Gardening SOS! 19/1/19

As summer continues to bake our garden, it becomes more difficult to find anything to talk about. One can bemoan the cost of the water with which we irrigate the garden on a heavy daily basis. One can whinge about the dry thunderstorms and the humidity immediately after. Or whine about the longing for an autumnal-styled day so one can work happily in the garden. My garden has effectively shut down to protect itself against the ongoing heat and I’m slowly drenching areas and then covering them in layers of lucerne hay (what others may know as alfalfa) which we grow on the farm.

It’s hard to understand how anyone can deny global warming and climate change. Tasmania is a temperate region and a day of 25 Celsius used to be considered rather exciting. Now it’s normal – more often than not anything above 25 is the go and has been part of our lives since before Christmas. The flip side of that is living so close to the beach, we spend hours swimming and swimming and swimming!

I wandered around looking for something about which to talk (apart from the veggie garden which is simply fantabulous!).

Here’s my six:

Foxgloves – possibly Dalmatia, although the spots have turned washed out green, rather than magenta. They are now all flowering from the base, as I have cut away the browned off and main stem. Question: will they grow again next season from that base, or do I remove them entirely in autumn. I imagine little foxglove seedlings will pop up everywhere as there were showers of seeds as I cut the stems away.

Scabiosa Perfecta White. And how perfect it is. I’m so glad I purchased this. Every time anyone walks around the garden and spies the flowerheads, they comment. And there’s dozens of buds to come.

Common blue Aquilegia which was resident in this garden long before we bought the property. It’s the dowager duchess of the place. It’s such a power-packed, long lived species in the garden and I let it seed readily.

Blue Nepeta. A number of plants and also indigenous to this garden and so hardy in the salty, hot air. The bees love it.

Senecio Cineraria Silver Dust. The bees also love this. I’m not too keen on the yellow flowers but love the foliage. But because bees are the mechanics for the engines of the plant world, the flowers can stay. I read that in order to keep the robust beauty of the silver foliage, the flowers should be pruned off. But I feel a moral responsibility to the bee world.

This next is actually not in our garden but is in a corner of the paddock at the farm. It’s a rare and threatened species of Tasmanian thistle Blue Devil Eryngium Ovinum. Thus we must always protect it –  no ploughing close by and fencing must be done with care.

The seeds have been collected by Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens Seed Conservation Centre for storage in the Tasmanian seed collection. A reserve collection was also sent to the world millennium seedbank in Kew Gardens.

I think it’s absolutely beautiful…

That’s my blooming lot for this week. I may be pushing next week to find anything to chat about, but I shall look forward to reading this week’s and next and for many weeks thereafter. If you want to spend a wonderful few hours, go to The Propagator.

Cheers!