January 2020 - Andrea Whitely Garden Consultant

January 29, 2020August 7, 2024

This Week In The Garden…I Am Giving My Gardenias Some Love

Nothing quite says Summer for me than Gardenias. Have you always loved their heady fragrance? Feeling the urge to stick your nose against the screen right now??? I adore that divinely, and deliciously beautiful scent from the luscious white blooms and the emerald-colored glossy green leaves that can unmistakenly only be from the Gardenia.

I adore this fragrance and so of course despite the naysayers telling me that these can’t be grown very well in Perth, I set about to prove them wrong. These lovely plants with their glossy, tough, deep green leaves, do well in tropical settings as well as more formal gardens and of course a cottagey collectors style garden like mine.

Pots work well for me

I have always grown Gardenias well in pots or large planter boxes where I can control the soil composition and water. I use Baileys premium Potting Mix which has a neutral PH of about 7 pretty much every time you test it. It also has a good moisture-holding capacity and slow-release fertilizer. The pots are hand-watered when they need it so, I check the moisture of the soil-by sticking my finger in the pot and if it still feels moist then they are not ready for a drink-even if it is a hot day. Overwatering Gardenias, as with many other plants, will cause the roots to rot, particularly if the plant is potted. I regularly add Nutrarich Mature Compost and slow-release rose fertilizer to the potting mix so that these plants are always enjoying a mix filled with soil microbes and nutrients.

January 22, 2020August 7, 2024

This Week In The Garden, I Am….Making Changes To My Verge

Last week, we had some work done on our driveway. Our local council put in underground power last year and the light pole which was on the edge of the driveway has been moved to allow for much better access to our property. This has given me a great opportunity to make some changes and start a new project.

We renovated our house about 7 years ago and when we did the builders destroyed the lawn on the verge, which is the space between our property boundary and the road. Technically, homeowners do not own this space but have responsibility for it.

We used to have a well-maintained buffalo lawn in this space, that was reticulated and was constantly being repaired by my husband after damage caused by folks driving over the reticulation sprinkler heads. I really value my husband’s time and was always concerned about watering the lawn that we were never going to be able to use in a practical sense, as this space is mostly used for parking vehicles.

This is why, when it came to moving back into our house after the renovation, I decided to plant purple Agapanthus, yellow Hemerocallis day-lilies and delightfully purple Verbena boneriensis, immediately outside our picket fence and on the other side of the council-owned tree which is a very large and not my favourtite kind of tree, a Queensland Brush Box (Lophostemon confertus), I have been placing woodchips that I top up each year or so with mulch that comes from trimming the Fiddlewood, the Marri and the Jarrah trees in our back garden.