I’m guessing you’ve got that song in your head now too…sorry! Do you do that? I’m sure everyone does, but descriptors (for me) are so often linked to a tune. Most often I’ll not know the name of the artist, which I realise does them a disservice because clearly their work has made a long and lasting impression…but over the years I’ve lost the musical thread - my head is so full of other stuff and whilst I know it might require only a quick search to nail the name of both song and artist…doing so will completely distract my attention from the task at hand, which in this case…is writing to you. (OK so to put me out of my temporary misery and perhaps yours too…this one is The Heat Is On, Glenn Frey (soundtrack Beverley Hills Cop…and no, I haven’t ever watched it!).
I wish I had a collection of play lists in order. The teenage me (even the 8 year old) would certainly have done so…right through to that daydreaming (perhaps time-wasting?) romantic young woman in her early 20’s! And those lists would have been very precise! But somewhere along the line…(motherhood?) I lost the musical plot! No more so than when everyone else took charge of what we were listening to…and now I just accept whatever’s on the go. This hasn’t affected my memory bank though, of lines penned and heard…and one day when I really have nothing else to do…I shall make very, very comprehensive lists of all my favourite music…instrumental and vocal…I will even backtrack to discover the real words of all my favourite songs! That task would bring me complete and utter joy because…music really does make my world go round. (I just can’t have it playing when I’m working at my desk…I’d never get a thing done!). But…
Rhythm…now there’s a topic that applies to so very much of life. I’m aware of it in pretty much everything I do. Visual rhythm is an important thread…like a beat, a thrum; and use of repetition, colour, texture and form to connect, contrast, juxtapose and/or lead the eye..are all, I feel, related to rhythm. And all are put to good use across the garden as well as connecting elements of a room, rooms to each other, inside to out…and beyond.
There’s rhythm to cooking…a process that has a beginning, a mid point and end with each part requiring a method that likely has a pattern…be that chopping, stirring, whisking, pouring - each requiring a flow to bring about the result. Writing, has a rhythm…and hopefully mine on this platform is beginning to take shape so you can get a feel for what to expect as we potter along together…the Substack voice…it’s a bit different to the newsletter, the instagram and even the voice of the book…because…there’s more scope to go gently…I don’t feel the need for it to be quite so tight.
A house has a daily rhythm. I consider a house to be a living entity and each and every day it must acclimatise to the elements…in particular, the temperature. If we are to be comfortable living within its protective walls, then a little help from we, its inhabitants, can go a long way in helping it, to protect us.
Before Glenmore, I hadn’t enjoyed the experience of living in a house wrought from sandstone (c.1850). With walls a solid 50cm thick, the old house stays cool as a cucumber during the summer months (regulated by closing doors at sun-up) and closing shutters to keep the heat off the window glass. (In the winter, once heated, those walls retain the warmth too).
The well-insulated double-brick we used to add on to the original house, is not nearly as effective as the stone. But still I manipulate the temperature during the course of the day…closing shutters as the sun works its way slowly around the house from east to west…preventing the sun from directly hitting the glass (as well as the heat that bounces off the ground…despite being surrounded by garden!). The heat here can at times, be fierce.
This rhythm of the house affects my life enormously…as I’m the one most often here for long spells and so for my own and everyone else’s comfort, I work in unison with the vagaries of the weather during the summer months.
I love manipulating the light (as well as the temperature). I make use too, of woven internal blinds and external canvas blinds…and with the drop of each blind, the mood and character of a space alters, suggesting a place one might like to spend quiet time (heat…can make one sleepy…but that option is not for me…not now anyway!). The lowering of a blind can be evocative of exotic travels…or just recall a darkened room for a newborn’s afternoon nap…(not that mine did - darkened or no!).
At the moment, the heat is dissipating earlier in the evenings than it did a few weeks ago. A few years back, Larry decided we just had to have air-conditioning…in the kitchen! But if I can keep the heat at bay for most of the day, and we just have an hour’s blast come cooking time, it’s enough. The power required comes from battery-stored energy collected from solar panels on our roof, so that sometimes necessary blast isn’t affecting the main grid…or our electricity bill!
