How NOT to Transplant your Plants
How close can you go to killing a plant without actually killing it?
Before I actually wrote this article I thought long and hard as to whether other gardeners would actually believe my story or if I should try to change some of the detail to make it sound more believable. In the end I decided to protect its integrity and just tell it as it happened.
It was a hot summer afternoon in the middle of December which had been preceded by a winter and spring with well below average rainfall. You’d have thought that transplanting a semi established shrub would be the last thing a gardener with any ounce of credibility would consider on a day like that.
Well in this case I’m not sure if I had a moment of madness or I was suffering from a bout of extreme optimism but I still look back today and find the story I’m about to tell quite amazing.
Caloundra Gem Flower
The shrub in question was a Grevillea Caloundra Gem (G. Banksii x ‘Coochin Hill or so the label said) that I’d planted right at the front of the garden bed just two years earlier. It had grown to a height of about 2 m and was doing quite well. The problem for me was that despite the lack of rainfall it was doing just a little bit too well and was starting to hide the slower growing plants behind it. So the only solution for me was to shift it to another place alongside a fence where it would serve much better as screening plant.
Now I’d transplanted a few Australian native plants before and had a fairly good success rate but I’d never tried to transplant one that was this well established. I’d also never tried this exercise before without any prior preparation and especially on a day that was so unsuitable it wasn’t funny. At the time though for some reason I didn’t even consider any of this and just launched straight into the task. The only preparation I’d done before hand was to dig a new hole for around the other side of the house and enlist the help of my father to help carry it to its new home.
Before I knew it I’d dug a ring around the shrub about 50 cm in diameter and managed to cut through some fairly sizable roots in the process. As a result when I looked up at the foliage it was all now drooping rather alarmingly at the ground. All of a sudden it hit me exactly what I was doing. I was killing a perfectly healthy plant and all because I didn’t like where I’d planted.
Anyway not one to give in easily and having decided that I’d passed the point of no return (which I probably hadn’t), I decided to continue. As I kept digging the circle around the plant it was becoming very obvious that the sandy loam that it was planted in was very dry and crumbly and the size of the rootball contained within the sandy loam was getting smaller and smaller. As I tried to lift the rootball out of the hole more and more of it kept breaking away. In the end I got to the stage where the size of the rootball was only about 30 cm in diameter and even this looked like it was ready to break off.
Despite this though, the only option was to continue. While all of this was happening my father had been standing back watching. He must have been wondering that if by the time I was finished there was going to be anything left to shift.
As I lifted it gingerly out of its hole my father supported the other end and we slowly carried it around to the other side of the house to its new home. Just as I was placing it into its new hole (grave?) another piece of the rootball broke off. I couldn’t believe it. Surely this was the final nail in its coffin.
What was left in the hole was a semi circle about 20 cm in diameter and looking back now as to why I just didn’t give up there and then and just throw it in the compost I’ll never know but for some reason I decided to continue with the original plan. I then got 3 large garden stakes and drove them into the ground around the plant, got some garden twine and tied it to each of the stakes for support. This held the plant into position quite nicely. The next step was to back fill what was left of the rootball and buildup a small bank around the top. I then mixed some concentrated seaweed solution into a bucket of water and then slowly poured it all around the rootball. This I kept doing until the soil was so sodden that it took quite a while for it to drain away. The idea was to saturate what was left of the rootball with the seaweed solution.
The job was now finished and standing back looking at the final result I couldn’t help but think of the 101 ways I could have done it better. The transplant was now complete and there was nothing left to do but to sit back and wait.
The next day the weather was a bit cooler and the Grevillea seemed to be holding its own. The foliage was still pointing at the ground but it didn’t seem to have gotten any worse. This to me was no consolation as I knew that when most native plants die (for whatever reason) the foliage won’t show any signs of distress until long after the roots have died, so for me I knew it was just a matter of time.
Despite this though, I continued to keep watering it with the diluted seaweed solution. The next couple of days the weather remained cooler and every day it appeared to be holding its own. Then a few days later I came out to water it and I thought that some of the foliage was actually starting to sit upright again. I wasn’t sure if it was my wishful thinking but it actually looked like it had recovered a little. The next couple of days though told the story. Slowly but surely it was starting to look well again. It was actually starting to recover. As summer turned into autumn it slowly started to put on some new growth and flower again. I left the stakes in to support it for about another year and now about 6 years later that Grevillea Caloundra Gem is still growing in that spot. It’s now about 4m tall, and flowers for nearly all of the year.
2009. About 4m tall and still going strong.
Why and how it managed to survive that shift I suppose I’ll never know. Over the years though I’ve heard many a gardening expert say that you can’t transplant Australian natives but I’ve successfully done it many times for one reason or another. On this particular occasion I did almost everything wrong but when you go about in the proper way most of the time you should have success. I’ll write about this in another article.
If you were to ask me as to why it survived, I can only say that it is testimony to the resilience that most Australian native plants have and the effectiveness of that seaweed solution.
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Phosphorus Toxicity
Phosphorus Toxicity in Proteaceae Garden Plants
This is the story about a mistake I made in my new garden that for me at the time, was about as devastating as it could get. The remarkable thing about it though was as time went on I was nearly glad that I’d made that mistake.
When we shifted into our new house in Melbourne at the end of 2005 I was pretty excited as what I had to start with was a clean slate which meant careful planning and the opportunity to fill my new garden with all the types of plants that I really loved. For me Australian native plants were one of my passions as well as the protea family from South Africa. Basically, any member of the proteaceae family are the plants that I love the most.
The plan with the backyard was to excavate an area in the middle with the intention of having a sunken lawn with raised garden beds about 3m wide in between the lawn and the fence. The idea had always appealed to me as I like to add a little bit of interest in the way things are landscaped.
