Author Archives: Abbie Jury

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About Abbie Jury

jury.co.nz Tikorangi The Jury Garden Taranaki NZ

Bring back plants! Please.

Even after 60 years, Pinus sylvestris Beauvronensis keeps getting better and maturing well, even though it remains under 2 metres tall

Even after 60 years, Pinus sylvestris Beauvronensis keeps getting better and maturing well, even though it remains under 2 metres tall

Until recent times, maybe only a decade or so, New Zealand gardens used to be all about plants. Sophisticated design concepts were rarely seen and terms like spatial relationships referred to Cape Canaveral. These days garden design is cock of the roost and plants are very much a secondary consideration for many people.

Good design is ageless and not to be derided in any way, but I mourn the devaluing of the role of plants in a garden. Frankly, you can only get so far with clipped hedging (usually buxus, sometimes lonicera or teucrium), renga renga lilies, mondo grass (be it black or green), catmint groundcover (nepeta) and white standard roses (be they Iceberg or Margaret Merrill). Maybe kumquat or mandarin trees in planter boxes or large containers. You can achieve a perfectly nice, tidy garden using those run of the mill plants which are in everybody else’s garden as well, but it is never going to be anything special, no matter how good the design framework.

To lift a garden above the ordinary, good design needs to be complemented by interesting plants combined in interesting ways. Mind you, I would say that. I have always believed that mass plantings of a single variety are best in public parks and on traffic islands. I find it exceedingly dull in home gardens. It takes more gardening skill to marry together a whole range of different plants but that is the fun part of gardening.

Start with trees. You can not magic up instant trees. You can buy advanced grade specimens but they are still going to be juvenile and take years to reach maturity. There is simply no shortcut with trees so the sooner you get them planted in the right positions, the sooner you will see some results. And make at least some of those trees good long term specimens. Some trees just get better with age, others look better in youth and get scruffy and past it too soon. Learn to tell the difference so when you cut out the short term filler trees, you are left with some good specimens. Pretty trees such as many flowering cherries, Albizia julibrissin, the blue flowered paulownias and some of the pillar conifers are great for quick impact but rarely age gracefully. Really good trees will take future generations into the next century so they need to be chosen carefully for the right position and given time to grow. They don’t have to be forest giants but you may need to do some research to make good choices. Not a day goes by here when we don’t mentally thank Mark’s great grandfather who left us a legacy of fine trees planted in 1880, and his father who added to it with many rare specimens in the 1950s. Trees give stature and backbone to a garden, be it large or small.

Search out treasures. If you have ever been on a garden safari where you visit many gardens in quick succession, you may have noticed how they can start to look very similar and meld in the memory because they use the same palette of plants. With an ever diminishing range of plants being offered for sale in this country, this scenario is going to get worse, not better. It clearly doesn’t matter if you don’t mind having a garden that looks the same as everybody else’s, but as a nation we tend to favour an element of uniqueness. We don’t want to live in a street where every house is identical, even to the floor plan, but we are leaning in that direction when it comes to our gardens. Good gardeners regard the sourcing of rare or unusual plants as being like a treasure hunt.

It is plant combinations, mixing and matching, that gives interesting detail to a garden

It is plant combinations, mixing and matching, that gives interesting detail to a garden

Experiment with plant combinations. While it is easy and quick to plant a swathe of the same plant, putting together a mix of different foliages and flowers that please the eye is more satisfying. Done well, there is an overall harmony which is pleasing at first glance while the detail invites you to linger and look more closely. Done badly, of course, it looks a hodge podge but you can always learn from that. If you are mass planting using only one or two different varieties, there is no reason to linger and look – you are just after the first glance impression.

In brief, the two rules of thumb in creating good combinations are to think of layering so that not everything is the same height and to get contrasts in foliage. Grasses are never going to look dramatic planted alongside other grasses but combined with a big leafed plant like a canna lily, a Chatham Island forget-me-not or pachystegia, they will have a great deal more zing. Plant combinations are about more than trendy colour toning.

There are a fair number of good designers around whom you can pay to give you a well planned garden in terms of the use of space but good designers who are passionate and knowledgeable about plants are as scarce as hens’ teeth. Good gardens are usually owned by good gardeners who know a great deal about plants themselves. And it is the plants which give the dynamic aspect to a garden and so bring life to the space.

Plant Collector: Arisaema sikokianum

Arisaema sikokianum

Arisaema sikokianum

You have to love arisaemas. They are notable for their ability to change sex. When immature or not growing strongly, they are male. When romping away with vim and vigour, they become female and capable of setting seed. The poor weak male will still flower but is only suitable as a pollen donor. Should the female weaken itself by setting too much seed or coming under stress, it will have a little rest, becoming a male again. Is this a commentary on the human condition, I ask.

A. sikokianum is a Japanese species, remarkable because it is one of the few which holds it head above the foliage. Most varieties hide coyly beneath a canopy of leaves but sikokianum stands erect and proud, and somewhat phallic in appearance even when female. It grows from a flattish, circular corm but the problem is that, unlike most corms, bulbs and tubers (including most other arisaemas), it doesn’t multiply and set offshoots. You have to gather seed to increase it by raising them in pots or seed trays. But it is worth the effort to get a little clump or drift because the flowers last for weeks and are truly eye-catching. These are woodland plants, happiest with a light canopy of trees above, and humus rich soil which never dries out but which never gets waterlogged.

