Hardenbergia thrives in winter gloom

Despite all of Canberra’s winter glories – frost on the spider’s webs, stark, dappled tree trunks matched with starker shadows, great hanging heads of camellias – winter still means the vanishing of new leaves and no scent of new-mown grass and flowers (perfumes travel further in warm air). Canberra’s autumn and winter are seasons to celebrate. Our mid-summers and mid-winters are times to endure or to seek out compensations.

There is one major glory, though, that we get in Canberra. Hardenbergia loves us.

One hardenbergia vine is a glory, spreading several metres. A dozen or more are magnificence, unless the wallabies eat them first. Ours need to be trained up trees, not grown as ground covers, which some brilliant landscape gardener has done along some particularly stunning Canberra streets.

Heavy soil is almost as hard on hardenbergia as wallaby paws and teeth. The hardenbergia will flourish for a year or two, then wither and die. Choose the rockiest, most barren, sunny spot you have, and they will thrive. They don’t like humidity much, either.

Plant hardenbergia now and they’ll bloom for months from late winter to well into spring, especially if you feed and water them. But hardenbergia, still close to a wild native at heart (or gene pool), will still bloom even if it is totally ignored, which is why the wild ones here (Hardenbergia violacea) still look stunning every winter here in the bush. With hardenbergia, the best look is LOTS.

There are several cultivars around, most of which are more vigorous than the wild form, in shades of purple, mauve, lilac, white pink and variations on the theme. ‘Happy Wanderer’ wanders as well as its name suggests, with lilac rather than the deep purple blooms of the wild vine. Fast growing, it is superb as a ground cover for banks and bare sunny patches, but will also climb vigorously if you need to keep it away from wallabies or just want blossom on your crab apple tree in winter as well as spring.

Hardenbergia ‘Free’n’Easy’ has off-white flowers with a hint of lavender-pink. I suspect I’d find many others available this winter if I allowed myself a wander through the all-too-tempting local nurseries or websites and opened press releases from plant breeders instead of filing them under C for compost. Apologies to all the plant breeders out there, but by the time I get around to rrecommending new varieties they are usually no longer to be found in nurseries. Plus I like to write about the plants I have grown and love, not the ones I’ve only read about.

With exceptions. Like Hardenbergia comptoniana, which I gather has a mass of dark purple or white flowers and comes into flagrant bloom just as the H. violacea flowers are fading.

The vow that I won’t plant any new shrubs this winter doesn’t include H. comptoniana. Or come to think of it, just a few more H. violacea cultivars, twining up the bursaria bushes, out of wallaby reach.

This week I’m:

* piling leaves onto a sunny bed for next summer’s watermelon crops;

* stealing nutrients from the deep-rooted pear and apple trees for the more shallow rooted lime and orange trees – i.e. mulching the citrus with fallen apple and pear leaves;

* delighting in the flush of blooms from Climbing Ophelia, which isn’t supposed to happen till spring – she has obviously been confused by the mild weather and hopefully will stay confused and do it all again in spring;

* watching the honeyeaters in the last of blue salvia blooms and realising that I can’t prune them back till every bird-feeding flower has faded;

* realising it’s almost time for the annual vegetable seed buying spree!; and

* celebrating a banana flower! It took 20 years to get bananas fruiting here, and they only do so every three years or so. Actually they don’t taste of much, but watching bananas swell beyond the bathroom window is still a cause for celebration.