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Typographic design by Nicole Phillips
If there could possibly have been a childhood garden activity more exciting than burning stuff, it was going to the dump.
Stuff you couldn’t burn, or fit in the bin, you simply took somewhere else and chucked away. Easy!
I’m pretty sure there was a voyeuristic aspect at play - look what those people are throwing away – but the whole spectacle was intriguing.
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Typographic design by Nicole Phillips
When I was a kid, the coolest garden activity imaginable involved setting fire to stuff.
Every weekend, my dad would gather the week’s newspapers (admittedly not a massive fuel source, with all respect to The Daily Mercury) and other bits of cardboard and paper, and then go to the bottom of the yard and burn them in the incinerator...
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Typographic design by Nicole Phillips
We need bees in order to eat. Without pollination by bees our global food supply would reduce by about a third, leaving us without many of the fruit, vegetable, nut, seed and grain crops that sustain us.
It goes without saying that without bees we’d also be without honey, and that would make for a very unhappy Pooh Bear.
It’s easy to make your garden a welcoming smorgasbord for neighbourhood bees, both the European Honey Bee and Australian Native Bees.
1. Don’t use chemicals to control attacks by insurgent insect mobs.
2. Grow a range of plants that flower throughout the year, so there’s always food available.
Native bees like: Buddleja, Callistemon, Eucalyptus, Grevillea, Lavender, Melaleuca (Honey Myrtle), Westringia (Coastal Rosemary) and Daisies.
Honey bees in our part of the world also enjoy subtropical species such as Coriander, Basil, Guava, Macadamia, Carambola, Lemon-Scented Myrtle, and Lime.
Learn more by downloading (for free) the excellent Bee Friendly: A planting guide for European honeybees and Australian native pollinators from the Australian Government’s Rural Industries Research & Development Corporation
3. Grow plants with a variety of different flower shapes and forms.
4. Let flowering plants flower as long as they want, particularly heading into winter.
5. Consider raising bees yourself!
“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.”
Home-grown honey is a thing of beauty and delight.
I’ve got a mate who’s been keeping bees since before it became Brooklyn-hipster-cool.
He keeps his hives out on another mate’s property near Samford, but you can also raise honey bees in your backyard or on a rooftop.
Make sure your hives are positioned so the flight path doesn’t intersect with your daily activities, unless you feel like a mouthful of angry bee every time you walk outside.
In Brisbane, expert help is available from Bee One Third.
Urban apiarist Jack Wilson Stone can get you started, train you to maintain your hives, and give you tips to help harvest the good stuff.
I had the huge pleasure of sharing a stage with Jack last year, and a more helpful, knowledgeable and cheery chap you are unlikely to meet.
Find out more about Bee One Third’s services, courses and upcoming events on their website. For live updates on swarm relocation and other cool stuff, follow the Instagram feed.
Native bees won’t keep you awash in honey but don’t overlook them on account of that. With over 1,500 species, Australia’s native bees are critical for pollinating native flora.
The native Social Stingless Bee (Tetragonula carbonaria, previously called Trigona carbonaria) is also used for pollination of crops such as macadamias, mangoes, watermelons and lychees in Queensland.
The Blue Banded Bee (Amegilla cingulata) specialises in the excitingly named Buzz Pollination, needed for crops such as tomatoes.
You can set yourself up with a native bee hive from Bee Yourself. Versions are available depending on whether you wish to try and harvest some honey, or you’re mainly interested in pollination.
Few things get a fixie-riding, cold-drip-drinking, full-sleeve-wearing hipster as excited as a mason jar of local provenance honey.
In Brisbane get your Hood Honey from Biome, Sourced Grocer, Merriweather, Primal Pantry and The Gunshop, amongst others.
Eat it while bee-ing inspired by these 3 TED Talks:
Dennis van Engelsdorp: A plea for bees
Typographic design by Nicole Phillips
A few pithy comments on one of the most versatile and widespread plant types on the planet…should be able to knock that over pretty easily.
Grasses are used to make food, drinks, paper, household goods, rope, building materials and more. I grew up with a field of sugar cane at the back boundary, and the sounds and colours of the annual firing are literally burned into my memory.
In gardens and urban landscapes we have less contact with edible grass crops and much more exposure to turf and ornamental grasses.
So in the interests of not biting off more grass than either of us can chew, here are a few musings on those.
In Philadephia there have been a number of long-running programmes that convert the city’s vacant, unloved and abandoned lots into simple, clean mini parks. The limited budgets usually only stretch to cleaning up and then installing a low fence, perhaps a path and seat, maybe some minimal planting, and then turfing the rest. This all sends a message that the lot is now cared for, valued and open to the public.
Image: original photographer unknown. Sourced from http://www.cooperativeconservationamerica.org/viewproject.asp?pid=999
To see a bad use of turf grass, take a stroll along Margaret Street in Brisbane. See the mean-spirited fence and inaccessible lawn marking the site of the 100-year-old O’Reilly’s Bonded Stores, demolished last year to make way for a new development.
In public landscapes, lawn can be an unexpected and delightful surface treatment.
