Tikorangi The Jury Garden

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Magnolia Serene, the last of Felix's selections to flower each season

Our magic spring has continued with no wind. A magnolia flowering season with a bad weather factor of only two short lived storms is a good season here. Though I am told that in the south of the province, a series of severe frosts have taken out most of the season’s display. In the deciduous magnolias, Burgundy Star flowers on and is still looking good whereas Felix’s series (Iolanthe et al) are now past their peak. Iolanthe will continue on for weeks yet, but not in her full glory. Serene is still opening. This is one variety that we have been surprised has not had more recognition overseas. Good pink colour, flower form and size, flowers later but still on bare wood and a tidy, well behaved tree. Being liliiflora x Mark Jury, it has reasonable hardiness.

Lollipopped Fairy Magnolia Blush with Magnolia Iolanthe behind

It is full on michelia season. Fairy Magnolia Blush continues in flower and the lollipop row on our frontage is looking good. They were planted in quite harsh conditions (compacted old driveway, in some cases) about five years ago but haven’t minded a bit. I give them a light clip twice a year to retain the shape but otherwise they are left entirely to their own devices.

Mark’s Honey Velvet is in full flower. This is a Magnolia dianica (syn: Michelia yunnanensis) selection and every nurseryman, woman and dog has their own selection made now, so easy is it to raise seed. All we can say about Honey Velvet is that it has a honey cream coloured flower (rather than white) of good size, wonderful bud set, longer flowering season than some and good dark foliage. And it does not appear to defoliate in a cold, wet spring as some of the dianicas do. Other than that, we can’t get too excited about what is just a species selection.

Honey Velvet, Mark's dianica selection

We can and do get excited about the michelia breeding programme and the increasing range of deeper flower colour and size we are starting to see as Mark continues down the track of ever more complex downstream crosses. We can see real progress here but that, alas, is all we can say publicly. It was a bit of a red letter day here yesterday as Mark decided that he was happy to give the go ahead on another deciduous magnolia. Mark has only ever named three magnolias in a breeding programme which has built on his father’s work and thus spans close to five decades now with many hundreds of magnolia plants raised. So to make the decision on a fourth one is no light matter. It is still a long haul from here through final trialling and production before it ever gets anywhere near the marketplace but all we will say officially is that this one is not red.

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Mark Jury in full flower

Back in the 1950s when Felix Jury was establishing the garden here, one of the plants he coveted was Magnolia Lanarth. He ordered it from Hilliers in the UK. History is a little vague as to what number and form the plant material took (scions or plants) but it included a seedling which, when it flowered after a number of years, was clearly not the solid purple flower of the chosen cultivar. No, instead it was very large and pale lavender pink and white. Enquiries from Hilliers established that it was most likely a cross between Lanarth and sargentiana robusta. Felix did manage to establish true Lanarth (Magnolia diary entries 1 and 4 have photos of the splendid specimen after fifty years), but the chance seedling proved to be the jump start for a breeding programme. Felix subsequently named it Mark Jury, for his youngest son and it has been distributed in the trade both in New Zealand and overseas. We have never promoted it widely ourselves. Although it makes a splendid large tree for a park, we think the next generation are superior garden plants.

Athene

From Magnolia Mark Jury came Iolanthe (ref Diary 7), Milky Way, Lotus, Athene and Atlas (all involving forms of lennei) which are all flowering now. Apollo too is flowering (this one does not have Mark in its lineage, being thought instead to be a liliiflora nigra hybrid crossed with Lanarth). Picking favourites is all about taste. Iolanthe has an exceptionally long flowering season and a large flower with good colour here (though we were disappointed at how it looked in Switzerland at Eisenhuts and it does not appear to be the stand out performer in the UK and Europe that it is here). Lotus has a perfect form in pure cream but can take 5 or 6 years to settle into good flowering. Athene has blooms which in our eyes are simply beautiful. Atlas had the largest flowers imaginable until rivaled by Felix. Apollo is our best purple so far. Milky Way is just an all round top performer. What more can we say? Felix’s legacy is still remarkable.

Magnolia Apollo, Felix's best purple

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The view from the corner today

Winter may have struck early and cold here this year, but at the other end of the season a magical spring has arrived early. With no wind and fine sunny days, temperatures are now reaching up to 18 degrees celsius and the flowering is terrific. The early campbelliis have been and gone, as has Lanarth, Vulcan is just past its peak, sprengeri diva is flopping, sargentiana robusta and Sweetheart are at their peak. Felix Jury looks fantastic as does Black Tulip. The soulangeanas and mid season hybrids are all opening, including our newest release, Burgundy Star.

