Author Archives: Abbie Jury

About Abbie Jury

jury.co.nz Tikorangi The Jury Garden Taranaki NZ

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It is the time of the year when the deciduous azaleas star and there aren’t too many plants that star in bloom as they do. For 49 weeks of the year, they are largely ignored and then boom!

If you set aside the flower power, deciduous azaleas are a fairly unremarkable plant, at least in our conditions. I have never seen one with exceptionally attractive form. In winter when they have no leaves, they tend to look twiggy, scruffy and dead. With their fresh foliage in spring, they are generally unremarkable. By the end of summer, in our mild, humid conditions, the foliage is often mildewed. As I went around photographing ours on Thursday, I thought they would look better if we did a big round on taking out the dead wood, which we haven’t done for some years. This is a task best done when the plants are in leaf because in winter, it is hard to tell the difference between dead wood and live wood. But even when we clean them up in this way, it is still very hard to turn an azalea shrub into a good form which stands on its own merit because their growth habit is so twiggy, so formless.

These shortcomings are forgiven when they come into bloom. Masses of bloom, often strongly scented and the colour range is extensive. Some have a vibrance and mass that is rarely equalled. ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ they shout. Others are much more restrained in hue if you can’t think how to integrate the pure colour of the oranges, reds and yellows.

We have a fair swag of them, mostly planted between the 1950s and the 1960s. Some came into the garden as named varieties but the names have been lost in the mists of time. Felix Jury immediately used these in controlled crosses and raised more from seed. Mark also dabbled in turn, particularly with getting double flowers. Deciduous azaleas are one member of the rhododendron family that I think you can safely buy based on flower colour alone, without worrying about searching out particular varieties.

Most of our azaleas are surrounded by large expanses of green. And a rhododendron is not going to survive being planted right on the streambank like this azalea (which is itself a member of the rhododendron family but let us not be pedantic).

Azaleas are useful because they are nowhere near as touchy about growing conditions as most rhododendrons, particularly wet feet, as we refer to heavy soils that never dry out. In those earlier days, our park was prone to flooding. They will also tolerate dry and exposed conditions, living and growing when many rhododendrons will quietly give up the ghost and die. We only have a few deciduous azaleas in the cultivated gardens around the house; most are in the looser areas of the park and the Wild North Garden. And therein lies a lesson on placement. I don’t think they are an easy plant to place well in smaller, urban gardens, especially the strong coloured varieties.

It is hard to place a plant as dominant as this when in bloom in a smaller, town section planted in the soft pinks of springtime.

I drive past such a small garden every time I go to town. Freshly planted, my guess is that the owners went to the garden centre in spring and bought everything in flower that they liked. It has been particularly pretty this spring with both Magnolia Felix Jury and Iolanthe putting on a show despite their small stature at this early stage, along with some very pretty cherry blossoms, rhododendrons and camellias. And, this week, one garish deciduous azalea in bright yellow. I can see why they bought it but it does rather stand out as lacking harmony with the rest of the garden. The more restrained colours are easier to integrate.

I think our brightest azaleas work because they are standing pretty much in isolation surrounded by masses of green. When they have finished flowering, they will just be another shrub down in the park, like a neutral coloured cushion on a sofa. It is much harder to place them well in a small garden.

If you are in New Zealand and want to buy a deciduous azalea or three, do it right now. This is not a plant that fits modern methods of production and retail so you are unlikely to find them easily when they are not in bloom. Garden centres are not keen on them because they only sell when in flower.

I briefly attempted to disentangle the differences between deciduous, mollis, Ilam and Ghent azaleas, to name just a few groups. Mark gave me a potted history of the azalea in Aotearoa New Zealand and names like Exbury, Stead, Yeats and Denis Hughes all came up, along with notable collections around the country when they were a very popular plant several decades ago. Alas, I am not so fascinated by the genus as to give the time to fact check it all. I will say that if you use the broad term of ‘deciduous azaleas’, it will encompass the lot.

I picked one flower from each azalea that I could reach currently in flower, just to show the range of colour, size and flower form.

The three double white flowers are Mark’s efforts. I did not know this until he saw me laying out the flower board selection.

