Author Archives: Abbie Jury

Unknown's avatar

About Abbie Jury

jury.co.nz Tikorangi The Jury Garden Taranaki NZ

Plant Collector: Haemanthus coccineus

Haemanthus coccineus - usually seen more as a foliage plant than a flowering one

Haemanthus coccineus - usually seen more as a foliage plant than a flowering one

There is nothing particularly rare about Haemanthus coccineus, though if you want a plant, buy it without hesitation when you see it offered for sale. It is one of those oddities which are difficult to source in these days of streamlined plant production and an ever shrinking range. Most readers will know it better from its foliage – typically each bulb puts up two enormous, fleshy leaves which lie flat to the ground throughout winter, resembling elephant’s ears – which is indeed a common name for this plant. Unfortunately, both the young leaves and the flowers can be magnets for slugs and snails so it pays to be vigilant. The red paintbrush flowers on spotted stems which have popped up in the last few days are striking but fairly short-lived. This is a summer dormant bulb from South Africa and the flowering this week will have been triggered by the rains 10 days ago.

 

The bulbs are enormous fist-sized affairs. If you have a patch which is ready for dividing, you could do it immediately because, as with belladonnas, the plant flowers before it comes into new growth. Otherwise, leave it until the foliage dies off in late spring. Unlike some bulbs, haemanthus roots never die off completely so you have to lift carefully and replant immediately without letting the bulbs dry out. Plants may need some protection from heavy frosts and they don’t want to be in heavy, wet soils.

Haemanthus are another member of the amaryllis family (amaryllidaceae, to be precise) which gives us the showy flowers of belladonnas, crinums and last week’s worsleya, amongst others. Haemanthus albifloss is the reasonably common white flowered form which is largely evergreen but unless we had poor forms of it, it wasn’t much chop as a garden plant and is a mere shadow of its showier cousin, H. coccineus.

As a postscript to the worsleya last week: one kind reader in New Plymouth had a plant blooming and replied to my request. We swapped pollen and can hope for some viable seed.

In the Garden: February 25, 2011

Impressed by the Japanese Black Trifele tomatoes

Impressed by the Japanese Black Trifele tomatoes

• There is not a whole lot you can be doing in the ornamental garden at this time of the year but history tells us that we will start cooling off within the next fortnight so enjoy the respite. Try at least to stop summer weeds from seeding to reduce next year’s crop. Snip the seed heads straight into a bucket and dispose of in the rubbish or burn them if you are in an area that allows fires.

 

• It is pretty much the last call for summer pruning of cherry trees. While you are about it, you may want to tidy up plums and peaches as they finish cropping.

• Mark has tried a relatively large assortment of tomato varieties this year but top of the popularity poll is Japanese Black Trifele. It is a curious dark tomato, more deep green and black than red so traditionalists may find it slightly disturbing but it more than makes up for that with good flavour, fleshy texture (rather than too juicy) and good production.

• You can save seed from most vegetables (we will be saving the tomato seed), confident that future crops will come true but with two provisos. Save the seed from the best specimen in the harvest, not some poor little weakling. The quality of future crops depends on the quality of the parent plant. And F1 hybrids will give very patchy results and don’t generally come true to the parent. F1 hybrid seed is the result of controlled pollination between two selected parents and was the origin of the super sweet corn we now take for granted and of some of the modern tomato cultivars. The only way of telling if you have F1 hybrids growing is from the original seed packet.

• Keep up the deadheading on summer flowering plants like dahlias and cosmos to extend the blooming season.

• Deadhead agapanthus by waterways and near native bush areas.

• Get the winter veg into the ground but plant brassicas in small numbers successively every month to avoid the common problem of a huge surplus of cabbages and cauliflowers all coming ready at the same time.

Making cold compost step by step (part 3 of 3)

Part one – low tech, low input means of dealing with green waste.
Part two – making a hot compost mix.

1) In an earlier Classroom, we looked at making hot compost where heat helps the breakdown. Cold compost, where the work is done by worms, is by far the most common form of home compost. You don’t need special facilities – a pile on the ground, compost bins or a netting ring are all fine. It needs to sit on dirt so the worms can move in. You are aiming to build up about a cubic metre of composting material at a time.

2) The ingredients and ratios are the same as for hot compost but because cold compost is not usually turned, it is better to build it in layers. Nitrogen comes from green waste (fresh leaves, vegetable scraps, lawn clippings etc) and this can be up to 60% of your mix. Carbon comes from dried leaves and stalky vegetation along with all the twiggy bits and this should comprise 40 to 50% of the mix. The carbon also traps air in the mixture and stops it turning to a sludgy mess.

3) Do not put in seed heads or diseased foliage or plants. Without heat, the seeds and diseases will survive and when you spread your compost, you will be spreading them throughout the garden.

