Blooms and Bluebottles

Ah, before and after photos! First, my garden in Springfield, just before I left, obviously also before the deepfreeze weather moved in. The next photo is our neighbor's lovely little front garden, brimming with delightful blooming plants, groundcovers and splashing fountain.

I have found a great garden book which is helping me as I am putting Tracy's garden to rights. It was sadly neglected for more than a season, and there are some things I just can't figure out. For one, if the environment is marine (the house is on a peninsula, within minutes of the open ocean or a bay), the soil is by nature sandy and alkaline, the sun pounds down without mercy for at least six months of the year and water is rationed, why would any gardener with a bit of common sense plant 10 camelias, 15 azaleas and 15 roses? For another, if you put succulents in big pots, facing the scorching setting sun, why would you choose white rock for a mulch, a nice, reflective, heat-retaining white mulch? The azaleas look beyond pathetic and the camelias seem to be in various states of near death. If Tracy qne Dan weren't renting, I'd dispatch every one of the bedraggled items and replace with proper drought-tolerant, tough natives. Hmph.

One really nice native is the bottlebrush, Callistemon, which comes in many colors and sizes. It's tough as can be, can be pruned and requires very little water. Is there one in this garden? Nope.

Another dandy native is Kangaroo Paws, whose blooms do indeed look like little furry kangaroo paws. There must have been one in this garden once because I found a nursery tag buried deep in the mulch out back.

Water is a serious issue as Australia suffers from drought; the rules are three-minute showers, collect gray water for plant watering, and trap rainwater runoff in big tanks. I've tried hard to drain our tank as I water, but it rains just often enough the tank refills. Whew.

I really do love a colorful garden, however, so the plants

which are better adapted to our garden microclimate are welcome additions. We have several lovely gardenias, lots of hydrangeas, jasmines and mandevillas.

The deep orange bloom of the clivia is new to me, especially because it blooms strongly in deep dry shade, making a stunning comment at dusk when the color jumps out of a corner of the garden.

New Guinea Impatiens are blooming up a storm right now; some of the older plants have stems about an inch across!

When it rains hard, I'm amazed that most of the plants don't seem to suffer, even our passion vine.

And, to the Bluebottles part of my offering for the day: Bluebottles are one of the jellyfish found in the water and on the beaches between November and April. They pack a nasty sting, but swimmers are pretty nonchalant, even the nippers. The lifeguards have hot water ready to pour over the sting site, and within 30 minutes, the pain is gone, and the swimmer is right back in the water.

--30--

Huge critters and soapy trees

Garden spiders are familiar in my tame Springfield garden. There are lots of them, busy webbing and catching tasty flying things. Granddaughter Kylie arms herself with her weapon of choice, a flyswatter, when she ventures out into the back garden for a morning raspberry or two, flapping her way through the myriad of webs. But, though there are lots of them, the spiders are pretty small. I was digging around in a rosebed, shamefully neglected, and looked up to see an Aussie version of garden spider no more than 6" from my nose. Yikes! It was a St Andrews Cross spider (Argiope keyserlingi), very common. But BIG by my standards, with her legs, about 3.5" across! They are harmless, pretty well decked out in fancy colors, and they make their webs with a distinctive zigzag pattern of multi-strand webbing, sometimes looking like a St Andrews Cross. I've heard that they do this so birds won't fly into the webs by mistake.

Moving on, we met another garden surprise, a looper caterpillar, one of the geometridae, or inch worms. He (or she, how can you tell with something that looks the same on both ends?) offered no resistance to capture, so he is now ensconced in our creature keeper. About 4 inches long, he will made a magnificent moth of some type, so we're anxious to see just what type he will be. We named him "Looper the Pooper", for the unbelievable output from what turned out to be the back end.

Not everything in the garden is huge, actually. The lizards are tiny, but they more than make up for their size by their sheer number. There are hundreds of them scurrying in and out of rocks and over walls. I haven't yet captured one with my camera, they are that fast. But every day I try. My most promising location is the mailbox, which is located in a brick pillar at the end of the drive. After I cleaned out the cicada husks and expired cockroaches, the little lizards decided this is a perfect place to hide out. The box is big enough that several of them have moved in, and when you open the box, you never know in which direction they will bolt. Surprise! Mail left in there too long will bear traces of their happy habitation. It's that poo thing again. Nothing like a couple of curious kids to have that topic introduced pretty regularly. By the way, did you know on a warm day when the cicadas are in full throat, the cicada wee falls like rain under the trees? See what I mean about the topic?

We had a fine rain the other day, and I saw my first soap tree in operation. One of my favorite garden perennials is saponaria officialis, soapwort, a lovely low growing shrub with pink blooms. The leaves can make a soapy concoction. Aha, but this is Oz, and everything is BIG, right? So it's a tree that makes soapsuds when it rains after a dry spell. No kidding, red ash, red almond, soap tree, properly Alphitonia excels, makes frothy suds! Jack was quite taken with the whole thing, as was I.

