By Beatrice Hawkins
As I am writing this I have had some excited phone calls from entrants in the garden competition who opened their gardens on last Sunday. The response was fantastic with many people calling by to look. Thank you once again for entering and opening and enjoying the experience. If you didn’t go looking readers, do so this weekend, as many will be open again. Particularly go out to the Mundey’s at Tannymorel and see their lovely garden that is open as a fundraiser for the community.
I am not a great gardener but do enjoy it and recently my main garden has been a riot of red set off with a carpet of white alyssum. It has looked really eye catching with bright red hippeastrums in profusion, tall, bright red, peony poppies and beautiful, orchid like, red jacobean lilies. To have had all 3 in full flower at the one time has not happened before in this garden and they have really looked lovely in the carpet of white.
I have bought some other hippeastrum bulbs but haven’t managed to get them to flower as yet… maybe next year. One single white sonatini variety has flowered.
The plain red ones I have I rescued from my daughter in laws garden and every bulb grew and has multiplied! They seem to be such a hardy plant I thought I would look into their history and see what else I could do to make them even better. First thing I know is that I need to be more diligent in snail and slug control. They are a big problem in my garden and hide very well in the alyssum and feast on the hippies!
Both the hippeastrums and jacobeans are native to South America but the spectacular blooms available for us today are the result of continued hybridising over a long period of time. Hippeastrums now come in an amazing array of colours and forms, singles and doubles and bi-colours. They are a beautiful plant with their large trumpet shaped flowers, with each stem usually having 4 flowers, held proudly atop.
One of the foremost Australian breeders, Mick Maguire of Woombye on the Sunshine Coast, once described them in an interview in 2014 with Jerry Colby-Williams, as reminiscent of his first girlfriend.. “ big, bold and beautiful”!!
They like full sun and good soil but don’t really like sandy soil. The spot where I have them is fairly sandy but also has been upgraded with additional manure and nutrients over time. They are very hardy and can go without additional water for a couple of years and still survive, so very good in drought prone areas. The ones in my garden are a true testament to this as they were in a very dry, forgotten area when I rescued them and they have had minimal water during our recent water restrictions here in Warwick.
Their only downside seems to be that they only flower for 2 to 3 weeks of the year. They are fairly pest and disease resistant except for the fact that snails and slugs love them and cause huge damage if not controlled. In my case, they attacked the flowers as they first appeared from the bulb and I had some flowers with shredded petals!
They will grow beautifully in pots as well as the garden, so long as they have sun. They will flower in partial shade but not full shade. Their flowering can be controlled to a point, by keeping them in the crisper of the fridge if you require them to flower as a specific time as they will usually flower about 5 weeks after planting. The suggestion is that if you would like an alternative
to poinsettias for a Christmas floral centrepiece, keep some bulbs cool for a few weeks then plant them in a pot about mid November, keep them in full sun, and they should bloom beautifully for Christmas. Plant them in good potting mix with their necks a few centimetres proud of the soil. It is suggested that planting in the garden should happen in autumn but in pots, from September to December, depending on when you want to have them flowering.
After flowering, remove the spent flower stem as close to the base as possible but allow the leaves to die back naturally before removing them. As with most bulbs, this is when the nutrients for next years flowers are being stored.
Lastly, there are the beautiful, bright red, peony poppies that come up every year since I first planted the seed sent from WA by my granddaughter. So that garden bed at least has been colour coordinated!
Other garden beds closer to my house have more variety of colour and flowers but the red and white in the front garden have given me much pleasure each time I’ve come home for a few weeks now.
