Tulip surprise

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I *may* have mentioned my somewhat sniffy attitude to tulips before (*definitely have*…) but that does not mean that I am going to dismiss them out of hand. There are always exceptions to the rule and I came across one on our visit to the city cemetery, Te Henui, last week.

A tulip meadow!

Look at these graves of mass, mixed tulips. It is like a wildflower meadow, albeit tulip hybrids are about as far away from wildflowers as can be imagined. As of last week, this pretty sight has escaped the fate of last year’s tulips when some atrocious grave robbers regarded the display as their personal picking garden. I loved this vibrant sight on a grey day.

Oh. And just behind is Magnolia ‘Atlas’ – another Jury magnolia

Mark and I discussed these many different tulips. I quite like the little, pointed purple ones and the huge, overblown lemon affairs were reminiscent of herbaceous peonies. We agreed that it was the red and yellow bicolors that we most disliked and I wasn’t at all keen on the orange ones.

Tulipa saxatilis
Likely the very same tulips 70 years later
Tulipa sylvestris 1950s

We only grow two varieties here and both are species, originally collected from the wild (but not by us). Tulipa saxatilis from Crete I praise every year. It gently increases for us and has a softness that the stiff hybrids lack. Our little yellow one is probably Tulipa sylvestris, the wild or woodland species, native throughout Eurasia and North Africa. I was amused to find a photo of it from the mid 1950s in our rockery here. We have kept it alive but I rather doubt that we have any more of it than Mark’s parents started with 70 years ago.

Tulips have a long history and still retain popularity that shows up every year in shared photographs on line, particularly from the UK and northern Europe. Of course, I could pick out more desirable selections but it is the waste that also worries me. Even in those northern climes, they are often treated as annuals. They can limp on in our climate for a while, getting ever weaker with a dramatic decline in blooming after the first year. When growing bulbs, I want to buy once and then grow them well enough that they will return for many years to come.

The tulips at Floriade ranged from the oh so very tasteful and refined to … less so.

I have never been to see the tulips at Keukenhof near Amsterdam and it is not on my bucket list. But I then remembered Floriade in Canberra in 2017 which was an astonishing spring display. I wrote about it then but I also take this opportunity to pull out some of my photos.

Tulips will forever be known as chillips in our house. That is due to a regular presenter on a very popular TV garden show from back when we still actually had one. This particular presenter was somewhat of a fan of chillips, as he pronounced it each spring season. Let there be chillips but in meadows and mixed plantings, I say.

Some of the people at Floriade were as colourful as the flowers.
Floriade also did the mix and match meadow style seen in the cemetery but with added annuals.

August is for narcissi.

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Not to my taste

True, so are July and September. If you grow enough different ones, you can have somewhere over three months of cheerful daffies in bloom. I have timed them. We avoid the big show daffodils; as garden plants, the weight of the flower pulls the stem down. They make better cut flowers than garden plants. Nor are we into the novelty breeding of split corona (which make the flower look like a squashed nose to me) or novelty colours like pink and peach. As far as I am concerned narcissi are in shades of yellow, occasionally white, sometimes with orange centres but predominantly sunshine yellow.

We have an abundance of narcissi both in garden situations and naturalised in meadow areas. This one is Felix’s ‘Twilight”.

We have plenty. Mark and his parents before him sourced every named, smaller growing variety they could find so we have ‘Beryl’, ‘Jetfire’, ‘Peeping Tom’, ‘Thalia’, ‘Tete a Tete’, ‘Pandora’ and more, including the various species. But then Felix started dabbling with hybridising to produce his own selections (‘Twilight’ and ‘Twinkle’ were named and we released them through our nursery). Mark raised many more by controlled crosses just to get the numbers to make a show in the garden. It may have taken several decades, but we now have a splendid early spring display over a long period of time.