In the evenings, all the doors and windows are flung wide open, encouraging fresh air to plunge in. In the silence of pre-dawn, cool air spills directly inside, rather as gentle waves break on the shore..swirling and eddying in little rushes, flushing out any hot air that remains and setting us up for a new day ahead. A rhythmic dance with temperature…such is life in a hot climate.
Oh but earlier in the week I noticed the first yellowing of frangipanni leaves…a sure sign the heat is on the wane. We are so lucky to be able to grow frangipanis…a few kilometres south and it probably wouldn’t be the case. That there was one growing here against the north-facing wall of the old house (when Larry put our name to Glenmore without first telling me!) was pretty much all that got him out of hot water in my books! A frangipani to call my own? That was pretty much enough to seal the deal!
I was (am still!) a habitual pavement frangipani flower collector! As a child no trip to the beach was complete without a pavement pick-up. Just yesterday I took a little detour when I noticed that within just a few steps off the path back to my car, a beauty lurked up a Sydney side street. When I bent down to pick the flower up off the footpath, a dog behind the gate of the house to which the tree belonged went bonkers…the owner and I had a good laugh…I mean what mad, mature woman is still collecting frangipani flowers off the ground? I know where all my favourites are around Sydney and am not a little worried that one of them has recently been replaced..I’ll hold back that little story ‘til a visit tells me yay or nay.
We planted the two at the pool as soon as the building work (restoring the old stables to use as pool house) was complete…which must have been the summer of 1991. (We put in the pool before a kitchen…it’s a long story that can wait for another day!). Those two trees grew from cuttings taken from the original and are fine specimens now. In fact…quite a few peeps have sports of the same tree…I’m happy to give them away when we do a big pruning.
As an aside (heavens I wasn’t going to go down this path!) soon after the book was released I had a phone call from someone who had, once upon a time, long ago lived in the house. She’d secured a copy of the book as soon as she heard of it and…asked if she could please come to visit. It was my recounting of the story of the frangipani that prompted her request…and she told me how on the day of her marriage (at the little church just up at the corner…visible from here) she had looked out of the upstairs bedroom window, over the frangipani (just as I have done oh so many times since) and wondered if she was doing the right thing! When she did come to visit, I took her up the steep steps…so she could revisit that moment. And I recall her telling me she had just two books on her bedside table: The House and Garden at Glenmore…had joined her Bible. Truly…one can never imagine what recounting a story may bring…(and yes…she had indeed made the right decision!).
Just as I mentioned in the last post that Saturdays are for completing all the urgent kitchen gardening tasks, so Sundays bring a similar round of seasonal jobs to be undertaken in the ornamental garden….and the Field.
I’m going to put aside describing the Field to you in any detail for now…because that will be a very long story! Enough to say that last Sunday, I did a lot of rose deadheading, as well as follow-up summer-pruning of the spring-flowering species roses. Here in our climate, we still have a long rose growing period ahead, and already too much lax growth has gone crazy since my January efforts, and so I’m happy to wave some of it goodbye and encourage the new shoots that are forging ahead in its place. I must be careful though, because all these particular roses flower on the previous season’s growth, so I don’t want to cut off likely flowering stems!
What I did do though…was to tackle the Rugosa roses hard. You often read that it’s suggested you don’t need to deadhead Rugosas (a hardy variety…that are good and drought tolerant, in some cases making dense shrubs). Well…perhaps in cooler climes where summers are short and there is only one opportunity during the course of a season to get the highly (in some cases) perfumed flowers followed by their magnificent hips. Here…I can encourage flush after flush of flowers through the spring, summer and autumn months, if I take my secateurs to each cluster of spent blooms.