Swathes of the light rail corridor in Dusseldorf are lushly planted with turf and bordering shrubs, creating a sinuous ribbon of green through the city.
Some people are virulently anti-turf, and with good reason: turf grasses can be bottomless sinks of water and chemicals, they require maintenance using oil-powered machines, reduce diversity and take up land that could be used to grow more productive species.
In parks, turf can be the bane of the landscape manager’s life: it gets hammered at big events, people take shortcuts across it, it wears unevenly and yes, it requires constant attention.
But what’s the alternative? More paving?
Parkland lawn is permeable, visually cooling, less glary and reflective, softer underfoot, and flexibly accommodates a wide range of uses and activities: in certain public settings it's incredibly successful and undoubtedly the best option.
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time. ”
Playing peacock to the turf grass’s peahen are the ornamental grasses, including true grasses, sedges and rushes.
The diversity of colours, forms, textures and sizes makes grasses a tempting planting choice. The range of different seed heads, flowers, and colour change as they die back means grasses are generous guests, contributing different things to the garden throughout the year.
The sensory delight is enhanced by the play of light across the foliage and the movement of grasses in the breeze.
Yes, please!
More info
Australian grass seeds for pasture, lawn and ornamental applications available through Native Seeds.
Information on weed grasses in Australia.
Ornamental Australian native grass cultivars by Ozbreeds.
Typographic design by Nicole Phillips
In 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the world’s greatest detective, was hoodwinked by two Yorkshire girls.
The girls, cousins Frances Griffith and Elsie Wright (no relation to your humble correspondent), had taken a series of photos that seemed to clearly show them with the fairies they played with in Elsie’s large and enchanting garden in Cottingley.
Frances Griffith in the garden with fairy visitors. Image: Science & Society Picture Library
Elsie Wright and fairy friend. Image: Science & Society Picture Library.
Although Elsie’s Dad laughed off the photos, her Mum, like many at the time, was quite taken with ideas of the supernatural.
After attending a lecture on spiritualism she showed the photos to the speaker, to get his opinion on their veracity.
He took them to the leader of the Theosophical movement, who in turn asked a leading photographer to examine them.
Having been declared “genuine, unfaked photographs” they rocketed through the British spiritualist crowd, quickly gaining the attention of Conan Doyle, who not only encouraged the girls to take more photos of the fairies but also wrote an article in their defence for The Strand magazine.
To those of us living in an era of photoshop and instagram filters the pictures of the Cottingley Fairies are blatantly staged.
(Curiously, the word blatant, is said to have been coined by Edmund Spenser in his epic poem The Fairie Queene to describe a thousand-tongued monster representing slander. The meaning of the word changed over time, until 1889 when it settled in as "noisy in an offensive and vulgar way.”)
Nonetheless, the girls stuck to their story until 1981, when Elsie finally admitted the fairies were paper cutouts, copied from images in a book and secured in place with hat pins.
“There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any, so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies?”
So if no one’s managed to capture a fairy – yet – what about the evidence of their parties and gatherings?
Fairy Ring of Clitocybe nebularis (Clouded Agaric) Image: Josminda, under CC Licence via Wikimedia Commons.
Fairy rings are circular enclosures of mushrooms that appear in the landscape after fairies have visited for a knees-up. You never see them being constructed: it all happens in the dead of night after the human realm has stopped paying attention.
Image: Richard Croft, under CC Licence via Wikimedia Commons.
Image: Kelisi, under CC Licence via Wikimedia Commons.
Some (boring) humans are not satisfied with this explanation. They believe that fairy rings are the result of fungi that live in the soil, causing the organic matter to break down, resulting in rings of dark green grass, occasionally brown or dead grass, and, in wet conditions, mushrooms following the same circular pattern.
Image: Zorba the Greek, under CC Licence via Wikimedia Commons.
The fairy ring starts with a single spore and at a single point in the soil. It grows outward at a uniform rate, creating the circular pattern. About 50 species of fungi form lawn fairy rings.
Some websites provide information on how to get rid of fairy rings. This is not an approach endorsed by Landscapology – would you mess with a supernatural creature known for its mischievious malice when dealing with interfering humans?
Image: Cropcircles, under CC Licence via Wikimedia Commons.
Keep in good by planting Grevillea 'Fairy Floss', a small rockery grevillea with pale mauve flowers, or attract the Superb Fairy Wren – voted Australia’s most popular bird in 2013 - with Acacia fimbriata, Melaleuca linariifolia and Pandorea pandorana.
Grevillea 'Fairy Floss'. Image: Tatters, under CC Licence via Flickr.
A pair of Superb Fairy Wrens. Why is the lady always the dull one...don't get me started... Image: benjamint444, under CC Licence via Wikimedia Commons.
Above all, keep your eyes and ears open…who knows how many other creatures are enjoying your garden when you’re not around…
Typographic design (isn't it a stunner!) by Nicole Phillips
1. Coolabah
Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong, under the shade of a…what? Not a wattle, bunya pine or weeping fig tree, that’s for sure.
