Happy Plants

growth collage
Originally uploaded by imageo.

Yesterday's rain has given way to sunshine and a glorious march day, perfect to take some photos for the photofriday challenge growth. The plants just seem to be happy :)

sorry for the hiatus

I've been away and back and away a lot, so my humble cretaceous garden has had to fend for itself. It has done so admirably, compared with other more conventional plantings elsewhere in my garden. So I think there may be a myth, ormoral here, perhaps cretaceous plants thrive best by neglect! (and tropical weather, even without the rain).

An interesting (re)discovery

Today I came across some old sketches of my original ideas for the cretaceous garden. The first was perhaps a little ambitious, with a water feature and mini pier from the carport. However on the back of this sketch was an interesting hand written list-

suitable plants with cretaceous ancestors

• ferns
• moss
• cycads
• laurel (eg sassafras)
• cypress (low growing)
• deciduous beech
• ginkgo
• bamboo ??

The fact that I had included bamboo suggest that I had not researched this list well, if at all. Grasses, of which bamboo is one, didn't really evolve until until after the cretaceous (but more about bamboo later) I suspect it is on the list because it was already there in the garden.

I also has a second list of look-alike cretaceous plants

• broad leaf cover (eg aspidistra)
• pin cushion plant
  

Looking back that was a pretty good list to start, and matches what has flourished, I'm giving myself 7 out of 10 for plant selection (now is that a B minus or a C plus on a standardized marking system?)



My second design is much closer to what I have created it has a dry creek bed of rocks instead of a pond. I left out the stepping stone and have a mini island instead.

You might like to see what the area looked like before it became cretaceous.

New growth update

The new growth at the top of my wollemi pine are developing fast into a new series of branches. I'm amazed how quickly they are developing and the muliple branching. Might be time to repot the plant, or maybe I should wait till after the next hot spell.

meet the cycads

Cycads (pronouces sigh-kads) are an order of plants that flourished during the Mesozoic Era. They have large pinnately compound leaves (fronds) that superficially resemble palms and some ferns. However these plants have a markedly different strategy for reproduction, since they developed before insects had evolved on land. They are dioecious, which means there are seperate male and female plant, and have cones rather than flowers.

Cycads are very common in the Australian fossil record They are generally very hardy plants and are still growing in many parts of the world. Most widely in South Africa, South America, the Pacific and Australia (as a relict of their Gwondanaland floral heritage). They are widely believed to have been a significant food source for dinosaurs. The seeds of many cycads are poisonous, containg BMMA, a neurotoxin which results from the cycad's roots close relationship with blue green algae that also helps these plants fixed nitrogen into the soil. In the pioneering days of european settlement in Australia, cycads where "harvested" as a rich source of starch, not for eating but as a laundring aid.

I have several sago palms, cycas revoluta, a japanese variety, which is probably the most popular cycad for cultivation. They where starting to look very unhealthy in the heat, the frond turning yellow and dropping down. Then just as I was worrying, two of the larger plants sent up new fronds. I am not sure if it was the heat, or the smoke hazy that triggered this change, I remember hearing that cycads are a type of plant that flourish after a fire

the bird nest fern

The birds nest fern,Asplenium australasicum, is a epihyte fern which is common in the tropical rainforests of northern australia and nearby pacific islands. It has long simple radianting fronds that are an attractive light green. Like the soft tree fern its inverted umbrella shape of fronds helps collect and channelwater and leaf matter down onto its growing center.

Of all the plants in my garden it is this fern that likes the highest humidty. I expect this to be the best indicator plant of creataceous-like condition in my garden. However since it doesn't have a true ground penetrating root system it does not really give me a representative view of the saturation/driness of the soil.

more yellow spots

Just noticed more yellow spotting, this time on a small cycad, is this a sign of drought stress, air pollution or another problem from the hail at christmas. For now I'll assume it is hail damage and the plant will recover.

cast in iron

The Aspidistra (Aspidistra elatior) better know as the cast iron plant was a very popular indoor foliage plant in the Victorian era. To the best of my knowledge it is not related to any Cretaceous plant species, it just looks a lot like some of them. It also has the massive advantage that it is thriving in the dry shady areas under the tree ferns.



They are angiosperms (flowering plants), but I haven't seen any flowers, apparently they occur at soil level and are only pollinated by terrestrial Amphipods little shrimp like creatures, (such as sand fleas, and other little bitty varmites). The angiosperms developed late in the jurrasic and spread extensively in the late cretaceous, particularly in the northern continent of laurasia.

Introducing the plants

How rude of me I have been rambling on mainly about watering and I forgot to introduce you to some of the important plants in my 100 million year old garden. The plants themselves are of course not that old, most are less than 10 years old. They are just the same or very similar species to those that existed back in cretaceous times.

Having a look at my plants I see that my Ginkgo Bilboa (Maiden Hair tree) has some spotting on the leaves. Not sure if this is drought stress or the result of hail at christmas. You can see a younger and happier leaf, on the same tree, in my photo blog, wandering in the light.

The gingko is not only a fascinating plant, it is the source of a powerful phytochemicals (commercially produced GBE or Ginkgo Bilboa Extract, is normally standardized to 24% ginkgo flavone glycosides and 6% terpene lactones) that has many claiming it as a wonder drug but it cannot be safely mixed with a number of common prescription medicines, including asprin. You can also dry the leaves yourself and make a great "pick me up" tea. Another amazing fact I found out about gingko is there are four special gingko trees that survived the 1945 atomic bomb at Hiroshima in Japan, and are still alive today.

Stay tune because I'll write a lot about my gingko

Deep Watering : Method #2

Our local Council, have long had the practice of adding about 30cm of flexiable tubing when they plant new street trees. They then come around every month of so on the trees first two summers and fill the pipe with water.

So this second method involves adding a pipe or other channel way to let you deliver water deep below the new developing roots when you do the planting. The same pipe can come in handy during dry spells. However trying to add pipe below existing plant may do more damage than good. If you buy plants in tubes (they are very economic to buy that way) a great thing to do is bury the tube (unfortunatey the tube pots are seldom longer than 10cm) right beside the plant as you are planting it, you can then fill this tube with water as the plant develops.

Naturally I do have a wollemi pine

Discovered in 1994, by David Noble in the Wollemi National park not far from Sydney, the wollemi pine [Wollemia nobilis] is a significant mscientific discovery. The rather bizarre pine is related to the monkey puzzle pine (of south america) and norfolk island pine. There are perhaps fewer than 100 adult specimens known in the wild. After being initially considered a new species, it was eventually matched to fossils from the mid cretaceous period 110 million years ago, and was believed to have become extinct about 65 million years ago. So it pretty natural that I should have one in my creataceous garden (well in a pot in my garden)

"This is the equivalent of finding a small dinosaur alive on earth" ... Professor Clarrick Chambers, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, December 1994

collage of photos for my photomacro autostitch
Originally uploaded by imageo.

The photo above is not a single photo it is a photomosaic stitched together from several photos. If you want to know how this portrait of my special tree was taken, go and have a look in my photoblog, called wandering in the light