So last week I did just that, not only in the Field but also in the Borders, where I have a couple of the variety named Sarah van Fleet. How I love her…I’ve often thought over the years that if I could grow only one rose….(but let’s hope I never quite have to make that decision!).
Sarah van Fleet makes a handsome garden specimen. And I was lucky to stumble upon her at the beginning of our garden making, although it was a rather funny encounter and experience. When I enquired of the owner of a vineyard in country Victoria what the name of the rose at her gate might be, she replied quite snappily that it wasn’t a picking rose. I was quite taken aback! It had never occurred to me that a rose may or may not be…for picking. And either way, it didn’t matter! It’s the only aggressive comment I’ve ever heard in relation to a plant enquiry and it does make me laugh! Gardeners…may have their likes and dislikes and they’ll give you an honest opinion but usually in a gentle manner.
All that said…the vineyard owner was right…you probably wouldn’t pick Sarah for a vase! Although I often do pick a single bloom and if it lasts but a few hours or a day…I really don’t care! In fact…I like following the course of a short life journey…from exquisite flat-faced, musk-stick-pink flower with golden-yellow stamens and delicious rosy perfume…through every stage of petal drop and on…into decay. And I am forever grateful that the name of this beauty was at least, revealed!
But back to the deadheading…I went in hard, with purpose in mind…even cutting to the next ‘eye’ behind newly formed clusters of buds…(which will redirect healthy growth) in the hope of promoting a flush for an upcoming event!
Now truly…timing a flush is not my strong suit! You wouldn’t want to leave me in charge of Flemington Race Course for Melbourne Cup day…that’s for sure!! I’m just going on gut instinct…and if it works then, yippee. At worst my shrubs will be more strong and healthy looking, flowers or no. If it doesn’t, it won’t be the end of the world! We shall see!
In a similar vein (with that event in mind) in the name of promoting new growth, getting more dense plants and ensuring good airflow, I wheeled my barrow all around the garden.
Pruning the Buddleias hard is usually on my January to-do list, but there must have been other priorities and this year they missed their turn. It’s too late to expect an autumn flush if I were to do so now, so instead I went in lightly…deadheading all the spent flowers back to a ‘pair of leaves’…a point at which, if I’m lucky, we just might get a new flower spike. There are already a few pushing through…the one above a case in point and oh the fragrance!
In fact, I was going to put this task on Thalia’s list this week…sometimes, when really pushed for time, I make a good section of cuts on a plant that needs work, so she might clearly see exactly where I mean for her to follow….but the air was so dense with the perfume of just a few flowers right in my face, that I couldn’t resist completing both shrubs myself! Just a hint of Buddleia takes me instantly to an English summer…every time.
So as my fingers worked quickly, deftly…cut after cut…memories went flitting all around. With a kitchen garden still-to-do list pressing in my head, all of a sudden I was in London…August…1985….and our engagement party where (although I was not so well-versed in flowering shrubs by any means back then) a huge Buddleia (a more pale mauve than this one) was in full flight. I was living at the time, with the mother of an old school chum of Larry’s. She had a beautiful basement flat with a glorious garden and was delighted to host the news of our engagement. I remember being excited to concoct some kind of dip that was the same colour as the Buddleia flowers (heaven help me I can’t remember what else I’d put in it but berries certainly gave it the colour!) and I was thrilled to bits that my outfit was only a shade or two out from those flowers too (a beautiful, fine silk taffeta sleeveless, square-neck shift that my mother had made when pregnant with me but that she’d cut in half after she had me…making a fabulous top and well-above-knee though not quite mini…skirt with a bare midriff! It seemed fitting to wear it for such a wonderful party on a balmy London evening….flooded with the deep honey scent of Buddleia!
I quickly deadheaded the Border dahlias, made some cuts in a Wormwood for Thalia to follow suit this week, did some rose work on the pair of New Dawn that clamber up a pair of obelisks to either side of an opening in the Murraya hedge, then took my barrow up to the house courtyard where tip-pruning the Port Wine Magnolias is a quick but regularly necessary task. I’ve been training a pair since they arrived as mail order tubestock five or six years ago. I have a feeling they might send out a few autumn flowers so I’ll tell you more about them when they do.
