Yareena Myoporum on The Bluedale Plants Online Show, Episode #23

This week we’re going to be continuing on with the groundcover plants that we’ve been discussing over the previous weeks and this week we’re looking at a ground cover plant called Yareena™. Its botanical name is Myoporum parvifolium.

Click on the photo above to watch this on video…

Yareena™ Myoporum is a ground hugging green foliage ground cover plant that has very dense foliage and will cover your ground to about 10cm  to 15cm high. It’s a really good fast growing plant for someone who’s looking at wanting to fill up a gap in the garden very quickly.

As with all groundcover plants, it’s ideally suited to trailing over retaining walls, covering over rocks and in between rocks and other structures you have in your garden. It isn’t a plant that will get out of control at all so it’s very easy to keep contained. It’s not something that once you plant it it’s going to appear 12 feet away and create a big problem in the garden.

It’s just a matter of trimming it out of the way of obstacles and moving the foliage around rocks if you want it to go over a rock. You can encourage it and direct it.n So it’s a great plant, a lot of people like it because it is very quick growing.

Another feature of it is that it gets flowers, now, the flowers are very small fine white flowers that appear in Spring and Summer. It does have a showy lot of flowers in amongst all the foliage so the green and white are a great contrast.

Yareena™ Myoporum works in a wide variety of climates. It can grow in land in light frost areas – I wouldn’t like to see it used in a heavy frost area, it may get some burning of the foliage, a little bit of die-back here and there but light frost areas from the coast in Queensland all the way through New South Wales to Victoria. It’s quite versatile in that regard. It works in a wide range of soil types and does well from free draining sandy soils through to clay loam soils.

To Maintain Yareena™ Myoporum you occasionally give it a trim and give it a fertilise coming in to spring to encourage new growth and this will also help with the onset of flowers. Apart from that just plant it step back and watch it grow and enjoy it.

We have Yareena™ Myoporum available in140mm Pots as well as the Forestry-Tube 10 Packs. So depending on what you’re looking for, just 1 or 2 plants, go the pot option. You get a good size plant and you get a bit of immediate impact.

If you’ve got a large area of ground to cover, the Forestry-Tube 10 Pack is always good value for money.

For more information or to buy Yareena™ Myoporum click here… 

 

Happy Wanderer Hardenbergia violacea on The Bluedale Plants Online Show, Episode #22

This week we’re going to be looking at another native sprawling plant called happy wanderer. Its botanical name is Hardenbergia violacea. Happy Wanderer is a groundcover plant that has purple flowers.

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Next week when we’re talking about some groundcover plants I’m going to introduce you to a white flowering form of the Hardenbergia but this week we’ll just concentrate on the purple flowering form.

It has purple flowers coming out of winter in to spring. Beautiful pea shaped flowers, quite attractive in the garden. The foliage itself tends to cover the ground like a carpet. It is a little bit wiry so it may need a little e bit of trimming up here and there, as the foliage tends to want to spread out a little bit. Over all a very neat, tidy plant.

Like a lot of the ground covers they’re ideally suited to rockeries and gardens where you want to cover the ground or if you’ve got retaining walls you want something that’s going to trail over the retaining wall. Those applications are really good for Happy Wanderer.

Sometimes people like to train Happy Wanderer over a trellis, so for instance if you had a bit of a trellis on an entry pathway coming in to your house, Happy Wanderer would be quite happily trained over that.

Or if you had a gazebo or even a fence that you wanted to train Happy Wanderer on, just by simply putting some guide wires up and training the foliage to climb on it, it’ll cover a fence or a pergola or any other structure that you might want to cover in the garden. In saying that, if you don’t want it to climb you just let it do it’s thing.

It won’t be a natural climber so it’s good as a plant that when you put it in your garden, you know it’s not going to climb in to your other plants and on to your other trees and shrubs and become a bit of a menace. Great like that, very easy, very hardy plant.

Hardenbergia is quite a versatile plant, Happy Wanderer will be quite happy growing in Brisbane, Sydney New South Wales, Victoria and does well inland. It will handle heavy frost, it’s got quite a tough leaf for a groundcover plant. So a very tough native plant that will do really well in a wide range of climates.