Hippeastrum aulicum with lemon calanthe orchids behind

Also brightening large areas are the Hippeastrum aulicum. Again, decades of gently spreading them has increased numbers so that they are our dominant woodland bulb for August. Quite simply, they are large flowered but elegant in their simplicity and with the right ratio of flower to foliage. All class, is aulicum and that cannot be said of all hippeastrums. I am not a fan of most of the hippeastrum hybrids I have seen but each to their own.

Lachenalia aloides tricolor and freesias

The rockery is hitting its spring peak with lachenalias, freesias, Tulipa saxatilis, Wurmbea stricta (formerly Onixotis triquetra), grape hyacinth (muscari), the first of the season’s moraeas (peacock iris) and more. I would note that the pretty lilac tulip from Crete is much hardier than I thought it was and I have probably been giving incorrect information on this for many years. I see photos of it from UK gardens come through social media. The schizostylus continue to bloom intermittently. We never seem to get a mass flowering from it here, as per photos I see on line, but both the red and pink flower randomly throughout the year for us. Amazingly, the large snowflake Leucojum vernum ‘Gravetye Giant’ is now into its fourth month of flowering and that is not to be sneezed at. Cyclamen coum is finishing for the season while dainty little Cyclamen repandum is opening.

I don’t like many of the stiff, so-called Dutch tulip hybrids, but I love this species, T. saxatilis

The first of the bluebells are already open. And that is the end of a year in bulbs. I started with September last year which, when I reviewed it, could equally apply to August really but bulbs are not limited to calendar months. May and June were the quietest months but it is possible to have fresh bulbs flowering every month of the year in our climate.

Wurmbea and narcissi with our native carex. I find bulbs combine well with some of smaller growing grasses.

I have an elderly gardening friend who once told me she wouldn’t grow bulbs because she hates the messy foliage that hangs on most of them after flowering. I was a bit gobsmacked but I wasn’t going to argue it with her. I tend to discard bulbs where the foliage to flower ratio is too high, but I would not want to be without the freshness and energy of seasonal bulbs.  I can forgive them their messy time.

Narcissus ‘Beryl’, one of my favourites
Narcissus ‘Tete a Tete’ and common blue muscari

Down but not out

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When the Magnolia sargentiana var. robusta fell over in July 2023, we were a bit sad. Not distressed or devastated, you understand, but disappointed. It is always sad to see a big tree fall, especially when their demise is unexpected. At its best, M. sargentiana var, robusta was as pretty a sight as you could wish for in a magnolia.

Sargentiana var robusta in a good flowering year, before it fell.
The colour can vary from appearing pink all over to white flushed pink.

I say at its best because our tree was a bit biennial. It only wanted to flower in profusion every second year with a rather weak attempt in its off years. Its flowers are also anything but robust being very light in texture – sometimes likened to paper tissue. The are good reasons why both Felix and Mark bred magnolias with heavy textured petals; in our climate with rain that is often torrential in spring and strong equinoctial winds, light textured blooms do not fare well. A single storm can take out the whole display.

The sad sight in July 2023
We left it untouched and it flowered again a year later in 20024

This tree was imported by Mark’s dad, Felix, sourced from the famous Hilliers Nursery in the UK, back when plants were easily moved around the world, with few, if any, restrictions. It was in the 1950s when Felix was first planting up the park so this specimen would be around 70 to 75 years old. It will have had wet feet, as we say about plants in sodden ground, because it was planted down by our stream.

So, fall it did in 2023.  It is a big tree but fell alongside the path and stream without impeding access, the root ball half in and half out of the ground. We made the decision to leave it and see what happened. I looked at it this week. There was one chunky branch low down that was coming out at right angles from the main trunk. When it fell, that branch then found itself upright. It clearly preferred this position of dominance because it has grown quite a bit and is forming a tidy new canopy.

The lump in the foreground is the root ball – disturbed but still anchored. The vertical trunk to the left is the branch that we will now save, cutting off the main lengths to the right.
That is the new upright on the right of the photo. But really, I took this to also show the prodigious quantity of astelia epiphytes that establish on our older trees – signalling a climate that is both mild and with adequate rainfall all year round. The seed is spread by birds.

