A garden for birds

I have been trying to photograph the Firetails that hang out just outside the kitchen window. Firetails are small, very fidgety birds, and needless to say, none of my pictures so far have been particularly fabulous. There are a couple of bird feeders outside the window, and they skitter into them, and skip about the wires, and scatter the seed into the violets below (there's a bit of alliteration for you!). Then they jump about in the undergrowth looking for the lost seeds.


They like to hang out in the fuchsia patch, the shrubbery gives them good protection and a safe roost. They don't actually nest here, I've never seen a nest anyway, but they must stay nearby somewhere since they are 'largely sedentary' (according to the link above).


Lorikeets have been visiting the bird feeding stations too. This photo is the best I could do. It's not such a bad shot of the feeding post, the hydrangeas and azaleas and the senescent wattle trees, but click on the photos and you'll see a larger version with brightly coloured blurs that represent the birds.


When I mentioned the bird feeders to a guy I worked with briefly a few years ago, an Uber-Greenie I didn't particularly like - unusual for me, since I like almost everybody - he smugly told me we shouldn't feed the birds but only provide water. To that I say, 'Sod You.' If birds come into our garden it seems only fair to me that we provide something for them to eat, since we've not left much natural habitat for them out beyond the fencelines.

Late autumn garden

This morning, at 9am, it was already as dark as dusk. The wind had whipped and wailed around the garden all night, and it was very wet and squally. A whole tree has fallen down over the road about two houses down from us; we saw it in chain-sawed pieces this morning, roped off with plastic safety tape. The garden was best admired through the big glass sliding doors, sitting in front of the heater, with cup of tea in hand. Luckily for us, I got out there the other day and took a few Autumn happy snaps. There is so much going on, loads of colour, but it's easy to miss when you'd rather be curled up inside in the warm.

There are the inevitable and irresistable Autumn leaves on the trees;





There are flourescent orange berries;


The magnolia fruits are splitting open, revealing cherry red and glossy seeds inside.


The hydrangeas are fading, their veins showing like spider's webs.


The feijoas are swelling and I think we'll be eating them soon. There are loads this year!;


There are thyme flowers, miniature roses, pelagoniums, and snowbells;





and SP is particularly taken with the glorious Tibouchina, sitting on the grass amid it's scattered royal purple petals and the leaves dropped from the ornamental pears above.


xx

The last of the windflowers

I love Japanese windflowers. There is a large patch of white ones right outside the kitchen window. They are the most lovely flowers, swaying on long stems and somewhat serene. I have been meaning to write a post about windflowers throughout all of Autumn and yet I never got around to it, and now, in the kitchen patch, there is only one white windflower left. Given the way the wind is whipping and screaming around the hills today, sending not just twigs but entire branches flying, I don't expect the last lonely windflower to be there by the end of the day. But here it is, in perpetuity.


There are a few more pink windflowers left up in the back of the garden, but they're looking a little shabby and worse for wear at the tail end of the season.


But even though the flowers have gone, there remains dozens upon dozens of pea-sized fruiting bodies dancing in the wind.


All that, from all this. Beautiful.

I'll leave you on this stormy Sunday with some photos I've taken of these graceful anemones throughout the season.

Oh Bugger.

Today SP and I went by our house and checked out our new and dramatic earthworks.
Now you can see why the right hand side of my front yard makeover has to wait!


And look out the back: what a mess...


And then, on a whim, we drove down to Brighton Beach and played in the sand for a while, getting grains between our toes and in our hair.


We watched as the sun began to go down.


And then I dropped my little compact camera in the sand and grains got into the lens mechanism and now it won't shut and a horrible white screen with red writing comes up and says 'Lens Error.' Damn.
I will have to see if it can be fixed, but if not it seems somehow fitting that photos of sunsets were the last things my little camera took.

Look at me now!

