Gertrude Jekyll on the Blue Garden

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had the ambition to make a blue garden bed. Recently I came across what Gertrude Jekyll has to say about blue gardens. I don't think she was too keen on them to be honest. This is what she had to say in an anthology of her writings "Gertrude Jekyll - The Making of a Garden": "...a blue garden, for beauty's sake, may be hungering for a group of white lilies, or for something of palest lemon yellow, but it is not allowed to have it because it is called the blue garden, and there must be no flowers in it but blue flowers. I can see no sense in this; it seems to me like fetters foolishly imposed. Surely the business of the blue garden is to be beautiful as well as to be blue. ...Moreover, any experienced colourist knows that the blues will be more telling - more purely blue - by the juxtaposition of rightly placed complementary colour."She felt that a garden in shades of blue from true blue to purple, was duller than a garden where blue was contrasted with white or yellow.

I think my blue garden shows my slow realisation of the truth of this. I started off with hydrangeas and euphorbias (the kind with blue grey foliage) and Elijah Fescue blue grass. I wanted to fill up the gaps quickly so I used Sisyrinchium angustafolium "Devon Skies" which unfortunately doesn't spread as the catalogue suggests, just sits miserably in clumps with one or two flowers rather than the "carpet" one is led to expect; Scabiosa which has done very little and certainly not flowered; and lobelia (this at least has been successful and is a brilliant eye catching blue).

As I wrote before the acanthus had to come out and so I planted Delphiniums in the centre and plumbago against the wall, also some Dichroa versicolour which are similar to hydrangeas in appearance.

I also recently bought a small ground cover called "Edna Walling blue bells" which has variegated leaves. It is doing well. However the garden bed now has too many different blues in it, because I couldn't resist buying more plants.

As for contrast - well I had white lilium longiflorum which were lovely but didn't last long. Jekyll liked liliums and they are a significant flower for the Arts and Crafts style garden; Astilbe which is a pale pink and doesn't really work well; and Achillea "Moonlight" which is supposed to be a pale yellow but has not flowered at all yet. I also have some white "Lion's ear" Leonotis Leonurus which is growing well but not flowering yet. Perhaps late summer will bring some contrasting colours if the other flowers last that long. Timing is everything in flower beds it seems.

If a tree falls at Sydney's Olympic Park, will anyone hear it?

The Minister for Planning, Frank Sartor, has made a decision to allow a developer to remove 22 of 26 brush box trees (Lophstemon confertus) at Sydney's Olympic Park.

The trees date from 1916 when they were planted along the avenue to the State Abattoirs at Homebush. They are a vestige of the former stockroutes taken by the cattle to the stockyards. They were laid out on the recommendation of the then director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, J H Maiden . The trees for the area were chosen for their ability to survive extreme conditions of flood or drought. Many decades later, the Abattoir site became Sydney's Olympic Park, where the 2000 Olympic Games were staged. The 2000 Olympics were proclaimed the Green Games, with the Government planting native landscapes and providing a special environment for the endangered green and gold bell frog. Now the games live only in our memories, it seems green credentials no longer matter.

The development is an office building by Bovis Lend Lease. The site is known as Site 4B, corner of Olympic Boulevard and Herb Elliott Avenue. Some of the trees are not within the building site, they are along the approach to the building, so arguably could be preserved.

While the trees themselves are not listed heritage items under the the Abattoir Heritage Conservation Area is, and the avenue is adjacent to heritage items including buildings and gardens within that precinct. The developer responded to this in its Preferred Project report by agreeing to plant 4 additional trees to add to the 4 trees retained (not even keeping the same trees!)

The Director-General’s Assessment Report to the Minister under Part 3A states as justification for their removal: “The existing Brush Box trees currently on the site are in relatively poor condition”. However this is based on an assessment of 6 trees only, carried out by Urban Tree Management in November 2006. The report notes that the 6 trees are in a “fair to low condition, primarily as a result of drought” and goes on “As a consequence, the removal of existing trees is a less serious issue than if the subject trees were healthy subjects.”

This conclusion is wrong.

The UTM report notes that while the trees as a whole were showing signs of stress from the drought, “no changes were observed to the remaining trees proposed for removal” since the previous report in 2005 – therefore there was no factual basis to assume they had declined. In fact only 2 of those other trees are actually identified in the UTM as being in poor condition.

· The report makes clear that the trees are not terminal – that if artificial irrigation was applied they would recover and with good management could be successfully managed

· In fact, if artificial irrigation and mulching is not undertaken, the report concluded, even those trees marked for retention could suffer from the impacts of the adjacent excavation which will affect the water table. It is the excavation which poses the major threat to the trees’ health, not any environmental factors.

A horticulturalist who recently viewed the trees said they were in good condition - but for how much longer?

The beginning

This journal begins with me digging up the acanthus. I couldn't bear the way it looked anymore, the snails ( or slugs, I never see the little fiends so I don't know which it is) have had their way with it so that the leaves were more hole than leaf. The strange thing is that the acanthus were practically the only flowers growing in the garden of this house when we bought it just over a year ago, and they were never eaten then. They sprang up everywhere (acanthus grow from tubers) and they continue to reappear, so I'm not really worried about them disappearing for good.

But with Christmas approaching I decided to put something else in the place of the worst affected plant, so I planted some plumbago and delphiniums. The reason for this is that this part of the garden is the "blue flower bed" (so really the acanthus shouldn't be there, since it's not blue, more cream and purplish-grey). Then my mother told me that snails love plumbago too.

In this journal I'll talk more about the house and the garden, but a brief history - the house is on Sydney's North Shore, it was built ca. 1912 and it's called "Sandringham". It was built by a builder who lived two doors down, Richard Blundell. I haven't found out much about him yet. When we bought it the garden had really nothing except grass, overgrown ficus and privet (now removed), and two ancient camellias - one is as old as the house and as tall (2 storeys). So there was no historic garden to speak of. We have tried to create one, with Gertrude Jekyll and Edna Walling as our guides. More of that later.