Too much? I admit there is a whole lot of this orange wonder in its location in a wilder area of the park where it has thrived, untouched by human hands for decades.

My lukewarm attitude to big red rhododendrons

Back in the days when we used to retail plants, I would quip that nine out of every ten big, red rhododendrons were bought by men; the tenth was usually bought by a woman for her husband. This may well be an exaggeration but it made me view big, red, rhodos as very… well… masculine.

Looking down to the park. Noyo Chief on the right, polyandrum on the left of the mown path. And photobombing Ralph in the foreground.

It may be that, in the intervening years, men have matured beyond that manly cliché and refined their tastes. I couldn’t possibly comment. This train of thought came back to me as I stood looking down one of the tracks to our park. On one side is a large, handsome plant of ‘Noyo Chief’ in full bloom and on the other side of the track is R. polyandrum in flower. My brain registered that ‘Noyo Chief’ was putting on its usual showy display but my heart drew me down to look more closely at polyandrum. It is all a matter of taste and preference. I can see the merit of the big red but it was the gentler charm of the very fragrant, loose-flowered cream that stirred my emotions.

Polyandrum with its heavily scented, large flowers that measure up to 17cm across but not your classic ball truss of a rhododendron.

Back in the early 1980s, Mark started the nursery here. We will give his father, Felix, credit for many things but contrary to what some people still think, he did not start the nursery. That was all Mark’s effort, from one wheelbarrow up. He started with rhododendrons as the main line and, as one in four New Zealanders lived in the Auckland area at the time (now more or less, one in three), he always had the goal to produce rhododendrons more suited to their climate. This meant varieties that would keep good foliage and not need regular spraying in a mild, high humidity climate that lacked winter chill.

The NZ hybrid Rubicon is one of the best reds – my camera has turned it pinker than it is to the naked eye. But you can see the silvering on the leaves which is a sign of thrips which we get badly in mild climates. This plant flowered brilliantly for years and then simply… died.

There are a few big ball truss types that perform well in Auckland and this includes the arboreums, many of which are big reds. ‘Kaponga’ is a good example. But it was the maddenii group that Mark targeted. Felix had already found that they performed way better here in our mild, humid climate, keeping healthy foliage without spraying, flowering abundantly every year and many, if not most, had fragrance. Most of Felix’s successful hybrids are from within the maddenii group – ‘Bernice’, ‘Moon Orchid’, ‘Floral Dance’ and ‘Barbara Jury’, amongst others.

This is an unnamed maddenii from Felix’s breeding – the same cross that gave Moon Orchid and Felicity Fair.

The same maddenii beside white Mount Everest. I like that contrast of the looser maddenii with the chunky sturdiness of the ball truss on Everest.

Alas, none of the maddeniis have big, ball trusses that are generally associated with rhododendrons. Nor do they come in red, be it bright red or dark red or pure red. And the maddeniis don’t have that chunky, solid, rounded form of growth seen in many rhododendrons, instead being much looser in form. We spent years working hard to convince the buying public of their merits. It often felt like pushing the proverbial excrement uphill and I don’t miss those days at all. These days, I am happy to enjoy them in our own garden. The maddeniis make my heart sing more than any other group of rhododendrons. Personal taste and all that.

Rhododendron nuttallii x lindleyi ‘Stead’s Best’ delights me far more than any big, bold red.

As a postscript to big red rhododendrons, let me tell the story of ‘Fireman Jeff’. Back in the early days of the nursery, our country’s borders were much looser and there was a lot of new material coming into the country. Mark bought all the new hybrids he could find locally, mostly originating from the USA. It was the era of plants like ‘Lems Monarch’, ‘Lems Cameo’, ‘Puget Sound’, ‘Trude Webster’ and so many more. I see our 1990 mailorder catalogue ran to a full 127 different rhododendron options, which seems a huge number for what was still a small nursery. ‘Fireman Jeff’ was amongst those recent imports. Mark and I must have been a bit tired in 1989 when we wrote its description for our catalogue:

Fireman Jeff (Jean Marie de Montague x Grosclaude) 2m Mid season.

This over-rated hybrid is best suited to a cooler climate where its bright red, almost hose in hose flowers could make a splendid feature in your neighbour’s garden. Large plants $10.00.

