Author Archives: Abbie Jury

About Abbie Jury

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Spring panic, camellia pruning and a good ladder – a very good ladder

The Hippeastrum aulicums are coming into flower and the calanthe orchids are in full bloom.

As we hurtle into the full flush of spring, after a remarkably calm and mild winter, not only is the weather breaking up but I can feel the old sense of rising panic. The weather is entirely to be expected. Mark calls it ‘the magnolia storms’ on account of them always hitting during magnolia season – the confluence of cold fronts from the South Pole and warm fronts from Australia and the Pacific Ocean, I believe.

The sense of panic is more personal. I am the last of the generations who came through an education system where everything depended on the final examinations. There was no internal assessment. I was particularly good at exams which was just as well because I was never very diligent during the year. The arrival of spring meant I had to focus and cram in preparation, which I did. My last two years in school and then five years in tertiary education were marked by deep anxiety and stress in spring and exams generally finished towards the end. It was not my favourite season.

Some plants just get better with age and some do not. A magnolia should be amongst those that do get better and Magnolia Iolanthe fits that brief, even after 70 years.

I had barely recovered from repetitive stress dreams that dogged me well into mature adulthood when we inflicted springtime stress on ourselves in a different form. Many years of opening for the Taranaki Garden Festival meant that the advent of spring signalled the time the pressure came on to make sure every corner of the garden was up to opening standard. In a garden the size of ours, that was a big task that took planning, personal deadlines and a lot of hard work that wasn’t always fun.

The exams are a very long way in the past and we no longer open for the garden festival. Any stress these days is entirely self-inflicted but I still felt the old anxiety rising as I walked around the garden this week. The onset of spring has been so rapid this year, that I found myself worrying that if I was distracted or forgot to look for a few days, I could miss something entirely. I had to speak sternly to myself, pointing out that this is what we garden for and that I need to take the time to breathe, to look and to enjoy. I listened to my own advice and truly, the seasonal sights are a joy to experience and yes, I do have the time these days to appreciate them. Every day, another plant will open in bloom to add to the floral tapestry already on display.

I have almost finished pruning the camellias that need it and I pondered the thought that two skills which are under-rated in gardening are pruning and staking. It is awfully obvious when they are done badly and doing them well can seem to take quite a bit of time.

The undulating hedge in the Wave Garden – cut with an electric hedge trimmer.

We use a variety of pruning techniques on the camellias, depending on the situation. If we are doing a full rejuvenation, it is easy. We just cut off to a good framework and then practise patience for two years while the plant recovers and makes bushy, fresh growth. Camellia hedges are done with the electric hedge trimmer. Mark did the Wave Garden hedges and I spent probably as long going through afterwards with secateurs to tidy up wayward branches and bits that were still out of place.

Camellia Tiny Star was cut back pretty much to bare wood two years ago after getting way too tall and leggy. This is two years of regrowth.

It was the four umbrella camellias surrounding the sunken garden that have taken the most time. These are top-worked, so grafted about a metre off the ground. They are a seedling from Mark’s breeding programme that we never sold but Mark has always referred to as Pink Poppet. For years, he has kept them in shape with the hedge clippers. When I say years, I have no idea how long. Maybe fifteen or so? They had become very dense and full of debris and dead twigs. I decided they needed a good clean out and thinning.

Spot the difference? These are two down the other end of the sunken garden that have just had hours of attention and you can see in the wool bale how much has been removed.

I may not have started, had I realised how long it would take. The first one took me around four hours. I did speed up but even so the last one would have been two and a half hours and I could have spent longer and done a more thorough job. At the end of it, I had removed at least a third of the bulk and they did not look any different. But that is the whole point and the reason why it took so long. I didn’t want them to look any different, I wanted them to be able to breathe, to shed spent blooms and leaves and to get rid of the growing issue with black mould on some of the foliage. Invisible pruning. I am hoping they may last another decade.