Well this was fun! Taking out those Roldana branches I mentioned last week that were overcrowding the Melianthus in front. I’m always surprised at the amount of material that can be cut out…more in this instance than is left behind and yet…if one didn’t know better, it looks as if nothing much has happened at all. Oh but it feels better!
Then I tied the new shoots of a white wisteria to the wires over our north facing verandah. We’ve been without cover there for two summers which is less than ideal. For many years we had the most beautiful white flowering wisteria. It was so vigorous, we couldn’t have imagined its demise in a million years…those intoxicating long flowers dangling almost to our noses and yet (in fact the year of the book) it budded up…then nothing. It simply curled up its toes. I’d been trying to confirm a shoot date with Daniel to photograph it for the book but alas…. (L has long suspected a painter of tipping out the remains of a bucket but who can say?). As a stop-gap, I trained the grape that grew along the other end of the verandah to take its place and shade the north facing kitchen windows, which did a fabulous job for a few years until.. the possums decided it made for a tasty midnight feast. Uggghhh….so now, I’m trying to get another wisteria up and over the wires…in hope that next summer….we might have shade again!
Down in the kitchen garden there was a lot to do!
But first things first! As I do each morning as I water during the summer months, I have my eyes peeled for the 28-spotted ladybird. She likes to cause havoc…specifically in potato and aubergine foliage (sometimes the ornamental Datura /Angel’s Trumpet too). She is not a good bug! In the early days I used to think oh…what a lovely plump version of a ladybug…but no…she is not and I’m afraid will quickly find herself under the sole of my shoe if I spotted.
The same goes for the green caterpillars of the white cabbage moth. I replaced the netting over my newly planted brassicas where I mentioned last week that, thanks to the gaping holes I’d stupidly left, a white cabbage moth had got in and yes…laid its little yellow eggs all over - there wasn’t one plant left untouched! I’d been in a hurry…and never was that old saying act in haste, repent at leisure more apt! I had to rub off each tiny egg before replacing the net…having learned my lesson (for the umpteenth time!). I’ll keep checking each few days just in case I missed an egg, for once they hatch, those caterpillars are fast workers and I could lose a seedling in the blink of an eye, which would be a shame as already, just a fortnight on, the seedlings have more than doubled in size.
Over in the guild beds, I left a couple of mature kale ‘decoy’ plants in over the summer months. They’re not at all attractive, given their leaves have been eaten, but…it’s easier to see the caterpillars on those old leaves and to pick them off when I see one: each one gone is one more likely generation of eggs wiped out. We won’t be eating those tough old leaves, so better to leave them in hope of attracting the white moths to them, rather than to my precious new season’s seedlings!
There was so much to do in the kitchen garden I’m afraid there are no pics of the doing…as the doing must be done!
But I made great headway, taking the nets off all the bean tunnels and wigwams. Although the bower birds still peck the leaves, the vines are near spent, so it doesn’t matter so much. Whilst I still have a lot of beans in fruit, many now display pods of beans drying in the sun…so it’s imperative they have good air circulation, which they don’t, under net.
I removed spent zucchini leaves, tied up the toms, dealt with the dahlias down the back that had all collapsed over their frame in the last storm…a fortnight ago now. And then…at last…got to planting more seedlings! Fennel, celery, celeriac, lettuce and a couple of red cabbage. Each with a little blood & bone at the bottom of its hole, a big handful of compost and then, the seedling. In one spot in particular, I added a good load of compost before planting, then of course…each seedling got its very own wire cylinder; the brassicas each got their own wire cylinder and a covering of net. And everyone got a layer of mulch!
