Yaaaar!

This isnt a playground that I normally look after. I actually came here on a day off. The mowing crew boys tend to look after this one.

Everytime I see this playground I tend to get a little bit envious. I would have loved an epic pirate ship playground as a kiddly wink. Most of the playgrounds I would climb over were made of treated pine, towards the end of my childhood they were transitioning into the bright metal playgrounds you see all the time now.

It also turns out playgrounds have to have a going over at least once a week by someone who is playground certified. I have not done this course, so we get someone else to do it. It basically means that a person who is trained to look for hazards and potential dangers for children can look over the playground and check that it is still safe for a child to play on. For example a couple of weeks ago in the playground in memorial, the plastic cover had come off the safety chain on the baby swing. To me or you that doesnt sound like very much at all. The person we have check it zipped off to get a new plastic cover and promptly warned the people using the swing that the cover was missing and just to be aware of it. It seems like such an insignificant thing, but the links in the chain are small and babies fingers can get caught inbetween them. The idea never even occurred to me. It was fixed by the end of the morning making it safer for the children, and safer for children means I dont hear as many children crying that they have hurt themselves. This is a good thing, as some kids have a magnificent set of lungs when they get injured.

Hognails

These funny looking things are the blossoms of an Australian Rice Flower. They also go by the common names Pill Flower, Sago Bush or White Dogwood. They are relatively new on the market and have become popular in the last 10 years or so. My leading hand and I had been trying for ages to get a couple of plants in to try and see how they go. They can become quite tall shrubs, up to 2m tall. They are native to New South Wales and Queensland, so it may be a few more years before we fully see what they are capable of in our sandy Western Australian soils. They are hard as hognails when they are established, requiring little water and a good prune every so often. They are also very rewarding plants. You can get them in pink or white hues and they flower quite prolifically. The one in the photo has been in bloom for a good couple of months now. The flowers, even thought they are small, last a long time in flower arrangements and I have used them a couple of times in my floristry. Im excited to see what this plant does with itself over the next couple of years.

Fashion trend

Some people find it hard to believe that gardens go through the same trends as the fashion industry does. Sometimes you can pick when a garden was designed by what is planted in it. For example, this plant is a diosma and it was hugely popular towards the end of the 80's and the early 90's. Alot of gardens back then contained hedges of diosma or golden diosma (which is very similar to diosma, except new leaves have a golden look to them) and large cocos palms, the shadey areas would have had a tree fern or two. Diosma still remains a popular plant today, just not as much as used to be. For that I am quite thankful as when a diosma flowers, it only flowers on the semi-hardwood growth. These are the stems of the plant that are a good couple of months old and still have the redish tinge to the thin leaf covered stems. Unfortunately people with very manicured hedges often remove this growth. So if you are too vigorous with your hedging, then your diosma wont flower. Your best bet is to only prune it about 4-6 times a year, and not prune too hard into the old hard wood. Fingers crossed you let it grow for a bit as they look quite lovely when they are given the chance to blossom, they are a mass of pink or white flowers.

Stolen Puppy Love

One of the nice things about being based in the same parks every day is you get to know some of the patrons who visit the park quite frequently. Particularly the dog walkers. I have a great love of dogs and would gladly have a pet dog if my home and lifestyle allowed it. So I love speaking with the dog walkers, stealing pats where ever I am able. I talk or wave to the owners of these two dogs almost every morning. Responsible pet owners, there definately needs to be more of them in the world.

Techno Babble

Variegation is a term used to describe plants that have leaves that contain more then one colour. Green and white is the most common of combinations. I occasionally get asked why some variegated plants turn fully green when growing in the shade, or why variegated plants grow much slower then their plain green counterparts. Plants make food from a pigment in their leaves called Chlorophyll. It absorbs light to provide the energy for photosynthesis, the process in which plants turn carbon dioxide into oxygen, which in turn provides food for the plant to grow. Chlorophyll is green in colour, so where ever there is green on a plant, there is chlolorphyll. Where there is white, there is no chlorophyll, and that part of the plant is wholly dependent on the green parts to supply food to it. When there is very little light, plants are sometimes able to produce more chlorophyll and revert back to their natural green state, losing their variegation in order to make more food for the plant to survive. Variegated plants grow slower then their plain green counterparts as they just arent able to make as much food as the green plant. So there you have it, if youre a hungry plant, then variegation sucks. Man this is an educational blog today! Thanks for bearing with me.

Less Alien

I know people arent really fans of spiders, so I do try to keep spider posts to a minimum. I wanted to share this little guy with you all. He is my favourite type of spider, a Jumping Spider. I know that certain types of jumping spider can bite, so as always treat them with respect. I wanted to get a shot of his face, but he was not going to play. Jumping Spiders hunt down and pounce on their prey, so they have a lovely pair of large eyes which makes them seem less alien then most web building spiders. If I do manage to find a photogenic Jumping Spider, promise I will put a photo up :)

Nom

More weed tutorials. This is Soursob. It is part of the oxalis family. As a kid I used to chew the flower stems for their sour taste. Which is most likely where the name comes from. It is harmless to humans, but I know it can be toxic to live stock when consumed in large quantities, and for a plant that rarely produces fruit or seed it is surprisingly good at dispersing itself through human activity (moving around of contaminated soils, etc). They can also be spread via water ways as the bulbs float and will travel downstream. Unfortunately the easiest way to control soursob is to spray it with Round Up or any selective turf herbicide if it is growing in lawn (such as Bindie, etc), and it can take several years to get it fully under control if the infestation is a bad one.

Taking a Breather

Wearing flouro can be a double edged sword at times. It is a colour that is very attractive to certain insects. Which is great when you have butterflies, ladybird beetles, etc, landing on you for a breather or thinking that youre a flower. Unfortunately the colour is also rather attractive to bees, Im not afraid of them but I am allergic. So I just worry that one day I wont notice a bee resting on me and startle the little guy into stinging me. Fingers crossed I get more visitors like this delightful damselfly.

Blossom Scent

There are a couple of common names for this plant, so it is easy to get tripped up on it. I have always known it as an Orange Jessamine, joys of working in a Retirement Village for 2 years, you very quickly learn all the old fashioned names for plants. Most people in the gardening industry will just refer to it by its genus name of Murraya. Its full botanical name is Murraya paniculata. It is a large shrub, up to 2m and very good for hedging. What I like about it the most is it has the most magnificent scented flowers. They smell very similar to orange blossom, and the scent really travels on warm days. I absolutely love it. They are quite a hardy plant when established. If the soil around them is rich then the leaves will take on a lovely deep green colour. If they are growing in sand with very little nutrients, then the leave have a much more yellowey appearance to them. They have rather shallow roots, so try to keep the mulch up to them and prevent drying out. Otherwise, Id recommend growing them for the blossom scent alone.

Just why?

Ok, somewhere in the cosmos is a list of items you never expect to find in a park. A list that stretches the imagination and logic sections of your brain, to ponder how said items came to be in a park. I now get to add Tomato Shaped Kitchen Timer to that list. This is exactly how I found it. It has not been dropped or fallen out of a bag. It is not in an area that requires timing for races or any sports event. It is by the tourism office, near the town hall. Somebody has just decided that the perfect place for such a timer, is right there. I do believe I spent the better half of the morning trying to figure out why it was there. I was torn between whether it was Aliens that were baking human sacrifices in a lunar oven, or whether the wooden pillar has suddenly decided to sprout colourful plastic fruit offerings for the Wooden Pillar Gods of old.