Garden Gleanings by Jean McCall

Welcome to Jean who has been a long term resident of Goonengerry. Jean has been a regular contributor to the VJ, submitting the rainfall totals for Goonengerry. She has taken up our request for gardeners of the hinterland to talk about their own gardening experiences … ed

I’d like to relate some of my trials and tribulations- and successes- whilst gardening in the Goonengerry area over the last 19 years. My garden is on a very sloping hillside, facing east, with a large area south east, and a couple of gardens around the house verandahs.

The challenge of invading ground covers

The pretty forest Lobelia, is a native ground trailer with mauve flowers. It can be very rampart and invaded a great deal of my garden, coming up through, and even over, the grevillea ground covers and taking over patches of native violets. The native violet or viola hederacea makes a good ground cover in more shaded parts of the garden.

Green and white ribbon grass makes a good holding border along terraced gardens. Once they have flowered the long white stems need to be trimmed off to prevent spreading as they will bend down and form a new plant by re-rooting.

The Bush Violet with 2cm blue roundish flowers has woody stems and woody suckering growths in their root system. These can become invasive and difficult to cut out. It does make a good bushy 18-20cm high ground cover in sunny areas where control is not needed.

The red passion flower creeper/climber has very attractive 6-8cm bright red passionfruit type flowers and large red veined green leaves. It is great for growing along a fence away from shrubs or over a frame or shed, but beware of placing it among other plants or shrubs, as the root system travels and puts up suckers throughout the garden.

The ground covers that I’ve found that perform the best are these native grevilleas- grevillea Bronze Rambler and Grevillia Laningera prostrate form. These will do well on quite steep slopes too. Austramyrtus Tennifolia is a good native low growing and spreading shrub. It is sometimes called the Midgen Berry and it grows about 30cm high and spreads to about 1.5–2m. The plant has attractive bronze tips on the new growth, small white flowers and followed by small pink berries. All of the above ground covers take the sun well and will also tolerate the afternoon shade. They respond well to a good pruning.

The Callistemon Tinaroo is an excellent small bottlebrush shrub. It is described as an open straggly bottlebrush shrub in the wild. When pruned regularly of spent flowers and dead wood it becomes a dense bushy shrub about 2.5m by 1.5m. It has small bright red gold tipped flowers and flowers intermittently after the first flush, and is a haven for small birds.

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