Apart from the occasional trimming here and there, if it starts moving in to areas you might not want it to or if it’s trailing over a retaining wall and you just want to keep it a little bit contained because it’s getting a little bit too long it doesn’t need a lot. Fertalising coming in to spring is always a good idea just to give it a new flush of growth after the flowering.

If your training it on a trellis or you want to train it on a fence, naturally there’s going to be a little bit more work in that but over all very easy to maintain.

Happy Wanderer is available in the Viro-Tube 10 Pack which is a very good way of buying a mass group of plants for your garden.

For more information or to buy Happy Wanderer click here… 

Snake Vine Hibbertia scandens on The Bluedale Plants Online Show, Episode #21

Snake Vine Hibbertia scandens on The Bluedale Plants Online Show, Episode #21

This week we’re going to be continuing on with the groundcovers section of the website that we’ve been talking about which we started last week. We spoke about Aussie Rambler last week and this week I want to talk about another plant that is called Hibbertia scandens or the common name is Snake Vine.

 Click on the photo above to watch this on video

Now Hibbertia is a native sprawling plant which forms small in the garden. It will cover large areas. It’s good for rockeries, good for people who want to have something that trails over a retaining wall, rocks or other features in the garden.

It’s very easy to contain, it doesn’t get out of hand. What’s more it has beautiful yellow flowers which are a really good contrast with other flowering plants.

You can also use Snake Vine Hibbertia as a filler plant and mass planted it will give you a really good groundcover. It will cover the ground completely which is really good at keeping weeds at bay.

The nature of the plant – being a sprawling plant – it may just need a little bit of trimming here and there if it starts getting out of shape a little bit but apart from that it’s very easy to use and requires very little maintenance.

Snake Vine Hibbertia is generally more suited to coastal climates and is a little bit frost sensitive so if you’re in a frost prone area – particularly  if you get heavy frost, light frost isn’t too much of a problem but heavy frost could be damaging to the foliage – it may defoliate a little bit under heavy frost. Generally speaking the coastal conditions from Brisbane, Sydney NSW, in to Victoria it’ll do really well.

Because Snake Vine Hibbertia is a sprawler it does send out runners and tendrils in affect that cover the ground. Occasionally it may want to get in to other areas of the garden. Not that it actually throws suckers or sets down roots or anything like that but it just may sorta move in to areas where you might want to keep it away from so you just give it a hair cut.

If it is trailing over retaining wall and starts getting too long then you just give it a trim. It’s very easy to maintain. It’s not something that is going to get out of control so I don’t want to scare people off by saying that it might because it won’t but it really is a very easily maintained plant.

On the website we have Snake Vine available in the 140mm pot as well as the Viro-Tube 10 Packs.

For more information or to buy Snake Vine click here… 

 

Aussie Rambler™ Carpobrotus glaucescens on The Bluedale Plants Online Show, Episode #20

On this week’s episode of The Bluedale Plants Online Show Craig Waters showcases Aussie Rambler™ Carpobrotus glaucescens

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Groundcover Plants on The Bluedale Plants Online Show, Episode #19

Groundcover Plants on The Bluedale Plants Online Show, Episode #19

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been discussing designer grasses and we’ve pretty much covered most of those so from here on in over the next couple of weeks we’re going top be looking at ground cover plants. Now the range of ground cover plants that we have on the Bluedale Plants Online website are all native varieties and they come in a range of different formats, flower colours, we have yellows and whites and purples and a range of different climate types that they’d be suited to as well.

So the whole idea of the ground cover range that we’ve put together is to choose plants that are reasonably quick growing reasonably low maintenance, they can actually cover the ground in your garden to cover large areas and add a splash of colour through out the season.

Ground covers are great if you you have say, a retaining wall and you wanted to get something trailing over it to soften the edges of it or if you have a rockery garden and you have rocks set with in the garden and the ground covers can either sprawl around the rocks or sprawl over the rocks and I’ve seen them used in sloping gardens on bato where as the plants grow they almost look like a water fall of water coming down the bato and they really add interest, a different textured foliage to the garden. Something just a little bit different than an upright plant or a tussocky type plant like some of the grasses are.

