Author Archives: Abbie Jury

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Tikorangi Notes: August 21, 2010

Magnolia Serene by the pool, 2009

Magnolia Serene by the pool, 2009


The photograph much admired by radio host and landscaper Tony Murrell on Radio Live this morning was the end of season snap of Serene taken last year. We might equally describe this as a fine example of why you do not plant a magnolia beside your swimming pool although in our case, it is why building the swimming pool beside the original Magnolia Serene was not such a brilliant idea of ours. The tree was there first. (Magnolia Diary 13).
Iolanthe, after a storm

Iolanthe, after a storm

Magnolia Lanarth is the first to drop its petals

Magnolia Lanarth is the first to drop its petals

Personally, I prefer the post-storm image of the original Magnolia Iolanthe (Magnolia Diary 9), planted beside our driveway although Lanarth (Magnolia Diary 4) dropping its petals more tidily and conveniently in our park is also a favourite.
Lanarth petal drop

Lanarth petal drop


All this is a little premature this season as we are just entering the new magnolia flowering season – there should be a splendid display out by next weekend.

And as a footnote, the petal drop around our lollipop Fairy Magnolia Blush is a regular delight still in store for this season as the first buds are just opening. (Magnolia Diary 12).

Circles of Fairy Magnolia Blush petals

Circles of Fairy Magnolia Blush petals

Tikorangi notes: Friday August 20, 2010

Nectar-feeding tui in a Prunus campanulata

Nectar-feeding tui in a Prunus campanulata

LATEST POSTS:
1) Breeding woody trees and shrubs like magnolias and camellias is a long term commitment over many years, so it was an absolute revelation to Mark in the mid nineties to be taken to visit hellebore breeder, Robin White, to see just how far and how fast you could get with a whole new type – the double hellebores.
2) In the garden – our hints for garden tasks this week and more on the topic of killing moss with washing powder.
3) Grow It Yourself Vegetables, by Andrew Steen. At last, a new book in this country where the author is actually writing from more than just one year of experience in growing vegetables. Enough from ingénues and novices – we would rather learn from people who actually know what they are writing about and have extensive background experience.
4) Planting an easy-care hanging basket using succulents was certainly not part of our own repertoire of experience, but neighbour Chris (wife of our garden right hand man, Lloyd) was keen to demonstrate how simple it is in the latest Outdoor Classroom.

Campanulata for the tui

Campanulata for the tui

TIKORANGI NOTES:
One of the unspoken conventions of garden one-upmanship in this country is how many tui you can boast of in your garden, particularly in spring. The tui (one tui, two tui – the plural does not have an s added) are native nectar feeding birds distinguished by the white tuft of feathers at the throat (along with a disconcerting ability to mimic other sounds). At this time of the year, we can number ours in scores as they move back from wherever their winter feeding grounds are to feast, particularly on the campanulata cherries and the single camellias. Being a territorial bird, they will bicker and squabble over prime spots and indeed over ownership of an entire tree. While I was out with the camera looking at this tree, the big, bully senior tui flew in and gave very short shift to the dozen or fifteen already ensconced. They were not going to argue the point and moved on quickly. No matter where we look at this time of the year, we see them feeding in the garden – tui will come if there is plenty for them to feed from but in order to keep them around, you need a succession of nectar producing plants.

Plant Collector – double hellebores

The pretty double hellebores

The pretty double hellebores

When we were in England in the mid nineties, Mark was taken to meet plant breeder Robin White who played a large role in introducing double hellebores to the market – known for his Party Dress series. We had not seen the doubles in this country at that stage and Mark was absolutely fascinated by how quickly and how far it was possible to get in breeding a whole new strain of helleborus. These days double hellebores are widely available in New Zealand, thanks mainly to Clifton Homestead Nursery, with a range of colours and under half the price they were when first introduced.

