A tour of the garden

The Rimu Walk is probably our most iconic area and arguably the most unique to our garden, being woodland reinterpreted as subtropical plantings.

Goodness gracious me. I see I last posted on October 4^th and that is probably my longest silence yet on this site. Sometimes life can get in the way of writing and sometimes I feel there is nothing left to say that I have not said before.

Our Lloyd, vacuuming the lawn (as we quip) on Thursday in the sunken garden

This weekend is a busy one for us with three overseas tours booked in. We had the Australians on Friday, the British are due in today and the Americans tomorrow. We don’t open our garden much any longer; it is not easy to get into these days. But we do accept the occasional specialist group or overseas garden tour. We only offer one option now – a personally guided tour which includes morning or afternoon tea and a duration of two to two and a half hours. It alters the whole dynamic of visiting groups when we personally host and share food and drink – in Aotearoa New Zealand, this is known as manaakitanga. We want to enjoy the experience as well as trying to ensure the visitors do. I do not miss the days when tour groups would pour off the coach, be pointed in the right direction and then waved goodbye after 40 minutes.

A glimpse of the Avenue Garden from a side path with Iris sibirica ‘Blue Moon’ in full flower yesterday

As we titivated the garden to opening standard, I pondered the different levels of garden maintenance and presentation. The most demanding level for us was when we opened for the Taranaki Garden Festival. This is because everywhere has to be up to opening standard. Left to their own devices, visitors will wander all over the place. Who doesn’t want to see what is behind that fence or where your service areas are? Indeed, in the early days of the festival there were a few visitors who would shamelessly wander into the house to check it out too. Manners and respect have improved in the years since. But there can be no messy bits, unless they are cordoned off and out of view.

Bidding farewell to the Australians on Friday

Guided tours are different because we get to chose the route and lead the way. In a large garden like ours, it is possible to skirt around sections that are not looking their best or to alter the route to see something interesting on the day. It certainly makes it easier to present the garden and, while some may drop off the back of the group, they generally play follow the leader.

Our recent project we call the Summer Gardens with the Podocarpus parlatorei arches. No.1

The blue and white Wave Garden with its undulating camellia hedges. Summer Gardens 2

Then there is the base-line level of maintenance and presentation that garden owners are happy to live with between open days or seasons. That varies hugely. Some people maintain a pristine appearance because that is what makes them happy. It is easier to do that in a small garden. I can’t think I have ever seen it in a large garden in this country. Not many people employ garden staff and those that do, rarely employ sufficient staff to straitjacket several acres into obedient submission.

Some will just relax and take their eye off it all until it is necessary to get it back into shape for the critical eyes of garden visitors. Most of us fall in-between the two extremes.

The Court Garden. So-named because it looked like a tennis court before we started. Summer Gardens 3

The borders, as we call them. Still coming away into their summer raiment. Summer Gardens 4

If you want a lower maintenance garden, keep your plantings very simple and in blocks of the same plant. We are the opposite. We like a highly detailed garden and accept that means constant close attention all year round. It would only take a year of inattention for us to start losing the detail as neighbouring plants encroach and thugs start taking over. By year three, it would be a jungle.

The astonishing Doryanthes palmeri and the back border of the Summer Gardens (5)

An extremely restrained planting – by our standards – acting as a breathing space between busy areas – two brown carex grasses and our own celmisia hybrids. And a bit of other stuff because we like to add some seasonal interest. (Summer Gardens 6)

Even when we are not open to the public, we aim to keep the background maintenance up to date – the pruning, removal of dead plants, constant vigilance on weeds and plants turning into thugs, the clipping and the shaping, keeping mulch up and all the rest. I don’t play golf, as I comment to visitors who ask about the amount of *work* I put in. I garden by choice.

The Iolanthe Garden – named for the original plant of Magnolia Iolanthe within it – which is more casual cottage garden in style. Summer Gardens 7)

Because we like detail and plants, the Iolanthe Garden contains plants like this fine form of Rhododendron excellens, given to us by Glyn Church

and the likes of Paris polyphylla amongst the foxgloves and mishmash of cottage garden plants in the Iolanthe Garden

When the background and routine care is maintained, sprucing up for opening is less major, for guided tours at least. The late Sue McFarlane of Winterhome Garden near Kaikoura used to talk about keeping hedges, edges and lawns all done to maintain standards. Hedges, edges and lawns won’t hide the lack of background maintenance from any discerning visitor, but they sure add to the sight of a well- presented garden.

Looking down to the park, as we call it. First planted in the 1950s by Felix, now full of mature plants and managed as a meadow.

Perfection in the first of the Higo iris to open for the season down in the park.

