PLANTWISE - November 2009

The Australian Garden

taking public garden design to a new level

Posted by: Kate Bryant on Nov 28, 2009 at 03:00AM 1 Comments

I am not often completely dazzled by public gardens, but this extraordinary Australian garden and its attendant buildings, art and hardscaping knocked my socks off.

Developed over the past three years, half the garden is still under construction and slated for completion in 2011.

The Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne (The Australian Garden) is an ambitious public garden planted entirely with Australian native plants.

The space is centered around a Red Sand Garden which represents the arid center of the Australian continent. Around it are themed structures and intriguingly designed conceptual gardens.

The five Exhibition Gardens are designed to teach and inspire visitors to appreciate the beauty and value of native plants – and to learn how to garden using less water by planting appropriate plants and by using simple water conservation techniques.

The Diversity Garden is divided into 85 strips representing distinct bioregions of Australia. These long, thin demo gardens contain representative plants from each bioregion, with regionally-appropriate soil and mulch.

The Water Saving Garden displays plants that use less water to thrive. Each of the three terraces demonstrates a different watering regime, symbolized by a brightly-colored watering can sculpture: dry, low water and moderate water. Watering cans are symbolic tools of water conservation, as much of Australia is on water restrictions. In some places, hand-watering is all that’s allowed. And some households I’ve visited only use gray water for their gardens now. (As I write this, people are rejoicing over a torrential rain that’s falling, after an unseasonably hot and dry spell. Given nearly a decade of drought conditions in southeastern Australia, it is hoped that this downpour might replenish the reservoirs a bit.)

The Future Garden explores the artificial manipulation of plants to achieve particular commercial or aesthetic effects – for example, grafting, hybridisation, the development of cultivars and, most recently, plant bioengineering. The Future Garden also showcases commercial Australian plants that have been developed using these techniques. I happily admired the many beautiful native plant hybrids and cultivars – but the overall concept of the garden was quite opaque to me until I read the interpretive signs.

The Home Garden aims to provide guidance to those who would like to use native plants to enhance the architectural style of their home. Five large-scale “vignettes” are presented, each planted with native plants intended to enhance the different Australian period architectural home styles.

The children’s garden will need a few years to effectively grow into its own but I’m sure it will mature into a lovely play and discovery space for children. (Although it would be hard to compete with the magnificent children’s garden at the Melbourne Botanic Garden – by far the best I’ve seen so far!) All the platforms and play structures are constructed of natural materials and are designed to amuse and cultivate curiosity.

After ambling through the extraordinary exhibition gardens in the hot sun, my group and I tore off our shoes and waded through the Rockpool Waterway. My all-Australian party of family and friends noted that the shallow running water and the rust-red sculpture representing an iron-rich streambank felt precisely like standing in the shallow running water of a stream in the Australian bush – a ringing recommendation of the site’s artistry.

Next, I wandered up through the arid garden, which was chock full of well-labeled native plants adapted to the parched, sunny conditions.

The last area I explored was the Eucalyptus Walk, which winds through various Eucalyptus ecosystems. My favorite area was the scented bush gardens with native plants that are intensely fragrant, either in foliage or flower.

This garden is a superb model for integrating beautiful and educational plantings with art and architecture. It is done in a stimulating way while clarifying and developing a richly developed sense of place. I left feeling elated and inspired.

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Adelaide Botanic Garden

Inspiration from Mediterranea

Posted by: Kate Bryant on Nov 24, 2009 at 01:00PM 0 Comments

Like most Australian cities, Adelaide has several botanical gardens dotted around the city. I visited two during my short visit to that city. The larger one was the Adelaide Botanic Garden.

Situated on the dry Adelaide Plains, the Adelaide Botanic Garden includes a few native Australian “bush” and temperate rainforest habitats, sweeping lawns and mature, exotic subtropical trees and shrubs as well as specialty plant collections like cycads, palms and bromeliads. There is also a National Rose Trial ground where roses are trialed for their suitability to Australian gardens.

There is a newly designed and planted terrestrial bromeliad collection, arranged in an elegant array of beds surrounding the Amazon Waterlily Pavilion. I visited the day after a prolonged heat wave with high temperatures of about 115 F. Some of the bromeliads’ leaves were a little fried but most of them still looked great.

One of the most interesting educational areas of the garden was the South Australia Water Mediterranean Garden, showcasing plants from the five main mediterranean climates of the world: southwestern Australia, South Africa, Central Chile, California, and the Mediterranean Basin.

Situated in southwestern Australia, Adelaide fits neatly into one of the five mediterranean climates of the world, with a classic mediterranean weather pattern of cool, wet winters and warm, dry summers.

