Roses are Red – according to the promo material.

My imagined perfect Rose garden didn’t translate as desired from my mind to the garden, but I can’t deny that occasionally we get a stunning display of roses. Usually this is for a couple of weeks in spring – until the first unseasonable heatwave scorches the flowers, or they are battered by wind and rain. Considering the damage that steady rain can do to roses, I wonder how they can do well in places like England where they have been adopted as the national flower.

We also get some decent flowers in autumn, and in preparation for this year I gave mine a hard pruning in February. Maybe they haven’t flowered any better than previous autumns, but the pruning has done them no harm.

In the back garden I have a selection of David Austins. These are old-fashioned looking roses, many of which have a very pleasing fragrance. They have a reputation for having a long abundant flowering period in contrast to those genuinely older style roses that they resemble.

In my small collection I have a variety of shades of pink and two different types of white. Some of the darker pinks were supposed to be a deep red, but they didn’t live up to the advertised descriptions. Those pictured are the pale pink “Heritage” and the white is “Winchester Cathedral”.

I also have a “New William Shakespeare”. This is supposed to be a deep red but isn’t. It is also supposed to be quite resistant to problems but a little earlier today I noticed it has a terrible case of blackspot.
Others in the collection are “Hero” which has refused to flower for the last two years; “Othello” – a lovely dark pink with a very sweet fragrance like lemonade; “Mary Rose", with a VERY pink flower and “Glamis Castle”, a prolifically blooming white.

While these roses can flower profusely, I have found that the flowers are extremely delicate and drop petals very easily. Successful deadheading needs a very light touch, otherwise the scale of the task is increased; as one spent head is removed the displacement of petals leaves more heads to be dealt with.

The Day the Garden Went Mad.

The Day the Garden Went Mad (well...the weekend it went mad to be more truthful).

Yesterday we received 46mm of rain that mostly came in one hour.

It's the most rain in one individual downpour that we have received in the three years since we moved here. Hopefully it won't have a negative effect on the upcoming fruit harvest. Too much rain at the wrong time causes the fruit skins to split, obviously spoiling the fruit.

At the moment the sky is clear, but more rain and thunder storms are forecast for the next few days, and temperatures are supposed to rise to the mid 30s(Celsius). It looks like we are facing some humid days ahead.

We went away last weekend for a couple of days and came back to find the garden had gone mad. We returned to a mass of colour with every rose at the front of the house in bloom. Our veggies also sprang into life over that couple of days. Peas that had been newly sown were already tempting the birds and were desperate for a bit of protection.

My two types of climbing beans were showing different rates of progress. The "lazy housewife" were struggling - they seem to be much more appealing to nibbling critters than the robust "purple king" that were sown at the same time. The latter had not been touched, but the former had been chewed severely.

This morning I saw the season's first blaze of golden yellow in the zucchini plants. While there have been buds for a few days, today was the day the first one opened fully, inviting fertilization. All of the zucchini and squash (three plants each) are looking promising, but I'm very concerned about our pumpkin prospects. The butternut seeds I sowed have so far produced one good plant, that succumbed to frost burn despite being covered, and now one struggling plant that will hopefully erupt into health with yesterday's heavy watering.
In previous years butternuts have been one of our most successful crops.

We have almost finished off the last of the kohlrabi. I don't think I'll bother with it again. It took so long to grow and took far too much room in the garden and produced very little - although the little we were able to cook we enjoyed a lot. We even tried some of it raw and found it had a very mild radish flavour, though it totally lacked the moistness of radish.

A few weeks ago I tried creating my own seed mats after reading about it here: seed mats on Thomas's "A Growing Tradition" Blog.

I tried it with radishes (successfully), with carrots (successfully) and with Mesculun Salad mix (failure). This approach certainly helps to neaten up the rows of veggie seedlings (and if you want to see a very neat garden check out Thomas's blog!)

The Patience of the Gardener

Very little has been done in my garden for a few weeks.
We’ve had some extended periods of rain and some weekends away visiting family so the garden has been neglected for a while. The recent rain has been very welcome. I’ve enjoyed the sounds of the hidden waterfall within the new tank (which is now close to full).

