My native violet layed down for a very good rest, but bounced up this morning after a watering and some rain today. The lomandra looked thirsty, but still pretending to be green. the prostanthera's were screaming out for water, but otherwise everything pulled through. ( I did get out the watering can yesterday in preparation) Yesterday was a rare day that I applauded my garden's lack of sun exposure, which may have just given it the edge on survival ability. In any case, we're just glad there were no fires close by. happy new year Andrea

Nothing had trouble in my garden (and everything is in pots). The reason was two-fold I think: a) Our garden has a hedge along the north side and a light canopy that stopped the wind. b) we only moved them a few weeks ago and anything that was going to lose leaves had already lost them in the move. I hope we don't get too many more of those though.

Yup well my garden was certainly very hot. Full sun all day there were a few plants that seemed to fare better than others. The Grevilleas, only 5 months old, seemed not to be affected. However the native violets that have popped up have a severe case of sunburn :-( The poas, lomandra and native fuschia's (mental blank as to their real name) all did amazingly well. We have had 3 days in the high 40's and with the smell of the mulch very strong in my nostrils I knew it was not going to be pretty. I did put the water on, sub mulch drippers, for 2 hours early in the morning on the first hot day. I am thankful that my garden has survived but feel really sorry for those who have lost their gardens in fires as well as their homes. I wish everyone a Happy and Safe New Year, plenty of lovely gardening hours and please no more fires! Happy Gardening to you all. Julia

My garden on the Central Coast is a bit like a bomb site. The Cyatheas are burnt to a crisp. Lots of my Michelias, Lilly pillies, Native gingers, and many other rainforest plants have had a severe pruning. Some, I think I may have lost. The ones that were recently watered are not too bad; just the tips are burnt. I guess if there is enough moisture in the ground they can minimise damage by transpiring as much as possible. I have a couple of Costus plants and they appear to have been roasted. The main worry is that there is bound to be more of these days before summer has passed. We are on tank water here and so we need to be sparing when watering the garden. As well, we are right beside a National Park so fire is always a worry.

My garden has got a pounding, as well. I have never seen it so bad. All my ferns are brown, including my birds nest fern. My Waratah is half burnt, and the Banksias. I think they will all bounce back though, they are tough plants. I too live near bush, Robert, and have tank water, its tough on those hot days. I think the key is to prepare for the heat. The day before the furnace day, I sat all my small pots in water and put shadecloth over them. They have done well, but I have lost half my seedlings. I must admit, I was getting ready for a fire, got all the hoses ready, got buckets in the cupboard, and started thinking about what I would take with me. Apart from jewellery and photos, couldnt really think of anything else ! BIG CHEERS FOR ALL THE WONDERFUL PEOPLE WHO LOOK AFTER US, WHEN THE FIRES ARE ABOUT !! Popi

So sorry to hear that you had a bad day Popi......Good to hear that you are OK...And yes I agree a big cheer for all those wonderful people.....MM.

My God, 45 deg. I thought it was hot in Bris but you win. Glad to hear you are all ok! Cam.

Hi All, I just answered Marion's post on the same topic in the 'Gardening in Oz' forum, but its reassuring (?) to know that others are suffering the same woes with the heat. The difference is that Rocky has several months of 35-42 deg days each year, and I know from past experience that getting plants through that first Summer is the hard part. That said, tree ferns are a real worry - I even installed a couple from New Guinea as they were marketed as 'sun hardy' - the survivor lives under a tarp and is looking pretty sad. Overall, its the combination of hot, blustery winds followed by a still 40deg day that I consider the worst possible combination - to see established Aussie Southern lillipillies getting burnt is unusual in my experience, and the rest of the garden really gets a hammering when something that tough gets sunburnt. As I said in my other post, Melalucas and Allocasuarina may have been a better choice for my canopy than the rainforest species I've chosen, but I'll perservere. March is only a couple of months away :) Cheers, Artie

Interesting observation....after driving around the area and seeing all the other sun damage to plants....most of the exotics seem to have done better than the native plants. I saw a council planting of CISSUS ANTARCTICA and it was completely dead, brown, caput. The F3, expressway was closed on Sunday for a while, saw the result of that fire, yesterday, still smoking and strong smell of smoke.

I think the reason exotics might seem to do better than native plants is that we gardeners do have a tendency to plant "natives" which aren't really native to our particular patch of soil/climatic zone at all. They may be Australian plants, but grown outside their natural range they're really just another exotic.
Even our local plants only occur in specific contexts. e.g rainforest plants like Cissus don't normally grow out in the open.
I've been experimenting with "dry rainforest" species, rather than "rainforest" plants. Both occur naturally in my local area, but I've decided that I can't create a rainforest micro-environment given the (possibly permanent) drought we're having. They have come through the hot spell unaffected. I could also grow dry sclerophyll plants, but find the "dry rainforest" (softwood scrub) plants more interesting and apparently just as drought hardy. They are often the same genera as the rainforest plants, but tend to be species with smaller or narrower leaves. They have that "rainforesty" fresh green look about them , and do very well for heat and sun-resistance.
Some species I've found good are Celerywood (Polyscias elegans), Deep Yellowwood (Rhodosphaera rhodanthema), Ribbonwood (Euroschinus falcata),Soap Tree (Alphitonia excelsa), Hollywood (Auranticarpa rhombifolia) and the birds'eyes (Alectryon species). Brachychiton species are particularly good - and their fire-retardant properties make them look a very desirable proposition just now!