Mark Jury - first flowers this season

Felix Jury’s main output using the magnolia he named Mark Jury are all in the early stages of opening, as is Mark. Manchu Fan is opening – this hybrid performs really well here for us in the reliable, smaller growing white goblet class. Ruby, planted next to Manchu, is pretty ho hum here, as is Rustica Rubra. But then we tend to prefer solid colour in our magnolia flowers, rather than the pale insides to petals and that is just a matter of taste.

Starwars is opening on our roadside boundary (our road verges are astonishingly beautiful at this time of the year). Starwars was bred by the late Os Blumhardt and we were enormously impressed with how good it looked in the UK and Europe. In fact we wished we could claim it as ours. But here it is best in its bud stage. While it flowers very well, the tree is a rather large grower and the flowers lack good form when fully open and the petals lack substance. It was far more a stand-out plant in Europe than it is here.

Referred to as Carpark Purple here

The also-rans can be as impressive as any named variety on their day, and if they aren’t they get chainsawed out PDQ. You can’t name everything and to get a magnolia on the market means there are many (very many) reject seedlings. Pride of place at the moment goes to the one we refer to as carpark purple (a lovely performing purple Lanarth type planted in our carpark). And we keep chuckling at Baby Tulip which is basically Black Tulip shrunk down in size to be a shrubby stellata type of bush covered in baby dark tulip flowers. It is not good enough to name and release, but it is a little cutie which is a contrast to the enormous flowers opening on the likes of Iolanthe, Atlas and Felix Jury.

Referred to here as Baby Tulip

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Magnolia Felix Jury

When Magnolia Felix Jury first flowered, it was pretty clear that Mark had taken the step that his father, Felix, had been aiming for with his earlier breeding of Iolanthe and Vulcan. Here was the big campbellii type flower on a young plant with strong colour. Mark named it for his father, even though it may be seen as a slightly unexpected memorial for a man who was a quiet and modest person and of slight stature. The magnolia is none of these. It is large flowered, robust and simply spectacular.

What was even more gratifying for us on our recent trip to the United Kingdom was to see how very well Magnolia Felix Jury is performing there. We walked into the Garden House in Devon and there in pride of place at the entranceway was a fine specimen. It was in leaf but Mark still recognised it instantly. The head gardener confirmed that it is in such a prime position because it performs so spectacularly well and we found that in a number of other gardens around the country. To say that Mark was quietly chuffed is a bit of an understatement. There is no certainty that plants which perform well in New Zealand will be equally good overseas.

Magnolia Felix has been described as a giant pink cabbage on a stick

It is difficult to get full tree shots of magnolias, and especially for the original Felix which is planted in a grove of seedlings, but this plant in our park is about 12 years from cutting.

Felix Jury in our park

Black Tulip is also in full flower and it seems that this will be a good season all round here for deep colour. There are various theories internationally as to what affects the depth of colour but most seem to be anecdotal rather than scientific. We just feel that some years here we get better colour than other years. New Zealanders tend to take the red magnolias for granted and don’t really understand that the deep colours are unusual internationally.

Magnolia Black Tulip in full flower

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Black Tulip opening now

At this time of the season, it is all the dark magnolias coming into flower. The only other colours we have are the soft pink campbellii and one early pink and white seedling which has been left in situ because it provides a contrast to the wine red, purple and deep rosy colours coming out all around the property.

Black Tulip is opening more flowers every day. This one has caught us by surprise with its instant popularity in the market place. Mark named it because the flower, while not large, had such a lovely tulip form and very heavy, dark petals which gave it good weather hardiness. And it is never going to become an enormous tree. The original plant never throws a pale flower so we were disconcerted to see that pale flowers can appear on trees in other locations. While we accept the occurrence of both dark and light flowers on Lanarth, modern hybrids are expected to be uniform.

If you line up a Black Tulip flower beside a good Vulcan flower, there is not much difference in colour. What makes Black Tulip appear so dark on the tree is that the petals (or, more correctly, tepals) are so thick that no light can shine through.

Black Tulip

We usually advise people to plant Black Tulip in locations where it is to be viewed close up. In the landscape, the flowers can be so dark and relatively small that they tend to meld into the environment whereas viewed close up, it has certainly captured the imagination of the public. It is being trialled as a street tree in New Zealand and we recommend it for driveways, lawn specimens or back of the flower border in home gardens. On a very recent visit, we were gratified to see it as a flagship plant for John Woods Nursery in the UK and to hear that it is performing better than Vulcan. It appears that the British public are as charmed by the perfect flowers as the New Zealand public and can see it fitting into smaller, modern gardens.

But on a larger property, our personal tastes lean to something more over the top and flamboyant which has maximum wow in the landscape – Felix Jury is opening its flowers.