The last significant gardening I did was to prune half of the roses. In previous years I’ve pruned them towards the end of winter after being advised that frost would damage the new shoots if they were pruned too early. Unfortunately the late pruning meant the flowering season was much shorter. By the time we had a good show of flowers it was almost summer and the heat possibly did more damage than the frost would have done.
This year I’m doing a little comparison by pruning some plants early and leaving others until later to see which is best.

I’m now approaching my fourth year of trial and error gardening and I’m slowly learning a few things about the things I’m trying to grow. Unfortunately it can take months to find out whether something is working or not and then the lessons learned often can’t be put into practice for almost another year. That is the frustration of gardening, everything takes so long to get right, and it can often take years of trying different things until something works.

I also planted most of the new plants that arrived from the Digger’s Club – and again patience is required. How long must I wait to enjoy the fruit from the blueberries (at least two years), the raspberry and the gooseberry? The two Chilean Guava plants are still in pots waiting for me to find time to plant them out.

After work yesterday I had a short wander around to see how things are going. I noticed the broccoli is looking a bit unhappy. Their leaves have increasing brown patches which I guess is some kind of mould caused by the constant cold dampness of recent weeks.
At least the onions, leaks, garlic and broad beans seem to be progressing well, so we should get something productive out of the winter veggie patch even if we have to wait until spring and summer to get the benefit.

Gardening "Progress".

I’ve recently been reading about gardening achievements that others have described in their books and blogs. This has made me think more about what I’ve done in my own garden and what I want to achieve in the future.

The reassessment of my gardening “progress” perhaps started a few weeks ago when I came across the book “Velvet Pears”. This in one of those very attractive books full of gorgeous photos interspersed with personal memoir.


The book details the creation of a stunning garden and the restoration of a house, at Tilba Tilba on the south coast of NSW. It’s the kind of story that will inspire any gardener; but also has the potential to plunge them into frustration and despair when they realise their own efforts fall well short of the apparent perfection the book portrays.

Moving on from the book I came across the blogs of two people who have recently moved house and now have gardens that are blank canvases to work upon. Their situation is similar to my own when I moved to my current home almost three years ago. I had all kinds of plans and prior to the move and I enjoyed sketching them out – trying to picture what I could do.

The basic parts of my planned garden started with the desire for roses, native plants (in particular grevilleas) and a veggie patch. I knew more or less which parts of the garden I would dedicate to each and to a great extent I was able to stick to that plan. Unfortunately the reality has not lived up to the dream.

What went wrong?
I’ll ignore the fact that I had no gardening experience – even though my ignorance was most likely the cause of every one of my problems. I now always say that my gardening efforts have been a process of trial and error, with an emphasis on the latter.

The first hindrance to fulfilling my gardening dream has been the block of land. Its width exceeds its length, and on a smaller block I don’t see this as ideal. This makes it more difficult to create the individual areas I wanted. I tend to think a longer block makes it easier to divide a garden into separate “rooms”.
Every part of the backyard can be seen from the windows of our back room so with any attempt to create “separate garden rooms” the joins are clearly visible so the intended illusion of individual secluded spaces is lost.

We also had a large, fixed clothesline right in the middle of the back garden that gave a very “picturesque” view from the back windows of the house. That problem was recently fixed. We removed the old clothesline and put in a new removable one at the side of the house.
Other problems are not so easily fixed such as the soil. It is very heavy clay. When dry it tends to bake like concrete, and I have found that it forms a hard crust about six inches deep, beneath which it is soft and powdery. However, that powder soon becomes thick and sticky when it gets wet.
The soil has caused most of my problems, the most noticeable being an area of natives I planted near the fence-line of the front garden. I attempted to create raised areas of free draining soil for each native plant but the results weren’t good enough. After a promising start several of the plants died and others were uprooted by the wind, having insufficient depth to give them an anchor. The growth of those that remain is very stunted, creating a collection of bonsai grevilleas.

The clay soil also slowed down the success of my veggie garden. I was foolish enough to think I could deal with the clay by digging in a bit of gypsum and composted cow manure. While this did have a slight effect, it was no where near enough to turn the designated area into a veggie friendly garden.

