GARDEN JOURNAL

Balcony Garden – Blooming This Week

Saxifraga Gregor Mendel is blooming on the balcony this week. I purchased this plant from a local grower at the recent CRAGS plant sale. I’ve purchased from him before as his plants are proven Calgary-hardy.

Gregor Mendel is a hybrid dwarf cushion Saxifrage, originally developed around 1894. The flowers are a pale lemony yellow and rise about 7.5 cm (3 inches) above the tiny mound of shiny, bright green foliage. It’s going to be in bloom for about a month. Here’s the trough that it it going to live in this summer.

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Botanic + Biennale

The 17th Sydney Biennale was on when I visited the Royal Botanic Gardens. As part of the show the Garden played host to a couple of artworks on the theme of threatened and threatening nature.

Choi Jeong Hwa from Seoul presented ‘The unbearable lightness of being’. This floating lotus blossom made me smile and reminded me of Tim Watkin’s kinetic sculptures.

Too bad the fountain was on – it’s competing for attention. But colour choice for the flower is brilliant.

The following shots are of Sydney-born artist Fiona Hall’s installation ‘The Barbarians at the Gate’. She painted beehives with military camouflage patterns associated with different countries and then sited the hives at the Gardens as foreign objects “analogous to the shipping in of people during early colonial times”. The camouflage worked really well. The installation was subtle and sited really well close to one of the Garden gates.

Each hive also had a special roof to reference the country it represents. The result is meant to illustrate ‘a colonial-era nation building process of introducing people, plants and animals into foreign habitats forever changing the ecology of a place’. The site is also marked by a low sandbag edging, totally in keeping with the idea of defending against an invader. I’m glad I had a chance to see the pieces – they helped make the massive scale of the Gardens more human and friendly.

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Friggin Flying Fox

In 2007 one of the largest trees in the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens Palm Grove died. The tree, a Pacific Kauri, (Agathis moorei) was collected in New Caledonia in 1853 by Charles Moore, the Gardens’ Director at the time. The demise of the tree is attributed to the roosting habit of a grey-headed Flying Fox colony.

The flying fox colony, over 20,000 critters strong, has also been responsible for the devastation of another 18 significant trees in the Gardens and damage to an additional 300 trees and palms. The bats have literally set up ‘camp’ in the Gardens and are causing damage x3.

1. The large number of bats, particularly when roosting and breeding, break branches and strip trees of leaves and new shoots.
2. The loss of shade when the upper canopy dies (from roosting bats) damages or kills trees and plants underneath that are not suited to full sunlight.
3. Large amounts of guano kills the living tips of palms and other plants in the lower storeys.

Attempts to move and deal with the bats has been controversial as these flying foxes are listed as a vulnerable species. They play an important role as pollinators in the Australian ecosystem. But Australia’s population of grey headed flying fox has declined by 30 per cent in the past decade because its food source – these are nectar and fruit eating bats – is being threatened – the coastal forests which they rely on for blossoms are being cleared. So, it’s a battle, with all sides struggling to do the right thing – nature at odds with human intervention.

But back to the dead tree.

The Kauri Project was developed in response to the downing of the dead Pacific Kauri. Similar to the 2001 Onetree project in the UK, the Kauri Project  commemorates the tree by distributing its wood to local craftspeople who will  produce and exhibit the results of their wood crafts. All items will be for sale with proceeds used to replant and conserve the Palm Grove and its Kauri trees.

I like Richard Raffan’s turned bowls the best – simply beautiful. The wood crafts are on display at the Gardens starting today, August 21 through to August 29. You can get information on sales from the Botanic Gardens Trust office or by email.

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Spring Tour

It’s been a cold, wet spring. The tomatoes have suffered, and I replaced the ones that are in this video. I mean, when you have short growing season, sometime you just have to admit that the gamble of pushing the growing envelop, even on a protected, south facing balcony didn’t pay off. So from Sun Golds to Tumblers the vegetable garden evolves.

The only other thing that the cold weather has impacted is the ponds. Experience tells me that no matter how tempting the water plants are at the warm, totally protected nursery, it’s best just to leave them there.

Fish on the other hand are a different matter. Pond comets can take the cold. I was disappointed to learn that our local, downtown pet store had closed. So a forced trip to the burbs to find comets is at hand this week. Haven’t had fish on the balcony for a couple of years. They are pretty easy to look after, will nibble of floating pond plants and are good alone for the weekend if you go away. The perfect pet for some.

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Nothing But Time continued

Finished another video this weekend. Companion piece to these posts from last year.

I liked that when you are at the UBC Botanical Gardens in Vancouver, you have to search this area out – it’s quite literally a ‘hot spot’ on the hill in the alpine garden.

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Nothing But Time

Here we are ready to get growing for another garden season and I’m just getting around to editing the balcony garden journal footage from 2009. I like how my journal has moved from its original large sketchbook format in 1989 to an online version in 2001 to the movie clip version in 2009. That’s 20 years of growing notes.

But no matter how I’ve chosen to track my progress, my journal reminds me of the many plants I carefully selected, planted and nurtured. And a few that didn’t make it. Gardening history indeed.

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Canadians Grow Their Own Boats

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Farming in Southern Alberta

They are farming more than vegetables and beef in Southern Alberta these days. There’s a new year-round crop that is growing like crazy.

It’s the wind.

Wind farms, like the Kettles Hill Wind Power Project and the Cowley North Wind Project are just two examples of how companies are harnessing our well known and often much maligned southern breezes.

I’ll admit, I’m quite taken by the power and beauty of a field of wind turbines and as a downtown balcony gardener, being a wind power NIMBY is obviously the least of my worries.

From a distance the turbines look magical as they slowly rotate and together make a beautiful pattern of movement within order. Up close, the sound of the blades is initially a little frightening because they are so frickin big. And every helicopter and turbine disaster news or movie clip that I’ve ever seen comes to mind.

But once I got past that, I admit I kind of like this type of farming.

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Scared of Heights?

A little I’ll admit. But I went on the Greenheart canopy walk anyways at the UBC botanical gardens this month. Tourism, naturally.

Brian was our walkway guide. He works for Greenheart, was involved in parts of this walkway’s construction and has a background in West Coast Aboriginal studies so he shared and added his knowledge about the rain forest and how the plants and trees might have been used.

The walk is in the David C. Lam Asian Garden, and its eight platforms and nine bridges take you through the pacific coastal rain forest canopy. It’s like walking on a bouncy, moving metal plank with rope handles. The cable system is designed to expand allowing for normal tree growth – no nails or screws, just suspended wires and platforms that allow the trees to breath.

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