Portland (USDA Zone 8b), on the other hand, is considered a “modified mediterranean” climate. While we have the requisite cool, wet winter and warm, dry summer pattern, our cool, wet period is longer than in the classic mediterranean climate and our warm, dry period is shorter. Extreme highs and lows are mostly moderated by the maritime influence. And continental air sometimes floods the region via the Columbia River Gorge leading to occasional heat waves in summer and wind and ice storms in winter.

The Adelaide mediterranean demo garden offers plenty of ideas and inspiration for sustainable and climatically appropriate plants for Portland. Of course there’s much to learn about plants summer drought tolerance from seeing them grow in dry, lowland Australian conditions. But to do well in the Portland area, plants must also survive our wet winters punctuated by cold spells and occasional freezing winds.

Some suitably water-wise – and cold-hardy – plants I glimpsed in my walk through the demo garden include: Grevillea juniperina from Australia; from South Africa, the silvery ground cover Dymondia margaretae and striking blue and white flowered Agapanthus; from Chile, a spiny bromeliad called Fascicularia (there were a few species, both hardy and not); Arctostaphylos (several) and Matilija poppy (Rhomnea coulteri) from California; and Myrtus communis and lavender cotton (Santolina) from the Mediterranean Basin.

Some of these plants are common, others less so. They’re just a little taste of what I saw that does – or could – thrive in Portland. But seeing them thrive in a no- or minimally-watered Adelaide garden reassures us of their drought tolerance, at the very least. It’s good to have that sort of information available, given the latest reports on global warming.

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The Other Heronswood

Posted by: Kate Bryant on Nov 22, 2009 at 01:00PM 4 Comments

The historic house with lawns of drought-tolerant kikuyu grass and heirloom flowers interspersed with an array of both unusual and time-tested drought-tolerant plants

Last week, I tried to go to the Botanic Gardens at Cranbourne near Melbourne but, with the extreme heat and drought, the gardens were closed due to fire danger.

Fire, heat and drought are tremendously potent issues throughout most of Australia these days, after nine years of drought conditions.

My intrepid group of friends and family, including my energetic, plant-loving, 86 year-old dad, decided to head south down the Mornington Peninsula to another garden in Dromana, the home of the “other” Heronswood. To the horticultural cogniscienti of North America, there was only one Heronswood – the now-closed Heronswood Nursery in Kingston, Washington, founded by superstar plant explorer Dan Hinckley and his partner Robert Jones. A true plant Mecca, it was bought by seed giant Burpee but lost much of its elan without Hinckley’s expertise.

However – getting back to plant travels in Australia – there is another Heronswood – albeit completely unrelated – in Dromana, Australia, a town on the southern edge of Victoria’s Port Philip Bay, about an hour south of Melbourne. The beautiful stone house at Heronswood was built in 1871 and is now on the historic register. Diggers Nursery was built on the property in 1978 by founder Clive Blazey who had a plan to save old vegetable varieties, which were being dropped off seed lists in favor of new hybrid varieties.

The company is named after the 17th century Diggers in England – a group of agrarian communists who believed in food equity. On the Diggers Nursery website, Blazey writes:

“Growing our own uncontaminated food is not a new concern, but one that goes back to the 17th century Diggers in England. The original Diggers, inspired by their founder Gerrard Winstanley, seized public land with the aim of growing food to give away to the poor. Their crime was simply planting vegetables on common land but it was met with a force of troops at the request of land owners. The first Australian reference to Diggers came in 1853 during the gold rush. United in rebellion the Diggers rose up when forced to pay unfair taxes. This sparked the Eureka Stockade, so to be called a Digger was to describe a subversive mate who shared the common cause…”

In this politically engaged spirit, book author and nurseryman Clive Blazey runs a “climate-positive” nursery devoted to preserving valuable heirloom edibles. I enjoyed reading their list of green initiatives including driving fuel-efficient cars, buying renewable energy, gardening organically, using organic food grown from heirloom seed, cutting water bills, and more. Environmentalism is a serious business for many Australians, especially given the severe water restrictions currently being practiced in many states. There’s a shift occurring in Australian gardens, from primarily English-style rose and flower gardens to more drought-tolerant plants including Australian native plants, long considered worthless scrub to Anglophiles.

The Heronswood garden and Diggers Nursery in Dromana is a required stop for garden lovers visiting the Melbourne area. In addition to Heronswood’s display and demonstration gardens with sweeping views down to the bay, Diggers plant nursery and shop, and the excellent restaurant Fork to Fork, there’s the rest of the Mornington Peninsula, a respected wine-growing region of its own.