--30--

One Year Downunder

On the first anniversary of Tracy and Dan’s permanent move to Australia, I find myself thinking about the immigrant experience. Today I took the bus up to the very end of the peninsula north of Sydney, called the Northern Beaches, to the lovely little village of Palm Beach. Yes, lots of palms! While waiting for the return bus, I struck up a conversation with a spritely 86-year-old woman and two very polite 20-somethings. It turns out the woman, impeccably turned out in a black pantsuit and jewel-tone blouse, was born in Istanbul and came to Australia with her parents when she was six years old. She speaks old Turkish, and was telling the girls how important it is to learn more than one language. They were speaking a language not familiar to me, but in halting learners’ English, said they were from Czech Republic. “Ah,” said our companion, “you are speaking Czechish. Don’t ever forget your mother tongue, even though Australia is the most wonderful country in the world!” Her brother lives on the central coast and once a month he travels by bus and ferry to meet her in Palm Beach for lunch. They are able to speak in Old Turkish so they don’t forget their heritage. Our young Czechs are studying English and hope to be able to immigrate to Australia as well. Traveling around by bus, I’ve heard many different languages I can’t identity, although no Spanish yet. I’ve been thinking of my great-grandparents’ experiences as immigrants to the US; it must have been similar in many ways. As we boarded the bus and moved south again, I noticed the lady was pensive, her bright violet eyes seeing past the palms of the roadside to a distant yesterday.

My most favorite recent immigrants, the Ries tribe, have settled into their new lives and a new house in Newport, a five minute walk from a dandy little beach and the village shops. The bus line is also a five-minute walk and Dan takes the bus to his work in central Sydney. Tracy faces the insane traffic for her 20-minute drive to the lab where she works three days a week. Jack and Abby are in the last couple of weeks of their school, Sacred Heart of Mona Vale. With my arrival, they’ve been able to take the city bus, which operates as a school bus in the mornings, by themselves into school rather than driving with Tracy or going on the bus with Dan. Backpacks on their backs, bus tickets firmly in hand, they pop on the bus for the 10-minute ride to school. They like to sit up front, as there are noisy teens in the back. Scary for seven and nine year olds.

And speaking of noisy, I’m delighted to report that my feathered alarm clock still calls to me in the mornings: our resident kookaburra begins yelling around 530am. We have flocks of lorikeets and cockatoos screeching their way around the neighborhood, as well as some doves, minahs, and as-yet-unidentified little brown cheepers. Our delightful human neighbors are waging a losing battle between the lorikeets and a the gorgeous flowering yellow gum tree in their back garden. The lorikeets love the blossoms, which they savage as they aim for the tasty bits deep inside the bloom. Phillip and Pam have tried netting (the lorikeets get under the netting and can’t get out, making a whale of a racket) and hanging flashy CDs on strings, to no avail. Phillip was last seen brandishing a broom and charging at pesky birds but he’d have to spend his entire day out there to keep them away.


Our garden is lovely, though neglected for a couple of years. I’m having a wonderful time revamping and cleaning. Abby, Jack and I have got a worm bin going, called a Can O Worms, of course, and we’re feeding 1000 red wigglers kitchen scraps till they get big enough to get going on garden trimmings too. We’ve planted seeds (beets, carrots, lettuce, alyssum, nigelia, poppies, sunflowers & flower mix) and planted out sturdy seedlings (tomatoes, watermelon, basil, sage, petunias, lobelia, strawberries) and most everything is doing well. We did have some little casualties when a band of marauding snails rampaged through the sunflower seedlings leaving only pathetic tiny stalks in their wake. So off to Flower Power this morning for iron chelate, which is an ok snail bait. I also put coffee grounds around the seedlings as Australian snails apparently don’t care for that either.

Insect life is astounding as ever. A cockroach sighted in the house resulted in mass hysteria with bug sprays, fly swatters and yelling. It wasn’t that big, but it’s likely the critter was well-fed: something has been eating the peanut butter off the mouse traps without springing the traps. And truly disgusting were the eight cockroaches found swimming in the bottom of a wine glass, left outside, with about an inch of wine left. Even after an all-night orgy, some of them were still alive in the morning. Ugh.

The kids swim in the Newport

Nippers Club on the beach on Sunday mornings. It is wonderful! Last Sunday, about 250 nippers, ages 6-14, and about 200 parents swarmed to the beach for a couple of hours of organized chaos. The kids are learning great skills in surf safety and having fun at the same time. Parent volunteers work diligently with the kids with games and races. Lovely mayhem!