So the ground covers have that ability to really soften hard edges, add interest, give a little bit of different dynamics. You can create really interesting effects, for instance if you have a raised garden or a mounded garden you can have the plants coming out of the top and around the mound so it looks like a bit of a hump in the ground with this plant sprawling down it.

Some of the other situations you can use the ground cover plants are in coastal aspects and one of the plants we’ll look in to next week when we’re looking at them is one called Aussie Rambler which is a fantastic plant for the coast but I’ll talk a little bit more about that next week.

For more information on our Ground Cover Plants click here 

Themeda Mingo on The Bluedale Plants Online Show, Episode #13

On this week’s episode of The Bluedale Plants Online Show Craig Waters showcases Mingo Themeda australis ‘Mingo’ PBR

Click on the photo above to watch this on Video

This week I’d like to introduce people to a native grass and it’s part of our designer grass collection which over the coming weeks I’m going to expand on and introduce a series of these grasses to the people at home.

The grass I’d like to introduce today is one that’s called Themeda Mingo. Now It’s full botanical name is MINGO Themeda australis ‘Mingo’ PBR and it’s a cultivar variety called Mingo.

Now  Themeda  Mingo has a common name of Kangaroo grass. It has blue prostrate foliage that makes a fantastic ground cover and the foliage is quite a striking blue. What’s actually interesting with Themeda  Mingo is that when you come into the cooler parts of the year you actually see the colour of the foliage change and you get a bit of a purple tinge to the foliage which makes it a striking plant that can be used in a range of situations from a standard garden ground cover to an informal lawn.

Particularly if you plant it young and train it with your mower by mowing on a higher setting it will knit up and actually form an informal lawn – not like your traditional buffalo or couch grasses – it will be quite thick in profile but still, some people are looking for something a little bit different for a court yard and Themeda  Mingo if it’s used in a lawn application like that can be a good choice.

As I mentioned it’s a traditional ground cover plant so if have a native garden or a garden where you actually want a ground cover plant that will grow amongst rocks or trail down an embankment where you don’t want to be mowing or maintaining that area and you want something that’s fairly low maintenance, Themeda  Mingo is going to work really well for you and because you get that change of colour foliage you’re going to see interest throughout the year.

One thing I didn’t mention at the beginning is that Themeda  Mingo also gets a flower which is a browny rustic colour with a bit of a red tinge in it. It’s a low growing plant so the flowers are also low growing so they’re not something that’s going to get too much out of hand. It’s a plant that’s very easy to maintain and could work well in many gardens.

Like most grasses you do need to give then some trimming through out the year. Now Themeda  Mingo is what they call a warm season grass so it’ll actively grow in Spring, Summer and Autumn and then at the end of winter after it’s gone through it’s Winter phase you can just give it a light haircut removing about 2 thirds of the foliage.

Now if you were training it as an informal lawn simply mooing it high at the end of Winter will tidy up any loose daggy bits that may have developed over the Winter months when it’s in a dormant cycle.

So apart from that, very little maintenance, a bit of fertiliser coming in to Spring. Water if it’s particularly dry just to help the fertiliser bed in and get a bit of active growth with the plant, but apart from that very easy to maintain.

We have Themeda  Mingo available on the website as a 140mm pot or as a Viro-Tube 10 Pack.

What we’ve found so far is most people are favouring the Viro-Tube 10 Pack because they’re wanting to have a mass planting of the Mingo which is a great way of planting Themeda  Mingo. Not so much as a specimen nut as a group of plants so the Viro-Tube 10 Pack has proven very popular.

For more information or to buy Themeda Mingo Click here…

 

 

Bluedale Plants Online is an online nursery that offers No Fuss, Functional Plants delivered in Top Condition straight to your door.

Bluedale is a dedicated grower of Australian Native Plants. Our range includes Native Grasses, Strappy Leafed Plants,Sedges and Wetland Plants and Native Trees & Shrubs that you can buy online.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nafray® Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘PA300’ PBR on the Bluedale Plants Online Show, Episode #5

On this weeks episode of The Bluedale Plants Online Show Craig Waters showcases Nafray® Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘PA300’ PBR

I’d like to introduce the viewers this week to a designer grass from our designer grasses collection called Pennisetum Nafray®. Now, the Nafray® plant is a mid sized plant that gets to a metre tall, it has deep green foliage and in Autumn has beautiful coloured seed heads.