I see a year later, in 1990, we changed our tune a bit and wrote: “To prove our comments last year wrong, it flowered beautifully for us this season. Better suited to cooler climates where it may justify its good reputation.” And we had put the price up to $15.50. We dropped if from our range, though, because it wasn’t suitable for our target market.

I lack any photos of Fireman Jeff. This instead is another maddenii seedling.

‘Fireman Jeff’ is still being sold extensively but the advice remains sound – best in cooler climates (south or inland) with winter chill and lower humidity. Keeping to the arboreums and maddeniis is a safer move if, like us, you are high humidity and lacking winter chill. With a garden dating back to the early 1950s here, we can speak with some authority on the rhododendrons that have lasted the distance in these conditions.

These are both unnamed seedlings but again, that combination of the tight ball truss and the loose maddenii bells pleases me.

Good things take time *

Pleached Fairy Magnolia Whites in a row shaped to a flat plane. We have two such rows.

Behold our pleached rows of Fairy Magnolia White! I am delighted. A goal has been achieved. It has taken 10 years and that was starting with big plants. In retrospect, I admit that it seems quite a long time but such is the way of gardening. It has looked fine and established for maybe 6 or 7 of those intervening years but finally, we have it how it was envisaged.

Pleaching is creating a hedge on stilts where the foliage is knitted together to form a length that is more or less flat on two sides but uninterrupted in its length. I photographed pleached street trees in Vernon, the small French town closest to Giverny back in 2014 but I think it was Mark who drew my attention to them because he already had the plan of pleached rows defining our summer gardens, on which we had started the groundworks back at home.

Lloyd on our baby tractor, moving in trees one at a time back in 2014

The start of the summer gardens, when we were all a decade younger. You can see the peg in the ground – they were working to string lines to get the spacings even and straight.

So it was Mark’s vision and his and Lloyd’s hard work that saw large plants going into the new ground in the spring of 2014 and autumn of 2015. We already had the plants growing in a field on our property across the road. They were our original stock plants from when we first released Fairy Magnolia White and they were trained to a strong central leader or trunk. It was no mean feat digging them and getting them across the road and planted but Mark and Lloyd were 10 years younger then. As an aside of useful advice, as soon as they were planted, Mark removed about a third of the foliage, which seemed brutal at the time but was all about reducing the stress on the plants after transplanting.

This is what it looked like a month ago when Fairy Magnolia White was in bloom

In the years since, they have been trimmed once a year – as flowering finishes – to get them to the form we want but it was when our gardener, Zach, joined us that it all started to come together. This must be the third or maybe fourth year that Zach has trimmed them and he has it just right now. As garden tasks go, it is not a massive job – I think it only took him just over two days – and the heaviest part is managing the ladders, which are large. But it is a skilled, precise job. It is all secateur and handsaw work – not hedge clippers.

Squared off to be narrow in width, as viewed from one end of a row

It will look sharper when the hedge of Camellia Fairy Blush beneath also gets its big trim this week and the gap between that hedge and the pleached michelias above is fully defined. I was impatient to record my delight with the clearly defined, more-or-less two dimensional appearance (height and length but little width).

We have three archways of *Podocarpus parlatorei.* This front one still needs to thicken in the middle but it is getting there.

Credit to Zach, too, for creating the archways of Podocarpus parlatorei in the same garden. Mark had always planned either arches or gables – to echo the gables on the house. Realistically, had it been left to us, I am guessing we would probably have taken the easier route and just trimmed to tight columns but Zach has trained them over to be arches and they have almost filled out to final thickness. They are tied in, in case you are wondering how he did it. The key is getting it tied in when the new growth is soft enough to bend. When it has hardened, it will break. The podocarps are trimmed annually but he has kept the arch tied and trimmed every few months. Again, getting the ladder into place is the most onerous part of this task. Mark, Lloyd and I are all getting a bit old to be carting the largest ladders and working at height. This is just yet another reason why I appreciate younger generations.