Behold my ladder. In an establishment with many ladders (about eight different ones), this one is mine, all mine. I bought it to use in the house. We have a higher ceiling stud than modern houses and I couldn’t reach the top cupboards from the kitchen step ladder. So it lives in the broom cupboard in the house but I also use it in the garden. It is so lightweight, I can lift it with a single finger. It is very stable with a platform for comfortable standing, rather than a narrow step at the top. There is even a handy top shelf for small tools. I can’t recommend it highly enough for anyone who needs a convenient ladder for outdoor or indoor use. Lloyd was so impressed when I let him use it indoors for a task that he said he was going to get one for his home. For New Zealand readers, I bought it at Mitre 10 Mega and it wasn’t hugely expensive – a bit over $100, from memory. It is worth every cent.

Gardening in the ruins

Not Christchurch. The Garden of Ninfa in Italy.

Poor old Christchurch cathedral is back in the news. Badly damaged in the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, its future again hangs in the balance as money for the restoration has dried up, with substantial shortfall of $89 million – at current prices but likely to rise.

In the 1880s on the left and in 2001 on the right. Photo credits Wiki Commons.

Christchurch’s Anglican cathedral is a key building in the heart of the central city square. Built in the neo-Gothic style in the years between 1864 and 1904, it immediately became an iconic image of that city.

A haunting image taken 30 minutes after the 2011 earthquake (Wiki Commons)

I have no personal opinion on the right or best option for the future of the badly damaged building. I can understand the desire for restoration from some parties. Christchurch lost so much of its history as a result of the earthquakes and this is one of its most significant, historic buildings. Its flamboyance harks back to earlier times before the stodgy utilitarianism of most modern structures. On the other hand, I can see the point of view of the Anglican church, that their focus is on caring for the living, not preserving architectural history at huge expense financially. The post-earthquake reconstruction required throughout much of the city was incredibly expensive, stretching both government and local body resources and those financial resources have now dried up. While historic buildings are important, the reconstruction of sewage pipes, water and power takes precedence, followed by the need for new homes for the many displaced people.

I visited Christchurch in 2013 and saw some of the damage first hand, but just from a domestic, suburban point of view. The inner city remained largely closed off. The sheer scale of destruction was hard to comprehend. My well-travelled Christchurch gardening friend and I had discussions about how the cathedral could be made safe, preserved as a ruin and gardened. We had both seen similar scenarios in Europe. But we knew our idea was romantic fantasy at the time.

Ninfa, again. Built around a larger village than Torrecchia shown further down the page.

For the rest of the country, the earthquakes are already just a memory – but Christchurch is left with a ruined cathedral in the heart of the city, a constant reminder of what happened, now with no solution in sight.

Of the possible options for the cathedral, the current situation of stopping restoration mid-flight seems the worst possible one. Fully restored, the city square would have been returned to its pre-quake status. Demolition would have given the option of replacing the old cathedral with a new building in an exciting, contemporary architectural style marking the new era. Of course, it might also have led to the building of a utilitarian monstrosity of no architectural merit at all but public opinion may have had some sway on a replacement. But to be left with a ruined cathedral, shut off from the public and surrounded by the detritus of a building project sitting in limbo just seems like a continuing reminder of the destructive earthquakes with nothing positive in sight.

Torrecchia Vecchia in Italy, built around the ruins of a village

Maybe those discussion my friend and I had back in 2013 are not so far-fetched at all. It had me delving back through my photo files for images of gardening amongst ruins. I am still a bit sad that Covid cancelled our 2020 trip when we planned to get to Lowther Castle in East Cumbria. We knew Dan Pearson, a UK designer whose work we admire greatly, had an ongoing project creating gardens around a ruin. I can’t find photos I can download without breaching copyright but it is worth clicking through this link to get a view of that project which looks both grand and romantic. I would love to have seen it in person.

Britain and Europe are littered with ruins. I have never forgotten a garden we visited, overlooking Lake Stresa in Italy. At the top of the garden were stone ruins – a Roman fort, no less. As in Ancient Roman. Christchurch cathedral doesn’t have that antiquity – but neither does Lowther Castle.

Ruins of the former grand house at Trentham near Stoke-on-Trent in the UK. It was all barricaded when we visited in 2017 but I am sure I read that there were plans to make the ruins safe and then extend the gardens into that area.

