I always look forward to autumn, with its warm, still days that get that chill in the afternoons that hints winter is coming. Our start to autumn has been glorious. Our batty friends appear to have moved on, but there’s still plenty of other wildlife around enjoying our mild days – dragonflies, corellas and possums, to name a few.
It’s been phenomenal to watch the number of people coming through - on even just a half decent day - making the most of what we have on our doorstep, both at the playground and throughout the grounds. Kids will spend hours at the zero-depth water park, and I’m getting lots of comments from people out enjoying the gardens. Make sure you say hi if you see me!
Autumn colour is already creeping in, particularly amongst the Maples whose leaves are turning pretty quickly this year. I’m excited for the Elm Forest to turn golden and get that beautiful leaf drop carpet, and then for the bulbs pop out underneath them in the next six to eight weeks.
The Garden for Life is looking great with lots of bits and pieces of colour about the place, as flowers start to wind up. The Climate Matched Gardens are also doing extremely well at the moment – considering they are designed to survive on what rain we get.
Another highlight is the Woody Meadow, which gets cut back to 300mm annually, as part of a University of Melbourne project. The garden is part of a global project, determining which plants are suitable as low input, low cost and resilient species for urban landscapes. It’s been four months since its last prune and everything is coming back with lots of reshooting.
As always, we’ve got plenty to do up here. We’ve got a couple of small projects on the books, but we’ll be mainly undertaking maintenance ahead of winter. This’ll involve lots of cutting back –particularly our deciduous species once they start to drop a few leaves, as well as deadheading from summer flowering.
With all the rain, things have grown really well but are starting to get out of scale in their beds. I’m hoping to divide up the Phormiums (New Zealand flaxes) in the Garden for Life - they get quite large and are starting to overpower the Callistemons. Most of our grasses have finished up, so we’ll start cutting them back a bit earlier this year. We’re also hoping to bring back the photinias, which have gotten a bit furry.
We’ll be renovating the TifTuf turf at the Garden for Life through the cooler months – scarifying, fertilising and doing some lower cuts. We’ve done a bit of sanding to fill some of the holes, and we want to get on top of the poa that seems to have self-seeded throughout.
We’ll also do some replanting in some of the beds – particularly around the Bill Cane Living Collection and the Bush Tucker Garden - and we’re looking to revamp the borders of the rose garden beds in the Sensory Garden. We’ve already cut back the lavenders – watch this space over winter.
Visitors might get a whiff of blood and bone around the place as we lay down some fertiliser.
For those gardeners at home, I recommend doing some similar work about the yard – cutting back, dividing, lawn work, fertilising and mulching. Now is a great time to get mulch on your garden beds to try and soak up the winter rain.
While there’s algal blooms in the lakes, irrigation has halted around the garden for safety reasons. Because the rain seems to have dried off, and we’re not irrigating, I expect mowing will be brought back to fortnightly.
The hotter days have really brought out areas where we’ve had discrepancies in the irrigation system, we’ve got a few spots where we’re still working on but other than that we’re extremely happy with how even our coverage has been.
As always, the Friends of Sale Botanic Gardens have been extremely helpful, tackling a mountain of work while they’ve been up, particularly in cutting back a lot. I’m looking forward to my time with them in the beautiful autumn weather.