Sartorial elegance meets Peter Rabbit. In the garden of course.

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“Back in December 2005, Monty Don, the British horticulturalist and human Peter Rabbit, wrote a delightful little essay for The Guardian on how to dress as a gardener.” (Derek Guy, ‘Why We Dig Gardening Style’ Mr Porter, Fashion)

Writing my almost overdue post about March bulbs flowering now felt like getting blood from a stone and, as a writer and gardener with deadlines that are all self-imposed, I was delighted to be diverted in an unexpected quarter. Monty Don as a human Peter Rabbit, you say. Tell me more.

The alt text to the photo (the bit on the black background that is probably too small to read) says: ‘Monty Don wearing a weathered French chore coat, blue shirt, and weathered French work pants. He is holding a tool in the garden.’

The writer is a US – based master of sartorial elegance and expertise, Derek Guy. This is not a subject of great interest to me in the greater scheme of things but Derek Guy had come to my notice through Bluesky. Social media gets a bad rap these days when, at its best, it can open us up to new ways of looking at things. Having dabbled in and out of Guy’s posts, I have learned things I never knew about quality men’s tailoring and why the Spanish king – I think it is the one from Spain – always looks so beautifully attired while our PM, try as he might, is more like a sack of potatoes in a blue suit jacket without even a hint of Peter Rabbit’s charm.  Social media makes my world bigger, as I say.

I was amused by this reply to the original post

Having perused these witty dissertations from both Guy and the Monty Don himself, I am forced to admit that we let the side down badly here. Mark manages the ‘rumpled corduroy trousers’ as long as I can continue to source this item of clothing. They are much scarcer than they were 50 years ago when I first had to shop for them, replaced, I guess, by the unpleasantly named ‘sweatpants’. But there our flirtation with classier garden-wear ends.

You can tell that Mr Guy is more focused on the clothes than the activity of gardening. His alt text reads: ‘Ashley Edwards wearing a blue sweater, gray neck warmer and gray beanie. He is sitting in the garden.’

I have noticed that English gardeners often adopt a higher standard of dress code. I think that is due to tradition and to the recognition of gardening as a higher level skill and a profession. We have to look to earlier generations where there was some crossover to those who gardened in the far-flung colonies.

Felix’s garden attire did not change much down the decades beyond the colour of the shirt. Notice the hat. This will have been taken in the mid 1950s

Mark’s dad, Felix, always wore a tweed Trilby hat outdoors and his winter gardening attire included a wool tweed jacket. He always wore shirts – olive green for the garden – and woolen trousers. Very brown and green he was, more leprechaun than Peter Rabbit.

Mark and Felix looking at the original plant of Magnolia Vulcan in the early to mid 1980s. Notice Felix is still in a Trilby hat and woolen trousers. We put his final Trilby in the coffin with him when he died. But notice also, Mark in his rumpled brown corduroy trousers. Should he die before me, I may dress him in a pair of brown cords for his final journey.

Fortunately, women have escaped the scrutiny of both Guy and Don. There is a certain genre of English lady gardeners, photographed tending their gardens while clad in pastoral themed, artful ‘peasant style’ dresses. In my mind, I associate them with growing the dahlias that are so in vogue these days but that may just have been a photo I saw which made me wonder if these charmingly attired women ever did any digging or kneeling in their gardens.  

My rule of thumb is that if the clothing is old, comfortable, has pockets, is easily washed and dried and is suited to the weather, it can be considered gardening clothing. Upon occasion, I ask myself, “Would I be embarrassed if an unexpected visitor turned up and saw me wearing this?” If the answer is yes, it is usually a sign that it is time to consign that item to the dustbin of landfill.  That is as far as sartorial garden attire goes here. But I do feel a little pang that we have failed dismally to establish any reputation at all for our garden clothes.

The third Guy illustration’s alt text reads ‘Alfie Nickerson in a bright yellow zip-up jacket and blue shorts, along with beaten brown Blundstones. They are carrying flowers and a dog.’ I had to google Alfie Nickerson and I, for one, welcome the new generation of gardeners with their modern style.

I sign off without photo but can offer the alt text: ‘Abbie Jury is wearing a bottle green, stretch cotton, sleeveless dress with deep pockets from the defunct label of Ezibuy and battered woollen Allbird lace-up shoes in beige.’

February bulbs signalling seasonal change

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Will my bulbs of February be the month when there are slim pickings, I wondered at the start of the month. But no. I begin to think that there may be no such months, in our garden at least.