I’ve found a Rotary Club and am already signed up to volunteer at the Carols In The Park event this weekend. Seems odd to be singing about snowmen when it’s 85F and the cicadas are humming their own tune! Shops are full of Christmasy stuff and tinsel and lights are everywhere. We’ve got a little tree, fake of course, but valiantly sporting ornaments.

We had a Duck party for The Civil War Game, which we had to tape in order to watch it at a decent hour. We hooped and hollered like all Good Ducks everywhere. Go Ducks!

--30--

Happy birthday, Charley

What better way to celebrate the anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth than a visit to a couple of botanic gardens? I visited Hunter Valley Botanical Garden north of Newcastle and Stony Ridge just south of us in Brookvale in the last couple of days. Not the manicured displays of plant life from around the world, these two gardens are a testament to the hardiness of local fauna and the vision of gardeners to let the plants show off by themselves. I marvel at the adaptations plants make to microclimates; Stony Ridge is a pocket of garden-gone-bush in a suburban neighborhood, making a contrast between home plantings and the real thing. I hope to join the volunteers at Stony Ridge on Tuesday for some maintenance work.

Icon check

I love the huge roadside attractions all over Australia. Homegrown, odd, and clever, they are in the spirit of the Burma Shave signs of my childhood, only gigantic. Anyway, near Newcastle is The Rock, a huge replica of, you guessed it, Uluru. It's a gas station of sorts, with picnic area (it was between bucketing showers, so no picnikers). The bathroom door features pictures of local animal scat, so more possibilities to check off icons of Australia. Wombat poo, check; koala poo, check; roo poo, check.

Another icon is the dingo, and on my recent road trip to the central coast for bushwalking and just generally poking around, I shared the track with a hungry-looking dingo. Dingo in the wild, check.

Reptiles and more

At Australia Reptile Park, a good many of Australia's famous critters are on view. Besides reptiles, there are the mandatory koalas, roos, wombats, crocs, birds, and of course, spiders. The center is doing quite a job on Tasmanian Devil research; in the wild they are threatened by a 100%-fatal virus. ARP has 39 little devils and they are working on cause/cure for the virus. Meanwhile, you can watch a trio of devils getting a feed, and that's an experience! They really are as noisy and aggressive as their press makes them out to be.

The snake & lizard area was extensive, the frogs and turtles fine, but for me it was the spider house. Since we have been dealing with our resident spiders, this area was of special interest. Yup, there they were: a couple of huntsman, a nasty little redback, a funnelweb and some miscellaneous others guys thrown in. There were giant models of a redback and a funnelweb, almost big enough to count on the Huge Roadside Attractions list.

Never a dull moment at school

Although I don't always trust the accuracy of a third-grader's report, this time it might be taken as true. There was an alledged sighting of a red-bellied black snake on the school playground last week, and the teachers chased the kids off the area and closed it. Third most venomous of Australia's Deadly Dozen! But kids around here know their critters, so when all the kids knew it immediately for what it was, I'll believe it!

Sharks and rays

How could I resist visiting a place where you can wade with sharks and rays? Somehow I was expecting an ocean-side attraction, but this one is housed in a huge metal barn, some meters from the ocean. There are two big tanks and several smaller ones for the smaller specimens. You can carefully offer bait fish as a snack with a pair of salad tongs to rays of all sizes and smaller Port Jackson sharks. The young woman on duty, her shirt embroidered with "shark wrangler", told me the sharks and rays like to get a pat and they are very friendly. Hmm. If you are ready for more, you can don a wet suit and snorkel and get in either of the big tanks with the denizens. It's another one of those home-grown attractions, with the owners' two terriers running around. Now, why they haven't been tossed in a tank yet, I don't know.

Koalas in the wild

Where the Hunter River runs into the Tasman Sea, a submerged valley with lots of side canyons makes up the Myall Lakes National Park. There are beaches and little towns where you need to set your watch back about 35 years. Check out the turn knobs high in the shower. It was pouring rain, and thunder and lightening displays were quite stunning, so I didn't get the feel for the beauty of the beaches, and no koala with half a lick of good sense would be in the tops of the gum trees during a lightening storm. The big trees have rather fragile limbs which tend to come crashing down during windstorms too. This limited my bushwalking considerably. I stayed at Tea Gardens (not too many gardens, no tea except in a pot); the first thing I saw pinned to the bulletin board at the information center was the advert from a couple of locals who will help you get rid of your snake problem. On the Tilligerry peninsula is a small koala reserve run by volunteers. No koalas to be seen in the rain, but the helpful vollie at the desk said, of course, "You should have been here yesterday!" But for a modest donation, I was able to plant a couple of gum trees from the reserve's nursery in an area they are reclaiming for koalas. I was content with that. Gum trees grow so fast, I'm sure they will be huge by my next visit.

##30##