Brown Boronia is a West Australian native that is very, very fragrant. People walk around the city selling bunches of it when it's in flower and you can smell them from miles away. A beautiful sweet aroma. They cleverly had some right at the front door of the Better Pets and Gardens shop I went to today - to buy cat food.
The aroma is just magnificent and I could smell it as soon as I got out of the car. Their selling ploy worked very well on me - came out with two boronia plants as well as two tomatoes, a capsicum, a punnet of bok choi on top of the cat food!
Boronia is sold as an aromatic oil for burning in oil burners.
I've tried to grow one of these before but it carked it pretty quickly, hopefully I will have more success this time. Here are the two I bought today:
The one on the left is the standard Boronia Megastigma, the one on the right is called 'Heaven Scent' which is, the label informs me, and improved version of the first.
The second plant has more compact bushier growth as you can see in the pic. The flowers are smaller but seem almost as heavily scented as the standard plant.
The flowers are quite profuse and are dark brown/purple on the outside and either yellow or, in this case, lime green inside. Here's a close up of the flowers both inside and outside:
The plant is native to the south-west of my state so I think my previous problem has been heat and dryness. I have a spot in my current native garden that I think may be OK for this plant. So I'll put it in the ground in a few weeks and see what happens.
Vegie Pot Update
I took pity on the mostly-dead snow peas today and gave them a burial befitting a .. well, umm a dead vegie plant :) :
All of the lettuce I had originally planted were still there, so I just added a few more to fill in the complete circle around the inside of the pot. In the middle I planted a tomato.
I bought a single tomoto plant in a pot instead of a punnet of seedlings even though it's a more expensive option.
I dislike buying a punnet of them and either throwing half the plants in the bin or just being absolutely overwhelmed by fruit if I'm silly enough to plant them all. They also take up far too much room if I plant 8 tomato plants. (What family could ever need 8 tomato plants?? hmm maybe an Italian family). I haven't had much luck with transplanting out ones I grown from seed either, so I'm better off buying an individual plant.
Trendy Tomato
The tomato I bought today is calld 'Pink' (after the singer maybe???) and is supposed to be a heavy cropper, so I probably should feed it more than I usually do. I'm generally pretty slack with fertilising, preferring only to do it during soil preparation. I gave it some Thrive (TM and all that) liquid fertiliser when I planted it today. Might go mark it on the calendar so I remember to feed it again in a few weeks.
Anyway, here's how the pot looks now, hopefully I haven't planted the tomato too soon as it's not really spring yet. I am a bit concerned for the lettuce once the weather warms up, but hopefully they'll all be eaten before it gets too hot for them :
Yum- I see summer salads on the menu, and right outside the back door!
The other tomato (a 'trailing' one meant for hanging pots, but I don't have any hanging pots) is in a separate pot with the rest of the left over lettuce plants, and in yet another pot is the yellow capsicum/mild chilli that I bought.
All in all there was quite a bit of dirt under my nails today!
Next time I'll show you my worm farm. 'Til then happy gardening everyone!
4 comments:
The boronia you grow happily there, is your compensation for the bulbs that like the cold of Ballarat, Canberra, and the Dandenong Ranges.
You might succeed with tulips IF you cover the ground they are in, with a sheet of board to keep the summer from warming up their earth. They just like to be COLD.
all the time. cut buds just open and drop petals the moment they are taken in a warm room.
There is a boronia perfume Double L is the brand I think.
SPRING!!!
Ha ha... yeah I wish I could smell it too :-) If there is a smello-internet then those cooking programmes would be very very exciting one to watch. I have not seen boronia before in real. I learnt something today :-) Have a wonderful Monday!
Wow, the boronia flowers are stunning. I think I want to give that one a try!
Thoe brown flowers are kinda weird. The lettuce looks good tho =)
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