If it is still a roped-off building site in ten years time, or if hope dies of raising the funds to complete the restoration, maybe, just maybe, memorialising the site with a garden in the ruins will be an idea whose time has come in this country, too. It took 40 years to build, so I guess the 13 years it has been an unsafe, dangerous building may have a while to run yet.

The Palatine in Rome – more gently controlled serendipity than active gardening

Villa Ariadne in Tivoli, near Rome. All serendipity here on a huge site of ruins but no less charming for that.

A postscript comment from Christchurch gardener, artist and garden writer, Robyn Kilty: It’s tragic Abbie! I have been to Ninfa too, and wondered if the Italian solution would work for Christchurch! Remembering that Ninfa is a much larger area- a village – with a most picturesque stream running through it, whereas the Square in Christchurch is an urban built up area with no stream, not much history, and surrounded by hard grey concrete. There is a small grassed area nearby, which is completely out of scale, but still, a Memorial garden of some sort would be preferable to the nothingness and the ugly temporary scaffolding that is meant to prop up what is left of the ruin. This seems destined to be the fate of the centre of Christchurch ad infinitum.

The trouble is that there has been and still is, such indecision around the whole sad situation – groups for and against restoration and at the time of the earthquake, a bishop from Canada with no vision and no cultural links to Christchurch, yet representing the Anglican community who appeared to hold all the power. She was in favour of demolishing the ruin and replacing it with a beach!!

As the current work to make the ruin safe has progressed, it is uncovering more and more structural damage that is more extensive and deep-seated than originally thought, so that sadly the cost of continuing to restore the Cathedral has become prohibitive, and with costs rising all the time, it is beyond the Anglican community and now the government. Even if it had been financially achievable, the feeling is that pouring more millions of dollars into restoration would still only result in a kind of ‘fake’ cathedral, where modern construction methods and materials could never replace the 19th century original anyway.

While some type of memorial garden amongst the ruins seems to be a solution, could it ever be like Ninfa, or even Lowther Castle, as our ruins are just a sort of small, out of scale aberration in the centre of the Square in Christchurch, surrounded by concrete. Imagine orange and yellow African marigolds gracing the centre of Christchurch where a cathedral once stood. Or perhaps that would be fitting after all, as we are told that the Christchurch Cathedral was mediocre in design anyway compared to grander Cathedrals in Europe and not worthy of restoration. Oh dear – why did our Victorian city fathers build their dream of an english city with a mediocre english cathedral at it’s core – on a far flung earthquake prone swamp??

Sorry, I’ve not left this comment on your Comments page, but that doesn’t seem to work for me – probably because I don’t press the right buttons.

I would make three points in reply to Robyn:

It is all in the scale. Yes the cathedral site is one building, not an entire village but that is a design and scale issue, not a concept problem.
Given the track record of the cathedral in earthquakes, maybe a rethink is needed. “Earthquakes have repeatedly damaged the building (mostly the spire): in 1881, 1888, 1901, 1922, and 2010. The February 2011 Christchurch earthquake destroyed the spire and the upper portion of the tower, and severely damaged the rest of the building.” (Wikipedia)
Not African marigolds! Nevair! And preferably not tulips either, but that is personal taste.

Early spring gold

A selection of the earliest flowering narcissi – we like variety

What a delight are the dainty narcissi. I see I started photographing them in in mid July so we have had a month of pleasure so far and plenty more to come. When it comes to magnolia flowers, we lean to the bigger is better way of thinking but the narcissi are different. Small and dainty, thank you.

The big daffodils flower later and we don’t have many of those. In fact, we have none of the large-bloomed, modern hybrids which are what dominate the commercial bulb catalogues. They just don’t fit our garden style. Also, because they are later flowering, they get hammered by the narcissi fly and with their long stems and heavy heads, they flop over as garden plants in heavy spring rains.

Down in the park. Those backswept petals are a feature of cyclamineus narcissi but they are by no means all as backswept as these specimens that look particularly startled.

