A Challenge Upon My Garden

There is a major force that influences the design and management of my garden and plants.

Here is a photo of it taken in stealth at night using only available light (so the photo is pretty blurry).  Can you see what it is?

Here is another photo taken on another day, with a flash, from a different angle.

Yes.  It's a possum with no head.

Why does it look like it has no head?

Because it is a possum with so little fear (or so little sense) it will wedge its head inside my bird feeder to steal the seed........even while I am standing nearby taking flash photos!

Actually, there are several possums who come to visit, and they didn't stop at the bird feeder.  They rather liked many of my plants - both decorative and edibles.  

These are brushtail possums which are about the size of a cat.  However they do not have the agility of a cat - they make a lot of crashing and thumping sounds as they jump and climb on things.  They also make a lot of noise calling, hissing, and grunting.

Both last year and this spring I have seen babies clinging onto a female - and then later see them following her - a very cute sight.  As a species they are not known to be very social creatures but if their habitat is too crowded, females especially will stay together and I think that is what is happening here because I often see more than one adult together at a time and many in a night. 

Accomodation may be limited in this environment, but the large numbers of pets in nearby houses don't seem to be a problem to them. And they certainly have enough to eat, from all the gardens around, pet food left outside, as well as the native plant leaves that they are supposed to be eating for a healthy diet!

Stay tuned for later posts to read about my adventures trying to protect my plants from these marauding marsupials.....

In My Garden Today - The Trick with Princess Lilies

These are my Princess Lilies which are flowering at the moment.  I am still coaxing some to produce more than one flower stalk (and there are two with no photographable flowers at all) but they look pretty impressive here in a strategically constructed collage.

I absolutely adore Alstroemerias, so for several years I have given myself an advanced Dwarf Alstroemeria (Princess Lily) for my birthday which is in November.  Each plant had one beautiful flush of flowers that had set in the nursery then faded away and ended up in plant heaven, despite the promises of copious flowers over a long period on the label.

But last year I learned that they do not like being buried too deeply as they shoot directly from their underground rhizomes, rather than shooting from stems above ground.

So I bought a set of little Princess plants online, at an end of season sale....and having been careful not to bury them too deep (the temptation to compost or mulch over the top is great but I am sticking to the rule) they have survived to this year and are bigger than when they arrived in little tubes wrapped in a parcel, if not as big as I'd like.

Because their growth comes from the rhizomes just below ground, the temperature of their soil and roots is important, so choose their postion and mulch carefully.  If the soil gets too hot the plant may produce many blind shoots without flowers, or become dormant altogether.  Once the weather cools in Autumn they should start to produce flowers again.

Ramms Botanicals who market Princess Lilies in Australia have an information sheet at http://www.ramm.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Alstroemeria-Princess-Lilies7.pdf
and there is another at the Garden Express Site where I bought mine -http://www.gardenexpress.com.au/alstroemeria-growing-notes.html

Each Princess has her own name, and I have Fabiana, Oxana, Camilla, Theresa and Letizia.

Blog Title Graphic Design

My Blog header uses the image from a postcard by A.L.West from a set called “Birds and Blossoms” published by Raphael Tuck & Sons Ltd in 1921.  It is in the public domain. It and scans of many other vintage postcards originally sold by that company can be found at http://tuckdb.org, which is a free database of their cards and postcards.  

Raphael Tuck & Sons Ltd were a significant force in the "postcard boom" of the Victorian era and a major influence in the development and popularity of the Christmas card.  They made a lasting impact on the artistic world because of the wide number of people at all levels of society that their affordable postcards reached.

The font is “KG Behind These Hazel Eyes”, Copyright (c) 2012 by Kimberly Geswein.  http://www.kimberlygeswein.com. It is licensed as freeware for personal use only.