The combination of the beautiful surroundings, the salty air, the beautiful local gardens and the wineries with their magnificent lunches makes the Mornington Peninsula a beautiful day or weekend trip. Across the bay, the City of Melbourne can be seen across the water on a clear day.

A view of Port Philip Bay from Heronswood’s dry garden

Diggers nursery sales area

This garden demonstrates the idea that vegetables can be produced year-round for a family of three in a very small plot of land if proper succession planting is used.

The restaurant Fork to Fork offers lunches with organic, seasonal produce, mostly from the Heronswood gardens, as well as locally produced meats, fish, cheeses and wine.

One of many charming scenes at Heronswood Nursery

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Canberra Botanic Garden

a walking tour

Posted by: Kate Bryant on Nov 16, 2009 at 12:00AM 0 Comments

I haven’t met a Banksia I couldn’t kill in my Portland garden. Looks nice in Canberra, though. This is Banksia spinulosa var collina.

Australia is a vast country – the sixth largest country in the world – and – depending on whom you ask – is home to an estimated 15,600 – 20,000 species of vascular plants (a category which excludes fungi and lichen).

Go to visit almost any native garden in Australia, then, and you will have an encounter with an immense number of plants that totally confound your ability to memorize them. That has been my experience so far, anyway. I thought I had a fair grasp on a good number of Southeastern Australian native plants. But, as is often the case, the more you learn, the more you realize how little you actually know.

For one, many plants are amazingly similar in both foliage and flower. There are rafts of medium sized shrubs with flaky brown bark, tiny needle-like leaves and sprays of boxy little white flowers. Also, squidzillions of bushy shrubs with thick, waxy, blade-like, olive green leaves. I cannot count all the shrubs with spidery red or orange flowers (this includes many Grevillea and Telopea.) And let’s not even start on the complexities of distinguishing between the hundreds of Eucalyptus species!

So while this trip the other day to the Canberra Botanic Garden was ecstasy-inducing – with the heat, the heady scent of resinous-leafed Eucalyptus and minty Prostanthera and the surreal, mellifluous calls of wattle birds, magpies, and bellbirds filling the air – it was also intellectually humbling. Australia is an immense continent with a richly complex geologic and botanical history and no matter how often I visit and how much I think I know, I still find I have much to learn about Australia’s native plants.

Here are some photographic highlights from a scintillating four-hour ramble around the Canberra Botanic Garden. Picture yourself walking through the shimmering heat and bright, all-enveloping light and drinking in the sounds and the scents of the Southeastern Australian bush – and maybe you’ll forget that it’s raining – again – in Portland.

Melaleuca decora – a magnificent tree to look up into from below

I spent a lot of time on these groovy benches, admiring the silky gum tree (Eucalyptus) trunks.

Eucalyptus grove

Grevillea trifida

It practically took threats to extract me from this part of the garden. So much to see!

Red bottlebrush (Callistemon), species unknown, but looks like C. citrina

The grass tree is something of an icon of Australia, as the genus (Xanthorrhoea) is endemic (only grows here) and has, um, a rather distinctive form. This fascinating, primitive-looking plant usually flowers – and therefore reproduces – after a bush fire.

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Bromeliads of Foster Botanic Garden, Honolulu

decorative pineapples!

Posted by: Kate Bryant on Nov 10, 2009 at 08:00PM 2 Comments

Back again after a few days visiting family friends in rural areas of eastern Australia. Unfortunately, bits of necessary technology went missing and wireless was non-existent in the country towns I visited so I was out of communication.

Before I dig into the Australian flora and garden culture, let me just share with you one area of Honolulu’s Foster Botanic Garden: a peaceful, lush oasis containing many heritage specimen trees, a large palm collection, a garden of edible tropicals and – my favorite area – the bromeliad section.

Bromeliads are most famously represented by the pineapple – Ananas comosum – an icon of the Hawaiian Islands, although it is actually native to southern Brazil and Paraguay.

Bromeliads can be broken down into three main groups: the spiny Pitcarnia group; the Bromeliad group, which are “tank” bromeliads that have little basins for collecting water in the center (this includes the pineapple); and the Tillandsia types, which are epiphytic (“air-plants,” which usually grow on trees, drawing moisture and nutrients from rain and run-off) and include Spanish moss, which most famously drapes from live oak trees in the Southern USA.

These images exhibit the diversity among “tank” bromeliads at the Foster Botanic Garden in early November, 2009. These plants provide incandescent color and gorgeous architectural form in the tropical garden. Many of them make fine house plants, too. Best of all, there are some beautiful and more cold-hardy Bromeliads that can be grown in Portland gardens.

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