No, our jumbuck-filching, tuckerbag-stuffing antihero spent his last moment beneath a coolabah tree. Eucalyptus coolabah is found in riparian zones, like our man’s billabong, and is often wider than it is tall. The 350 year-old Dig Tree, forever associated with the disastrous Burke and Wills expedition, is also a coolabah. My dad really, really wants to see it.
Image: William Blandowski's Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, published 1857. Wikimedia Commons.
2. Canoes and baskets
If the dodgy swagman had paid more attention to his surroundings, he could perhaps have negotiated the billabong with less finality: aborigines have crafted canoes from eucalypts for centuries.
Like the coolabah, the river red gum (E. camaldulensis) grows along waterways, and is the most widely distributed eucalypt species in the country. Bark from the trees was fashioned into canoes used for fishing and river crossings, and canoe trees bearing the scars of earlier use can be seen throughout south-eastern Australia.
3. Fire and brimstone
The other thing old mate could have done is set fire to the tree. As a natural incendiary device you’d be hard pressed to find better.
Eucalyptus oil is highly volatile (one reason it’s good for your schnozz and pipes), and bushfires spread via the open canopies, deep leaf litter, and long strands of peeling bark carried on the wind.
On the plus side, most eucalypts can regenerate after fire, carrying their seeds within tough capsules that the fire unlocks.
Image: Robert Kerton, CSIRO. Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons licence.
4. Gumnut Babies
Eucalypt seed pods inspired another classic from the Australian story-telling pantheon: Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. The stories, by May Gibbs, star a pair of babies, naked except for seedpods that they wear like a sort of tough, green beanie. (I admit it does sound slightly weird when put like that). With their mates in tow, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie lead the charge against the big, bad Banksia Men, arch-enemies of the ‘gumnut babies’.
5. Flowering
If the shapes of the seedpods aren’t wonderful enough, the flowers of the eucalypt are a joy to behold. For me, the West Australian eucs are the showstoppers: go to Kings Park in Perth and take a hankie, because seriously, it's a drool-fest.
6. Margaret Preston
Of the many Australian artists who have captured the eucalypt, I have a real fondness for Margaret Preston and her bold, coloured prints. Kookaburras sit in old gum trees, they frame views to Sydney Harbour, and flowers and seedpods fill vases.
Image: John Tann. Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licence.
7. Scribbling
The artists aren’t the only ones making beautiful lines – the scribbly gum is a living sketchbook. Whilst there are five varieties known as scribbly gum (E. haemastoma, E. sclerophylla, E. racemosa, E. rossii and E. signata, the only one found naturally in Queensland) their scribbles all have the same source: they are tunnels made when the larvae of the scribbly gum moth burrows between the old and new bark to lay its eggs. You could spend a lifetime trying and not be able to create patterns that exquisite.
Image: Mark Marathon. Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licence.
8. Tree of Knowledge
Speaking of trying, the town of Barcaldine went to considerable time, effort and expense looking after its most famous arboreal landmark, the Tree of Knowledge, a ghost gum. Reportedly a gathering spot for striking shearers during the period of industrial disputes that led to the founding of the Labour Party, the 150+ year-old tree was receiving good quality care and thriving, when it was mysteriously poisoned in 2006. This was also trying for the town. In the same location now stands a much-awarded timber structure. From the outside it resembles an enormous box. Inside the timber pieces are arrange to create a negative of the canopy of the former tree.
The lemon-scented gums lining Fraser Avenue at the entrance to the West Australian Botanic Gardens and Kings Park.
9. In the garden
Perhaps the poisoning of the Tree of Knowledge was politically motivated, but eucalypts have somewhat of a reputation for being difficult in the garden. To hear some speak, having a euc within coo-ee of home is a death wish, as if the trees build up years of simmering resentment and then just lose it, throwing their toys and limbs out of the cot and onto innocent suburbs below. Having said that, being woken by the sound of lightning striking a euc outside our family home during a cyclonic summer night, is a very clear and strong childhood memory.
Despite this, one of Australia’s most famous gardens, Cruden Farm, the long-time home of Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, is most famous for its entry drive avenue of lemon-scented gums. If you don’t have a Murdoch-sized garden what can you grow? The plunkett mallee (E. curtisii) is a small tree, growing to 6 metres with lovely cream-coloured flowers; the swamp bloodwood (E. ptychocarpa) is a tall tree to 8 metres; and the ‘Summer’ range of hybrid gums have selected Western Australian flowering eucs grafted onto rootstock that enable them to better tolerate out humidity. Check out Fairhill Nursery’s range.
Tips for Young Players: planting two or three trees in the same hole creates a multi-trunked effect, and allows the canopies to grow together and not shade out your whole garden.
10. Holland and Ellen
Knowledge is at the heart of one of my favourite Australian novels. What lengths would you go to, to prevent your treasured only daughter from marrying and moving out? In Murray Bail’s (fabulous, wonderful) Eucalyptus, Ellen‘s dad requires suitors to name all the varieties of that tree growing on his property.
A love song to this most cherished Australian tree.
More info?
The Australian Government maintains a webpage dedicated to the Eucalypt.
All eucalypts are gum trees, but not all gum trees are eucalypts. Find out more about eucalypts, angophoras and corymbias here.
