One of the best plant combinations I’ve ever seen was in the garden at Vineyard Cottages in Ballandean. On a central arbour marking the axis of two intersecting paths is a yellow banskia rose, and a purple Chinese wisteria. The two were in flower when I visited a number of years ago, and the image will be forever burnt in my memory. The purple and yellow flowers set against the hazy blue backdrop of Sundown National Park was simply stunning!

Is it any wonder? Everything about the combination is spot on. Yellow and purple complement each other on the colour wheel, which means that in theory, the combination should work nicely. But as any half knowledgeable artist will tell you, mixing colours also has a lot to do with combining the right shades of a certain colour. In the case of banksia rose, the yellow is a soft lemon shade, which means it teams perfectly with the wisteria’s dusky lavender.

But there’s more to a good plant combination than colour alone. The other reason banksia rose and wisteria work so well together is that they both like very similar growing conditions. Because they hail from the botanical hotspot of southern China, which has a climate ranging from alpine to subtropical, the two plants thrive right across the Darling Downs. Cold winters aren’t a problem, nor is drought, heat, or heavy black soil.

The only major difference between the two plants is the way in which they are pruned. Banksia roses are a cinch. Unlike most modern shrub roses that flower on the current season’s growth, banksia roses flower on wood that grew last summer, and the plants only flower once in spring. So if you’re going to prune you should do so just after the plant has finished flowering. This will give the new wood a chance to form before the plant goes dormant in winter. Don’t prune in winter like you would other roses. If you do, you’ll cut off all the flowering wood for the following spring.

Wisterias are a bit harder to prune, but they’re not as difficult as many gardeners imagine. Unlike banksia roses, wisteria flowers on short, finger-like spurs that form along lateral branches growing from the main trunk. With this in mind, wisterias are pruned for two reasons: to keep the plant relatively compact, and to encourage the formation of these flower spurs.

Ideally, wisterias are pruned twice a year. After the plant has finished flowering in spring it will start to send out lots of whippy shoots. In summer, these “side shoots” can be pruned back to about 30cm from where they originate on the lateral branch, leaving about four to six leaves on the shoot. If you want to extend the plant, leave some of these side shoots in place to grow on. Then in late winter, shorten the side shoots you pruned in summer even further. Take them back to about two or three buds. This will encourage the side shoots to become flowering spurs, and all being well, you’ll get to enjoy a magnificent display of flowers in September.

Besides staying on top of summer and winter pruning, the other way you can encourage wisteria to flower is by growing them in quite lean soil. Avoid applying lots of high nitrogen fertiliser. All this will do is tell the plant to send out new growth and you’ll end up with a triffid-like monster that never flowers but does a great job of crushing your back fence with it’s weight. Fertilise your banksia rose after pruning to encourage new flowering wood, by all means. But with your wisteria you should either avoid fertilising altogether, or at most, apply some “flower and fruit” fertiliser that’s low in nitrogen but high in potassium and phosphorous.

Finally, if you’re going to grow a banksia rose/wisteria combination, it pays to give a bit of thought to what you’re going to use to support the plants. Strength is a primary consideration, as a mature wisteria is heavy, and a mature banskia rose only slightly less so. In the garden down at Ballandean the plants were trained on an arbour made from solid hardwood, but they also had a wisteria growing on a solid post-and-rail boundary fence. If you’re handy with a welder, or know someone who is, steel can be a more reliable choice.

Combining plants for best effect is an art form, just like any other. Good combinations are hard to achieve, so if you’re after a showstopper for your garden, take my advice – banksia rose and wisteria are a match made in horticultural heaven.

First puublished in the Toowoomba Chronicle 1st October 2011. Photo by Justin Russell, wisteria and banksia rose, Vineyard Cottages, Ballandean.

St Patrick’s Day has come and gone for another year and a question beckons: did you get your sweet peas in? March 17 is the traditional date to sow Lathyrus odoratus seed on the Darling Downs, but in truth, sweet pea seed can be sown anytime in early to mid autumn, and if you miss the boat this season, you even get a second chance by sowing in early spring.

Nonetheless, St Pat’s Day is as good a reminder as any, so last Thursday afternoon you would have found my wife Kylie, brilliant woman that she is, racing against dusk to get her seeds in the ground. She’s hoping for a display the equal of what we had last November, but I fear that it ain’t gonna happen. The unusually wet spring of 2010 contributed to the lushest growth I’ve ever seen on sweet peas, to the point that our four metre long row of plants grew so tall that they almost doubled their six foot trellis. Flowers appeared in genuine profusion, and the resulting scent was mind-bendingly intoxicating.