I cannot tell you how delighted I was to collapse into the pool! On Sunday anyway…on Saturday I was working so long into the evening I didn’t have time…which honestly goes for most days! When the girls were little…well…I guess there wasn’t so much garden but I do sometimes wonder at how I spent those hours watching over them as they played under the shade of umbrellas, little legs in the cool water of the wide, platform at the shallow end with buckets of shells on the poolside! Truly…these days, there’s no lolling about…but at the end of a big gardening day spent in the searing heat…when it’s all one can do to put one foot in front of the other…it is pure luxury to be able to plunge in! And then to go picking for dinner!
This week Thalia has cut all the wispy growth from the cotoneaster balls at the end of the Barn (plants that preceded us…many years ago we shaped them from the enormous shrubs they were into loose balls but one of them hasn’t enjoyed the last wet years and is looking a bit thin). Whilst I had the Barn in my sights…I asked her to also cut back the tall, straight growth of the two pear trees that we’ve long trained as espaliers against the aged, ironbark slab walls of that building and…while she was there, to trim back the Lavender…the huge growing Allardii form that I planted…probably twenty years ago. If I think about it…probably more…it’s been there a very long time! Proof that you can keep certain varieties of lavender growing for long periods of time. You just need to look very carefully…right down into the base of their stems…to see where tiny new shoots of growth are emerging. This job will take two passes, as some of the branches have already sent out some healthy new foliage as you can see above, whilst others have not. A first pass…removing a lot of spindly growth should promote new growth on older wood that has been putting its energy into the overgrowth. This is how I’ve kept them going all these years although one does seem to have expired, so we really ought to take some cuttings….and that ideal time to do that is pretty much….now. Another job for this month’s ever-growing list!
Then…there was the second cut of the year for the white-flowering Oleander hedge! From time to time we get a bloke with a hedge-trimmer to trim the big hedges (which I promised a couple of posts ago to come back to and I will) and last time one of them was here, doing a bigger hedge, I asked him to give the oleander a quick going-over. It was a good temporary fix but you can see the growth in just…maybe six weeks! So this time around, Thalia is doing it with her shears. The more regularly we can do it, the more dense the growth will be…but of course she can’t be doing it all the time! (If I didn’t ‘work’…you know who would be clipping it!).
It’s Persimmon season…but the birds seem to be having a better season of it than we are. And Clemmie is having a better season of it than me…I have yet to eat one! The pair of trees up on the Persimmon Lawn (we had to call that part of the garden something for easy referral and explanation!) precede us by a long shot. They’re the prettiest trees in the garden and they’re old…as well as being the old-fashioned astringent variety. This means you leave them on the tree for as long as possible, then on the bench ‘til they look like they’re just about ready for the compost, and when their skins are so fine they’re almost transparent and the most glorious, rich colour…you cut them in half with a very sharp knife, take a spoon and plunge in…they’re almost like eating fresh jam! It took me years to work this out.
In our first years here, to our great surprise, we would sometimes look outside on any old morning at this time of year to find members of the family from whom we had bought Glenmore (who had not necessarily lived right here but had jointly owned the property pre our tenure and were clearly in the habit over generations) happily picking fruit and sawing away at branches before our eyes! In those days I was more worried about the shape of the tree (although in retrospect I know they were doing right) but…I just couldn’t get the timing of eating the fruit right no matter how many times dear old Zetta told me to wait ‘til they looked off! I wasn’t familiar with them…and didn’t much care that the troop swooped in to strip the tree bare! Over time they stopped doing it…and for years, the tree was covered in dozens of fruit that clung on ‘til the branches were bare of all their leaves….glowing like glorious mid-winter baubles.
And so it was that one day…I braved trying one of the fruit again…and got the timing bang on! Well that was it…instant addiction! Over the years I’ve ferried baskets to everyone I know who loves them (including members of the aforementioned family!). But how typical that these days, the birds have also taken an interest like they never used to….and so we have to fight for them! Some are sitting on the bench now…hopefully Clemmie will leave them alone so I get to eat at least one at the time of my choosing. She’s impatient and I think eats them too early! Needless to say I hate those crispy ones you can buy in the shops!
