The test of a garden is if those who enter it smile. Smiles may come from a lilypilly or box hedge topiary shaped into dinosaurs or rabbits or the green leafed horse I once saw outside a country race track in Queensland as a child. Smiles may come from the beauty of a garden of river pebbles edged by poa tussocks, shaped so that you can imagine a stream growing there. Smiles may also come when you notice your host has an outdoor bread oven, set in a curving wall where guests can sit in warmth as the pizzas cook, and you realised you are about to have a most excellent lunch.
The easiest and cheapest way to get garden smiles, though, is a heck of a lot of flowers. In winter, in our climate, that means hurry and get in primulas, pansies, and especially a horde of multi-coloured Iceland poppies, because mid-winter is no time to be monochrome and tasteful. Iceland poppies are bright.
You don't need bed after bed of blooms. You'll have enough flowers for joy with two beds either side of the front door, or along the path; a small circle out the front; or even the traditional flowerbed by the front fence, or where the front fence would be if you had one. A tiny bed packed with flourishing plants will nourish the soul. A large bed filled with weeds and a flower or two struggling to survive is just one more thing - like advertising billboards or vast walls of concrete - the human subconscious tried not to notice.
Cold weather colour doesn't have to come from flowers. Our brightest winter trees are the cumquats and calamondins, plus the red and green parrots and rosellas who hang upside down eating the fruit. Andrew Marvel described oranges as "golden lamps in a green night", but they are only hang truly bright on the trees in cold winters.
The brightest and possibly most cold tolerant are the "sour" Seville oranges, that colour in winter then hang on the tree well into summer, getting bigger as their rind grows puffier and their insides drier. A good Seville should be picked mid-winter, to make marmalade, or halve them, dust with brown sugar and possibly a little rum or gin and grill them till the sugar and juice bubble, then eat with a teaspoon, and possibly cream. Sevilles are definitely a wow! fruit, in looks, in rarity and deliciousness. They have far more intense flavour than sweet oranges. Just add sugar and you have the basis for the best ever orange cake or orange sauce.
Another stunner is wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox) a largish shrub with winter flowers like waxy yellow stars on bare branches with a scent that is both sweet and spicy and pervasive. One dark night in a large farm garden I found my way back to the unlit house by following the scent of the winter sweet bush that grew near the front door. They can be tamed by pruning, but otherwise will grow to about three metres by three metres. Possibly the best way to admire the flowers is to lie under the tree on a blanket and look up at them against a backdrop of pure blue Canberra winter sky. The leaves give butter yellow autumn foliage before they fall, and the young leaves are a pretty spring green, but the bush is boring, even straggly looking, all summer, which is possibly why wintersweet is rarely seen in modern gardens. It's worth having a dull sunny corner of the garden though in return for magnificence mid-winter.
And of course, camellias. The way to have a stunning camellia display is to have planted a single bush fifty years ago, so it has now become a tree, or plant lots to bloom at the same time, or even better, lots of early, medium and late blooms so you have massed flowering following by another and another from autumn till late spring. Camellias tend to sulk for a few years after planting, and neither grow much nor bloom, then suddenly they double in size, and double again, and small children look at them in awe then pick an armful for their mothers. I can never decide if I love the single blooms the best, or the varieties that have been bred to be so massive that the sheer weight of them makes them fall from the bush after rain, so there's a carpet of reds, pinks, white until they turn to brown and need to be raked up.
If you want fast results, plant Iceland poppies, now. The shrubs and trees will take at least four or five years to begin to repay your effort. But gardening is like investing in the stock market: choose well, and wait, because in five years, if you haven't planted those camellias, or the wintersweet, the Seville orange, cumquats, the daphne, Tahitian limes or carpet of crocus, paperwhite jonquils, or grape hyacinths, you will gaze out the kitchen window and wish you had.
This is what I should be doing this week but will probably be answering emails and doing video chats instead:
- poking the snow pea seeds into the soil for spring nibbling, either for us, the grandkids, or the wallabies, who somehow manage to get every crop of snow peas I have ever planted. A wallaby only needs to get into the crop once in its three month growing period, and it becomes wallaby tucker.
- planting out the lettuce, red cabbage and red kale seedlings
- picking cherry tomatoes
- assembling the new garden table and chairs, so that when lock down requirements are eased though not abandoned we can have visitors for lunch with appropriate social distancing. (We buy very little that is new - my washing machine is 36 years old - but our old garden table was over 45 years old, and possibly older, and gently collapsed after a quite mild attack by a wombat.
- weeding. We have weeds I have never seen here before. Do weed seeds float in bushfire smoke? Though they probably are carried by bushfire gale winds.
- Freezing vine leaves for winter. Pick unsprayed grape vine leaves. Avoid beetles and bees. Use tongs to dip in boiling water for 10 seconds, holding them by the stem. Turn off the heat. Cut out the stem and freeze no more than a dozen in any container at a time.