Nafray® pennisetum is a great feature plant so you can plant it as a single feature in your garden to great effect. If you wanted to get a more continuous look planting a group of them together will give you a great display.

It works well against fences because it does get to that metre high. You can plant it against your fence and it will soften your fence. Used in other parts of the garden it’s a great filler plant. So a very good versatile plant all round.

Pennisetum Nafray® is what they call a warm season grass so it’s really only going to need trimming once a year and you generally do that at the end of winter.

By cutting off the previous seasons growth and reducing the foliage down by about a third to half, that will allow fresh new foliage to emerge coming in to spring. From there you’ll get fresh new flowers coming in to Autumn and it will make it a stunning feature. It’s very easy to care for basically just trimming it that once a year.

Like all the plants on our online store we like to supply different sizes for different applications. So if you wanted to have a whole group of plants in your garden why not buy a Viro-Tube 10 pack, you get 10 plants and it’s a great economical way of buying plants.

Again, if you’re only wanting 1 or 2, buying a 140mm pot is the ideal choice.

For more information on Nafray® pennisetum click here

Bluedale Plants Online is an online nursery that offers No Fuss, Functional Plants delivered in Top Condition straight to your door.

Bluedale is a dedicated grower of Australian Native Plants. Our range includes Native Grasses, Strappy Leafed Plants, Sedges, Wetland Plants and Native Trees & Shrubs that you can buy online. 

Lucia™ Dianella caerulea ‘DC101’ PBR on The Bluedale Plants Online Show, Episode #4

On this weeks episode of The Bluedale Plants Online Show we showcase Lucia™ Dianella caerulea ‘DC101’ PBR

This week I’d like to talk about a Dianella groundcover called Dianella Lucia™

Now Lucia™ is a great plant that grows to about 40cm high, has deep green arching foliage. It’s a real stunning plant that will form a beautiful ground cover.

One of the great features of Dianella Lucia™ is that it has mulberry coloured flowers which are quite unique to the Dianella plant range.

Dianella Lucia™ is a plant that works really well in coastal gardens and also works well inland as well. If you’ve got a frost free location then Lucia is an ideal plant in an inland environment.

On the coast it’ll work really well in fertile soils, it’s probably best used with having a mulched garden so that the plants don’t dry out over the summer.

It’s great from Queensland, New South Wales and in to Victoria. Overall it’s a very beautiful plant, very easy to grow and very hardy.

Dianella Lucia™ is one of those plants that needs very little care once it’s planted in the garden it forms a massif foliage. Rarely would you have to give the foliage a trim in fact you could probably leave it 2 or 3 years and just tidy it up if it got untidy.

Each year when it flowers, if you decide to you could cut off the spent flower seed heads which generally you would do in early Autumn but look it’s not absolutely essential, you can leave the spent heads on and they will naturally fall of in time.

Lucia™, through our online store comes in a Viro-Tube 10 pack which is an ideal way of buying it if you’re wanting to have a mass planting in your garden.

If you’re just looking for 1 or 2 plants you certainly can purchase a 140mm pot which is equivalent to a 6 inch pot. A great way to purchase plants, you get a fairly established plant immediately.

For more information on Lucia™ click here

Bluedale Plants Online is an online nursery that offers No Fuss, Functional Plants delivered in Top Condition straight to your door.

Bluedale is a dedicated grower of Australian Native Plants. Our range includes Native Grasses, Strappy Leafed Plants, Sedges, Wetland Plants and Native Trees & Shrubs that you can buy online. 

Kingsdale® Poa poiformis ‘PP500’ PBR on The Bluedale Plants Online Show, Episode #3

On this weeks episode of The Bluedale Plants Online Show we showcase KINGSDALE® Poa poiformis ‘PP500’ PBR

This week I want to hi-light one of the designer grasses that we have on our website called Poa KINGSDALE®.

