Gone to pot
A few years after buying the land I once owned in Tasmania, I imagined an ornamental garden there that required as little in the way of maintenance while also presenting something pleasing to the eye. I’m as keen a gardener as anyone, but I’ve seen elsewhere that in making a garden, one’s enthusiasm might ultimately create a rod for one’s back, especially by including too many plants and assorted gardenalia in too limited a space (see also The fantasy-trap). The garden I pictured comprised just four plant species; Tree fern (Dicksonia antarctica), Kidney weed (Dichondra repens), Butterfly flag (Diplarenna moræa); and the deeply perfumed Cheesewood (Pittosporum bicolor). The first and last of these grew naturally on my land.
I envisaged an expanse of Dichondra across three terraces less than a metre high (the literal lay of the land was not without its difficulties), with some randomly scattered pockets of the other three species, either as a mix of two or three species, or a stand of one. In style it wasn’t quite as minimalist as could be since I wanted to maintain a sense of the y axis about it. The only effort required to maintain the garden would have been expended on biannual clipping of the Cheesewood to create broad densely foliaged columnar forms; annual removal of dead Tree fern leaves, and; dividing clumps of Butterfly flag every few years. As mentioned elsewhere, Dichondra can be grown as a lawn substitute, but it rarely, if ever needs mowing, although doing so helps create a denser, more weed-resistant foliage base.
Something of that pared-back vision still appeals to my inner minimalist, but had that garden been created, I’d have had to forsake too many other beautiful — and fascinating — plants native to the area, and the garden’s habitat value would have been marginal. Now that I live in the seasonally dry tropics with its rich plant and animal diversity, it would seem almost churlish to eschew that diversity in favour of a similarly minimalist garden. With seventy species of plants destined for my quarter-acre in Townsville, about fifty are currently represented in four hundred or so pots in my backyard. With little doubt, more species will be added over time, and others removed, but what I want to avoid is cramming in as many individual plants and species as possible. It’s not only because it would appear too busy for my liking, but also because too many plants in the one place risks being counterproductive.
A favourite client in Adelaide maintained an insatiable desire, it seemed, to grow as many different plants as possible in his small inner-city garden, all the while wondering why so many either fared poorly, or failed miserably. There is a limit to the more-is-more approach to gardening. As the number of plants increases, competition for light, water, and soil fertility also increases, and at some point growth and vigour stalls in some plants more than others. As vigour declines, weakened plants become susceptible to predation and disease. What eventuates is a poorly group of plants, and the increasing likelihood of multiple deaths.
According to a much esteemed and highly influential British gardener and garden designer (in my view, one cannot excel at the latter without first being well practiced in the former), “The possession of a quantity of plants,…does not make a garden; it only makes a collection. Having got the plants, the great thing is to use them with careful selection and definite intention” (my emphasis). Gertrude Jekyll’s gardening knowledge and insights were probably without peer in the UK over the turn of the twentieth century and well on after she died in 1932. Ms Jekyll might be remembered for her painterly approach to garden designs that considered plant and flower colour and texture, in addition to height and form, but she also knew a thing or two about using plants efficiently. Only so many plants can flourish in one space at one time. Jekyll’s ebullient flower borders were packed to the brim, but never suffered the indignity of being overstuffed.
My Adelaide client hadn’t anticipated that with so many plants in his collection-cum-garden, they were competing with each other for resources, and the leafy exuberance he desired was, little-by-little, slipping away. There was also the not-too-insignificant matter of growing plants ill-suited to the site. Since noticing some of his obsessiveness in me, I resolved some years ago to restrain myself from adding just one more plant to the mental list of species I’d compiled for my garden on the outskirts of Hobart.
With quite a different æsthetic approach to garden design than Gertrude Jekyll, Mirei Shigemori — arguably Japan’s preeminent twentieth century garden designer — was of the opinion that, “in most cases, the artistic value of the garden is proportionate to the degree of simplification”. In other words, less is more. Keeping a cap on the number of plant species for my garden in Townsville hasn’t been without difficulty. Every so often I learn of a species suited to the climate which also bears some other intriguing quality or qualities, and add it to my list — a spreadsheet comprising rows of species with columns for their common names and various characteristics including ultimate height and width, flower colour, scent, and pollinator attractiveness, among others. In the past year, the list has slowly expanded and contracted several times, advancing and receding according with whichever mode of thinking dominates at the time — the collector who appreciates species diversity or the minimalist who in all things seeks simplicity. In an attempt to assuage these seemingly irreconcilable tendencies, only a handful of species will grow in the front yard, whereas the forest garden planned for behind the house will be significantly richer.
