November Garden

We have been hedge trimming and mowing in earnest this month and it was while I was in the middle of our double Camellia sasanqua hedge earlier in the month trimming back the top that I looked out through the cut leaf maple coming into leaf. The light was purple, maybe not quite caught by the photo. The roses are coming into bloom. We have planted some new ones this year and they do have lovely flowers but the established and reliable ones are giving the show, white icebergs and red floribundas.

Insect numbers are on the increase and a green butterfly was spending lots of time in the thyme, sufficient for me to get a couple of decent shots out of many taken. I have looked on the Coffs Harbour Butterfly House site and I think our green butterfly is a Macleay’s Swallowtail Graphium macleayanus.

Our current horticulture trainee Tom has an interest in woodwork so when an old stained glass window turned up in the builder’s skip we decided to have a go at upcycling it into wall art. With mirrors all the go in gardens at the moment we decided to back the glass with a mirror so that the colours of what turned out to be faux stained glass would show up. The section now painted with our turquoise paint had previously been rose glass paint and detracted from the olives and blues in the centre now highlighted by the mirror. The window was white so Tom sanded it back, did much filling with putty and oiled the oregon frame with linseed oil. We have hung it above a raised garden in our Gazebo function area.

Finally a shot taken this morning as we prepare for a wedding under the Linden tree. This Verbascum “Polar Summer” from Cloudehill Nursery is flowering nearby with Cercis canadensis, Stachys byzantina, Lavandula dentata and the Linden beyond.

 

Poppies for Remembrance Day

 

Gallipoli poppy, Papaver rhoeas

Since the Centenary of the Landing at Gallipoli in 2015 Gallipoli poppies or Flanders Red poppies have been readily for sale in garden centres. The red poppy has been used as a symbol of Remembrance of the 1914-18 War in many countries. It was a  beautiful coloniser in the disturbed soil of the battlefields in Belgium and France. The Gallipoli Poppy we grow has been developed by Oasis Horticulture.  There is another red flower that symbolises for me the Great War conflict in Palestine and that is the red anemone. When I first saw this photo at an exhibition at the War Memorial in Canberra I thought it was actually my own grandfather kneeling to pick the flowers. It turns out not to be but the image of the light horseman collecting anemones behind a camp in Palestine

An Australian light horseman collecting anemones near Belah in Palestine

is still very moving. I remember when I was around 10 years old and sick with the measles Grandpa bringing me a bunch of flowers from his garden including (in my memory) white flowering dwarf plum and red anemones. We do have poppies volunteering in this garden but not Papaver rhoeas, although I do remember a dark pink poppy in the cereal crops in the central west that may be P. rhoeas. Our “field poppies” are Papaver dubium,  the long headed poppy and Papaver somniferum ssp. setigerum, the small flowered opium poppy.

Papaver somniferum ssp. setigerum

Papaver dubium