A wedding posy largely comprised of auratums and gloriosas. The bride also chose to wear gloriosas in her hair.

February was marked by a bit of a rollover from January, notably auratum lilies, gloriosas and Scadoxus ssp multiflorus katharinae. All are excellent cut flowers. I knew the lilies were but I have never cut the scadoxus before and they show a remarkably long vase-life. This discovery was made because our middle child came home for a small, intimate wedding in the garden here – an event we never expected to see. In the spirit of this informal occasion where the vows were both heartfelt and a central part of the whole event, she did her own wedding flowers from the garden here. She made her posy and a smaller one for their two year old to carry as well as the vases for the long table while I did the big showy vases of OTT lilies – mostly auratums but with a few Lilium formasanum and belladonnas.

The ephemeral delight of a sea of tiny Leucojum autmnale – autumn snowflakes – in the rockery

Some bulbs are a fleeting delight. The daintiest, tiniest little flowers of the autumn snowflake – Leucojum autumnale – all bloom at once as harbingers of the change in season. The Worsleya procera came and went in the first ten days of the month. No less spectacular, the Paramongaia weberbaueri impressed with its debut performance this very week. I do not think it will have a long season in bloom.  

Moraea polystachya

Then I pondered the fact that many of the bulbs that I declare have a long season are in fact bulbs that we have in the garden in abundance, counted in the high hundreds. If we had 500 worsleya, they are likely to flower more in succession and might have me admiring their long season in bloom. That is the case with the blue Moraea polystachya just opening and likely to flower for a good couple of months. But it is not each individual moraea bulb that is flowering that long, although it does set buds that open successively. It is having many bulbs around which open for their weeks to star.

Belladonnas – showy but not choice

Some are short in season but somewhat glorious. The belladonnas – Amaryllis belladonna  -are more wildflower or roadside plant than one for cultivated garden but that does not diminish their charm on the day. They last well in a vase, too.

Crinum moorei var. in the woodland gardens

Crinum moorei variegated has spectacular foliage in late spring and early summer but the foliage starts to whiff off a bit, sometimes losing its variegation, as the perfect, white, scented blooms open. I would prefer it to time the foliage and the flowers to perfection but the gardener’s personal preference is irrelevant. It remains an excellent bulb, showy for a long period with the foliar lead-in followed by lovely blooms. We always grow it in the shade gardens because that foliage will burn in our bright summer sun.

Little Cyclamen hederifolium is all through the rockery and woodland margins – naturalised but never a problem

As the big blowsy bulbs of summer pass over, the autumn snowflakes are joined the by the dainty Cyclamen hederifolium which we have in abundance – decades of letting it gently seed around to naturalise.

A zephyranthes now, which was news to me. We have it in red and pink.

We have known this plant as Rhodophiala bifida, following on from a period of it being Hippeastrum bifida but apparently it was classed as Habranthus bifida prior to that; now, now it has been moved again to Zephyranthes bifida. I do hope it has found its forever home in the zephyranthes family. It doesn’t have a long season in flower; nor does it increase quickly but it is lovely in its time.

Nothing rare or unusual about this bulb but it is no longer a valotta, now being in the cyrtanthus family

Whereas what we once had as a valotta (and was it also once an habranthus?), is now to be known as Cyrtanthus elatus. I do try to be botanically accurate but it is not always easy to do so. For those railing against name changes, they may be inconvenient but there is scientific data to justify the reclassifications. I would assume it is all DNA-based these days.

Colchicums! Not autumn crocus, but I am not sure whether this is Colchicum autumnale from northern Europe or Colchicum speciosum from Turkey. I think we have both.

Haemanthus coccineus may be the most fleeting of all the late summer bulbs we grow, but mostly this plant is grown for its spectacular foliage, colloquially known as elephant ears. Colchicums, too, have a brief season but not as brief as the haemanthus. They are oft referred to as autumn crocus but that is not botanically correct at all.

The bulbs are telling us that we are on the cusp of summer turning to autumn.

Worsleya procera – choice but not prolific.

A surprise

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A paramongaia, no less, which does not seem to have a helpful common name

Well lookee here! Zach appeared brandishing this pot from one of our covered houses in amazement. I was equally astonished that Mark could dredge the species name from somewhere in the deep recesses of his memory, loosely connected to his remembering seeing its relative the pamianthe in flower at Jack Goodwin’s and that must have been at least 35 years ago.

