Cool Weather Changes

I have always loved that in our lovely warm climate in Brisbane, we can garden all year round. No frost to kill off tender plants, no frozen ground that’s too hard to dig (dry and crusty maybe - but not frozen!), beautiful lush green plants all year round. In fact, the cooler months are often a better time in the garden for us because it’s still relatively warm and there’s no scorching sun and flooding rain to obliterate everything.

Although we don’t have typical deciduous trees that turn beautiful golden tones in autumn and reveal their structural bare stalks through winter, we (or at least I) have one significant plant group that turns up its heels and leaves giant gaping holes in what was a green leafy oasis.

*Curcuma sparangifolia* - only 30cm tall, with gorgeous flowers that are held quite high.

Turmeric! I grow a number of turmeric varieties - mostly for their beauty. Some have short leaves and delicate flowers, others have giant leaves, over a metre tall, and huge blooms peaking out at ground level. (Check out my blog on black turmeric). They look exceptionally full and tropical over summer. And then as soon as the cooler nights hit they start drooping, yellow off, and shrivel up - no bronzing foliage and architectural twigs here, just general death. Every year I’m left with massive bare patches that have me promising to come up with a cold weather solution. Some years I re-jig that garden space, dig up the hefty clump of dormant rhizomes, and relocate them elsewhere, but then of course, I’ve just shifted the problem for the next year! Mostly I embrace the emptiness which allows a little more sunlight into other patches, and simply cover the dead foliage with a layer of mulch… which of course only looks neat for approximately 30 seconds before it’s fair game for my tiny feathery dinosaurs. But it’s only a few short months before I have my leafy jungle back.

Plum Gorgeous

Giant Milkweed