Arisaemas belong to the Araceae family which also includes arum lilies and the mouse plant (arisarum). You may have picked certain similarities in appearance, though they are not close relatives. A. sikokianum is available in New Zealand though you will have to search it out. These treasures are not standard garden department fare in this day and age. We also have quite a bit of success with A. speciosum (which is easy to grow and multiply) and A. candidissimum, if you find them available but we struggle with some of the showy varieties which need more of a winter chill.

Grow it Yourself: gherkins and cucumbers

Gherkins are a pickling cucumber. Cucumbers are actually a tropical plant so are not going to want to be planted out until temperatures have risen. By all means start them from seed now but keep the babies under cover for a few more weeks. But is it worth growing gherkins at home? Fresh, home pickled gherkins should always taste much better than those commercially produced but you have to be pretty passionate about them to want to grow them yourself. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking you will put in one plant because then you will get a few baby gherkins every few days whereas what you want is plenty of them all at once so you can start the pickling process. You probably need about five plants, each of which will take up a square metre, and then pull them out and compost them as soon as you have harvested sufficient quantities.

All the cucurbits are gross feeders (hungry plants) so they need rich, fertile soil in full sun with plenty of depth to get their roots well down. They also need plenty of water during the heat of summer but as they are prone to mildew and all sorts of nasty diseases including Fusarium wilt, you are best to direct water to the root zone and avoid wetting the foliage. Keep the sprinkler well away. You can train the runners over a frame or structure to reduce the amount of ground space required or you can just leave them to sprawl over the ground like pumpkins. Personally, I think it is worth making more effort with a few cucumber plants which will gently crop from January to early April, when salad veg are most in demand. I am particularly keen on the little Lebanese cucumber. But then I would say that because we have neighbours who adore pickled gherkins. We make land available, they grow them and pickle them and give us a jar or two.

Tikorangi Notes: Friday October 14, 2011

Feeding from both the veltheimia and the agapetes

Feeding from both the veltheimia and the agapetes

Latest Posts:

1) ‘Tis spring – must be rhododendron time. R. johnstoneanum “Ken Burns” in Plant Collector this week.
2) A call for more rigour and less fervour in Abbie’s column this week – what used to be called The Good Life (courtesy of Felicity Kendall and whover Briars – was it Richard?) but is now styled Green Urban Living.
3) Grow it Yourself – beetroot this week.
4) Tikorangi Diary and notes about half price clearance special on most magnolias.

Tikorangi Notes:
I was delighted by the sight of the little waxeye gathering nectar from the veltheimia flowers outside my office window. We often see them working the Agapetes serpens (which I describe as the waxeye bush, for its ability to feed the birds) but this is the first time I have seen one feeding on the veltheimia which looks better suited to humming birds because of its very long, tubular flowers. We do not have humming birds in this country which has always seemed a bit of a pity to me. We would gladly trade blackbirds and sparrows for humming birds.

Rain has not helped the garden preparation this week – our annual festival (now styled the Powerco Taranaki Garden Spectacular) starts in a fortnight so the pressure is on. I did feel sorry for the tour group here on Wednesday when it was hosing down but at least it wasn’t windy or cold! The magnolia season is drawing to a close with only Serene looking picture perfect now. But the michelias (now also reclassified as magnolias) have a longer season. The first of Mark’s new series, Fairy Magnolia Blush, is looking particularly pink this year. Indubitably pink which, in the world of white michelias, is pretty remarkable. More rhododendrons open every day though the maddenii and nuttallii types are generally later flowering and won’t be doing much for another fortnight. The garden is open every day now and we are generally around for plant sales – sound the car horn if we do not appear because we will be in the garden.

Indubitably very pink this season - Fairy Magnolia Blush

Indubitably very pink this season - Fairy Magnolia Blush

Rhododendon johnstoneaum “Ken Burns”

Rhododendron johnstoneanum "Ken Burns"

Rhododendron johnstoneanum "Ken Burns"

October is the peak time for rhododendrons and while this group of plants has seen a considerable slide in popularity in recent years, there is delicious anticipation in watching buds fatten, show colour and then gradually open. We would not want to be without plenty of them in our garden and this week it is “Ken Burns” that is looking delightful. It is hard to describe the colour. I would call it honey buff, others describe it as champagne. The buds are buffy yellow with a pink flush and the fully open flowers fade out to a cream with a yellow throat. It is even lightly scented. The leaves are quite small and slightly hairy and the plant stays well furnished and compact to about 1.2 metres high and a similar width. But for those of us living in warmer parts of the country, one of the real stand-out features of “Ken Burns” is that it stays healthy and rarely gets affected by nasty thrips (which turn the leaves silver and weaken the plant) or by sun scorch.

I had always thought that this is just a superior selection of the species R. johnstoneanum (which is as it occurs in the wild – raising species from seed gives variation within the seedlings), but it appears that there is a school of thought that it may be a natural hybrid (in other words, R. johnstoneaum crossed with something else unknown). The story goes that the original plant was growing in the garden of Mr Ken Burns who lived near Timaru and it was nearly lost when a bullock leaned too heavily on the fence and inflicted major damage on it. Somebody salvaged the plant and named it for Mr Burns. It is not at all the done thing to name plants after oneself. Since then, all plants bearing this name have been propagated by cutting which keeps the plant true to name. To raise it from seed would be to give rise to more seedling variation so it would no longer be “Ken Burns”.