Everlastings, Paper daisies, Sun rays, Strawflowers. This loose gang of Australian flowers is one with such an iconic quality. The dry, textural petals vary from the hard beetle shells in confectionar ...
I’m not really one for regrets. I certainly don’t wallow in them. But if I can learn from an honest reflection on what could have been done better, I’ll go at least that far. So in the int ...
If you’re an Instagrammer, the recent opening of the garden of Jo Ferguson and Simon Hazel won’t have escaped you. For a couple of days it felt like everyone was there, and in a fully understand ...
There’s a favourite spot, down on the beach at Lorne, where about five Metrosideros excelsa (Pohutakawa) in an uneven row make for deep pools of welcome shade, with trunks and canopy that magically ...
For reasons I’d only be guessing at, it’s a great year for Paeonia ‘Molly the Witch’ (Paeonia mlokosewitschii). It could be that it’s the third relatively moist summer in a row, or it coul ...
And so to questions of soil fertility… My training as a horticulturist led me to believe that my capability as a gardener would be measured by the extent I was aware of, and could provide, the optim ...
One of my early loves, Malus floribunda made a huge impact (and the same specimen still does) on the main lawn at Ripponlea, where I did my gardening apprenticeship. I remember virtually burying mys ...
About 25 years ago I started making a ‘dry’ garden – one that would never be watered, but would still carry the quality of verdant oasis that I was then addicted to. Among a whole book of lesson ...
Since I’m here at Dixter, I thought I’d wander ‘round the garden and see which plant was most currently deserving of Plant of the Week. This garden is full of great plants, of course, but one th ...
I have a thing for caramelly/biscuity coloured flowers. I can’t help but think that it’s linked to a sweet tooth. As I scan quickly back through memory files, every one of the plants that spring ...
I can’t think of any genus more transformed by careful breeding over the last thirty years, here in Australia, than the genus Helleborus. The plants we had here – that we’d always had – were g ...
I’ve always been in two minds – maybe more than two – in regard to penstemons. Yes, they’re generous in bloom, and yes, they come in a good range of colours. They flower for an incredibly lo ...
I spent last week in the second-most remote community on the continent. Which must make it one of the most remote communities in the world. Besides loving the work I was doing, assisting with an art ...
So there are miscanthuses that fall into a ‘landscape’ category – that look fabulous en masse, or repeated about – and there are ‘novelty’ miscanthuses that should stand alone – that you ...
One of the great ‘discoveries’ of my unwatered ‘steppe’ garden has been Euphorbia ‘Copton Ash’. I’d admired it, from a distance, for several years. It’s always hard to recall why you ...
So while bed-bound with covid last week, I wallowed in some culture and read Jane Austen’s Emma, having heard from a reliable source that it eclipses the better known, and perhaps better loved, Prid ...
OK, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that today’s Plant of the Week has to be out of season. Once the last of the autumn leaves blows away in my garden, there’s really nothing to see until the ...
It’s a complete mystery to me why, of 100,000+ photos of plants in my photo library, I don’t have a single decent pic of Helleborus argutifolius. It more than merits tens, if not hundreds of pic ...