We are now at a point where we think it will be fine to cut the rest off and just leave the upright section which is close to the roots. We won’t be doing anything about the big, chunky mound of roots. They can just stay – a bit of natural contour.

It is pleasing to realise we can keep the tree. M. sargentiana var. robusta is not the sort of magnolia most people would decide they simply must have. Nor is it suited to small gardens. But it belongs in magnolia collections and the tree is part of our own garden history.

Magnolia ‘Mark Jury’, believed to be a chance seedling with M. sargentiana robusta

Besides that, the species itself – though not this particular tree in our park – is thought to be one of the parents of the beautiful tree Felix received from Hilliers that was meant to be ‘Lanarth’ but wasn’t and he named after his youngest son, so Magnolia ‘Mark Jury’. That tree, also still in our park, turned out to be Felix’s special plant – his secret weapon, Mark says – which he used in the parentage of six of the eight magnolias of his that were released commercially. In turn, some of Mark’s hybrids also descend from those. The rest, as they say, is history.

Found it!

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The title and cover photo on the lower book does not do it justice at all – see the next photo. I would bet the publisher chose the cover photo, not the author.

When we moved into our home, it still contained Mark’s parents’ belongings. I knew I had seen a book which clearly inspired the garden here but it has taken me years to find it again. It wasn’t until I took apart all the bookshelves to dust each book individually and to try and get a more helpful categorisation by subject that it turned up again.

When Mark’s parents built their dream house here around 1950, neither had travelled overseas. The house draws largely on English style but with bigger windows. They started on the garden as soon as the house was built and I realised when we moved into the house that we could work out which books inspired these passionate gardeners across the world.

The Picture Book of Gardens by A.G.L. Hellyer is comprises full page photographs in black and white. The gardens are very much what I describe as English manor house style – spacious, but not grand historic gardens, beautifully tended and exceptionally flowery and pretty. The inscription inside the cover had me puzzled. Along with the date of publication, it placed this book as 1956, by which point the garden here was well on the way to being designed and executed. It is likely this book was more an affirmation that they were on track.

I think it was the earlier book, The Modern Garden by G. C. Taylor, B.Sc., that helped them refine their visions. First published in 1936, Felix and Mimosa’s copy was the fourth revision dated 1949 and is clearly extremely well thumbed. There I found the inspiration for our sunken garden.

Our sunken garden as it was last week. It is starker than it used to be but the growing conditions have changed dramatically as the huge rimu trees have explanded their root systems through the whole area. We could not keep the borders looking lush and flowery with all the root competition binding the soil and soaking up all the water.
The sunken garden in Mimosa’s day. Probably 1960s.
Our sunken garden is much deeper than is commonly seen – and oft mistaken as a former swimming pool. But I think it bears a debt to this photograph, albeit scaled down to a much smaller space.
Maybe with a touch of this if you look at Mimosa’s rose garden.

When the title says ‘The Modern Garden’, it clearly means modern in terms of post WW1 and the demise of enormous estate gardens that didn’t survive all the young gardeners heading off as canon fodder to the war. So, we are talking modern in terms of Vita Sackville-West of Sissinghurst, Gertrude Jekyll, Lawrence Johnston and other great English garden leaders of the era between the world wars.

I have no idea who G. C. Taylor, B.Sc. was but this remains a very practical book. The more than 350 photographs may be smallish and in black and white but they are thoughtfully recorded and well composed with captions full of helpful advice. The author might have been slightly surprised had he known that he guided, from afar, a garden with a clear debt to his 1940 advice and inspiration that has lasted down seven decades. It is quite simply, one of the best gardening books I have seen.

This is from 1961, about 10 years after Felix and Mimosa built the house. It is understandable that they were looking at English books for gardening inspiration. The had already built in a style that would not be out of place in either of the aforementioned gardening books.

