589 Otaraoa Road, RD43, Waitara 4383, New Zealand
Email: jury@jury.co.nz | Tel & Fax: +64 6 754 6671
Tikorangi Notes: Friday January 6, 2012
6 January 2012
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Latest Posts:
1) A cautionary tale about garden weddings and completely excessive rain (subtitled: “The Bride Wore Orange”).
2) Hydrangea Libelle (white and blue lacecap) in Plant Collector this week.
3) Grow it Yourself – New Zealand yams (which just happen to be different to what the rest of the world call yams, for reasons unknown).
4) Of day to day matters in the garden – container plants and why we are not fans of water retention crystals.
And not my work at all, but check out the poignant study of “Locksley Avenue – A Portrait of a Street” by Adrienne Rewi. If you have ever wondered what happens to gardens when people are forced to walk away, Christchurch has many such examples. It doesn’t take long for nature to take over, even in a dry climate such as that of Canterbury.
We just refer to it as The Trichocereus
To be accurate, it is Echinopsis pachanoi (syn. Trichocereus pachanoi) and it is in full and fragrant flower again this summer.
Tikorangi Notes: Friday 30 December, 2011
30 December 2011
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Latest posts:
1) Finally found it – the proper Jacobean lily (though neither Jacobean nor a lily): Sprekelia formosissima
2) A touch of mea culpa on a very public spelling error – and a continuation of discussion on pohutukawa and other members of metrosideros family.
3) Grow It Yourself – or maybe not in the case of pizza counting as a vegetable in American school lunches.
Wet pigeons, awaiting the erection of the wedding marquees on the front lawn this morning
Tikorangi Notes:
The rain it raineth, unrelentingly alas. Mark’s pidgies are looking sad on the front lawn. I am merely contemplating the arrival of the marquee company, due any minute. On the bright side, at least the wedding party tomorrow did plan on two marquees and not trust to fine weather. And we have wonderful drainage so the grassed areas don’t get boggy and mucky. Add to that, we own a fair number of umbrellas. And it is not the wedding of one of one our own – though it is the daughter’s best friend. Maybe the rain will stop as the day progresses. Maybe the weather gods will smile and the forecasters have the timings wrong. Weather prediction in this country is a notoriously difficult activity, given that we are long, thin islands in the midst of vast oceans with competing tropical and polar air masses. But wait, do I detect a lightening in the sky to the north?
I am privy to all sorts of information about the wedding but my lips are sealed. All I can say is watch this space… The orange toilet brushes, dropped in yesterday by the bride’s father, rather caught my attention.
It would be so nice if the rains would stop. We will battle on otherwise – this is an unstoppable event – but it would be more fun if we were not making dashes around under umbrellas.
Categories: Tikorangi notes
Abbie Jury, garden weddings, Tikorangi: The Jury garden
Tikorangi Notes: Friday 23 December, 2011
23 December 2011
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Red dahlias for Christmas (but not for Plant Collector profiling)
Latest posts:
1) Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree (Abbie’s column) and why it may be a misnomer to brand the iconic pohutukawa as the New Zealand Christmas tree.
2) While the reasons why philadelphus is often referred to as mock orange blossom may elude me, the pure, fragrant beauty of the flowers at Christmas is above reproach.
3) Was there even life before basil?
The dainty Hydrangea quercifolia "Snowflake"
Tikorangi Notes: Friday December 23, 2011
Just two days before Christmas and the sun is shining brightly, temperatures are rising and there is no wind. After the torrential downpours of last week, it feels like a little Christmas blessing. In the garden we are busy with a grooming round. Well, two of us are. Mark is determinedly following his own path of draining the settling pond which stops our stream in the park from silting up and doing a weeding round. He takes the lion’s share of responsibility for weeding here. Lloyd and I are titivating in preparation for a wedding to be held here on New Year’s Eve.
Other gardens focus on the wedding venue market but not us. Mark prefers people to come because they want to see the garden rather than to see the place used as a venue. I did a handful of weddings a few years ago – singlehandedly because Mark resolutely stuck to his principles and made himself scarce. But then I met… Bridezilla. That was my last ever booking. If I had known how demanding she would be, I would have trebled the price I quoted and even then I do not think that would have compensated for treating me like the hired help in my own garden.
