Blooming Tough On Top Of The World
The Age
Saturday June 28, 2003
Himalayan plants prefer Melbourne's climate, writes Andrew Seccull.
From time to time, especially at this time of year, you tend to look at your garden or, to be more precise, particular plants in your garden, and wonder whether they are doing as well as they should compared with how they would grow in their natural environment.
Having recently been fortunate enough to travel to Nepal and trek through the Himalayas, I was able to spend many days walking up and down tracks, over hills and through valleys all covered with wild species of many of the plants that we grow in our gardens in Melbourne. The upside of the trip is that I was able to see what sort of conditions these plants had to put up with in real life and realised how much better off the plants were in my garden than these rangy mountain specimens. The downside was that no garden surrounds in Melbourne, no matter how beautiful and cultivated, could possibly compete with the spectacular mountain backdrop that was evident over there almost everywhere you looked.
The first thing you realise when you get there is that most of these plants do it pretty tough in the wild. Their natural habitat is cold and predominantly dry, except in summer when the monsoon comes through and dumps almost a year's rainfall in a few months. The second thing you realise is how much better most of the plants growing in your garden look compared with their wild cousins.
One plant that really stood out as special was the pure white magnolia, Magnolia denudata, which because of the size and clarity of its flowers stood out against the dark grey and green hillside like a beacon. They were certainly not as numerous as many of the other plants we came across, but were by far the most memorable.
Because we were there relatively early in the season not everything was in full flower. In the lower parts of the valleys the ground was dotted with the pale lavender/pink native primula, while further into the mountains small rabbit-eared iris leaves were popping up wherever there was sufficient sun, with their small stumpy leaves and purple flowers.
Pieris were one of the great surprise packages of the trip as they appeared to cope much better than many of the other mid-sized shrubs with the dry conditions. They were covered in clusters of small pearl-like scented flowers. In many cases constant clipping for stock fodder has kept these bushes stout and compact, which is something to keep in mind when dealing with them in your own garden.
Although still early in the season, the rhododendrons and azaleas were a bit disappointing, with most specimens showing the effects of a prolonged dry spell. The only place they really looked good was fairly high up into the mountains where, because of the shape of a valley, there is more reliable rainfall. Here we walked through rhododendron forests that, although not equal to some I have visited in the Dandenong Ranges, were as good as I saw in this part of the world. However, the visual impact of a single or group flowering of these predominantly pink or red-flowering small trees against the walls of the valley was spectacular indeed.
As with the rhododendrons, the azaleas that carpet much of the area underneath the forests of pine and birch appeared to be suffering from the dry weather as all were a bit straggly and pinched-looking, even in areas where there was water soaking out of the hill.
One plant that did appear to enjoy living at home was the Himalayan birch, Betula utilis, which is distinctive for its pinky-brown horizontal-flaking bark.
There are, on the other hand, some things that appear to remain the same no matter where you are in the world. The ubiquitous buttercup is as happy over there as it is in any Australian garden that I have seen, as are the foxgloves that pop up from between rocks along the trail and the wild strawberries that spill down over the walls. Most of these probably arrived over there stuck to the bottom of somebody's boot.
Back in Melbourne, galvanised with the information I had just gleaned from my trip, I was able to look at areas of the garden with new appreciation that, given the water restrictions already in place, these areas are not doing too badly at all compared with their cousins in the Himalayas. I now have every confidence that they will do even better again.
© 2003 The Age