The self-confessed plant-nerd in me sometimes thinks I should crack out the tape measure when I plant something new, make notes, and then compare it's growth over time. But then I remember I did enough plant measuring to last me a lifetime back when I was researching and writing my thesis: photos will suffice.
I took a photo of my banana passionfruit (Passiflora mollisima syn. Passiflora tarminiana) the other day, and then trawled through my photo archives because I remembered taking a photo back when I planted it. It was one of the first plants I put in after we bought our house.This is our banana passionfruit back in June of 2010 (under one of the neighbour's blooming wattle trees which drape over the fence).


And this is the same vine about 11 months on. Check it out! It's grown loads, and I've been trying to encourage it to grow horizontally along the fence rather than straight up. I've not yet seen a single flower on it and I'm hoping it doesn't turn out to be one of those infamous passionfruit vines that have lots of leaves and never set any fruit.


[By the way, Banana Passionfruit, a South American native, is a very serious weed in some parts of the world like Hawaii and New Zealand, and is starting to become an issue around Melbourne, Sydney, and in Tasmania here in Australia. It is not yet considered a serious pest here in South Australia - I make an educated guess that our rainfall is too low for it - but it is still a plant to be cautious about if you are considering it for your own garden.]

Victim of a vicious assault.

OK, that's a bit silly! That is a pot of Lomandra, variety Chewton Grey. I bought two big pots of it with hopes of dividing it up to make lots of little Lomandras to make a border along the front path leading to the front door. I also caved in and bought a Kangaroo Paw (Firelight).


Today the battery went flat on my good camera so I used our little compact instead. I'm glad to have it, but the photos are a lot more hit and miss than I am used to!


This is the obligatory 'before shot' of the front path (with SP enjoying her lunch in the background). I am standing with my back to the gate.


A few of the plants alongside the path needed to be relocated. It's not the best time to be digging up bulbs, after they have begun to sprout, but it had to be done. I've moved them to under a nearby rosebush. Incidentally, I planted about half a dozen of the bluebells last year, and today I found that they have increased to well over 20 bulbs.


If you look left from the same position you can see where I've peeled back the gravel for my lavender hedge (I know, I know, looks dreadful! I am getting rid of the gravel, I promise. It's just taken me a lot longer than I intended...) The Lavender hedge (Hidcote) was planted from plants in punnets in November last year. It hasn't grown very much yet!

This afternoon I got going. I soaked each pot in a Seasol mix to begin with, to minimise the shock.


Then I got cutting. This was quickly followed by me thinking oh my God: what have I done?! Oh boy. It was a lot harder to cut them apart than I thought it would be! I grit my teeth and powered on, with the aid of my secateurs, and crossed my fingers that I hadn't made a complete hash of it.


Now, I knew I needed to get 12 plants out of my two pots to do the entire path, but I chickened out and did nine instead. I just couldn't bring myself to cut them apart any more, fearful I would kill the lot! This meant I didn't get quite the entire way along the path. I'm going to have to go back to the nursery and get another pot to fill in the gap at the end. The right hand side of the path will be done later in the year. That part is going to be a whole new garden bed.
Obligatory after shot!

Super quick renovation update

There is a proper gardening post to come, but while I was on a certain satellite photo website, looking for a good picture to get a scale drawing of my front garden, I found a couple of photos that have been taken since our renovations began.
So this is January the 3rd 2011, before we started, backyard still intact.


Then April the 3rd, when the excavations for the extension have been dug out (also a glimmer of our new water tank by the shed.)


Finally, April the 24th, with form work, concrete strips, and even the baby bobcat wizzing around the back!


Where we're at now is the very uninspiring and non-photogenic part of renovating, which is putting in storm and rain water drains. We are very much looking forward to that part being over and starting our build proper.

Loving Lomandras

Autumn is nearly over, and as it gets colder I slow down, and so does my little blog. It's been almost a week since I last wrote, but I haven't forgotten you all.
Today I was helping out with the fundraising sausage sizzle for my ABA group. It was held out the front of a certain enormous hardware store. Both store and weekend sausage sizzle are likely to be familiar to most urban dwelling Australians, and SIL, BIL and I landed the lunchtime rush shift. Once we'd handed over the tongs and cash box to the next shift, we went off for a 'browse.' They headed off for the hardware, and I hot-footed it straight out to the nursery section and quickly found myself a box of green goodies.