4) The usual advice is that citrus peel and egg shells should not be added but we ignore that because we have large quantities of citrus peel to dispose of. The worms ignore it and it rots down of its own accord. However it pays not to add meat which will attract dogs, cats and rats. If you are adding newspaper, scrunch it up first or it comes out at the end of the process pretty much as it went in. Newspaper counts as carbon content.

5) The compost worms will arrive of their own accord. Striped tiger worms are the most common. If you are worried, you can buy them or transfer them from a worm farm but it is not necessary. If your compost pile gets sludgy and smelly, you do not have enough carbon content and it may have insufficient air (oxygen).

6) When you have about a cubic metre of layered mix, cover the heap or bin. Some people use old woollen carpet. Other options are heavy duty plastic, boards or corrugated iron. We use old weedmat weighed down so it does not blow off. With cold compost, it will take at least six months before it is ready to use and it may take longer over the colder months of the year. But at the end of that, you should have a clean mix which is easy to handle and nutritious in the garden. It is usually best to work with a row of compost heaps, or at least three – one you are building, one that is maturing and one that is being used.

Tikorangi notes: Friday 18 February, 2011

LATEST POSTS: Friday 18 February, 2011

1) Not, apparently, Worsleya rayneri but Worsleya procera, the Empress of Brazil, in full flower as a garden plant.

2) An update on our prized resident gecko whose photograph gave rise to much interest amongst local herpetologists, we are told.

3) Garden tasks for the week with an acknowledgement that autumn is just around the corner.

4) Step by step instructions on dealing to wasp nests safely – Outdoor Classroom.

5) The ignominious end of the carefully crafted Christmas tree – now resembling a dead sheep in the wild garden.

The swimming pool garden

The swimming pool garden


TIKORANGI NOTES: Friday 18 February, 2011
Summer is a time for intensive gardening around here, though not much planting which needs to wait until autumn and winter. We have big plans for substantial new gardens where the nursery has stood in recent decades – good flat areas in full sun. However, before we embark on bringing in yet more garden area, I want to make sure that we can manage the areas we already have to the standard we want. Like most New Zealand gardens, we maintain a large area with a skeleton crew (Mark, me and our ever helpful staffer, Lloyd along with one friend of the garden). The swimming pool garden is not a prominent area and only tends to be noticed during the summer season but as I floated around in the water earlier last month, I realized I could no longer ignore it. We had tackled the massive Curculigo recurvata last winter, but the Cordyline stricta and the Ligularia reniformis were staging takeover bids. Next, it has been on to the subtropical gardens beneath our avenue of enormous rimu trees. Predominantly planted in bromeliads, this means a prickly task which more or less shredded my arms above the elbows where the protective gloves stopped, let alone the legs between ankle and knee. But the garden is looking hugely better for a major thinning effort. Gardens grow but the change can be so gradual that it can escape one’s notice just how much it has changed over time.
A pleasantly shaded garden to work in during summer

A pleasantly shaded garden to work in during summer

Plant Collector: Worsleya procera

Worsleya procera (syn. W. rayneri)

Worsleya procera (syn. W. rayneri)

The most special plants flowering in our garden this week are the Worsleya procera (syn. W. rayneri) and they are not only special because they have the wonderful common name of Empress of Brazil (which tells you where they come from). They are also extremely rare in cultivation, a very beautiful lilac-blue in colour and generally regarded as almost impossible to grow as garden plants. We have two growing in different positions in the garden where they are just left to their own devices with no special treatment at all. When we had an international tour of clivia enthusiasts through, a number were also bulb aficionados and they were genuinely impressed that we could grow and flower this choice bulb in the garden. They are usually grown as really pernickety container plants. True, our flower spikes do not match the 150cm in height that they are reputed to reach, but the flowers are large and a most unusual colour in the bulb world.

There is only one species of worsleya but if you go back a step to the extended family, they are related to hippeastrums, crinums and amaryllis. Apparently in Brazil, they grow on steep granite cliffs beside waterfalls (where it is hard to imagine a flower spike of 150cm) but our garden conditions in no way resemble the natural habitat. The foliage is really interesting, arching in a semi circular, sickle fashion. These bulbs are not for the impatient gardener. Mark was standing looking at one of ours with Auckland plantsman, Terry Hatch, who originally supplied it to us. They agreed that was a long time ago, maybe as much as eight years. Mark found the label and it was in fact fifteen years. It had taken thirteen years to flower the first time. Time flies, apparently, when you are a gardener. Sadly, both ours are the same clone (one was an offset) and you need two different clones to get viable seed. Pukekura Park’s worsleya in the Fernery is not going to flower this year so if any local readers happen to have one in flower, we would love to swap pollen.