We once went to the National Daffodil Show when, for some unknown reason, it was staged in the War Memorial Hall of our nearest small town. It was amazing but the only dwarf varieties on show took up about one square metre while the rest of the hall was packed with impressive displays of show blooms and there was a clear preference for what we sniffily refer to as ‘novelties’ but devotees would describe as ‘breeding breakthroughs’. Those split coronas (the trumpet part in the middle) that look squashed don’t do anything for me and I am unconvinced by the colour break to pastel, salmon pink. But that is a matter of personal taste and life would be dull if we all liked the same thing.

Against a tree trunk in our entrance area

Mark and his father before him gathered up all the dwarf varieties they could find at a time when there were more available than seem to be around these days. So we have a reasonable representation of named varieties like ‘Tête-à-tête’ (more commonly written as Tete a Tete, without the French accents these days), ‘Beryl’, ‘Jetfire’, bulbocodiums (hooped petticoats) in both bright yellow and lemon (Bulbocodium citrinus), ‘Thalia’ and others. But we wanted more and we wanted them sooner than we could get by lifting and dividing existing clumps, which is why both Felix and Mark started raising seed.

In the hellebore border beside the drive

It is the back story of our garden, really. We could not afford to garden on the scale we do if we had to buy in all the plants. A lot of what we have across most of the genus we grow are unnamed seedlings that have been raised on site. In most cases, those seedlings are the result of controlled crosses rather than random, self-sown seedlings. A controlled cross is selecting two good parents and taking the pollen from one to fertilise the other, marking the flower stem and watching until the seed is ripe enough to gather. It is quite a bit more faffing around than just collecting random seed that has set but it ensures a higher percentage of good progeny.

That is a Felix Jury hybrid which he named Twilight which may still be available in NZ. Naturalised on our bulb hillside in the park.

If you want to start in a smaller way, you can just gather seed but, with narcissi, you need to sow it in a seed tray, look after it and pot on the seedlings when they are large enough, growing them on – usually in small pots – until they are large enough to plant out. From seed to flowering size takes about three years which may seem a long time to some who are used to more instant results but we are patient gardeners here.

If you are wondering where to start, Peeping Tom is a very early season, larger variety that is fantastically reliable and prolific. It and Twilight in the preceding photo are the strongest growers and form the backbone of many of our larger plantings.

The classification of narcissi is a complicated business and there are many different species and groups. In our climate, we have most success with the cyclamineus types, often characterised by swept back petals. The other advantage of keeping to dwarfer varieties is that their foliage is smaller and finer so they die off more gracefully, rather than the spent foliage flopping down and smothering everything around them.

Mid August is a very pretty time for us. The early magnolias are magnificent and the dainty narcissi scattered all around the place are such a good contrast in scale, colour and detail. We have figured we can never have too many little narcissi and are continuing to spread them further afield from cultivated areas, to extending the bulb meadows and tucked in wherever we think they can grow undisturbed that they may emerge and delight during their weeks to shine their golden light in early spring.

I laughed at myself when I found this photo of Jetfire from nine years ago. I was clearly having a flight of fantasy as I photographed flowers set against our stainless steel splashback, lit by the spotlights on the rangehood.

The Magnoliafication

The Magnoliafication – we made it up. A bit like The Rapture, perhaps, but with its roots firmly in the soil, showier and more socialist in concept so not, in fact, like The Rapture at all. It was the process by which we distributed our surplus nursery stock free of charge in our local town of Waitara.

Every plant nursery ends up with surplus stock, seconds and rejects. We had less than many nurseries, being smaller and focused on producing high-end products. But we still had them – lines we had over-produced and plants that did not make the quality grade and it seemed such a waste to burn or compost them. We had the occasional sale but when you are targeting the upper end of the market, sales are something of a betrayal of loyal customers who have already bought a plant at full price. We preferred to give the plants away.