Now, there's this range of plants labelled 'Flying Start,' which are a mere $3 each. They tend to vary a bit with what's available when, or where, and I still regret not buying more grey-leaved ground cover-type salvias when I saw them at my local because I've never seen them since. However, I was absolutely thrilled to see that this time there were Lomandras (L. longifolia) for sale, so I snapped up all five available pots. Lomandras are native to Australia, although not my area. Some quick reading tells me that the 'Loma-' in Lomandra means 'edge' or 'border,' and while that's actually referring to the flowers I think it's perfect because edges and borders are precisely what I'm using these grasses for.


Here's a shot of the next section of garden which is getting some action. I took this photo a few weeks ago when we were getting our concrete delivery, but you can still get an idea of what's going on. In it, I've started peeling back the black weed mat and removing the blindingly white gravel. At the very bottom of the photo is where I planted my little persimmon tree. I intend to plant my Lomandra border along the edge of this garden bed (to the right, by the driveway).


There were only five pots of the Lomandra available, and I don't know how many I actually need but I dare say it's more than five. I think I might be able to divide even these little pots quite easily, because there is quite a bit of 'space' between the separate plantlets in the pot. Fingers crossed! I've never tried to divide a plant before.


Of course, grasses are not all I came away with for the garden. I also got a little Snow-in-Summer (Cerastium), two thymes (Lemon - one of my all-time favourites - and silver posie), and a Hibbertia (Guinea flower, another native). These are all ground covers; I am intent on filling in the space in the front garden with ground covers. On my list of 'things to do' is to create a proper plan for the front garden as I have done with the back.

Lots of gardeing goodness to be had over the next few days. Fun fun!

A trip to Cleland

A while ago we noticed that our wee SP is fascinated by animals (but if you ask her, dogs, cats, birds, kangaroos all say 'oof oof oof'). Since then, we've been making noises about taking her to see some animals. Quite nearby is Cleland Wildlife Park. D had never been, and I haven't been since I was a child. This afternoon we went on a ten minute drive up the hill for a visit. It was a good day to go since it wasn't raining, but it was quite cold and only got colder as the afternoon wore on (Cleland is practically on Mount Lofty, our highest mountain at 727m [don't laugh! It's a petite mountain] and it's maximum today was only nine degrees Celcius.)Right inside the park we were greeted by some of it's littlest residents. Don't ask me if they are bettongs or bandicoots; I can never remember the difference. They ate the food pellets straight from our hands, leaving little damp dots from their wet noses.


The park is set inside some pretty reasonable open bushland. This is much what our area would have looked like before we built houses all over it and cleared the land for farming (although probably with a little less of the low grasses).


The park itself is very well maintained and planted with native plants, many of them indigenous. Many of my favourites were there (you might have noticed I have a lot of favourite plants!). I think today I took more photos of the plants than of the animals (they don't wriggle so much.) It was a bit inspiring for this junior gardener to see some of the ways that Australian native plants can be used.


As we walked around, I was reminded time and time again of why I love these plants. There's architectural and stately Banksia;


Luminous Dodonea;


My eternal favourites, the Correas;



Filamentous rusty Casuarina flowers (males);


Funky Grevilleas;


And how could anyone not appreciate the show put on by a new flush of Callistamon leaves?



But really, we were there for the animals (or, at least D and SP were).
SP had her first close encounter with a koala -called Becky. Her fur is dense like sheep's wool, but softer.



(And then SP tried to join her in her leafy snack. The photo, by the way, is black and white after our toddler insisted on holding the camera for a while and turned off the colour. I didn't realise for the first couple of shots.)


And near the end we made friends with some of the bigger residents, and chose a smaller one to feed.



And by that time we were freezing our bottoms off and our noses were going numb, and SP had a hold of the food pellet bag and was refusing to let go so it had to be wrestled away from her, and the sun was low in the sky so we went home for dinner. But I reckon we'll be back (in Spring, when it's warmer), it's only 10 minutes away after all!