This is in fact Paramongaia weberbaueri, native to Peru and Bolivia where it grows in harsh, dry, stony conditions. It looks a bit like a totally over the top daffodil on steroids. That flower is 20cm across and the trumpet is 10cm long. I measured. It must be night-scented because it was very strongly scented first thing this morning but only pleasantly scented later in the day.

Patience rewarded – the first flowering on our paramongaia

It goes so far back here that even Mark, with his elephantine memory when it comes to the source of plants, can’t recall who gave it to him but we have not seen it in flower before. It has been repotted occasionally down the years and we seem to have about 10 plants of it when he will have started with only one. That is enough for me to plant out half of them in the rockery to see it they like our conditions.

We have succeeded with its compatriot bulb, the Worsleya procera as a garden plant; the challenge now is to see if we can succeed with the paramongaia in the garden. This may take time. Ask me in ten or twelve years if we have them flowering in the rockery.

Even elderly Dudley may have been surprised by its appearance on the doorstep.

Baby kereru

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Soon after hatching – a far cry from its mature form

The kereru is our much-loved native wood pigeon. It was once a significant food source but is now fully protected and can not be hunted legally. Being a large, lumbering bird with small brain, I imagine it was easy to catch and an important source of protein in a country which lacked all mammals (bar two tiny bats that few have ever seen) in the days before colonisation brought both wild and farm animals.

They are a bird of beautiful plumage with a pigeon coo to be heard if you have them resident in your garden. But they are not at all beautiful or cute in the baby stage. Quail hatch out like the cutest little, feathered bumblebees, on the move very soon after hatching. Not the kereru.

Behold the beauty and care shown by the chaffinch as compared to the disgraceful kereru efforts

For starters, kereru parents should be ashamed of their nest-building skills. These consist of tossing a few twigs onto some sort of precarious branch and saying ‘that’ll do’. I have photographed exquisitely crafted nests by other native birds but not the kereru. They then lay a single egg and the ugliest baby hatches out and spends its first weeks perched precariously on its bunch of uncomfortable twigs.

It was a kereru almost taking us out as it flapped its way to gain altitude that drew attention to its nest in the Wisteria ‘Snow Showers’, all of 150cm off the ground. It is not a particularly safe spot; we fear Ralph the dog could possible reach it at a pinch. Se we are skirting around it and trying not to disturb it.

We don’t know exactly which day it hatched but this is likely a few days later

Zack spotted the scrawny little bebe about 10 days ago and came in saying, “Man that is an ugly, scrawny chick”. I couldn’t see it this week and feared it may have fallen out but no, it is still there. I photographed it yesterday morning. It is not much improved in the beauty stakes but I am sure its parents love it.

This is about 10 days later. Its looks have not improved a great deal since.

Below is a photo of one from earlier years. It has grown its feathers and is closer to fledging – a process that takes 5 to 6 weeks. There is only one chick per nest and it is a miracle any reach independence given the long process and the woeful quality of nest.

Here is one I prepared earlier, as they say on cooking shows. A fledgling kereru nesting in the tangerine tree.

I have shown the photo below before. In front of our picture window, we have a bamboo grid suspended to stop bird strike. Our double glazed windows reflect trees and sky and too many birds thought they could fly through, killing themselves on the glass. Window decals did not work. A kereru died before our eyes just centimetres from the decals. I didn’t want net curtains in this room so Mark constructed the bamboo grid. It works. We have not had birds die from striking this window since we hung the grid.

It is the bamboo grid you are looking at – not interfering with the view or the light but proven down many years to be enough to stop birds hitting the window.

It felt like a tragedy every time we found a dead bird, especially as they were often young ones learning to fly. All that time and two parents to raise just one chick a year only for it to die soon after on our windows. For the same reason, we would never have a mirror in the garden and we deplore that modern architectural trend of putting all windowed pavilions set amongst forest trees. Somebody must pick up the bird kill but it is rarely mentioned.

Still one of my favourite photos of this round chonk of a bird, in this case perched in Fairy Magnolia White.

Thanks to Zach for the three photos of our baby soon after hatching.

Summer Gold

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A field of sunflowers down the road from us caught my attention as the blooms opened. I speak of ‘down the road’ in rural terms. A couple of kilometres and a couple of roads and corners in-between but on my main route to town. When I stopped to photograph it on a grey day as the rain stopped, it was imbued with soft light and appeared almost mystical.