We use a mulcher mower on the grass all year round which is easier and means we never have to fertilise the lawns. It does also mean we end up with clumps of grass. The final mow when a tour is coming, we do with the catcher. It looks very tidy and spruce. But I am glad we don’t feel we need to set that standard for ourselves all year round.

The Wild North Garden – our experiment in light-handed, naturalistic gardening

On Monday afternoon, after the American tour has departed, we will be in eradicating every trace of shiver grass (too invasive), pulling out the pinky red Oriental poppies that I don’t like, digging out bluebells to replace with Cyclamen hederafolium and a host of other tasks we have put on hold. It won’t matter if there are some gaps in the borders as we continue to fine tune them in that constant quest for the ephemeral goal of visual perfection. It is what makes gardening interesting.

And finally, the rockery in front of the house which is probably the most labour intensive area of the entire garden. It peaks in autumn with the nerines and cyclamen and again in early spring with a multitude of dwarf daffodils and the lachenalia collection. It is quieter at this time of the year but the rhodohypoxis add splashes of colour.

The family tree of ‘Floral Sun’ – parents, siblings and offspring

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An unnamed seedling from the breeding programme

This particular rhododendron is looking splendid in the Avenue Garden and scenting the air around it. It has no name. It is one of Mark’s unnamed seedlings from the breeding programme. His comment was that it looks terrific in bloom and pretty anonymous for the rest of the year. To be fair, that could be said of the majority of rhododendron shrubs.

‘Floral Sun’. An additional reason for its selection was its compact, bushy growth.

Years ago, Mark crossed Rhododendron ‘R. W Rye’ with R. sino nuttallii. From the resulting seedlings, he chose ‘Floral Sun’ to release commercially. Those who know how understated and reserved my Mark is, will understand why I have never forgotten him looking at plant of ‘Floral Sun’ in our garden and sighing with satisfaction, saying: “If I never breed anything as beautiful as that, I will still die happy.” He doesn’t remember saying that now.

I think this one is a sister seedling of the original cross, not the back cross to its mother. It has the inclination to leggy growth sometimes seen in R. sino nuttallii.

A controlled breeding programme means one usually ends up with a row of sister seedlings and it then becomes a case of assessing whether any are worth selecting for further trialling and commercial release. Mark’s practice was always to select only the best one of a cross to name, to plant the runners-up in the garden and cut out the rest. We have a lot of runners-up or also-rans in our garden.

The only one of a run of seedlings that came out a different colour

Curiously, from that cross, every single one flowered yellow except this pink and cream confection in Avenue Garden.

I had to eat my words. When he told me he was doing this particular cross, I quipped that he would probably end up with a whole lot of small flowered white rhododendrons with no scent. But no, he ended up with a whole lot of scented, soft yellow sino-nuttallii types, most with heavily textured foliage.

A back cross of ‘Floral Sun’ to its parent, R. sino nuttallii.

He tried back crossing ‘Floral Sun’ onto R. sino nuttallii again and we have a few of the progeny of that cross planted out. None were ever named or selected because pretty flowers are not enough to warrant selection. The growth habit is equally important and he wasn’t happy enough with any to go further.

I can’t find a photograph on line that is free for me to use of Rhododendron R. W. Rye but it is a smaller flowered hybrid which is a strong yellow. The ever-handy internet did at least tell me who it was named for. Mr Rye was the head gardener at Castle Kennedy Gardens, near Stranraer on the east coast of Scotland. The only reason why I remember Stranraer is because it is where the ferry from Belfast used to land. Back around 1992, I spent a deeply stressful week in Northern Island as part of an international group being hosted by the British Foreign Office at a time of considerable tension during The Troubles, as that period of time was euphemistically labelled. As Stranraer hove into sight, I breathed out and relaxed for the first time all week.

Even the foliage on R. sino nuttallii is handsome

Rhododendron sino nuttallii photographs feature strongly in my photo files. It is my absolute favourite rhododendron and we grow many of it, as well as nuttallii hybrids. It is naturally white with spectacular trumpets although we also have a white flushed pink form. I can see why Mark wondered if he could extend the colour range of the species.

As the magnolia season wanes, the rhododendron season is starting to hit its stride. Nothing marks the passage of time more than the garden.

Big, red rhododendrons

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Rhododendron ‘Kaponga’ in Pat’s garden. We have a specimen planted somewhere in the garden but not in a prominent position because I would have to go looking for it.

I do not miss our days of retailing plants. Nursery work was simply a means to earn a living and now that we are retired from all but gardening and final selections from Mark’s plant breeding programme, we are reaping the benefits of those long hours and quite a bit of hard work. Nothing reminds me more of that than red rhododendrons.

“You should take a photograph of ‘Kaponga’, my friend Pat said last week. And indeed it did look as splendid as a full truss, red rhododendron can, when viewed from her window. I didn’t have my camera with me at the time. I am old school – I prefer to use a camera rather than my phone. So I called back in this morning and it is already just past its peak.

