LOVE THY neighbour
THE GRASSES REALLY ARE GREENER ON THE OTHER SIDE
New Zealanders may beat the hell out of Aussies on the rugby field nine times out of 10, but a number of Australian plants currently residing here run rings around their local equivalents.
Our rivals across the Tasman certainly got the jump on us when it comes to grasses. I used to be a big fan of our native Carex comans, but they weren’t a big fan of me. Even those that survived being rolled on by the cat on a regular basis eventually lost their pretty green colour and turned pale and dead-looking, which they sometimes were.
While I was gently combing out their dead hair in an effort to revitalise them, the Aussies were sending us Lomandra, a drought-tolerant, evergreen and almost indestructible grass that comes in a wide variety of styles, sizes and colours. It looks good with virtually no care and it stifles weeds in a heartbeat.
It exhibits commendable behaviour in wind, sun, drought, partial shade, humidity and even the cold. It’s heavily used in civic plantings around our town – every couple of years, council workers wallop the tops off them with line-trimmers and they bounce back without even looking in danger of dropping the ball. Yes, they look appalling until their hair has grown back, but don’t we all?
And here’s another Aussie success story – the dwarf frangipani Hymenosporum flavum, more attractively known as the “Gold Nugget”. It’s a miniature version of the gangly Aussie frangipani tree and grows only about a metre high and wide. It has large glossy leaves and pale-yellow perfumed flowers in summer.
We bought a couple of these a few years ago, but I was disappointed to find that their lovely mid-green leaves had a tendency to go yellow when planted in the sun.
I whacked them off at ground level, yanked them out, stuffed them into a couple of pots and hid them round the back of the studio. They grew about a foot in a fortnight in their shady haven and looked fabulous.
Minor issues? They’ve been slightly susceptible to mealy bug and are pretty thirsty when kept in pots. Anybody would be.
I wish I could say I’d never met a grevillea I didn’t like, but that would not be true. The Grevillea “Bronze Rambler” is possibly the most effective but least attractive way of covering up a difficult bank, short of concreting it.
Happily, the rambler has countless brothers, sisters, cousins and aunties – in fact about 350 family members – ranging in size from 50cm to 35m, in an array of shades to rival a Resene colour chart.
My first one was aptly named Grevillea “Superb”, a compact evergreen with bucket-loads of salmon-pink flowers about 12cm long. It was, I learned, a cross between Grevillea bipinnatifida (hard to spell and pretty much unpronounceable) and Grevillea banksii, and was delightfully easygoing. It survived droughts and frosts but was ultimately taken out by a neighbour who reversed into it trying to turn her car around in our driveway.
After a suitable grieving period (about half an hour), I transferred my affections to Grevillea “Moonlight”, which has the same qualities as “Superb” but with beautiful shimmering flowers that are a cross between gold and silver.
Grevilleas have many Aussie characteristics. They’re easygoing, adaptable and independent, and they don’t want you to love them to death. Well-drained, friable soil and water when they’re young are the top two items on their wish list.
When I lived in Dunedin, my new husband and I planted an acacia tree in our front garden. I think we divorced before it was two metres high – not because the marriage only lasted a minute but because the acacia took forever to grow.
I was thrilled to see wild wattles on the property I bought a couple of decades later, but locals informed me that wattles are naughty in the far north and not to be encouraged. Some are less naughty than others, depending where you live.
One I really like is Acacia pravissima (“Ovens Wattle”). An evergreen shrub, it doesn’t have the lovely, frondy wattletype leaves but tightly packed, triangular-shaped phyllodes and racemes of small yellow flower heads in late winter and early spring. I’d plant it in a heartbeat if I could be sure DOC wouldn’t have me deported.