There is very little in gardening that is new. Innovation lies more in reinterpreting the old than in coming up with a brilliant, original idea on one’s own. It has all been done before somewhere, sometime. Much of the advice in this book, especially when it comes to design, balance, and execution is still relevant today.

Both of Mark’s parents embraced the pretty, flowery look
Mimosa labelled this photograph ‘My little driveway’.

Bits and bobs on a winter’s day

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It has been a bitter cold week over the entire country, it seems. These matters are all relative; our daytime temperatures have barely made double digits so sitting in the 10°C to 12°C range with night temperatures about 10° lower. We have certainly complained at length about it. I have been most appreciative of the cheerful narcissi in flower. Yellow must be the most universally cheerful colour of all.

Narcissus cyclamineus hybrids raised from seed

We like the early flowering ones. They cheer up a winter’s day and they are done, dusted and starting to die back when the nasty narcissi flies start hatching out as spring warms up. If you think your narcissi are reducing in number or if they are all foliage and no flower, dig up a few and examine the bulbs. If they feel soft when you press them and if they have few or even no roots, then you have an infestation of narcissi fly.

Three archways of Podocarpus parlatorei

Zach has started the spring trimming round. First up were the Podocarpus parlatorei arches. It is a podocarp, as is our native totara, but this one is from Argentina. Mark had them as pillars but when Zach joined us in 2021, he started training them as arches. We own good, tall ladders in case you are wondering. Unfortunately it all has to be clipped by hand because the stems just bend with the electric hedgetrimmer but the end effect is to add some formality to the summer gardens, a defined axis.

Wavy hedges but in camellia plants, not the more common buxus. We had three visible frosts in a row on this week of cold temperatures.
Camellia microphylla is pretty enough in flower in autumn but it only has a short season

The arches terminate at what we refer to as the wave garden on account of the wavy hedges. Those undulating hedges are not an original idea; we have seen them used overseas and they are a hallmark of English designer, Tom Stuart Smith. However, they are usually done in buxus hedging. Our ones are in Camellia microphylla. This species camellia has a short but pretty enough flowering season in autumn so it has finished for the year. The advantage of using a camellia is that it doesn’t get buxus blight and can be left entirely to its own devices bar one trim after flowering and second tidy-up after its spring flush of fresh foliage.

Gloriosa in bloom during summer
Gloriosa tubers are more commonly the size of the two which are on the bottom

Look at these gloriosa tubers! The so-called climbing lily is not a lily but it is a good cut flower in summer. It is also making itself a great deal too comfortable so we are often thinning them. Zach dug out a bucket full and verily, we were astonished at their size. The smaller two at the front of this photo were what we would usually refer to as a good size, certainly not small. But they are utterly dwarfed by the big thumpers. Gloriosas are actually part of the colchicum family. The gloriosas grow from the tips, not from the centre V (which was last year’s growth point) so you need to make sure your tubers have at one intact tip, preferably two if you are buying it.

Helleborus foetidus deserves a more flattering name

Finally, I say I am not the world’s greatest fan of hellebores but really, I think I should limit that to the common Helleborus orientalis. I think they often perform better in colder climates whereas we can grow some lovelier plants in our generally temperate conditions (cymbidium orchids, amyone?). But look at this fine, self-sown specimen of Helleborus foetidus. And spare it a thought. I went to check the spelling and came across its Wikipedia entry:

Helleborus foetidus, known variously as stinking hellebore, dungwort, setterwort and bear’s foot, is a species of flowering plant in the buttercup family Ranunculaceae, native to the mountainous regions of Central and Southern Europe and Asia Minor.

What did it ever do to deserve descriptors of stinking and dungwort. Dungwort? I have never actually noticed its aroma but I have often thought ‘now there is an under-sung, remarkably elegant plant’.

Stay warm if you are in Aotearoa this week. Stay cool if you are in the northern hemisphere, suffering from extreme heat, drought and rampant fires.