Our garden is a joint passion, and therefore, a joint effort, yet Kylie doesn’t often get recognised for the many hours of work she puts in alongside me. So it was nice to hear visitors complimenting her on the sweet peas, and even asking for some tips on how to grow them.

Kylie starts, as all clever gardeners should, with the soil. What you’re aiming for with sweet peas (and edible peas for that matter) is a well worked soil that’s full of organic matter but not overly rich in nitrogen. Too fertile, and you’ll get lots of lush foliage growth at the expense of flowers. The solution is compost. A month or so prior to sowing Kylie adds a decent barrow load of home made compost to the sweet pea bed, as well as generous handful of lime per square metre to balance out any acidity. Some blood and bone will help provide slow release nutrients without making the soil too fertile.

Her next tip is to use saved seed. As the sweet pea season comes to a close each year we leave some pea pods on the vines to dry out. These are harvested and stored in a cool, dry place until autumn, before being soaked in a bowl of water the night before St Patrick’s Day. Nothing special is added to the water. The soaking alone helps the seeds absorb moisture, and by the following day, they’ve swelled up and are ready to go in the ground.

I should note that to save your own seed, you’ll need to grow an open pollinated, heirloom variety of sweet pea. If you try to save seed from a hybrid, the offspring won’t grow true to type, which simply means that you’ll get a bunch of seedlings that revert to either of the original hybrid’s parent varieties. Kylie mostly grows ‘Matucana’, an old variety from the 1920’s that bears bicoloured violet and maroon flowers with a knockout scent. The Diggers Club is a good source of heirloom sweet pea seed.

Beware the modern sweet peas. These are often sold in punnets at garden centres, and while they produce showy flowers, many are completely devoid of scent. It seems completely stark raving bonkers to me, that plant breeders would deliberately breed scent out of a plant bearing the species name “odoratus” but that’s plant breeders for you. As English garden writer Monty Don says, a sweet pea with no smell is like food without flavour.

Once you’ve got the seeds in the ground, be it on March 17 or whenever, it’s important not to overwater. If the seeds were soaked and the soil watered upon sowing, there is plenty of moisture for germination to occur, so hold off with the water until the seedlings appear in about seven days. As your seedlings grow, it will probably be necessary to tie them loosely to the trellis to get them heading in the right direction until the tendrils get a grip. Keep them powering along with regular moisture and a monthly application of liquid fish emulsion.

If you planted in autumn, you’ll be enjoying flowers by late spring or early summer. Don’t waste such special blooms by leaving them all on the plant – Kylie harvests the flowers regularly for use inside the house. She gives lots away to friends. The key is to just keep picking, because the more you pick, the longer the plants will flower. Eventually though, flowering will cease. This is your cue to let the pods dry out, in preparation for another magnificent display of colour and scent next year.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 26th March 2010. Photo by Justin Russell, Matucana sweet peas, Thistlebrook, October 2010.

My wife’s Grandma, Rachel Flett, grew up as the only girl amongst eleven brothers on a scrubby holding at Kogan on the western Downs. Born just prior to the start of the Great War in 1912, Rachel came of age during the Great Depression. She experienced first hand its food shortages, drought and unemployment, but also its happy times, marrying local boy Edwin Flett in 1934 and making a home at the family property “Verland”, south east of Chinchilla.

By all accounts, Rachel was a skilled homemaker. She had to be. Feeding eleven brothers, and eventually six of her own children, in an era without supermarkets, satellite internet or seven-day-a-week shopping, is no small feat. Kylie recalls that during visits to the farm, the pantry was always well stocked with bottle upon bottle of jams, preserves, chutneys and pickles.

These goods were all well loved by the Fletts. But nothing was quite as prized as Grandma’s grape jam. One of the family’s favourite stories recalls the event following Rachel’s death in 2001 when a grandson found the last remaining jar of jam tucked away at the back of the pantry. So treasured was the find, and so treasured its maker, that the event was cause for great celebration. The story goes that everyone present tucked into grape jam and fresh cream sandwiches for lunch, and recalled a life well lived.

The grape variety Grandma Flett used to make her jam is Isabella. To this day the original vine, thick as a big bloke’s forearm, trails across a pergola above the back door of the farmhouse and despite no attention, still offers cooling shade and still bears grapes. I’m not sure that anyone makes jam from its fruit anymore, but the old Isabella vine is testimony to how much value generations of home growers can get for an investment of less than $20.

If you’re after a plant that’s ornamental, edible, resilient, long-lived, easy to propagate, and makes a wonderful jam, a grape vine is the plant for you. I’ve got four different table varieties planted along one side of my vegie patch: Sultana, Centennial Seedless, Crimson Seedless and for sake of nostalgia as much as its usefulness, an Isabella. All are setting fruit as I write, and if I manage to beat the possums and the King Parrots, we’re in for a heavy crop.

