The squeaks and squawks of a family of brush wattlebirds have woken me at daybreak in the early autumn. I’m so attuned to the songs and calls of the resident birds in my garden I sleep blissfully through them as they start up but any new sound immediately makes me sit up in bed, as with the wattlebirds.
Although wattlebirds are not uncommon in the Hobart area, they usually prefer drier bush rather than the wet forest found around my home. It was something of a mystery why they should suddenly turn up and pick fights with my long-established new holland honeyeaters, until I saw one of the wattlebirds feeding in the long spikes of an exotic late-flowering shrub, the red-hot poker (also known as torch lily or tritomea) increasingly spreading through my garden.
The wattlebird was clinging to a tall, swaying spike of flowers and feeding on the nectar in the stacked cone of trumpet blooms.
Although I had over time rooted out the exotic shrubs and flowers planted by the previous owner of my home in favour of native ones, I had deliberately planted the red-hot pokers because they were a gift from a colleague when I worked at the Mercury, Guy Parsons.
A Vietnam veteran and keen gardener, Guy sold plants from his garden to raise funds for the Legacy charity aiding ex-servicemen and their families.
The donation of the red-hot pokers came as a reward for saving my cardboard take-way coffee cups so they could be used as seed pots for Guy’s floral output.
Sadly, Guy died unexpectedly a year after giving me the plants but his memory has always been kept alive by the sight of the red-hot pokers, especially in late summer when the flowers reach their full glory. And the recent antics of the brush wattlebirds attracted to the blooms has given this connection another dimension. It’s another link to the past when those working with Guy shared his good humour and friendship within the fraternity – shall I say flock – of Mercury journalists.
Spurred by the sight of the wattlebirds, I have been paying extra-close attention to the red-hot pokers this year, checking on the provenance.
I thought naively they were mainland Australian native plants at first (they look Australian with the same colours of kangaroo paw) but I learned to my horror that they originate from South Africa and are considered a weed. Gardeners are discouraged from planting them, especially in gardens close to the bush like mine.
Until being handed the red-hot pokers in one of my spent coffee cups, I only planted natives and a second “weed” bequeathed to my garden by the previous owners, agapanthus, had been ruthlessly removed each year when the plant determinedly re-emerged after previous attempts to eradicate it.
But I can’t bring myself to take the same hard-line approach to Guy’s red-hot pokers – the memories of happy times spent with Guy in the Mercury newsroom over-ride the “tuts-tuts” of the flower police at my garden fence.