But, we have a wedding coming and we agreed to this one because it is our daughter’s best friend. And it is proving to be a Major Event. Pride says we have to have the top gardens in immaculate condition, even though we know that guests are here for the event and few will do anything more than cast their eyes around and say, “Oh, very nice…”. Given that the colour scheme for the wedding is the wonderfully retro orange and brown, it is perhaps just as well that the dominant garden colour at this time is lush green. We are in the gentle hiatus between late spring flowers and summer lilies, though the hydrangeas are coming into their own.
The garden remains open for visiting each day. There is an honesty box if we are not around. Best wishes for Christmas to all who read this page.
Tikorangi Notes: Friday 16 December, 2011
16 December 2011
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The DIY Christmas tree
Latest posts: December 16, 2011
1) Gardening books that have stood the test of time (or are likely to). Abbie’s column giving recommendations old (some positively vintage) and new.
2) Please do not buy me garden ornaments for Christmas (what we are up to in the garden this fortnight, first published in the Weekend Gardener). Using plants as focal points.
3) The delightful small Chinese tree Tetracentron sinense in Plant Collector this week.
4) Grow it yourself – leeks this week. An easy crop for winter harvest.
5) The DIY Christmas tree for 2011 – step by step instructions. Though this is not exactly a spur of the moment creation this year.
The black sands of a North Taranaki beach
With rain every day this week, there has been little gardening going on here and little of the current flush of blooms will survive. The one consolation is that it could be worse – as it is in other parts of the country. Mark has been busy in the shed sowing seed while I made the Christmas tree but we may start to suffer from cabin fever, unless we get some sunshine soon.
Rather than battling out to try and photograph some sodden plant or garden scene this week, I have turned instead to two beach scenes from last Friday (when the weather was gratifyingly good – sunny, calm and mild) and we headed to the beach at Tongaporutu to gather oysters and mussels for dinner. On the west coast we have very fine black sand beaches. It used to amuse me that despite only ever seeing black sand, the vast majority of young Taranaki children still paint beach scenes showing golden sand. In mid summer, the hot sand can get too hot to walk on with bare feet above the high tide mark, but this early in the season, it is not a problem. Tongaporutu is about 30 minutes up the coast from us and is a wide open beach, often completely empty of people and completely magical. It felt like the essence of New Zealand, captured in a few hours
Mark, gathering dinner last Friday
Tikorangi Notes: Friday 9 December, 2011
9 December 2011
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Celmisia - New Zealand's mountain daisy
Latest Posts: Friday 9 December, 2011
1) No fewer than 700 Higo iris waiting to be planted out in Plant Collector this week.
2) Yet another joint venture infomercial masquerading as a reputable garden reference book – the Tui NZ Flower Garden this time.
3) The current quest for self sufficiency, of sorts at least. More a measure of a high quality of life here than a point of principle – Abbie’s column.
4) Grow it Yourself – rhubarb this week.
5) And absolutely nothing to do with gardening but a link to my other website (www.runningfurs.com) where I publish book reviews of a non gardening nature (mostly cookbooks, children’s literature and a bit of adult fiction) – the latest of which was indeed a cookbook: The Molten Cookbook by Michael Van de Elzen. Food porn, my chef friend calls it.
- Inspired by Hidcote – the white foxgloves
At last the temperatures are rising and it feels as if we may be on the cusp of summer after all. The tall white foxgloves have been bringing me much pleasure, simple though they are. We saw these used to great effect at Hidcote Manor in England but, being a biennial, it has taken eighteen months to get them performing here. I am hoping they will seed down as readily as their pink counterparts (most of which are being consigned to the compost to try and keep the white strain pure).
Sparrows in the Queen Palm condo
We have been somewhat amazed in recent weeks watching the entire condominium of nesting birds in the crown of the Queen Palm (Syragus romanzoffiana) – they must be fifteen metres up and it appears that every nesting space is occupied. The dominant population is sparrows with the odd starling having made a move on vacant property. As we sit in our favourite conversation spot, we look out at the many comings and goings, while the tui nesting in the nearby rimu attempts to patrol the entire area and convince all other birds that they are deeply unwelcome.
The celmisia in flower is a reminder to me of the next website project – building the record of native plants we have in the garden. This is of less interest to New Zealanders who tend to fall into one of two camps – the dedicated purist (natives only) and the rather dismissive (“natives are so boring”). In fact, we use many native plants in the garden but interspersed with exotics. I read an opinion recently that the use of native plants is an important way of anchoring a garden into its environment and its country of origin, which seemed to make good sense.
