How to murder your monster shrubbery

The short answer is “slowly and with feeling”.  But let’s not rush into anything.

I’m pretty sure there’s some kind of by-law in Hornsby Shire against putting your kids to bed with a recitation of “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”.  Something along the lines of the “Unsafe and age-inappropriate use of modernist poetry act of 1987”.  But when your eight year old requests read T.S.Eliot, what can you do?

 

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when if I say that T.S. seemed to be a teeny bit negative about ageing.  One can only speculate on how different this poem (and indeed his whole oeuvre) would be if Prufrock had focussed less on getting lucky with the sirens of the sea and more on pruning.

Because, let’s face it, gardening is an oldie’s game.  When, yet again, the annual spud harvest fits in a single soup bowl; when your carrots are absurdly abbreviated; when another fruitless year passes for the ungrateful kiwifruit vine, the middle aged gardener shrugs her shoulders and thinks “next year”.  The seasons tumbling past faster and faster just means a shorter delay before you have another go at germinating those ruby brusselsprouts.

Our Fraser Island creeper finally did its gaudy thing – flaunting great big, hot-pink clusters of flowers in the oddest place, not up where the growing fronds reach  towards the light but way, way down in the gloom underneath the rampant Sweetie kiwifruit vine.  It flowers on old wood.  What a fine turn of phrase!

The Tecomanthi hillii not alone in dragging its feet.  Here’s a wall of shame – some other plants that have taken their sweet time to do anything exciting at all.  At least the “Bower of Beauty” has finally decided to flower on our side of the fence, rather than, like it did last year, offering a display exclusively to he neighbours.

It seems fitting, then we’ve taken what might be politely described as a contemplative approach to the execution of the massive weeds that tower over our back garden.

Our broad-leafed privet rivals the great redwoods of North America.  We have a Japanese honeysuckle vine as gnarled and vigorous as a strangler fig, which scrambles through a hibiscus “bush” as tall as a two story building. If only the mystical growth potion that the erstwhile owners  poured on these doughty invasive plants would seep down the hill into my peaky looking zucchini plants.

I like to think incremental approach to weed-murder has some ecological justification.  Some weeds in some places – lantana, for instance – form a critical habitat, particularly for the smaller birds that have been disappearing from cities.  If you clear it without replacing it, the LBBs vanish too.

So over the last couple of years, as well as installing a spiky tangle of hakeas, callistomens, sorbs, grasses and vines in an out of the way corner of the yard, I’ve  been tracking down native fruit-bearing plants to replace the  tainted bounty of the privet and honeysuckle berries.  Purely in the interest of hungry birdlife, you understand.  Nothing to do with fetishistic plant-hoarding.

Daleys up in Maleny and The Good Karma Farmer in Newcastle are my bushtucker dealers.  In my experience, you can tell if it’s bushtucker because the critters get it before you.  Following this logic, I’ve put in lillypillies, native gardenia and Davidson’s plum, koda for the Lewin’s honey eaters and the brown cuckoo doves and blueberry ash for the wonga pigeons.  I’m fairly confident the birds won’t turn their noses up at the mulberries, the persimmons, my grapes, my persimmons and my cherries either, damn their eyes.

I’m still working on substitutes for the honeysuckle and the fine looking but weedy red trumpet vine we inherited from our house’s old occupants.   Along with the hibiscus, they’re a favourite of our regulars, the little wattlebirds, and the gorgeous eastern spinebill, an all too occasional visitor.

I’m slowly sliding the wonga wonga vines, the Bower of Beauty, the dusky coral peas and the guinea vines amongst the potato vines and the honeysuckle.  Lulling the evil invaders into a false sense of security before I strike… there will be time…

“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

You see, Prufrock definitely has the makings of a gardener.  You may well murder and create after your hundred indecisions, visions and revisions, but don’t forget that cuppa tea*.

*Health and safety warning: this is a gardening blog, not a work of literary criticism.  No responsibility is taken for any adverse horticultural outcomes of incorrect readings of the Western literary canon.

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.

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 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, 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.

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.

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.

An inexpert Anglo’s guide to identifying bush foods in the garden

Step 1. Come up with a list of possibilities through the interweb or other trusted source.

Step 2. Purchase, potentially with some difficulty, from a suitable vendor of native plants.

Step 3. Bring finds home and situate them carefully in the garden, giving appropriate thought to aspect and drainage.

Step 4. Wait. If, after some time, you find a patch of thoroughly excavated soil or even a few macerated fragments of greenery where your precious purchase was previously located, congratulations!  With the help of your hungry non-human assistants, you have identified an edible native plant!

Okay, it doesn’t always work that way, but I’m feeling slightly embittered since a second generation of bulbine lily has bitten the dust courtesy of the advanced culinary sensibilities of our trusty flock of brush turkeys. Thanks, guys!

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The apple berry vine was, I think, cleaned up by the possums.  The chocolate lily has suspiciously vanished from its new spot sheltered in the fringes of the prolific and obviously insipid tasting blue flax lily.  Dormant in summer, perhaps it will pop up again next year, but after reading descriptions of its “delectable” aroma and tubers that are edible both raw and roasted, I am not optimistic.  I have a strong suspicion, based solely on the fact that the regularly nibbled growing tips of the specimen outside my kitchen, that the Fraser Island creeper may also have some undocumented uses as a pot herb.  Don’t try this at home, though… unless you are a brush turkey, in which case, help yourself.