I was pleased to accept a term of gardening leave from my blogging duties when my alter ego Maria Spackman decided to take over the captain’s chair, but you can’t keep a good (and original!) Girl Reporter down.
I persuaded the Editor to keep me on as Your Special Gardening Correspondent, using the Ace card of my lovely assistant the current Mr Baxter – it just wouldn’t be the same without him, I said, and we do come as a package.
The joke’s on me, Reader – as it turns out we are relocating to Hong Kong after this episode, relieving Mr B. from his gardening duties altogether. I expect it will be back to container plantings for Your Girl Reporter in the months ahead, which will be far less adventurous, and something I can manage on my own.
It’s three years since we did the grown-up thing and bought a house on a quarter-acre block in Ipswich, west – but not too far west – of Brisbane, Australia. I’m a city girl, as you know, with no idea what I’m doing, and my Adventures have consisted mostly of killing things.
What I have lacked in skill, I have made up for in enthusiasm and it may not be coincidence that, with Your Gardening Girl Reporter in a desultory mood, things that were largely left to their own devices have enjoyed a glorious growing season.
Doing the grown-up thing: The current Mr Baxter and Your Girl Reporter take possession of our little corner of the Australian Dream.
It was hard to summon much enthusiasm for the basic tasks of just keeping things ticking over with our looming expulsion from Paradise, no matter how exciting the reason.
Instead, I’ve roamed my quarter-acre block, gardening gloves limply at my side, and tried to see if I made a difference. Do we leave this garden in better or worse shape than we found it?
Trees
It wasn’t all death and destruction for the trees under our stewardship. Some of them received a much-needed pruning, following years of neglect. The result has been most dramatic for the Poinciana at the front of the house.
Just as the Poinciana starts looking like this, it is time for us to leave…
The straggly and sparse tree we inherited is now a magnificent shade and the front deck feels like a treehouse – and what’s not to love about that?
The Poinciana has spread its feathery canopy right up against the neighbour’s mango trees, which enjoyed a bumper crop. The fruits attracted dozens of lorikeets, the common rainbow, but also scaly-breasted lorikeets, which I haven’t seen around here before.
They also attracted the local kids and the occasional Girl Reporter. Plenty for all.
Salad Bowl
The veggie garden bore the brunt of my neglect. I made no effort to keep up successive plantings and was repaid in kind. The least said, the better.
For the first time we put in a few pumpkin plants and, along with the chillies, they were the only vegetables which really thrived. The pumpkin thrived its way all over the salad bowl and across the fence into the neighbour’s backyard. I was starting to get a little frightened.
Sally’s Gardening Tip: Trim off the growing end of your pumpkin when it gets to somewhere between 3-5 metres. Advice varies, but doing that will encourage side shoots (and pumpkins) and avoid the need to swear allegiance to your new pumpkin overlord.
We harvested one Queensland Blue and have been in an ongoing battle against the pumpkin invaders for weeks. Lord Pumpkin currently has the upper hand.
I planted a few flowers in the Spring, mostly to find out what would grow where. The snapdragons did best and one day I’ll put in more of them. They didn’t get the dead-heading they probably needed and could have looked even better, but for now I’ll just look forward to counting self-seeded snapdragons on my return.
There’s a corner at the end of the Salad Bowl, in front of the smaller Strelizia, where I planted some Coleus, Cineraria Silver Dust and a few cuttings I’d taken of a dwarf variety of Alternanthera dentata, called Little Ruby.
My intention had been to take cuttings of them all and create a bigger display. It was another project which never really got underway and that’s another regret. That corner looks great, but it too would look even better if I’d given those plants a more regular haircut, even without striking the cuttings.
Our Grevillea Honey Barbara has trebled in size and produced many flowers, attracting native birds to our garden paradise.
From there, a small path leads to the pool area, with a little diversion on the way into the Stony Ground, a gravelled semi-circle on the outside of the pool fence. These two sections of the garden were where I spent most of my time this Summer and where I found the most joy.
The Stony Ground is the limit of my watering and it gets less than the Salad Bowl. I’ve put a dragon fruit against the pool fence and it’s grown well over the summer. Two grevilleas we planted three years ago in the bed on the other side of the gravel have been underplanted with aromatics.
The most spectacular is the Passionfruit Marigold (Tagetes lemmonii). We put in three small plants which didn’t really flower, but the foliage also puts out an intoxicating fruity perfume at the slightest touch.
They have grown leggy from a lack of pruning, which probably would also have encouraged more flowering but that’s the story of our summer Adventures in Gardening.
The original curry plant (Helichrysum italicum) and the two cuttings I did manage to take all thrived, and a silver lavender, rosemary and rue are still small, but healthy. It’s a start. Everywhere I look I see starts, and stalled plans for the future.
Everywhere, except the Lady Garden, that shady haven on the private side of our house, which suffered the full Hollywood. It took a while, but eventually she was denuded.
Penguins in the Lady Garden, an expression of our love in penguin form.
My Lady Garden needs constant care and attention and will not be entrusted to the hands of strangers. The plants were distributed according to their needs, mostly up by the pool, a shady paradise fringed with palms.
I had already planted loads of bromeliads, which I’d brought with me, at the pool’s edge and added irises, spider lilies and Clivia, taken from other parts of the garden. The effect was already dramatic, for minimal cost and care. There’s a pattern to my successes…
To these I’ve added many of the container plants from the Lady Garden, taking care to avoid anything which can get out of control in an Aussie backyard. To a plant, they’re flourishing and I’m looking forward to returning and finding this part of the garden truly established.
There were two gardenias in containers framing the entrance to my Lady Garden – a fragrant greeting to a private place. These I planted in the now empty veggie bed beside the back steps.
The one directly at the foot of the stairs is covered in buds and yesterday morning I was greeted with the first flower since it moved to its new home. The perfume from that one bloom reached right up to the back deck. In some places, I made a difference and it was good.
And now my watch is ended. But it’s Paradise Postponed, not Lost. We’ll be back, for further Adventures in Gardening in a traditional Aussie backyard. Until then, we’ll be filing from Hong Kong, on a whole new Adventure. It’ll be fun.
© Maria Spackman 2018
From 1 April, 2018 Your Girl Reporter will be filing from the new Hong Kong bureau, thanks to an unexpected turn of events. You can read more details here:
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