I took similar short cuts with the area I set aside for David Austin Roses. Instead of building up a significant area with decent soil, I decided to restrict my work to improving the soil in and around the planting holes. This did not have the desired effect. While I’ve had reasonable results from the roses, they have not grown as well as they should have done. I spread thick layers of newspaper around the plants to suppress the weeds and I covered this with sugarcane mulch. While this MAY have had an effect on the weeds for a while, our resident blackbirds soon put an end to that effectiveness by turning the paper into confetti as they dug through it in search of worms.

The last of the physical aspects I want to highlight is the aspect of the block. The front slopes towards the south which doesn’t help with frost. Firstly it is sloping away from the low winter sun and secondly it performs the perfect conditions to funnel early morning cold air towards the back of the house, aiding the forming of frost on my veggies and other plants. Last year we lost several plants to frost burn including a couple of grevilleas. I am now tentatively awaiting this years -6 temperatures and hoping they don’t damage my prized Bulli Princess which has grown to more than two metres tall since I planted it last year. It is now too big to protect with a tree guard.

In addition to the physical aspects of the land, my impatience to make a start on the garden has left me with some less than perfect plantings. I made use of the plants we had already purchased in Sydney prior to our move. This included a selection of red salvias and lavenders. I planted these in the first section of garden to be built from imported topsoil. It was along the side fence and I didn’t make provision for any taller screening plants because the salvias and lavenders grew far wider than I’d made allowance for.


I added a few other plants that were available at the time, but apart from a standard rose, nothing in the garden grows higher than about a metre. I am now trying to rectify this by adding a few taller growing shrubs. The first of these is a pencil-like conifer that should grow to 2-3 metres tall but no more than 50cm wide. The second, planted a few days ago, is an Acacia Decora (Western Golden Wattle) which can grow to 3 metres high with a width of 2 metres. Unfortunately the only suitable position for this was beside the standard rose, which will now have to be transplanted when winter arrives.

A Gardener's Diary part 3

It’s now over a year since I started on the garden. Progress has been slow and not everything has worked as I hoped.

Somehow the yard shrank. What seemed to be an overwhelming amount of land to fill with plants quickly became too small to accommodate all of the things I would like to do.

Unfortunately the block is wide but not very deep. The house is perhaps set too far from the road, giving us more front garden than back. And I can’t do a great deal with the front because most of it is needed to give driveway access to the side of the house.

One of the failures has been the garden of Aussie natives. This was more or less my first project after moving into the house. Most things remain stunted. I didn’t give them enough depth of soil to get established and there’s too much hard clay under the surface. It seems like I’ve developed a native bonsai collection.

The roses I planted at the front of the house are having mixed success. All of the books tell me that roses need 5-6 hours of sunlight per day; but they didn’t say that too much direct sunlight isn’t very helpful for the flowers. These are in direct sun for most of the day. Almost as soon as they open, many become discoloured – or dried up.
The biggest disappointments have been the Red Pierres. These red climbing roses develop massive clusters of buds – most of which turn brown before they even open. It’s only now, at the start of autumn that we are getting some good colour in the blooms.
Our Double Delights have been anything but delightful. They seem to develop one problem after another and the flowers have been few this season. I am thinking of transplanting them over winter – if I can find a more suitable spot for them.

The back garden is looking more promising. We trucked in a few loads of soil to give a decent depth of raised garden beds above the clay. This area has become a mix of natives and exotics. Most things seem to be thriving – though some are thriving too well. Everything now seems to be planted too close together and the salvias are taking a lot of work to keep under control. Most of the salvias seem to be “Hotlips” which according to the illustration on the label should be red with white tips. However, for most of the year white seemed to be the only colour being displayed – nowhere near as spectacular as the brilliant red flowers that were our first introduction to the salvia family.

A newer area was intended to be dominated by David Austin Roses. This was another disappointment that didn’t work to plan. Two plants bought through mail order died after a few months. This wasn’t surprising because they were the most pathetic rose specimens I’ve ever seen. If I’d seen them at a nursery I wouldn’t have given them a second look. Despite the poor start, this bed is now showing a little potential. Between the roses I’ve planted a few salvias. These are a deep burgundy, a much more impressive colour than the “Hotlips”. The surviving David Austins are Winchester Cathedral, Othello, Hero, Mary Rose and Heritage. I’m not sure whether I’ll try to replace the departed Glamis Castle and New William Shakespeare with other roses, or to try something else instead.

