a different kind of garden

Bless, based in Berlin, does design  so original it can shock people and loosen restricting preconceptions about what goes with what.

The installation called Windowgarden challenges ideas about inside and outside.

Windowgarden consists of a Perspex system that protrudes into a building. This enables everyone, even apartment dwellers with no balcony, to have a garden.

It's not just about blurring the boundary between indoors and outdoors. It's about bringing the outside in - letting plants and animals into what is generally considered a sacrosant space for humans - the exceptions being well behaved pets and pot plants.

Recently a series of Windowgardens were set up at Craft Victoria.  

Windows were removed and replaced with mesh that would let the air in.

Other windows were replaced just to give a different viewpoint.

Interior garden spaces were constructed by local artists and designers and filled with plants and objects.

As well as being a clever idea, Windowgardens can be fun, quirky and creative.

antiquarian gardening books for free

The beautiful old book with a dark green cover and the title, Encyclopedia of Gardening, in gold lettering, was dated 1824 and cost $340.  How sad. I simply didn’t have $340 to spare at the time.

But …  like many other books out of copyright, I have discovered I can download and read the full text for free.  I found that particular book in Google ebookstore.

Over a million books including many old gardening books, can be read for free by going to The Online Book Page. These include early gardening books published before 1800.

In 1988 Oxford University Press published a beautiful illustrated edition of the first popular gardening book in English – The Gardener’s Labyrinth, by Thomas Hill, written in about 1588.  It’s on my bookshelf. It’s not the same as owning a genuine antiquarian book but it’s a great replica, and easier to understand than the original because of Richard Mabey’s introduction and glossary.

Libraries are in the throes of furious book culling, and bookshops are closing down.  People are grieving for the demise of books.  They say you can’t find books serendipitously on the Web as you can browsing shelves.  Given a choice I would prefer to hold a real book in my hand.  But if you can’t find a book or can’t afford it, I think this is an exciting development.  

So -  books are available for free or at minimum cost, on the internet. The real problem is information overload – how to find the time and concentration to read all those books?   How to choose, prioritize?  The vast number of choices can so easily lead to a state of mind numbing daze. 

winter garden update

Here is one of the agapanthus plants that were divided.  It's looking healthy, though not yet a thing of beauty.

Blue fescue is complemented by self seeded Love in the mist.

Tiny pink buds on the bare branches of the crab apple tree give a hint of spring flowers to come.  Growing underneath and nearby, bearing winter flowers are the pink flowers of Australian natives Correa Dusty Bells and the paler pink of Thryptomene saxicola F.C. Payne. You can also see the lime green self seeded hellebore in flower.

N gave me some Canna indica from his garden, which is much more showy and tropical looking than mine. I stuck it in a corner because I couldn't think where to plant them. More than a decade later they are still there. During this rainy year they have become statuesquely tall. Impressive I think even without the red flowers.

The violets do need to be culled every so often but they always come back. 

You can see why these are called fish bone fern. Weedy and common they may be, but they are welcome here.

 A diamonded drop of dew carefully held in a Derwentia perfoliata leaf-cup.

 Re-arranging has meant that the Alygyone shrubs were moved at least 6 times. I have placed arrows to identify them - when they grow taller I think they will look good. This is unlikely to happen before the spring garden opening, so viewers will need to exercise their imaginations.

Other plants in this unestablished, immature garden bed include perennial artichokes and biennial echiums.   I think they will look wonderful together, but the full effect will not be seen for some time.

euphor(b)ia

What's the difference between euphoria and euphorbia?

Answer - one attracts bees and also has a bee in its name.

Euphorbia, also known as spurge or gopher plant, used to be little known round here, near the bottom of the world. When drought threatened the viability of many well known horticultural favourites, growers realized that here were a number of useful, tough, drought resistant and attractive species. Soon they seemed to be everywhere - in nurseries, parks and gardens.

They generously spill their seed and spread throughout the garden. This is a good thing although sometimes it is a bit too much of a good thing.

They’re not pretty in a floral sense, but are very striking, with interesting strong structural shapes and colours that change through the seasons.

They know how to defend themselves. When you cut them they bleed a sticky white fluid. When this touches the skin it stings and causes a rash. If it gets in your eyes it’s really scary and has been known to cause temporary blindness.