Time, too, has seen our clivia plantings go from strength to strength and they are certainly starring this spring. You can have too many clivias in a garden; the orange and red ones are very strident. I am not a fan of mass plantings of clivia but we have integrated them amongst other plants in shady areas and they glow. Ours are almost all seedlings raised here from controlled crosses. This means that Mark has taken the pollen from ones he thinks are good and used the pollen on other selected specimens, marked the pollinated flowers and gathered the ripened seed to sow in nursery conditions. It is quite a bit of faffing about but increases the likelihood of getting superior seedlings rather than leaving it all to Nature. We now have so many that we just weed out seedlings and thinnings.

Mixed colours and mixed plantings are our style, not blocks of single coloured clivias

The reason why clivias are usually expensive to buy is that they are slow growing. It takes much longer than most common perennials to get them large enough to set flowers and sell in garden centres – years more, in fact.

Gardening really is about the longer game but it is particularly rewarding when you see visions realised and areas that get better as plants mature.

* The heading is a reference that it is likely only New Zealanders will understand. Cheese. Yes cheese. A reference to a long running advertisment for a brand of tasty cheese.

Too many bluebells!

So pretty beneath the trees in an area that is not cultivated garden

The romantic haze of blue of a drift of bluebells – how delightful. And yes, it is but only in the right place. I have written about bluebells down the years and we went to some trouble to establish drifts here. Ironically, back in 2007, I wrote: “The bluebell planting was a bit of triumph for Mark. He had been gently nurturing a patch in the vegetable garden to build numbers and came up with about 2000 this year. Now 2000 bluebells may sound a large amount to most people but his mission, he explained, was to try and get that 2000 to look more like 20 000. It takes a huge number to have much impact in a large area.”

I was first inspired by a natural bluebell wood in Scotland back in the early 1990s and I loved bluebell season when our friends, Bruce and Lorri Ellis, had Te Popo Garden. I have a childhood memory of my mother’s treasured bluebells. She was a good English gardener, my mother, and she encouraged us to pick flowers as long as we picked them with long enough stems to be put in vases. But the bluebells were prohibited; we were allowed to pick the common, blue grape hyacinths (muscari) but not the bluebells.

We also enjoy the bluebells in wilder areas, These all grew from seed Mark scattered. The presence of pink and white ones tell you that they are Spanish bluebells.

I once spent some time unravelling the differences between Spanish and English bluebells and came to the conclusion that what we have here are all Spanish bluebells, or maybe Spanglish hybrids, but not the more desirable English species.

Our mistake here has been to allow some into cultivated areas of the garden. Bluebells are best kept to wilder situations. I speak from experience. Bluebells are thugs; in well cultivated garden conditions, they are more than thuggish and can spread at a frankly alarming rate. Not only do the bulbs multiply over-enthusiastically , but the seed disperses freely and germinates happily where it lands. We started trying to deadhead our garden bluebells some years ago. Now we – as in Zach and I, but mostly Zach – are trying to eradicate them from some areas and to drastically thin them where eradication is not possible. Bluebells may be pretty but we don’t want them everywhere.

Bluebells are fine in this situation, around a tree trunk where they are contained by mowing. The narcissi are bulbocodiums and you can tell the tree is a eucalyptus by that interesting twirl on the trunk.

I am sure we could hit them with spray but that is a last resort here and we haven’t quite reached that stage of desperation.

What to do with all the bulbs that have been dug is the question that is now troubling us. I don’t want to give them away seeing we have decided they are weedy. They can’t go into the compost because they won’t die in there. Some of the early ones went into buckets of water to see if they will rot down but that is taking a long time and we don’t need buckets of water so much as tanks or drums. Also, we won’t appreciate stagnant water as temperatures rise and mosquitoes become active.

I don’t think they are going to die here, even sitting on weedmat

Some have been spread on a stand-out area covered in weedmat in the hope that they will dry out and dessicate. But they are actually growing and flowering there. Maybe when the heat of summer comes, we can keep turning the heap and drying them out but I reckon they are tough enough to survive.

We have resorted to removing the foliage and putting them into plastic sacks. The theory is that black sacks will heat enough over summer to cook the plants inside them and it mostly worked on wandering willie (wandering jew or tradescantia) in the past but the volume was considerably less.

Our landfill wheelie bin is not to be used for green waste unless it is noxious weeds. I may make a professional decision that bluebell bulbs are indeed noxious weeds and start putting a bag a fortnight into the landfill bin but it will take months to clear them.