Behind the rose garden I’m trying another area of natives. A few haven’t survived, but so far it seems to be going reasonably well. The biggest failures have been Banksias. None have survived so I’ve given up on them for now. Also a group of Correas all gave up the ghost one by one after showing a very promising start.
The biggest surprise has been a native hydrangea. It was tiny when I planted it, but only months later it’s the most dominant plant in the back yard. It has almost overwhelmed the only non-native in the area – a burgundy iceberg rose. The burgundy of the rose contrasts brilliantly with the purple of the native. I had intended to transplant the iceberg away from the natives, but the colours are so effective together that I might keep them alongside and just move the rose slightly aside to give it a bit more room to grow.


The veggie garden has been a mixed success. For the second year we’ve had a good crop of butternut pumpkins. I don’t know how well I’ll go with them next year because I don’t want to devote as much area to them. I might try growing them as a climbing plant if I can make a suitable frame to support them. I’ve read that they can be suitably grown in this way.
Then again, we can’t believe everything we read. This was made very clear by the failure of my potato crop after I tried to grow them under straw as per an article I read last year. I don’t want to know how much I spent on this method. Not only was there the cost of the seed potatoes, I lost count of the number of bales of straw I had to buy to keep them adequately covered during their growing season.
We’ve had more success from one or two Ruby Lou potatoes that must have been left in the ground after last years crop were dug up.

This year’s zucchini crop didn’t seem to match the one we had last year, but it was more than enough to keep us fed. We just didn’t have as many to give away – and we didn’t need to make zucchini soup.
A big success was our first attempt at growing onions. They were Barletta onions – a mild white salad onion. The seeds germinated well and most of those transplanted matured into good size onions. I’ve now sown the remaining seed from the packet into punnets and they’ve now started to sprout. But unless I buy more seeds, the next crop will be much smaller.

Gardener's Diary part 1

For over ten years we have lived in a suburban flat with a balcony that gets insufficient sun to grow anything worthwhile: therefore gardening was never an issue. However, a year and a half ago we bought a house in a NSW country town that we rented to tenants, with the intention of moving in ourselves when the time was right.

Since buying the house, gardening has become a passion - even though, so far, I haven't been able to indulge in the practical side of things. While not able to get my hands dirty, or work up a sweat using a spade, I've been using my time to plan what I'd like to do when we do move into the house. There will be a native garden at the front and a rose garden at the back and I also want to grown some of our own fruit and veggies.

Very recently the tenants gave notice of their impending departure and we have decided it is now time to sell up in Sydney and start our new life in the country. It's an exciting prospect - made more tempting by the chance to finally get some dirt on my hands.

At the end of June I'm hoping to undertake my first constructive work in the garden. Prior to this, the only gardening project I accomplished at the house was an act of wisteria-cide, when I disposed of a rampant plant that was threatening to overtake the front of the building.

I intend to prepare a couple of small areas where I can plant a few roses. The eradicated wisteria had been growing on a couple of wire covered frames at each side of the house. I will use these to support Red Pierre roses. I will also grow a few Fiona's Wish and Double Delights in the same general area. One of the frames is very near to the front door and I'd like visitors to be greeted by something welcomingly fragrant.

At the moment, pots of roses are overtaking my balcony. While they won't grow to maturity here, hopefully they'll survive well enough during the rest of this winter until they are planted in the garden. In addition to a Red Pierre and two Fiona's Wish - bought in pots from the nursery, I took a gamble with three bare-rooted Double Delights, bought from a chain store. I've potted them and I'm trying to keep them well watered until they rejuvenate. They were possibly a bit too dry when I bought them so who knows how successful (or not) they'll be, but at $3.00 each I thought it was worth a try. I gave them a good 24 hour soak in a bucket of water prior to planting. Only time will tell whether they were past all hope.

As the time for my first project approaches, I have to find a suitable mulch to apply after the garden bed has been prepared. I want to avoid material too light or dusty that's likely to blow around in the wind. So far the best option seems to be a product sold by a local rose nursery. Basically this is small cubes of lucerne hay (possibly combined with appropriate nutrients). This appears to be perfect for the job, but seems to be quite expensive.