Of the four, Centennial Seedless and Crimson Seedless are the most manageable while Isabella and Sultana grow like the dickens. Every summer these two get unruly growth headed right back to the main arms while the canes I want to keep get tied to the trellis. Even so, the plants put on so much growth that I reduce their overall size by up to two thirds during winter. While dormant, I also spur prune all four varieties, which essentially involves cutting back all long canes to stubs of just two or three buds evenly spaced along the main arms.

Beyond pruning, grapes need little in the way of care. They are very drought tolerant, and will actually get sweeter during dry seasons as the sugars concentrate in the fruit. They don’t need lots of fertiliser, and their only main vice is a varying susceptibility to fungal diseases. Powdery mildew is probably the most common, but can be effectively controlled with a potassium bicarbonate based spray (such as EcoFungicide) during summer.

At this stage, Isabella is the only grape I grow that’s considered “dual purpose”. It’s a very old Vitis labrusca cultivar that was traditionally used as a wine grape, particularly in humid coastal areas because of its natural resistance to fungal diseases. Isabella makes a perfectly acceptable, though unspectacular wine, and is now more commonly grown as a table grape or even better, for cooking.

One of the main reasons Isabella grapes are so good for jam making is that unlike more modern table varieties, the fruit contains seeds. As any jam maker worth their salt knows, seeds usually contain pectin, and pectin is the magical ingredient that makes jam set. Isabellas fit the bill perfectly. So perfectly in fact that Kylie’s Mum recalls many hours spent leaning over boiling saucepans, sweat streaming from her forehead, skimming grape pips from the surface of the jam. Claims she lost weight every time it happened, but I bet the results were worth it.

I never got to taste Grandma Flett’s grape jam, but wish that I did. It sounds like the perfect accompaniment to my home baked sourdough, so I’m hoping that a new family tradition develops this summer: Kylie’s grape jam made with fruit harvested from our very own Isabella vine.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 14th November 2010. Photo by Flora Cyclam via flickr.

Every season has its stand out plants, those that prefer the conditions more than the others, and perform to their peak potential. When it’s dry in my garden, things like apricots and mulberries come to the fore. This spring, it’s my climbing roses of all things, particularly “Pierre de Ronsard’ and its cousin ‘Red Pierre’.

Both plants are looking absolutely magnificent, and they haven’t even burst into flower yet. The glossy new foliage is tinted maroon and fat round buds are forming all the way along arched canes, and in a week or two, the plants will be smothered with what I consider to be some of the most stunning flowers in the whole plant kingdom.

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) was a French poet who served in the court of Charles IX of France and for three years in the court of James V of Scotland. Pierre was known both as the “Prince of Poets” and as a very keen gardener. To honour the 400^th anniversary of his death in 1985, the Paris city council suggested that famous rose company Meilland might name a rose after de Ronsard.

The company agreed, and chose a climbing rose from the nursery’s trial beds as the plant to bear the Pierre de Ronsard name. At the time, old rose varieties were out of fashion, but Pierre’s romantic, cupped blooms were deemed so different to anything else on the market that the company were desperate to commercialise the variety. The rest, as they say, is history. Pierre de Ronsard was an instant hit with gardeners. In 2006 the World Federation of Rose Societies voted Pierre de Ronsard the “World’s Favourite Rose”, and the variety remains an international best seller.

Women tend to really like it, and while I tend to go for “manlier” colours like blood red, I can definitely appreciate the romantic image Pierre de Ronsard coveys. The flower colour is like strawberries and cream, off white petals blushed with carmine-pink at the tips. This unique colour, combined with the voluptuous bloom shape, conjures up scenes of medieval maidens picking olives on hot Tuscan hillsides.

Then, in 2006, Meilland released ‘Red Pierre de Ronsard’. Bred as a companion for Pierre, Red Pierre has similar cupped blooms, but in a raspberry red colour that is less romance and more flamenco fire. I’ve got mine growing on an old shed, and I absolutely love the contrast of sumptuous flowers with rusty iron and weathered timber. The delicious light tea scent is almost an afterthought.

Both Pierre and Red Pierre are genuine, strong growing climbing roses. This means that they have a natural tendency to produce long, stiff canes, often heading straight up toward the sky. However the more upright they grow, the greater the flow of sap through the canes and the less inclined they are to produce flowering buds.

The foliage on both roses is attractive, but the main reason I grow them is for their flowers, so it’s important to train the plants appropriately. In the first couple of years after planting minimal pruning should be done, other than to tidy up any wayward growth. Once some decent canes have developed, they should be trained as close to horizontal as possible to slow down the flow of sap and promote flowers along the stem. In winter, about a third of the oldest canes can be pruned back to the base of the plant to encourage new canes to form, and the lateral branches growing from the remaining canes can be shortened to just a few buds or about 15 centimetres. Next summer the shortened branches will be covered with flowers.

