Month: March 2019

Garden Loving Colleages, hoping you will join me at beautiful ‘Clifton’ in Hunters Hill for a Masterclass on cool subtropics planting to suit our coastal    Sydney gardens.

Felicity McCaffery, owner of ‘Clifton’ and Hunters Hill Open Gardens Convenor, has agreed to host my talk to shed further light across the dazzling array of planting bandwidth that fits between our cool subtropical goal posts.

See a 40 minute keynote presentation with 20 minutes for questions, of a selection of my Sydney designs and the current home work garden ’Sea-Changer’ at Forresters Beach, Central Coast, on how to make a better garden in warm temperate, coastal, frost free growing conditions.

Find out more about what cool sub-tropics gardening is and the exciting plants you could be growing that are a fit to our brief winters and long sultry, thunder storm filled summers to make your garden great again. Part Wendy Whiteley’s garden at Lavender Bay, expanded into seasonal colour blasts, year round textural contrasts, low maintenance and next to nil predation.

The Masterclass includes a cool subtropics mini tube plant to try at home, plus free admission to my         ‘Sea-Changer’ garden on Saturday 4th May 10am – 2pm, 21 Lavinia Street, Forresters Beach.

Limited numbers for this exciting talk and something to look forward to after Easter Holidays!! To hold the event Felicity and I need to get an idea on numbers. To add your name to the door list, see ‘Leave a Reply’ at the bottom this post and add yourself and your best garden buddy in the comments field. Look forward to seeing you on the day… EXCITEMENT !! 

WHERE: ‘Clifton’ 7 Woolwich Road, Hunters Hill

WHO: Garden Designer Peter Nixon – Paradisus

WHEN: 10am – 11.30am, Wednesday 1st May ’19

RSVP: to show you’d like to attend please send by Friday 5th April

COST: $25 pp at the door

BENEFICIARY: L’Arche 4 Sydney  

Bright Shade Gardens … can bring instant relief to our long hot summers. Entering garden space with this quality revives the head and the soul, with a languid coolness from searing heat. But what are the rare beauties that furnish shade gardens and give them fresh appeal year round…?

Jungle Cactus are true epiphytes you can use on larger host trees with big enough limbs  to support an accumulation of leaf litter and bark for them to grow in. They also adapt for terrestrial growing in open ground, providing the medium they grow in can be replicated in mounds of organic material mixed with bark chip to ensure sharp drainage with some moisture retention. Bright shade beneath large tree canopies with a little summer water will bring a blast of jockey silk colours to your design for the October garden.

 

 

Lithophytic Plants often form featured parts on the shade garden and if you did have introduced or lucky enough to have natural rock boulder or exposed bedrock, Cylogene flaccida is a very appealing alternative to Dendrobiums or Rock Orchids, making delicate early spring trails.

 

 

So many amaryllids made alluring subjects for the shade garden you know … to expand from the basic clivea and crinums like the gorgeous Scadoxus and all its tribe and especially S. multiflorus subsp. katarinae. Give it a fair bit of space where it’s not forced to compete for resources and avoid low overhanging canopy closer than 3 meters. A fair clump size clump develops around a meter across in 5 years or so and you’ll be rewarded with a rush of coral stars before the end of January.

Keith Tollis is a font of useful information as to best fit of his plants to your growing conditions so the selection is culturally right and ornamentally impressive.

By appointment 0409 302 304 at his Salt Ash growing space and garden.