Magnolia Vulcan as a street tree, but not planted by the Council

In the early days, Mark gave a lot of surplus magnolias and rhododendrons to local farmers in the hopes of beautifying the countryside and we still see some of those around the area. We also see properties which have since changed hands and new owners have come in and chainsawed out established trees with no awareness of what they are removing, but such is life. A few experiences made us feel we were being taken somewhat for granted so we stopped giving them to farmers. Instead, we had an arrangement with a charity shop on the main street of Waitara that they would collect plants when we had them and put them out on their front pavement for people to collect free. It worked well. Everything was taken and some of it at least would be planted.

There were a lot of Vulcans in flower around the town

A lot of what went down for collection were magnolias – some with inadequate root systems which would have needed nursing to recover, or misshapen plants which should have grown well, if a slightly odd shape. And a lot of those reject magnolias were ‘Felix Jury’ which took us a while to learn how to grow straight and tall. We also had a contract grower producing an export crop of the magnolias for us and his standards were not as high as ours so too many were unable to be exported. They went down to our magnolia distribution system outside the charity shop.

At the time, Mark quipped about the magnoliafication of Waitara.

Waitara has a lot of magnolias all coming into bloom. By no means did they all come from us, either as purchases or as freebies. When the powerhouse nursery, Duncan and Davies, was in full production on the other side of Waitara, it was a significant employer of locals as seasonal labour and it was also renowned for its huge end-of-season sales. There were also a number of other nurseries around, also producing magnolias and employing locals and some of the trees will have come from those sources.

The irony is that magnolias are generally seen as a high-end, prestige plant and Waitara can be described in many ways but elite is not one of them. Its post-colonial history has made it the poor relative in the district, at the low end of every socio-economic indicator. But it can sure grow magnolias well and I think it likely has more magnolias per capita than similar small towns.

I only drove around about 8 or 10 short streets this week, photographing magnolias from the roadside. I belong to a Facebook page which is mainly comprised of mad, keen magnoliaphiles in the more northerly parts of Europe. Most of the photographs they post are close-ups of blooms on small plants, often growing in challenging climatic conditions. I thought they would be interested to see them used more widely as a mainstream ornamental plant, planted by non-gardeners and gardeners alike. They were indeed surprised to see them in this context.

Given how many reject Magnolia ‘Felix’ we sent down, I was delighted when I found five planted in two gardens a couple of doors apart which were the right age and size to be from those. One had two trees planted side by side and the other house had three planted close together on their side boundary. I don’t know that they were our free ones, but given the high price tag on the premium product from both us and local garden centres we supplied, it seems unlikely that non-gardeners would go out and buy two or three at the same time.

I now plan to drive more extensively around the back streets of Waitara, playing ‘spot the magnolia’.

Finally, a wry observation about human nature. Friday was free plant day at the op shop, when we had plants to send down. One Thursday afternoon, two women drove in here in a modern car. They hadn’t come to buy plants, they had come hoping to get first dibs on picking over the free plants ready to go down to Waitara the next day. At the time we had a lovely, local man called Danny working here. He intercepted them and I hope they felt some shame at his incredulous response as he told them that was not how it worked. The nerve of some people.

This sight will not be seen again until July next year

Waitara has a splendid tree of the pink Magnolia campbellii which is one of my seasonal markers for the start of the magnolia season. It has finished flowering already but here is a photo I prepared earlier, which some of you may recognise. The tree did not come from us; it is likely it was a Duncan and Davies plant.

A travesty, I say. A travesty of pruning on this magnolia on the main street but I wanted to give the poor specimen an award for bravery in flowering on.

Odd crops

Hakeke at the top with white oyster mushroom below

We are timid eaters of assorted mushrooms and fungi in this country, having been raised with a healthy fear of death cap mushrooms which look so innocent and edible. Generally we have a choice of brown Portobello mushrooms or white button mushrooms at the supermarket, so I leapt at the chance to try fresh oyster mushrooms when I saw them at the local farmers’ market.

We were a bit underwhelmed, which was disappointing. More textural than tasty, one might say. I decided to taste test the remaining ones beside the flabby brown fungus that grows freely around here and which played a very significant role in the early colonisation of Taranaki, where we live.

