I've just driven down a track lined with flowering crab apples and am still glowing at the sight. The eastern rosellas eating the blossom seemed happy too, as I'm sure are the bees, and the hoverflies as well as the possums who will snack on a dozen flowers or so at night.
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Farming and forest monocultures are a buffet for pests and diseases, and a loss of habitat for countless species. But "lots and then more" in your street or garden is a delight.
Partly that is impact - a line of one variety of tree, or alternating trees in a pattern, gives an immediate wow factor - though any tree plantings along a street are superb, and the more the better, cooling the world and catching pollution and creating the white noise of leafy branches that helps cover the mutters of traffic or TV sets.
A single daffodil looks lonely. One bluebell is hardly noticeable, and a sole snowdrop will probably just get trodden on. But in a mass they are sublime. You'll probably forget to feed, weed or even eat the produce from one strawberry plant, but put in lots and you'll tend it and feast on it month after month, and every kid who visits will have red lips - or purple if you decide to have a row of blueberry bushes instead, or mulberry trees.
A single kind of plant is also easier to look after than a garden bed filled with many different flowers. Cottage gardens with many kinds of small, medium then tall plants look fabulous - but they also need fabulous amounts of work, as each variety will need to be pruned or pest controlled at different times.
Gardens with "lots" tend to be generous gardens too. Lots of daffodils, proteas, roses or bottlebrush means you always have bunches to give away. Don't plant a single apple tree, but a hedge of dwarf apples. Forget about one punnet of strawflowers or Californian poppies, put in six. Put in a whole bed of daphne, line the garden path with English lavender, hang baskets of lush fuchsias to shade your windows or fill a bank with thryptomene or hardenbergia.
READ MORE: JACKIE FRENCH
In a small garden a single tree can give you "lots" - one giant apricot, for example, especially if it's underplanted with daffodils, jonquils or hellebores which will have died down by the time you need to pick the fruit.
The secret in our climate is to choose different "lots" for every season, so as the year progresses and flowers fade and harvests finish, your garden is already moving to the next one. Just now we are leaving the "please come and share the limes, oranges, and camellias" period and moving into the "daffodils, iris, hellebores and vast amounts of rhubarb and mandarins" season. There'll be roses next, the stubborn kind that bloom no matter what, finger limes and mulberries, then apples, with great dinner-size magnolia grandiflora to give away, then stone fruit as well as ginger lilies - and lots of them.
This is the season to watch orchards blooming, or gardens of spring flowers, and in our valley, wild clematis and wonga vine dripping from each tree. No matter how hard life can be, a street lined with crab apples, or purple-leafed plums, or snow gums with each trunk shaped by wind and its own eccentricity, reminds us how generous our planet - and even humanity - can be.
This week I am:
- Watching George the echidna trundle into the vegetable garden next to the study, through the reinforcing mesh that keeps out wallabies and wombats but not echidnas. He stopped to munch a few stray ants, who now won't be carrying off my carrot seeds, then squeezed his way back out the other side. If he gets any fatter we may have to rescue a stuck echidna.
- Wondering why one supposedly mid-winter camellia has decided to bloom two months later than all the rest of the same variety. Possibly it's because the others were watered, and this one is out of hose range. Its flowers also changed colour this year, pink tinged white instead of rich flesh pink. This season is weird.
- Watering the tops of the tree ferns and cutting off the dead lower leaves. Tree ferns should be watered from the top, not the base, and need cosseting in dry winds.
- Rejoicing that the new purple smoke bush is putting out purple leaves! I have tried five sources to get true purple. The last one I planted was "sort of" purple but this summer we may actually have dark, vibrant leaves, topped with spires of white.
- Putting out more European wasp traps, fly traps, and possum mesh on the pergola posts so I have at least a few Souvenir de la Malmaison roses.
- Adding a reminder that "fire-resistant plants" only slow down fires if they are kept green and so provide humidity around them. A dead or desiccated fire-resistant plant will fuel a fire, not slow it down - and in a major gale flames and embers will be blown over tall trees and sappy plants may even explode. At high temperatures any vegetation will burn. Fire-resistant species may possibly help - but only if kept green, clean, sappy and moist, and in damp soil, too.
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Jackie French
Jackie French is an Australian author, historian, ecologist and honourary wombat (part time), 2014-2015 Australian Children' Laureate and 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. She also writes a gardening column for The Canberra Times.
Jackie French is an Australian author, historian, ecologist and honourary wombat (part time), 2014-2015 Australian Children' Laureate and 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. She also writes a gardening column for The Canberra Times.
