turkeys exhumed my long awaited Hass avocado treelet, and my big girls, the young-bloods, the prodigious egg-layers, started lounging around under the baby banana trees, making eyes at my kale and chomping on every “poisonous” rhubarb leaf the moment it unfurled, I’ve decided to go totally Christo. Every seed, every seedling, every newly planted tuber has its own little blanket of horticultural fleece. Anything growing that’s remotely likely to appeal to the poultry palate is swathed in netting.

The one upside of the chooks’ blithe disregard of the garden fence is the complete and total elimination of trad from the veggie patch. Three months ago our spindly raspberry canes and brave little Nightingale persimmon were drowning in a lush wash of juicy stems and emerald leaves, even as the ground slowly dehydrated around them. But now – nada. A few stems scattered around, waiting to reroot after the rain but not a leaf to be seen. It’s all very satisfying.

So it’s not all bad when your flock take to the greenery. The bowerbirds haven’t got a chance of getting my broadbeans. But with their leaf-picking ways, they are doing sterling work for the environment.

Brush turkey roosting in our poor denuded liquidambar

Their latest hang-out is the neighbour’s liquidambar tree – gorgeous and looming, throwing a great long shadow across our ice-box house all autumn. Basking in the sunshine on the other side of the fence, it steadfastly refuses to shed its leaves, months and months after our poor overhung specimen has shivered and shaken off its own. And then, when the last ruby shreds are about to be blown from its branches, and the winter sun finally promises to warm our August days, the bloody thing starts growing leaves again!

But never fear, Super Satin Bowerbird is here! I can’t prove definitively that their main objective was improving our passive solar gain but after closely studying these photographs for insights into bowerbird psychology and culinary habits, it certainly looks like it.