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Keith’s Garden
This is my friend Keith’s native front garden in Bulli, I have wanted to take photos of this garden for a long time and on a recent visit finally remembered my camera. Phew! I had to snap quickly as the sun was setting and the mozzies were out. The garden is located on the escarpment…
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Hardy Plants for a Pre-school Garden
I was given the pleasure of helping to build part of my daughters pre-school garden last year, they had a drawing from a few years back and hadn’t been able to afford to do anything with it. They are a not for profit Pre-school and have a wonderful base of talented teachers and passionate parents.…
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Portfolio: Garden Design Ashfield
This garden was in the making for only a few days, the plants went in on a very hot day last week but overall it felt very streamlined and easy to build and I have surprised even myself with the transformation! In the image below you can see what it looked like in November… The…
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Why are Kangaroo Paws so hard to photograph?
I have found photographing Kangaroo Paws to be extremely frustrating, which is a great shame as they are one of my favourite native plants. They are showy, have long lasting flowers, a weeping leaf habit mixed with the striking vertical flower stems making them an excellent feature plant. However when I go to photograph them…
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Joseph Banks Native Plants Reserve
Every spring the Sutherland Australian Plants Society Group hold a day of Spring walks in Sir Joseph Banks Native Gardens in Kareela. I have been meaning to visit this native garden for years t is fairly local to me and I had heard wonderful things about it. The gardens were started by Sutherland Shire…
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Portfolio: Marrickville Sketch Design
This is a garden that I have been visiting for a couple of years now, each time I spend an hour or two doing some sketches for the owners to move to the next ‘stage’. It is a wonderful garden spilling over with healthy plants, edibles mixed in with exotics and natives all thriving and…
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Happy Wattle Day: Acacia cognata
September the 1st is National Wattle day, did you know that? I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t until fairly recently…whoops! Wattle Day has quite a long history going back to when the Wattle became our National emblem, you can read more about it here http://www.wattleday.asn.au/about-wattle-day-1 What I find particularly interesting about this National Day of celebration is…
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Goodenia ovata and friends
This is one happy little scrambling native plant, with its sunny yellow flowers and buoyant bright green leaves it scrambles over anything in its path. Goodenia ovata is a low spreading shrub that grows as an under-storey plant in the bush around much of coastal Australia, it is tolerant of many different soil types and…
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Fast Growing, Weeping Screen: Acacia cognata ‘Burgundy Cascade’
It seems that there are endless forms of Acacia cognata all battling for attention, all beautiful with their soft weeping habit and mostly with a hardy nature. I personally will never tire of them and if the market continues to be flooded with choice I am quite happy. There are more than a dozen Acacia…
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My Favourite Banksia spinulosa Dwarfs
There are many dwarf forms of Banksia spinulosa, so many it can be quite confusing and seem a little ridiculous when it comes to choosing one. There are slight variances in the foliage, the flower colour, the flower size and in the size and shape of the shrub itself. For most people these difference would…
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Bright, Thick and Floriferous: Banksia marginata ‘Bright’
Check out the flowers on this baby, it was absolutely covered, I have never seen anything like it before and was suitably impressed. This is Banksia marginata ‘Bright’. A compact of the Silver Banksia, it grows as a dense shrub to 2 metres high and 2 metres wide – this one looks like it has…
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Small Shade Tree: Tristaniopsis laurina
I am often asked to recommend a small shade tree, something that can fit in a small garden and has a dense canopy which you can sit under. Most people also ask for a tree with lush foliage and showy flowers and perhaps decorative bark, plus they usually request it to be quick growing…..well this…
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Gardening with 2nds
I like re-cycling, myself and my family are usually dressed from the op-shop, I use every opportunity to re-cycle building materials around the garden and think nothing of going through the kerb side household clean-ups, therefore I am a big fan of rummaging through the half price plant areas in nurseries. Often these are tables…
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Water Garden Planting
Water is an important part of every garden, it encourages wildlife and can be a useful feature adding a tranquil peaceful element. Planting out a water garden is a great opportunity to discover some wonderful native plants, that flower and have striking foliage like other ornamental plantings, if grouped with some thought the plants will…
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Lovely, Prickly…
There are many lovely pricklies, lovely because they are prickly and just lovelies that happen to be prickly, Acacia amblygona is both. This is a low growing sprawling wattle, that appears thick and luscious from a distance but then when you touch it you get a little shock, it is not as tactile as it…
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Soft, Luscious Screen: Acacia fimbriata Dwarf
Acacia fimbriata Dwarf has a puffy sort of look to it from a distance, it is a full bushy shrub with a cloud-like texture. One of the most useful plants that I use in a landscape, as it has enough interest to stand on its own by contrasting with other foliage and form around it…
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Ode to Banksia spinulosa
Banksia’s may possibly be my favourite Genus of Native plants and this particular species could well be top of that list. I was at a clients garden this afternoon and we were lovingly looking at his Banksia spinulosa and stroking the new growth and commenting on what a wonderful plant it is. There is something…
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Low Shrubbery: Acacia howittii ‘Honey Bun’
I have had my eye on this little dwarf form of Acacia for a few years now, it isn’t as common as some of the Acacia cognata dwarfs, which is one of the reasons it appeals to me. This is Acacia howittii ‘Honey Bun’ and it is an incredibly pretty and useful low shrub, suitable for…
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Lovers of Hot and Dry: Alyogyne hakeifolia ‘Melissa Anne’ and ‘Elle Maree’
I went to look at a garden yesterday which was hot and dry, it had lots of hard surfaces that were heating up with the western sun, that got me thinking about this plant Alyogyne hakeifolia ‘Melissa Anne’ or native hibiscus. There are many Alyogyne mainly coming from WA and south Australia and this one is…
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Cushion Bush Breasts
I am in Tasmania driving around and camping and visiting family, its my home town. Of course we have paid our obligatory visit to MONA which in my humble opinion has the, most beautiful native gardens, they are modern and playful, hence the Leucophyta brownii pruned into breast shapes heehee…..Cushion bush prunes beautifully into spheres…
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Horizontal Contrast: Homoranthus flavescens
Homoranthus flavescens is a striking plant, the foliage appears succulent and conifer like and the branches grow almost horizontally and appear to layer on top of each other, plus it has a beautiful grey green leaf, making it a wonderful feature shrub in a planting.
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Polarising plants: Ozothamnus diosmifolius
I love plants that have the capacity to completely divide people, where they are either loved or hated. I think Ozothamnus diosmifolius is one such plant, I have only been recently converted and I must say it is partly by the discovery of all the new colours out there, pinks, oranges and the most amazing…
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Easy to grow WA species: Melaleuca incana
I would so love to have a garden in Western Australia, all the interesting natives I could grow Eucalyptus macrocarpa, Banksia coccinea, Macropedia fulignosa….ahhh but we always want what we can’t have…. So I continue to trail things in my heavy clay, coastal garden with our east coast humid summer and some WA species will grow…
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Spring Yellow: Conostylis candicans
What better colour to welcome spring with than yellow! Goodbye winter! However it is feeling a little bit like we have headed straight into summer here on the NSW east coast, which I find a little bit frightening, it is looking like a confusing time for plants at the moment, anyway thats another topic altogether… This…
Tag: yellow flowers