I’ve found both Pierre and Red Pierre to be extremely healthy roses. I’m not a particularly fastidious sprayer of roses at the best of times, and prefer to choose disease resistant varieties that will look good despite my lack of attention.

To date, I haven’t sprayed my Pierre’s with anything. Pierre is growing adjacent to the fertile ground of the chook run, so it gets no attention beyond pruning, and Red Pierre on the old shed simply gets some organic fertiliser in spring and summer. Any outbreaks of black spot have been very minor, and so far the roses have been free of powdery mildew.  Perhaps the only issue I’ve encountered is that the flowers don’t last very long in damp weather before turning to mush.

Our resident possums are another story. They have a fondness for eating roses that is almost on par with their fondness for rhubarb leaves. Who could blame them? If there’s a more beautiful pair of climbing roses than Pierre and Red Pierre, I’m yet to find them.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 16th October 2010. Photo by Justin Russell – Red Pierre.

My wife had a long held dream of owning a garden containing an arbour festooned with honeysuckle. It sounds romantic, doesn’t it, but I felt compelled to remind her that in our last garden we grubbed out trailer loads of the stuff after it went rampant under prior ownership and was on the verge of taking over the whole front garden. Well, her dream has come true. At our front gate is an arbour covered in honeysuckle, currently flowering its rampant little head off.

I have to admit that the scent of honeysuckle carried on a gentle breeze is like nothing else. Fruity, with a hint of pineapple, it almost convinces me to be appreciative. But I remain wary. Honeysuckle is one of those plants that’s welcome when kept in check, but hated when its invasive nature gets the better of it. The vines have a tendency to flop along the ground and form new roots, so I keep it on a firm leash with regular pruning and I never give it any fertiliser. For now, the honeysuckle earns a reprieve because it makes Kylie happy. And you know what they say, happy wife, happy life.

The experience many people have with climbers is that they are invasive, destructive, and even a bit alien like. People have visions of their homes being swallowed up by a rampant climber from the jungles of South America, and there is some reality to this scenario. Some climbers do come from jungle environments where they have to climb vigorously toward the light. Others are naturally adapted to growing on trees, and are able to cling without the need for tendrils. Others form heavy vines that will crush a support lacking in strength. But there are some that have a temperament more conducive to gardens. They play nicely, don’t destroy fences and won’t get in to the ceiling or crack the brickwork.

Wisteria grows strongly and needs a solid support but it could hardly be described as rampant. Likewise edible grape vines. They’ll do a brilliant job of shading a chook house without reducing it to rubble. Another favourite of mine is the old fashioned snail vine, Vigna caracalla. It’s a bean relative that grows quickly in spring before putting on a beautiful display of curly flowers in summer, regardless of heat and drought. In my frosty garden it is deciduous, dying back to the ground in winter before shooting from a permanent root in October. If you live in one of the more subtropical parts of the Downs, I’d be inclined to put this plant into the class above – slightly rampant. Keep an eye on it.

More genteel again, and a darling of landscape designers, is Chinese star jasmine or Trachelospermum jasminoides (if you can pronounce that name on your first try, congratulations). It’s not a true jasmine, but is so named because of its flowers. These are born profusely in summer and have a delicious sweet scent. I also like the plant for the rich autumn tones it carries over winter, and not least for the fact that even after it gets going, it won’t take over the whole backyard. A related species Trachelospermum asiaticum is an equally good plant, though a smaller and slower grower. Both will do well in a soil high in organic matter, will happily grow in shade, and are reasonably drought tolerant once established.

Even more genteel, in fact downright shy by all reputations is one of the world’s best loved climbing plants, the hybrid clematis. I haven’t yet grown it personally, but according to those who have there are a couple of important rules of thumb to bear in mind for successful cultivation.

One is that clematis demand a position with a cool root run, but they like plenty of sun to promote flowering. An easy way to achieve this is by covering the soil adjacent to the plant with a flat rock, or by using plenty of mulch. It’s also a good idea to choose a spot that gets some afternoon shade. Rule two is that clematis love a rich soil, so add lots of rotted manure or compost prior to planting and top dress every spring. Rule three is that clematis are not drought tolerant. They like an evenly moist soil. If you successfully grow roses in your garden, you should be able to grow clematis, and considering the sheer beauty of their flowers, they would be worth all the time and patience you can afford.

First published in The Chronicle 21st November 2009. Photo by James Jordan via flickr.com