Firstly the excavations from the lawn area were removed and then piled around the fence area for the raised garden beds. This would be ideal as most proteaceae plants like good drainage and friable soil so the raised beds would be ideal. The only problem was, that excavations were hard dry brown clay. This was about as unsuitable as you could get for these types of plants.
Now the easy way out of this would have been to get the clay carted away and then get lots and lots of garden soil or even sandy loam in to replace it with. Not only would this be very expensive and time consuming but it also meant that I’d be dumping my rubbish somewhere else and replacing it with somebody else’s (in this case the environments) good quality soil.
The only option for me was to improve what I already had and turn it into something that the plants would be very happy to grow in. Not only was this very achievable but it would also mean less work for me, money saved and better for the environment. The plan was simple, get some gypsum and lots of good quality compost delivered, hire as large a cultivator that I thought I could hang onto and then just cultivate it all in together.
It was all very simple but the success of the whole project was to hinge on just one small factor………. getting the right compost. Now because the majority of the plants that were to go in my garden were proteaceae I knew that the compost had to be free of any phosphorus. This was important because as most gardeners know fertilizers with phosphorus will kill most plants from this family.
When I went to the garden center and inquired about the phosphorus I was told that they couldn’t guarantee the compost didn’t have phosphorus and they suggested that I use Eucy mulch. This consisted of shredded leaves and branches from Eucalyptus trees. This to me didn’t seem like a good option at all as the mulch was far from being compost and was not suitable to bury under the ground as it was still going through the composting process. Neither of these options were suitable so I decided try another garden center. The next one I went to also had compost. I asked about the phosphorus and despite the sales person being unsure he did assure me that it was suitable for natives and there shouldn’t be any problems.
I suppose I should have been skeptical at this response but the compost was very good quality and it was also the right price. At the end of the day I thought it was worth the risk as there weren’t really many other options. So based on all of that the project went ahead and by September of 2006 my garden beds were ready to be planted out with all my favorite plants.
The summer that followed was very dry and I kept my garden alive by hand watering and some of the plants actually started to grow. But by the time autumn started to roll around some of these also started to die. All of a sudden I started to get a bad feeling about what was happening. Most of the plants that were dying were proteaceae plants and the ones that were doing ok were mostly not. I was starting to accept that my worst fear was now starting to become a reality. There was some phosphorus in the compost. This was the worst outcome possible for me. This garden I was building was to be a place for me to show case the types of plants that I loved the most and to top it all off some of the plants that had perished were actually very rare and rarely seen in gardens and plant nurseries.
Anyway as time went on more and more plants slowly started to pass away and I replaced them with non proteaceae plants. But as time went on I also discovered something else. Not all of the proteaceae plants were actually dying. Some were actually doing ok. All of a sudden my mood went from despair and perseverance to relising there was an opportunity here to actually learn something.
All of a sudden I could start to document which proteaceae plants aren’t affected by phosphorus, which one’s will barely tolerant it and which ones were killed by it. What the experts had been saying for years was not 100% correct. Some proteaceae plants aren’t affect by phosphorus.
The other amazing thing that came out of this discovery was that it steered me it the direction of another Australian native plant that I had long over looked. This particular plant is rarely found in many nurseries and gardens. It is very, very drought hardy, it’s forms are wide and varied and when in flower it can put on a display that would rival almost any flowering plant from anywhere in the world. It is called the Eremophila and since most of my proteaceae plants have died I’ve added about 20 different varieties of this plant to my garden and they’re all doing extremely well. It’s my intention to write an article about these plants very soon as even here in its native country of Australia it is still very much underutilized and deserves the respect of a separate article.
Anyway getting back to the problem of the phosphorus, a solution came my way in April last year. I was visiting a native plant stall at the Melbourne International Garden Show. While talking to the sales person his about his grevilleas, I mentioned that I would like to purchase some of his stock. The only problem was that my garden soil was contaminated with phosphorus and I’d grown tired of experimenting with which one’s would live and which one’s would die. To my surprise he offered me a solution. He mentioned that all you had to do was add a high nitrogen fertilizer to the soil and this would counteract the high percentage of phosphorus. What a piece of gold! This was definitely something that you can’t find in book. It sounded so feasible and so easy to do that it was well and truly worth trialling.
I then went to the garden store on the way home and purchased some liquid fertilizer that had the highest differential in the ratio of nitrogen to phosphorus that I could find (it’s unusual to ever find a fertilizer without any phosphorus at all). I still had some grevilleas in the garden that were still alive but only just. They’d hardly grown at all since they were planted and about 50% of their leaves were either partially or completely blacken by the phosphorus. These would be the subjects of my experiment. I then drenched them with the liquid fertilizer solution and continued to do so every second month over winter until in spring they actually started to recover and put on new green growth. It was amazing, what I had been told appeared to be working and as of today about a year later those plants are all doing very well and showing no affects whatever of the phosphorus. That high nitrogen fertilizer actually worked. The next step will be retry some of the types of plants that died and see if I can get them to grow with the use of that fertilizer, but that’s for further down the track.
As far as which plants died and which plants survived this is still a work in progress but I will make it the subject an article very soon. So please……… stay tuned!
Update 6th Oct 2009
So far the following proteaceae plants have survived without any affects of phosphorus toxicity.
Banksia Praemorsa
Grevillea Sea Spray
Grevillea Robusta (including when used as a rootstock)
Leucadendron Safari Sunset
Leucadendron Salignum
Hakea Salicifolia
Protea Repens
I cannot guarantee that if you were to give these plants a fertilizer high in phosphorus that they would survive but so far the ones in my garden are surviving quite well.
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