Now, Poa are beautiful plants that have been used by landscape architects for many years because they add an element of movement in the garden.

So for instance if you have a garden, you get a little bit of wind you see that movement of the foliage, that’s what landscape architects and designers are looking for and I’m sure as home gardeners, people will be looking for that as well.

One of the great things about Poa KINGSDALE® is that it has fine blue foliage which is a real striking feature of the plant. It’s arching so it’s a bun shape on the ground. It does get seed heads or flowers, not in the traditional form that we think of but in like a grassy seed head that is held above the foliage and we see that over the Summer period in to early Autumn.

With out getting too technical with the  anatomy of Poa KINGSDALE® I’ll try and explain it quite simply.

It is what they term a cool season grass so in it’s natural environment it grows in the southern areas of the east coast of Australia so around Melbourne and through Victoria in to New South Wales and you do see it from time to time up the north coast of NSW.

That’s it’s natural habitat range but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it in other areas like Brisbane it is very suited to those areas.

One thing with Poa being that cool season grass is that in Summer with the Summer heat it does enter in to a dormancy which is a feature of the plant and this is why many landscape designers like it, it does get change of the foliage colour.

In the cooler months of the year, from Autumn, Winter and Spring you see beautiful blue foliage and then you get a little bit of straw colouring through it over the Summer months which just adds another feature to it.

There are some maintenance things which I will talk about in a minute that you have to be conscious of when you’re using a native grass like Poa KINGSDALE®.

Thinking about using it in Sydney and Melbourne, beautiful, it does really well in those cool climates. It’s ideal inland with frost, it’s very frost hardy and it can handle frost down to minus 10 degrees with out any dramas at all, in fact it’ll hold it’s colour right through the Winter months so it makes it a great plant for inland climates.

One of the things with any native grass is that it does need pruning once a year just to remove some of that old foliage as I mentioned Poa KINGSDALE® being a cool season grass it grows primarily over Autumn, Winter and Spring and then in Summer you do get a bit of straw colouring in it which is a feature.

At the end of Summer to early Autumn it’s a good idea to reduce the plant height down by at least a third of the foliage height. Now what this actually does is it removes the old spent seed heads so that they’ll be gone and it takes of any of the daggy tips that may have dried out while it was in it’s dormant phase over the Summer period.

At that point the plant looks fantastic again and it allows for new growth to emerge in Autumn and you’ll have a fantastic plant over Winter and in to Spring.

For more information on KINGSDALE® click here

Bluedale Plants Online is an online nursery that offers No Fuss, Functional Plants delivered in Top Condition straight to your door.

Bluedale is a dedicated grower of Australian Native Plants. Our range includes Native Grasses, Strappy Leafed Plants, Sedges, Wetland Plants and Native Trees & Shrubs that you can buy online. 

How Bluedale Plants Online Got Started – Buy Plants Online

 

 

How Bluedale Plants Online Got Started:

My career in Horticulture actually started back in the early eighties when I studied Horticulture through Charlestown TAFE. From there I had a number of other businesses, landscape businesses but then about 10 years ago I started up a wholesale production nursery called Bluedale Wholesale Nursery which specializes in native grasses and wetland plants.

Our focus was the commercial landscape market, so we did a number of commercial projects and have continued to do that over the time.

One of the latest ones was the Kempsy bypass project which was a large project that completed just before easter in 2013.

From there we developed a wholesale website. and we noticed we were getting a lot of calls from home gardeners who were frustrated that they couldn’t find plants they wanted at their local nursery.

Because lots of the local nurseries are actually closing down due to the impact of bigger stores like Bunnings, and the super stores, they really weren’t getting the service and they came to us looking for plants they couldn’t actually buy locally.

From that we thought we can see a need and have what they’re looking for.

We developed the Bluedale Plants Online website with a full shopping cart so people can actually look online, browse, find plants and there are pictures of the plants on there. They can easily move from the individual plant profile to a shopping cart and actually purchase online.

Payments can be made via Paypal and then their plants are actually delivered to their door or to their nominated postal address.

Check out these ranges:

Grasses and Ground Covers   Trees and Shrubs   Garden Accessories