The most spectacular display of autumn foliage at our place just now is the back fence: not the gigantic Chinese pistachio out the front, the Manchurian pear or the medlars, or the native melia/white cedars, but an old-fashioned, very basic wire netting fence covered with Boston ivy.
Please do not yell at me. Ivy is a weed. Boston ivy is not. Nor is it actually an ivy, but Parthenocissus tricuspidata, more closely related to a grape. Over the past 30 years the Boston ivy has happily spread along the fence, so now the only time anyone glimpses wire netting is in mid-winter. The Boston ivy - and the fence - is green leafed all spring and summer, then in autumn and early winter the green leaves turn flagrant flaming orange, or sometimes orange red. (The colours of most deciduous plants vary with soil type, weather and many other variables. It's fascinating to watch the changes as the years go by).
You do not need a garden to have a brilliant display of autumn foliage. You only need a wall, or several walls, or a fence or railings, soil and sunlight. Boston ivy grows steadily, rather than slow or speedily. It needs full sun for the best autumn colour, but it will survive in semi or even full shade, clambering past it to get to the next bit of sunlight.
It will cling on to anything: Colourbond, brick, stone, concrete, its tendrils clinging with self-adhesive pads. This is both it's virtue and only real problem. While Boston ivy will cover your patio wall or railings, it will stick there with enormous stubbornness if you decide to move it.
When you finally do manage to haul it all away, it will leave dark brown stains that will need to be painted over. Do not plant Boston ivy unless you want it there forever, or at least till the wall comes down.
Boston ivy will grow in almost any soil. Ours is growing in "soil" that is mostly rock. A decent-size pot is all it needs to cover a wall of your patio. Our Boston ivy has never been watered, except by the rain, or fertilised, except by the lyrebirds and others who decide to perch on the fence. It has glowed bright in years of drought, bushfire and flood. If I did have a concrete or brick patio at ground level or 20 floors up, I'd cover at least one wall of it in Boston Ivy, simply for the autumn magic.
Or possibly I'd plant ornamental grapes, instead. Ornamental grapes were one of my great disappointments when I first came to Canberra from the subtropics. I had never seen autumn foliage before - it took about a decade before I stopped panicking ever winter, subconsciously sure half the trees in Canberra were dead. The first Canberra grapevine I met in autumn was at ANU, an enormous splash of yellow to orange to red. "Oh wow!" I though. (This was in the early 1970s when we said things like 'Oh wow!') "So that is what grapevines look like in cold climates."
I duly planted several grapevines, which have given me (or the birds or fruit bats) grapes, and brown downy mildew spotted leaves, with yellow brown leaves if any are left when it gets truly cold. You need to choose with grapevines: do you want lush foliage and a stunning autumn, or do you want grapes, assuming the local wildlife leave you any?
I have almost decided that if I'm not going to get any fruit, just bird and bat droppings on the paving, I may as well have ornamental grapes that at least I can use in cooking, and have autumn colour too. But only "almost", as I do enjoy the birds quarrelling over who gets the next bunch of grapes, and the grapes grow next to the Boston ivy, so we really don't need more colour in that patch of garden.
One of the most unexpected sources of autumn colour is wisteria, which turns bright gold. Wisteria can be a villain that creeps into every crevice, pushing up your roof and covering your windows. Grow it over its own pergola, where it won't be able to invade you house or windows. If you do decide to grow wisteria on a patio, plant it in a large pot to discourage it from taking over the building.
Our wisterias grow prolifically over what would be a car port if my car could fit inside it (I told the blokes it was too narrow, but did they listen?). Kindly males keep cutting it back each winter "as a surprise" for me, which means I don't get any wisteria flowers in spring.
Wisteria won't bloom till it feels it's reached its right height. As long as kindly blokes (including one who is six years old) keep pruning it, I won't get any flowers. It's not as though we don't have lots that does need cutting back here.
But not the Boston ivy, which will hide the ugliest of fences and the most boring walls. Add a few potted blueberry bushes, perhaps a dwarf mulberry, plus a tub with an oak leaf hydrangea or two, and you will have enough autumn colour for any bus tour to stop and marvel at, even if you don't have "a garden".
This week I am:
- Thanking Michael for a bag of persimmons from his gloriously foliaged, very neat looking tree. Our persimmon tree sadly half died in the last drought, so it has been cut down to become compost.
- Buying a shitake mushroom kit - every autumn I start craving mushroom and barley soup.
- Thanking the kangaroos who have proved capable of eating even this summer's growth of grass. Please keep on munching...
- Not quite getting around to planting Spanish onions - home-grown fresh ones are sweet and wonderful thinly sliced and raw, or sliced and soaked in milk overnight to be even sweeter and more tender.
- Picking leucadendrons for the vases.
- Delighting in the last flush of roses, too beautiful to bring inside.