Thats a good point, Trish. My ferns that are burnt, are local species, but I guess they are not growing in dense shade, and they dont have the trees they would normally have around them...if they were in their normal situation. We could also make the observation that nature knows best, and the plant associations are like that for a reason. The plants you are growing....are they local species ?

I have being holidaying in Tassie so surprises me the heat wave we had but came back to see all my waratahs bar 1 scorched every thing else was fine
spent a whole year looking after those things oh well maybe nextime!!!

Yes, Popi. I'm trying to convert my garden to having the basic structure in local natives with local provenance. It's not easy, especially when you live in a place like Toowoomba, away from the capital cities and the better-known ecosystems. The bigger the local nursery, the less help it is, as they tend to get their "natives" from the bigger suppliers down south.It's required a lot of research (great fun, of course) and the need to make local contacts for supply. Once found, however, the local plants do really well. The interesting thing is to discover just how many very attractive native plants haven't made it into the mainstream of "native gardening".

Hi Trish,

"...Some species I've found good are Celerywood (Polyscias elegans), Deep Yellowwood (Rhodosphaera rhodanthema), Ribbonwood (Euroschinus falcata),Soap Tree (Alphitonia excelsa), Hollywood (Auranticarpa rhombifolia) and the birds'eyes (Alectryon species). Brachychiton species..."

I have all of those, except celerywood and Alectryon species. Also Red and White Cedar. I'm told the timber workers last century removed heaps of Red Cedar from the escarpment at Toowoomba. I have Black Bean too - it's growing down the end of Palm Gully at Ravensbourne National Park.

Have you seen the Euroschinus falcata at the entrance to the lower rainforest walk at Ravensbourne NP? (There are more Black Beans there too.) It is mislabelled as Euroshinus falcatum or something similar I think from memory. There is some sort of Brachychiton in that National Park too, but I have only spotted juvenile plants there. I have seen a Brachychiton spp at the southern end of Hume Street that was at a common property boundary and highly unlikely to have been planted by human hands. There is another one near the old meatworks at Wallangarra.

I made up my own list of arid rainforest trees, if the terms are not mutually exclusive:

Angophora floribunda
Geijera parviflora
Brachychiton populneus ssp. Populneus
Brachychiton rupestris
Petalostigma triloculare
Flindersia maculosa
Flindersia australis
Atalaya hemiglauca
Pittosporum phylliraeoides (you have a new name now)
Pittosporum rhombifolium (ditto)
Santalum lanceolatum
Ficus platypoda var. platypoda
Brachychiton australis
Erythrina vespertilio
Agathis robusta
Grevillea robusta
Euroschinus falcata var. falcata
Callitris glaucophylla syn. C. columellaris var. campestris
Araucaria cunninghamii
Syzygium corynanthum

What do you think about them?

Also the Bat's Wing Coral tree from further west is growing around Toowoomba in gardens - I haven't seen it in the wild around there though. It's not rainforest, but could fit in and I'm sure it's deciduous. We had a huge one well past its prime that we had to cut huge branches off - they were dead or dying, infested with borers.

Incidentally, I bought your Toowoomba district plants book recently but have yet to browse through it properly.

Cheers,
Frank

Frank,
(and other members - but please note that I am particularly delighted to have found another forum member from Toowoomba)
There are Bat's Wing Coral trees on the downhill side of Prince Henry Drive, which I assume to be naturally occurring. They are scrawny specimens compared with the glorious things we saw in the Aramac-Muttaburra area recently, which were a mass of red flowers and shrieking lorikeets, on a good big rounded canopy, in the most miserable country! I don't know whether the locals I've seen are just young, or whether that's how they grow round here.
Atalaya hemiglauca goes well out there, too. With the predicted big global-warming fuelled dry-out of our climate, those of us who plant trees like this may be feeling very self-satisfied with our future planning, in twenty or so years time! On the same grounds, I think Brachychiton rupestris and populneus might be better than the others where a green tree is wanted. Their fire-resistance could have a much-needed firebreak effect when bushfires roar up the range as they were doing in Oct 2004.
I have a suspicion that Ficus obliqua might be better than platypoda, but am never quite sure which tree it is I'm looking at when I see a fig in a sunny spot some hopelessly dry paddock around here. Do you know? Despite having written the book, I still have so many things to learn! The trick to identifying them is to catch them in fruit...
To my great delight, some celerywood (Polyscias elegans) have come up spontaneously ("volunteered" as the Americans say) in my garden - and this in mid 2005 - Toowoomba's driest winter for more than a century. The area where they apeared is not one that I ever water. I suppose this is my reward for re-establishing a bit of a canopy. Tree cover of some sort is probably the "natural" environment as opposed to the dairy farms that would have been here for a century until supplanted by suburban sprawl.
Someone else's comment in this forum about Angophora floribunda being a sign of a clean aquifer is interesting, isn't it? I wouldn't have thought of it as a rainforest tree - not even "arid rainforest" (love that expression)- but this is probably my unreasonable tendency to exclude Eucalypts from the "softwood scrub" category. It's hard to know where to draw the lines, isn't it, between "softwood scrubs" "dry vine scrubs", "dry rainforest" "marginal rainforest", and "rainforest". Especially when some of the same species seem to appear in the full range.
Geijera parviflora definitely fits in the dry, sun-hardy end. It has a reputation of being very hard to germinate and establish, but I think there are local nurseries which have it. Love the plant, and it must be as tough as old boots once established. Are you growing it?
I believe Petalostigma pubescens would be hardier than triloculare. In practice, I find that different people look at the same trees in my yard (I bought some labelled triloculare, I think) and are about evenly divided as to...