Stopping to Smell the Stink

Flower scent is an evocative modality in gardens, often just as important as colour and texture.  The smell of roses gave rise to a popular saying that reminds us to look closer and appreciate the beauty around us every minute of every day.  There are so many plants loved for their scent that it's impossible to list them all in a blog.  Violets are perhaps one of my all-time favourites, followed closely by asiatic lilies.  I don't care much for roses but their scent can waft far from where their roots are in the ground.  Their ability to waft far and wide impresses me more than their blooms.  The same goes for gardenias.  Where I went to hort school there was a large Gardenia thunbergia that pumped out its scent so profusely that on late summer evenings its heady smell could be detected wafting some hundred meters or more from where the plant was to be found in the gardens.  Quite amazing.

Gardenia thunbergia

Yes, smell can seduce as much as any other sense.  Perhaps more than any other sense.  While we love flowers for their smells, plants don't do it for us, far from it.  It's all to attract pollinators and while bees are the first that springs to mind there are thousand of other insects that pollinate flowers.  Some have such specific relationships that only one species of insect will pollinate a single species of plant.  The gardenia in I mentioned before only releases its scent in the evening because it's pollinated by moths.  Ditto for most nicotine species.  Flies, too, pollinate flowers, but these fly-attracting plants are more likely to smell like a fresh cowpat or decomposing corpse than a gardenia.

A photo posted by James Beattie (@the_horticologist) on Mar 13, 2015 at 2:34pm PDT

The titan arum, Amorphophallus titanum

A couple of years ago a titan arum flowered at the Melbourne Botanic Gardens and I managed to get along to see it.  An interesting aside, the titan arum's latin name, Amorphophallus titanum, translates to English literally as 'giant deformed penis' (it would give Lorena Bobbitt ideas, make no mistake).  We arrived first thing in the morning and being one of the first into the greenhouse after it had begun flowering the night before, we copped its stink head-on.  It also goes by the common name corpse flower, however I would liken its scent more to a sailor's old jockstrap before making the comparison with rotting flesh.  It was certainly more BO than dead body.

I was pruning some unruly hops the other day in the back garden and a small species of carrion flower (Orbea lepida) I've been growing for a few years came into view as I was pruning and, low and behold, it had a flower on it.  It threatened to flower last year but the buds came to nothing, much to my frustration.  I was over the moon to see it in flower.  The flower is gorgeous but as I inched closer to the pot it's in, I did so with a slight trepidation.  It can't be that bad, I thought.  So I went in for the kill and took a big whiff.

A photo posted by James Beattie (@the_horticologist) on Jan 25, 2017 at 7:25pm PST

The flower of Orbea lepida

It absolutely stank.  I can honestly say it made me wretch, and no sooner had I almost thrown up, a fly came buzzing in to take a closer look at the flower.  I guess attraction, like everything, is a matter of perspective.

This succulent species is a doddle to grow.  In Melbourne, at least, Orbea lepida is easy.  It's happy in a pot - any succulent mix will do it just fine.  In my garden it gets morning sun and it's going gangbusters.  I'm going to have to repot it this year, a process that will see bits of it, no doubt, break off.  But it grows easily from cuttings as well, so you can fill your garden full of stink in no time for the price of a single plant.

It's a great practical joke plant to this end, I freely admit to encouraging others to smell the flower when it catches their eye, which it invariably does.  "Make sure you take a big whiff," I gently suggest, trying to stifle a naughty laugh as others go in for a whiff they'll regret.

Have a go at it if you see it in a nursery.  It's wonderfully straight forward to grow and an oddity that really 'wows' visitors.

Until next time, stay smelly!

When The Only Way Is Up

Like all gardeners, my yard never seems to be big enough.  I'm in the middle of a hefty backyard redesign at the moment and while construction is ongoing my productive space is reduced by two thirds.  I'm building the new garden myself to keep costs down, however using mainly hand tools and a strong back tends to push the build timeline out significantly.  There's still rebar trellising to go up, paving to be done, not to mention the several cubes of dirt to be dug for gravel paths, and all that's before a single plant goes into the ground.  Lots to do still, but today is nudging 35 degrees so I'm writing in the shade instead.

It's my first season without beans for several years and I'm trying, unsuccessfully, not to let it bother me.  I'd usually have a few varieties in and be picking bucket loads at this time of year.  Considering there are still several jars of dilly beans in the larder it's probably a good thing I decided to skip this year's crop.  At least that's what I tell myself.  Buying them at $7 a kilo from the market upsets me when they're are the easiest thing to grow.  But enough about beans.

A photo posted by James Beattie (@the_horticoligist) on Jan 28, 2015 at 1:27am PST

Bean crops of years past

Right outside our backdoor are two large reo mesh archways that we use to grow shit up.  We've grown the aforementioned beans up them before, as well as tomatoes and zucchinis.  They're a great bit of kit to have in the garden.  They make the expanse of deck they cover a productive spot where it otherwise wouldn't be and leave the rest of the vegetable beds they're anchored into for other goodies.  After previous years' success with zucchinis in particular, I wanted to try pumpkins up them again this year.  I say 'again' because I grew them up one of the arches a couple of years ago.  After they'd been growing happily for a about a month I decided to tidy up the plant, cutting out the branches of the vine that were working their way into the vegetable bed, fast becoming a threat to the survival of other plants around it.  It was one of those 'oh, fuck' moments, realising a split second too late that I managed to cut the main leader off about three inches above ground level.  It was in the afternoon on a weekend so I was probably a few beers in (#consummateprofessional).  No pumpkins that year!