I missed the first pendulous raceme of fruit on the Jelly Wine Palm - the nocturnal bats got there before me! And I need to do something about these quickly before I miss them as well. But they’re not easy to reach…
It must be about 20 years since we brought this specimen in and planted it close into the old house. I did a huge amount of research into palm trees at the time, and settled on this variety for it’s shape, likely mature height (anything too tall would be out of proportion with the house) and the grey/blue colour of its foliage. It also develops a handsome trunk and the house was truly missing something to ‘frame’ it…to pin it to the ground. It (and the Chinese Elm in the middle of the Elm Lawn!) are the only two ‘mature’ trees we’ve ever planted here. In the case of the Chinese Elm that was a mistake (saplings are, on the whole, more inclined to adapt and grow faster and stronger than transplanted, larger trees) but in the case of the Butia, I’m glad we did. At the time it was extravagant…and a joint Christmas present to ourselves. It actually wasn’t that big, but it’s a very good size now, making a good impact and anchoring the house.
As to the fruit…if I can just figure out how to get it down…I’ll poach it. Those little golden-orange fruit are delicious, tasting somewhere between an apricot and a date, and although I eat the odd one from the tree, they’re inclined to make my lips and tongue tingle…which cooking gently, seems to negate. And I think…there’s no need to add sugar!
Within co-ee of both the Persimmon and the Jelly Wine Palm sits the old Macadamia tree. I love it for its sturdy shape, its leathery, dark green foliage…the substance it adds in its commanding position atop the dry stone wall (we were careful not to disturb its roots when we carried out that work that was so significant in shaping the whole area to the front of the house; and when its next in flower I’ll include a photo…you know I’ve already seen the message about this post being too long!). But just at the moment, a couple of Sulphur Crested Cockatoos are hell-bent on knocking the nuts off. Which I would normally be tempted to say is annoying, but in this instance, they’re actually doing us a favour! They seem to like cracking open the outer shell and gnawing away on that, so Clemmie has been collecting the inner nut…half a dozen or so at a time, and grinding away at opening the second shell to get to the elusive edible part! This requires enormous patience…and I’ve scored just the odd one to eat!
Clemmie is also the chief Bunya nut cook! The cones are exploding apart with great rapidity now and she’s gleaning any she can that contain a proper nut inside its own individual little sac; boiling for 30 minutes, then prising each shell open…with difficulty…to gain access to the delicious nut inside. They taste a bit like a tropical potato crossed with a chestnut.
For further reading, Diego Bonetto released a beautifully comprehensive article about the Bunya Pine Araucaria Bidwillii just this week: its history, the significant role its long played for indigenous people, its proliferation post colonial settlement, and…more about how to prepare it for edible purpose. Diego is so very well informed…the go-to weed forager of Sydney certainly. He is a walking encyclopaedia of edible botanical knowledge. Here’s a link to his Bunya article.
At last…the Jerusalem artichokes are coming into flower! At 3 metres tall (as usual) but more than a month late compared to previous seasons…I’ve been wondering what on earth they’re doing! I love knowing this means their tubers are developing underground…and that soon we’ll be digging for bounty that’s better than gold!
And with that, I’ll leave you. It’s been a big week that’s not over yet. There have been event collaborations going on behind the scenes…more about which I’ll soon share, alongside pulling some design bits and pieces together, which by its very nature has my head outside of here and immersed in other people’s lives. But always, the tug of the garden and its daily needs bookend my days.
I wish you a terrific weekend and week ahead and will look forward to catching you at the next post. Mickey xx
Oh Sally...you're right! I have no doubt it is the very work itself that is the reason...just don't ask me to do anything that's considered fitness...like going for a run! Thank you for joining me once again on my weekly round. M :))
Just as well you are still fit enough to manage all the work you do in the garden, but then perhaps that is why you are so fit! Another great read, thank you Mickey