Any helpful ideas?

Ajuga – a better behaved blue drift in a garden situation

The moral of this story is not to repeat our mistake and allow any bluebells at all into garden beds. Ajuga is a much more garden friendly option to create a blue haze.

The meadow we are developing in the Wild North Garden with a scatttering of bluebells, but mostly pinkbells, at the top of the photo

It has taken us years to learn how to create a sustainable flowery meadow in our conditions of high rainfall and high fertility but I feel we are succeeding in the Wild North Garden. Looking at it this week, I thought that a flowery meadow that goes from spring to autumn is more rewarding than a bluebell drift that looks lovely for three weeks of the year.

Ralph, back to sniffing out rabbits or maybe rats down in the bamboo grove

For those of you who expressed concern about our dog, Ralph, after last week’s post, I am pleased to report he is not far off being back to his normal self. He appears to have some damage to his lungs with a persistent cough. We have our fingers crossed that this may heal over time. Organ damage is a known side effect of the poisons he ingested but whether it will be permanent remains to be seen. Otherwise, he is back to his usual exuberance and if he were human, he would thank you for your concern. We are deeply relieved.

Spring in the woodland gardens

Red Hippeastrum aulicum, pale yellow calanthe orchids and Crinum moorei varegata are all mainstays of our woodland plantings

It has been a difficult week, so all I have to entertain readers with this week is scenes from the spring woodland. We like highly detailed woodland.

High shade is the key – here in the Avenue Garden

The key to woodland gardening here is to manage light levels. The charming scenes we see of European and British woodlands – the expanse of white birches underplanted with snowdrops and crocuses and that sort of thing – are beneath deciduous trees which let light in during winter and shoulder seasons.

Trilliums are a bit marginal in our climate so it is always a thrill to see their understated charm

Scadoxus, however, are so happy here that they have pretty much naturalised themselves. This is S. puniceus which flowers in spring. S. katherinae will feature in summer.

In Aotearoa, somewhere over 99% of our native flora is evergreen and most people tend to garden with exotic evergreens as a preference. In our years of retail, I encountered many gardeners who would reject anything deciduous. As a result, we don’t get the seasonal light coming into shaded areas. Also, with our rapid growth rates, trees tend to grow much larger. As UK author and horticulturist, John Hillier inscribed in our copy of Hiller Manual of Trees and Shrubs, ‘double heights and halve the time for New Zealand’. Dare I say it, UK woodlands often look quite spindly to my eyes.

Orchids, we have a few. These are pleiones. We lost all the yellow ones that need more of a winter chill but the purple, lilac and white varieties thrive under laissez faire management in the woodland garden.

More orchids – dendrobium to the left and cymbidium to the right

Woodland gardening means dappled light and some shade, but not deep shade. There aren’t many flowering plants that will perform in deep shade. Lifting, limbing and thinning are needed to create high shade and to allow reasonable light levels below.

The Rimu Avenue has such a dense network of roots from trees that are now over 150 years old that we have had to rebuild soil below to allow underplanting

There are also times when the soils below will need some extra texture, volume and replenishment in order to get small plants established. Small plants at ground level won’t thrive if they are bedded in amongst dense tree roots which have dried out the surface.

It is not all bulbs in our woodlands. Azaleas, vireya rhododendrons, camellias, hydrangeas and other shrubs add mid-level detail and height.

On the upside, even high shade and dappled light is enough to hugely reduce weed growth and the visual delight lies both in the detail below and the play of light. It is much lower maintenance than gardening in full sun.

Why a difficult week, you may wonder. We nearly lost our beloved dog Ralph to poison – not our poison and not deliberate but traumatic, nonetheless. We thought he was going to die on Tuesday night. He is still recovering and we are now confident he will survive, although there is a possibility of long-term organ damage.

It is perhaps little understood in this country that our predator-free goals are only achievable with the extremely widespread use of slow-acting poisons, one of which has no antidote. There is a pretty gung-ho attitude and light regulation when it comes to the use of poison. We choose not to use it and will trap and shoot instead. Ralph’s ordeal this week is a reminder to us of why we made that decision. Our lives would have been so much poorer had he died so needlessly and in distress.

About Abbie Jury

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