These plants have a family all to their selves: Euphorbiaceae. They also have a society devoted to them. The International Euphorbia Society informs us that it is one the largest families in the world of plants, including about 300 genera and 7,500 species. And these stats do not even include the numerous forms, varieties, and undescribed species!

Currently three species grow in my garden: from top, E.rigida, E.martinii and E.characis wulfenii. They are incredibly interesting, attractive, reliable and useful design-wise. What else could you want from a garden plant?

gardening and philosophy: book review

When a book has 18 chapters on 18 different topics by 18 different writers, you would expect to enjoy some chapters more than others.  I found the whole of this book pretty interesting and 4 chapters riveting. 

If you love to think about the meaning of gardens and gardening, then this is the book for you: Gardening: Philosophy for Everyone - Cultivating Wisdom, edited by Dan O'Brien. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Gardening themes are to do with history, anthropology, ethics, sociology, aesthetics, art, ecology, philosophy, politics, botany ...  our entire relationship with our environment, natural and built, dreamed and envisaged.

The chapters I found riveting are worth future posts devoted to them. I'll make do now with brief summaries.

In Escaping Eden: Plant Ethics in a Gardener's World, Matthew Hall argues that plants are living beings and should be thought of as worthy of ethical considerations. They don't exist solely for humans to use as they wish.

In Hortus Incantans: Gardening as an Art of Enchantment,  Eric Macdonald writes about the notion of enchantment, a garden as a magical space, fusing nature and art.  Dumbarton Oaks is this kind of garden. '... a sacred kind of haven in a disenchanted world, the sort of place where it might be possible to once again become attuned to the mystery and wonder of life.'  I think this is the kind of effect that I have been trying to achieve in my garden. This approach celebrates the ever changing complexity and fundamental uncontrollable unpredictability of the garden.

Finally(??), the most fascinating and weird dimension that we and our gardens live and die in: time. 

  

Time and Temporality in the Garden is about different kinds of time: time that measures and time that refers to an appropriate moment - to everything there is a season ...   There is subjective, and shared or objective time. And cyclical time. All these kinds of time are experienced in gardens. 

Gardens, Music and Time is an even more interesting read. Until I read this I mainly thought of the garden as a work of visual art like a painting, influenced by artists such as Monet.  Paintings only deteriorate in time, whereas plants are always growing or dying. Focusing on the visual dimension alone ignores the processes of time, growth and change. 

And then there's musical time. All growth is movement, and there is a pattern to this movement in the garden that is analogous to rhythm in music. But unlike in music, this rhythm exists in chronological time and cannot be speeded up, slowed down or erased completely. 

'Gardeners use the passage of chronological time as a fundamental artistic material, but by so doing they create their own complex arrangement of temporal patterns and thereby offer us opportunities to think about the implications of time and its passage.'  

Contrasting examples of this are Zen gardens that change slowly and invite us to think about geological time, slow moving time or eternity, and a garden of deciduous trees and annuals that changes each year with the seasons and invites us to think about the fleetingness and inevitability of time's passage.

wild doings in the dark

Artworks, taxidermy specimens from the Melbourne Museum -  all part of a wonderful exhibition called Crepuscular*,  about nocturnal wildlife in the city of Melbourne.  The word Crepuscular, an adjective, has two dictionary meanings: 1. resembling twilight  2. the insects, birds and other other animals active at dawn and dusk. 
We know there is terrible loss of habitat and biodiversity, but when daylight fades native and introduced animals emerge from their hiding places to forage for food in parks, laneways and gardens.

The recent drought has persuaded several Powerful Owls (Ninox strenua) to migrate to the city from their traditional home in the forest.  In the city 'they discovered parklands overpopulated with game. Swooping on broad silent wings, owls effortlessly pick off and consume preoccupied possums.'
 
Here's how John Kean, creator of the exhibition, describes the Brushtail Possum ( Trichosurus vulpecula): 'Look up into the forks of the large trees in Carlton Gardens and you are more than likely to see a soft ball of fur curled and asleep and waiting for the moment when the sun dips over the Yarra. As the sky darkens, possums descend head first, and go in search of the remnants of commuters' lunches.'

Back in my garden ... the day before I visited the exhibition Greg cut back the Pittosoporum hedge that had grown so tall it was shading the garden and house.  Who did he inadvertently disturb sleeping in a cosy nest?  This cute little Ringtail Possum.

* Crepuscular, City Gallery, Melbourne Town Hall, finishes July 12.