The tension between one’s ultimate vision for a garden, the kinds and number of plants used and how they’re combined and arranged, is fraught. When making a garden from scratch, it helps immeasurably to first settle on a reasonably clear, if not also detailed vision of how it will appear once established. Knowing which plants will best achieve the vision while also being suited to the site’s climate and soil type is equally important, though in my experience a secondary consideration in terms of sequencing. With a clear picture in my mind of how the front garden will appear once mature, and some knowledge of which species will work to achieve that vision, earlier this year I purchased;
100 x Scarlet blood-root (Hæmodorum coccineum).
The common name of this Australian plant is an all too rare instance of it being entirely apt. So red are its roots, that they can be used to create red and red-brown pigments, the former of which appear similar in intensity to another plant root based dye, alizarin, which is sourced from a northern hemisphere plant, madder. Unlike madder (that’s a bold-faced guess, by the way), the blood-root’s fruiting bodies can also be prepared to create purple pigments. Related to Western Australia’s Kangaroo-paw (Anigozanthus sp.), the plant has relatively sparse narrow strap-like leaves growing from a basal stem to seventy centimetres or so in length. During the wet season it bears eye-catching scarlet red flowers on stems up to a metre in height. Once its flowers have been pollinated, the fruiting bodies eventually dry and turn a distinct black while remaining on their stalk for a time. Scarlet blood-root grows naturally on Castle Hill, which is but a metaphorical hop, skip, and a jump away from home.
The plants were purchased in tube-sized pots, as is my wont, and each has since been repotted into 140mm pots where they’re likely to remain until the end of the year before being potted-on again. Caring for potted plants well in advance of planting them into a garden is an ideal opportunity to become accustomed to their needs. The blood-roots are, I’m happy to report, doing well. There has been one loss which was likely to have been the consequence of my repotting technique — some roots of the plant had adhered to the side of the tube, and as it was unceremoniously pulled away, too few roots remained attached to the plant.
When repotting plants, it’s worth waiting until there’s evidence of small roots poking through the drainage holes at the base of the pot. There shouldn’t be too many, though. One should also be able to see soil, and I’ve found that a ratio of about 50:50 to be a good indicator of when to transplant. Ensure that the next sized pot is not too large. There is a rule of thumb that it best be no more than a third larger in volume. This helps avoid the risk of new soil souring as it waits to be infiltrated with plant roots. If wet soil is left too long without the biological activity of root growth that draws water up through the soil profile, it can quite easily become sodden enough to trigger anaerobic decomposition of the organic fraction of the potting mix (the same can also happen with over-watering once roots fill a pot, but that is less likely). If anaerobic decomposition continues, growth of roots through the soil will be inhibited which in turn will retard the plant’s growth above the soil. Rot of various kinds can eventually infect a plant and quickly kill it.
On the subject of water, as expected there has been precious little of it falling from the sky these past months. By coincidence, however, while writing this post, rain forecast by our beloved Bureau of Meteorology has started falling on my home’s corrugated iron roof. To hear the sound well, however, driving rain is needed, otherwise it’s too easily muffled by the foil-backed bubble-wrap style sisalation directly beneath the roof frame and the solar panels covering about a third of the roof. Wanting to listen to what there was of the rain, I turned off the music playing through my iPad. Cibo Matto’s rendition of Águas de Marços was coming to an end anyhow, “é o mistério profundo…”.
It’s a very uncomplicated pleasure to write — or do anything else, for that matter; cooking, reading, ironing, tax-returns — beneath an iron roof while it rains steadily. If there’s another sound more comforting than its patter, I don’t know it. In Papua New Guinea, as in Borneo, I’ve experienced driving rain for days on end, yet despite its inconvenience never tired of it. No doubt, some people who live in those and other places subject to lengthy bouts of heavy rain will have their own opinion on the subject, but for someone who has lived most of their life in Adelaide where summer months can pass by with nary a hint of the wet stuff, the sound of falling rain on a galvanised iron roof both soothes and reassures. I won’t bother watering my potted plants today.
To be continued…