‘Kaponga’ is a local selection of a red R. arboreum hybrid, bred and named by the late Bernie Hollard of Hollard Gardens fame. We like arboreums in our conditions because they don’t get hammered by thrips (turning the foliage silver) or die-back so the plant stays looking well furnished and healthy without needing spraying and special attention. ‘Kaponga’ was never my favourite; I do not love the big ball trusses on rhododendrons so favoured and admired by others. The looser trusses and flower forms of the maddenii group are more to my taste. ‘Kaponga’ is not a pure red like ‘Rubicon’, having a slight pink cast to its tone but it is an exceptional performer.

Rhododendron ‘Noyo Chief’ in our park, clearly planted in a more prominent position than ‘Kaponga’ because I know exactly where it is.

It is hard to capture reds accurately. The photo of ‘Noyo Chief’ in our park looks redder than it actually is. This photo of it in a vase is somewhat pinker than it is. The actual shade lies somewhere between the two photos.

Overseas readers will know ‘Noyo Chief’ better than our local selections and, while an excellent plant which performs well every year, it too has that slight pink cast to its full red trusses.

Coming back to selling plants, every person who sells plants will know that any plant in bloom sells on sight. Never more so than red rhododendrons with full, ball trusses. Over the years, I realised that men bought red rhodos. Almost every time. When women bought them, it was often as a gift for their husbands. I should not have been as surprised by this gender-based colour preference – there are still men today who won’t have anything to do with pink, pastel apricot or paler lilac colours, regarding them as too ‘girly’ or feminine for real men. Maybe gardening men have broadened their tastes in the time since we dropped retail about 15 years ago? I hope so.

‘Rubicon’ was my favourite – pure red and handsome foliage but prone to thrips. It needed spraying to keep it healthy and we are not willing to use sprays in the garden just to keep plants looking good. In the end the thrip infestation got so bad that they pretty much marched away with the plant. Brilliant red rhodo but best grown in a climate with a colder winter than we get.

I am sure I must have told the story before (but not, I hope, recently) of the Tauranga landscaper who came in to buy plants for a new retirement village. He would only buy red, yellow or orange flowered plants, maybe blue – no whites, creams, pastels and certainly no pretty pinks because he, personally, didn’t like them. At the time, selling plants was more important than my view, but I really, really wanted to point out to him that his retirement village occupants were going to have a majority of women owing to the fact that women have a longer life expectancy. Besides, some men do like pretty flowers and rise above the constraints of old fashioned, masculine expectations when it comes to colour choices.

It must have scarred me because, to this day, I find it hard to rise above my disinterest in big red rhododendrons. I can still admire a good plant that performs well but they never make my heart sing or lift my spirits. Each to their own.

Pat, she of the ‘Kaponga’ plant, had a neighbour who planted a row of reds on their road boundary. I had assumed it was ‘Kaponga’ until I looked at the foliage today and it is not. It will be one of the common varieties in commercial production here these days but, since we stopped selling plants, my memory has filtered out information that no longer seems necessary to remember and confidently identifying many rhododendrons has gone with it.

And now for a big plant

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The Doryanthes palmeri last bloomed here in 2018. Only eight years have passed since then. To have it flowering again already seems to be quite a quick turnaround. Taking ten years to bloom and then dying is the norm.

By May 5, the new flower spikes were making themselves obvious.

It is a clumping perennial and each rosette only blooms once before making offsets and the one that bloomed dying off. The rosette that bloomed last time died off fairly tidily. In fac,t I recall wondering if it actually did die off at all but I am assuming it did. It is a bit hard to remember how it behaved eight years ago. It looks as though each of the three spikes this year come from different rosettes.

Two months later, by July 1, the weight of the stems was pulling them down and the first hint of colour appeared

Three weeks later and the lowest stem is dropping further and definite colour is visible

This is not a plant for those short of space, living in a colder climate or faint of heart. Ours is now well over three metres in diameter so if you feel inclined you could calculate the area (Pi R squared, is it?) or the circumference (Pi D, I think). Or you could just take my word for it that it takes up a lot of space and you can not plant anything close in to it because those leaves act as brooms or blunt scythes in windy weather.

By August 25, I was having to duck to get under it.

Doryanthes palmeri is the Queensland spear lily, although any debt to the lily family is a long way back in the botanical family tree. I expect it to flower through until around Christmas. To be honest, it is a little bit inconvenient. I can still duck under it but Zach referred to the difficulty of limboing beneath it and I assume he and Lloyd are taking the long way round. The flower spikes are far too robust to push aside or stake out of the way. Based on past experience, I am confident that this massive flower spike will not break and is not likely to weigh itself down to ground level.