I am not sure that I have unravelled the complicated nomenclature of this flabby brown fungus. Mark has always known it as ‘woodear fungus’ but that is wrong. I couldn’t commit the original Maori name to my memory – hakekakeka – but it seems that is now synonymous with hakeke, which I can remember easily. It belongs to the Auricularia group, and it may be correctly identified as A. cornea but that seems to be interchanged freely with A. polytricha, which it probably shouldn’t. They are not synonymous. Anyway, it is common here and safe to eat. If you want to.

Mark found me some hakeke from the garden for my flavour experiment. I sliced both that and the oyster mushrooms into thin strips and cooked them in butter with a touch of olive oil (to stop the butter from burning) and some finely diced garlic, using separate frypans.

The verdict? Compared to the hakeke, the oyster mushroom was flavourful but it was the garlic butter that was the tastiest by a long shot. The hakeke is purely textural. The only use I could see for it in times when food is plentiful, is fried until it is crisp and then used as a garnish on, say, fried rice. I don’t think I will be adding it to our diet on a regular basis, even though we can gather it for free.

Wasabi in flower beneath the orange trees. With self-sown forget-me-nots.

We were given a small division of a wasabi plant last year. Despite the internet saying it was difficult to grow, we hit on ideal spot (fertile soil with overhead cover from a couple of orange trees) and the clump has grown. I could see some evidence of the swollen tubers that are the part that is grated to eat so I dug it up, only to find I was being a bit optimistic. It seems it is a two or three year crop in our conditions, to get big enough tubers to grate. We now have seven divisions, five replanted and two shared with others.

You can see the tuberous parts forming which are the edible parts but I didn’t want to sacrifice too much of the plant by harvesting too early

Interestingly, I doubt that I have eaten genuine wasabi before. Outside of Japan, most of what is sold as wasabi paste is in fact horseradish, mustard and green food colouring. I did grate one little bit to try but it was too small a volume to detect subtle differences in quality and taste. It tasted wasabi-ish. I am sure that in time, freshly grated wasabi will lift my summer sushi to a new level.

Salted limes. In the past, I have done them whole but quartering them makes no difference and more fit to a jar.

In the kitchen, I am curing a jar of salted limes. I have been doing these for years to use in cooking, particularly in Middle Eastern and southern European dishes. They also add flavour when cooking grains like wheat, be it freekeh or bulgar, quinoa, rice or couscous. I dropped couscous when I realised how processed it is, but if you eat it, I can recommend adding a finely chopped salted lemon or lime to give it flavour. Limes and lemons are interchangeable when it comes to salting; I just use limes as they turn yellow because we have more and they are a better size if I am salting them whole, rather than quartered as here. The brine is so strong that they last up to a year in the fridge.

Fermented artichokes – I just looked up several recipes on line and worked out the general drift rather than keeping to one. Delicious raw in salads – and more digestible.

Salt also plays a role in fermenting foods. I have just completed a small jar of fermented Jerusalem artichokes and the reason to ferment this crop is that the process breaks down the inulin to a more easily digested form. It is the inulin that is responsible for this crop oft being referred to as fartichokes. Fermenting means that you can eat, sweet, crispy artichokes without the unpleasant after effects. I like the taste of artichokes and they are heavy croppers for minimal to no effort but my stomach did not like them at all. Hence the fermentation. I did a big jar last year but we didn’t eat them fast enough and they don’t store as well as salted lemons. When some questionable moulds formed, I threw out the rest but I think we will get through the smaller jar.

Huhu grubs – reputed to taste a little like peanut butter

I have my limits. I know that huhu grubs, as we know them, were eaten in earlier times but I could not bring myself to gather these, even when I discovered a plentiful supply in a rotting stump. Huhu are a long horned beetle endemic to this country. We were often faced with a plate of cooked insects in the elaborate meals we were served in China and I did try a few. I think it is a cultural thing and it would take me a while to get over my gag reflex and to normalise eating insects, even while I know that they could be a valuable protein source and more environmentally sustainable than animal farming. If I am going to eat insects, I would rather start with them in a more anonymous form – cricket flour, perhaps – rather than launching straight into foraging at home and putting live, squirming bugs into a hot frying pan. I fed them to the birds.

About Abbie Jury

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