A photo posted by James Beattie (@the_horticoligist) on Jan 20, 2015 at 11:45pm PST

Zucchini 'Tromboncino' went ape a couple of years back

With a severe limitation on space this year I decided it was time to give the pumpkins another go and the only way was up.  I'd stay sober throughout all attempts at training it and so far so good!  Thankfully the cultivar I planted, pumpkin 'Buttercup', grew along a single leader for the first 8 weeks of its life, perhaps knowing I'd killed one of its brethren for being too unruly a couple of years previously.  It started branching about 4 weeks ago and is now of a significant size with one pumpkin already set and growing like the clappers.  Others have threatened to set, but after teasingly plumping up for a week they get all sickly-looking and drop off like the Second Earl of Rochester's infected extremities.

A photo posted by James Beattie (@the_horticoligist) on Jan 22, 2017 at 12:13am PST

Growing on vertical supports like this is a great way to increase productive space.  Had I allowed this pumpkin to trail along the ground it wouldn't enjoy as much sun as it does now, especially since it made it onto the roof a week ago.  This side of the deck faces east so the ground level gets direct sun for only about 5 hours a day, but the archways get sun for 7-10 hours a day depending on the time of year.  The difference in sunlight takes a barely adequately productive spot to a photosynthetic powerhouse, perfect for pumpkins.

So while my garden isn't big enough at the moment I'm raising my sights and looking up.  It won't be long until I have ample space to fill with plants and, no doubt, be soon lamenting I've run out of space again.

Until next time, stay dirty.

Jimmy

A New Year, a New Blog

In the first year of a Trump presidency I thought it time to kickstart a new blog with lots of pretty flowers and vegetables to distract from the downwardly spiraling cesspool of geopolitics.

A photo posted by James Beattie (@the_horticoligist) on Dec 20, 2016 at 3:36pm PST

Plants nourish, heal, inspire and deepen knowledge of the world around us

I'm not a hippy, far from it, but I believe plants and gardening have the ability to nourish the soul, feed creativity and sustain a long and fulfilling life.  The cherry on the cream is a plant, after all.  I chose horticulture as a career after working in an office for years while studying.  I grew to loath the idea of working in an indoor career.  Gardening was and still is a discipline that satisfies me both physically and intellectually.  The physical side of it is obvious, there's nothing more satisfying than digging a big hole and putting a plant in it.  The intellectual side is lurking just below the surface, waiting to be discovered like the chink of a spade hitting a water main.  Hit it hard enough and you'll be engulfed in a wondrous fountain of knowledge not even the most reliable plumber will ever quell.  Every plant has a story to tell.  Whether they're the clothes on your back, the beer you drink or the infuriating weeds in your paving, all plants have come from somewhere in the world and the stories of how they've found their way into your garden are often no less thrilling than the plants themselves.  Wars have been fought over plants.  Pivotal events in history have happened because of them.  We mark births, deaths and marriages with plants.  They nourish, heal, inspire and even intoxicate, both literally and figuratively, and in the process help to deepen our knowledge of the world around us.

My road to this besotting with botanics has been a long and meandering one.  I have worked in numerous gardening roles in my 15 years in horticulture.  After graduating from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Horticulture in 2007, I took a road not often travelled by hortos or other gardening-inclined folk.  I took up a job in bushland management, initially as a year's stopgap to figure out where it exactly was I wanted horticulture to take me.  I enjoyed it so much I stayed for three years, and as years do when one is enjoying ones self, they flew by at an alarming rate.  Over those years I worked in some pristine bushland around Melbourne and the Yarra Valley, as well as many degraded sites that needed nurturing.  I fell in love with our indigenous flora, particularly our grasslands, whose story is an interesting but tragic one for another time.

After three years I worked briefly as a jobbing gardener before scoring a job working for Gardening Australia, the national telly program on the ABC.  It's been a mainstay for the green and black thumbed alike in Australia for over 25 years and it was privilege working with a show that I grew up watching and loving (it was a secret pleasure as a teenager watching Peter Cundall on Saturday nights before going out to party).  It sounds like a dream job and in many respects it was, but that early-learnt loathing of office work was an ever present Blundstone boot, gently kicking me in the back of the head.  Very rarely did us behind-the-scenes-hortos get out into the gardens we wrote about.  While producers had the privilege of flitting about the country filming some of our most spectacular gardens and natural landscapes, we were daisy-chained to the desk 99% of the time.  It was an indoors job, stressful most of the time, and it was only a matter of time before I packed it in.  Which I did late last year.  So to keep my writing brain from atrophying I decided to write - and here I am, and you are, hopefully enjoying ourselves together in this wondrous Garden of Eden we call Earth.

So follow me as I delve headlong into the compost heap of life, bringing humour and humus together in a way that engages and stimulates, titivates and intoxicates, elucidates and educates in a way garden writing never has before.

Until next time, get out there and get dirty.

Jimmy