Italian sunflowers as opposed to local ones but really, they all came from the Americas to start with

I can only remember seeing three different fields of sunflowers. The first was in Italy, on the road from Sermoneta to the famed garden of Ninfa. It was industrial farming – commercial production for either seed or oil but that whole setting of a phalanx of sunflowers in the dry, arid landscape seemed imbued with the charm and romanticism that is steeped in the very ground and most things above in that pocket of rural Italy.

Heliotropism in action near Sermoneta, south of Rome

It was also the first time I saw en masse the characteristic of heliotropism – the habit of both foliage and young flowers following the sun during the day. I was amused by the following sentence in the Wikipedia article: ‘Sunflowers move back to their original position between the hours of 3am and 6am, and the leaves follow about an hour later.” That is very specific information. Apparently that movement stops when the flowers age and they settle to face the rising sun in the east.

Sunflowers in Huirangi, ‘across the bridge’
Across this bridge

The second sunflower meadow was, as we say, ‘just across the bridge’ from us in Huirangi. We can cut across the historic swing bridge and be there in minutes. Our eldest daughter, grandson and I first went about 3 summers ago and were pretty impressed by the appeal of the place as a destination. An Instagram event, daughter declared. A very popular Instagram location at that with hay bales, strategically based old tractor or two, provision to select and cut your own sunflowers and I am pretty sure there was icecream. It was clear that others were as delighted as we were at being in the midst of fields of sunflowers.

Their Facebook page tells me that their season is later this year and that they are opening next weekend and the following two weekends, through til March 1.

Tikorangi sunflowers

The third sunflower meadow down our road is different. It does not seem to be either for commercial harvest or as a visitor destination. It appears to be part of a regenerative agriculture system. The sunflowers are of a squatter physique – lower growing and sturdier – and  interplanted with a white flowering brassica and probably other selected plants as well. I didn’t feel I could scale the fence to check out the pasture composition but did spot the yarrow and blue chicory in the adjacent paddock pasture so it would seem more herbal ley than monoculture.

Tikorangi sunflower meadow, seemingly part of a regenerative approach to farming

We live in an intensive dairy farming area, one which grows grass all year round in our milder climate which means stock graze outside all the time. It is often described as a ‘green desert’ because the main focus is on encouraging maximum grass growth, aided by nitrogen-heavy fertilisers. The contrast from that to herbal ley and sunflower plantings could not be more extreme and I am sure the meadow contributes a huge amount more to a sustainable ecosystem rich in biodiversity and feeding beneficial insects and microbes.

In solidarity with Ukraine

The common sunflower is Helianthus annuus – helios being Greek for sun and annuus meaning it is an annual. Curiously, given that all helianthus are native to north, central and just a few to south America, the annual sunflower is now the national flower for Ukraine. I am guessing it is a commercial staple for that country, which is a grain bowl of Europe.

Like many families, we grew sunflowers with the children when they were young and into competitive school gardening. To this day I remember the sunflowers one of them was growing, towering over 2 metres tall, only to fall in an overnight storm. Disappointment seared on my motherly brain.

Helianthus, I believe, and more garden friendly than the big annual sunflowers
Not helianthus at all. The orange flowers on the left are heleniums while the yellow stars are Rudbeckia ‘Goldsturm’.

Nowadays, I grow a few of the different, smaller, perennial species in the summer gardens. There are around 70 different species of helianthus, or sunflowers, including Jerusalem artichoke. I have a mental block when it comes to remembering the differences between helianthus, heliopsis and helianthemum (and that is without going to helichrysums, heliotropes and other plants starting with heli). Similarly, I have trouble each summer remembering the differences between some of the helianthus, echinaceas, rudbeckia, heliopsis and ratibida and which is which in the summer gardens. But I am pretty sure these are helianthus with either species or cultivar names that I have even less chance of remembering when I struggle to remember they are helianthus.

Helianthus from an earlier March season. The lower one I think is the species whose name I have recorded somewhere – I just can’t remember where – while the upper photo is a selected dwarf form which has a cultivar name that is recorded in the same place as the missing species name.

Summer gold, indeed.

Here is a photo I prepared earlier that may show why I struggle to remember which is which and that is without adding yellow echinaceas to the mix – left to right is Rudbeckia laciniata ‘Herbstonne’ , helenium, Rudbeckia ‘Goldsturm’, the only helianthus in the line up and Ratibida pinnata