The doubles are not the same as the common Helleborus orientalis types and you can see that the foliage is quite different with deeply divided leaves. They also tend to flower later. Most are bred from a very limited number of double forms of Helleborus torquatus which is native to the former Yugoslavia. Torquatus has also had a role to play in introducing the highly desirable deep slate colours. In 1971 Elizabeth Strangman found just two plants showing double flowers somewhere in the nether regions of Montenegro and the quest to stabilise double forms started immediately. It appears that the majority of the doubles on the market still descend from those two plants. Most helleborus are single and have five petals. A semi double has an extra layer of petals (so about 10 all up), a full double has more. They all still face downwards so these gentle plants are better suited to people who take time to look at the detail of their garden and to turn the flowers upwards to admire them, unless you plant them on a slope to be viewed from below.

In the Garden: August 20, 2010

  • The season of panic for gardeners is nigh. The slow moving cold days of winter are over and the rush of spring means the pressure is on to get everything done. Priority number one has to be pruning grapevines if you have them – their sap is on the move already. If you are not sure what you are doing, our Outdoor Classrooms on the topic (both winter and summer pruning) show how – click on the Outdoor Classroom topic to the right or type into the search box immediately below the photo of yours truly on the top right.
  • Kiwifruit are pruned in a similar manner to raspberries – take out old fruiting canes and weak growths, leaving the best of last season’s new growth to set fruit for next season. It is usual to tie kiwifruit along horizontal supports to increase crop yield and to keep them under control.. We saw them trained to cover pergolas in northern Italy where they were regarded as rather more exotic than here. They were very effective and we are thinking of trying it.
  • Keep sowing peas fortnightly and sow onions from seed.
  • Get a mulch onto the asparagus patch if you are lucky enough to have one. It is the optimum time for feeding this crop as it breaks dormancy and comes into growth.
  • It is the last call for using hormone sprays on the lawn, if you feel you must. After this next week or so, put the spray right away to back of the cupboard until all deciduous plants in your own and your neighbours’ gardens have put on their fresh foliage later in spring. You can cause terrible leaf damage which can last until leaf drop next winter, or even kill the plant in bad cases, with even the slightest whiff of spray drift at the wrong time.
  • It is the time for digging and dividing spring and summer perennials which will be coming into growth.
  • Do not delay on sowing new lawns or patching balding old ones. The lawn we showed in the last Outdoor Classroom is now a pleasing swathe of green though still very fresh.
  • Apparently the use of Cold Water Surf as a moss killer is widely known, judging by the calls I received after last week’s Countdown to Festival. And it is quick – I tried it on a mossy path and within three days it had turned brown. Don’t be too generous lest you be like the person who told me she laid it on so thick that her lawn foamed when it rained. Another caller told me it does not have to be CWS – any washing powder will do so I have bought the cheapest I can find to experiment. Be a little cautious though – it will either be the alkaloids or the phosphates or something caustic that causes the moss to die. In moderation, septic tanks show these are not a problem but you probably don’t want to carpet your environment in them. Vinegar also works.

Grow it Yourself Vegetables, by Andrew Steens.

In that great surge of garden books on growing edible plants, it is a relief to see one from an author who is doing more than just documenting his or her first year of trial and error, or relying on other people’s research. Andrew Steens brings experience, enthusiasm and qualifications right across the spectrum of gardening and horticulture, focussing in this case on growing vegetables. Readers of the Weekend Gardener will recognise him as one of the panel of fortnightly contributors charting activities (of the fruit and veg persuasion) in their own home gardens. That level of hands on experience does shine through. He has written a book which will pretty much tell you what you need to know about how to grow vegetables and which crops to grow and how to manage your productive garden in a sustainable way. Unusually, he has also given his personal picks for top performing selections by name which is helpful.

On the downside, it is by no means the sharpest designed reference book I have seen. It is a little busy and cluttered which makes it harder to use. There were times I felt that more rigorous editing would have sharpened the writing and cut out some of the extraneous detail which includes preaching to the converted. The author’s recent experience is from Point Wells, north of Auckland. Writing a book to cover all of NZ, which has huge climatic variation, is a big ask. He has made a good fist of it, but I think that southern gardeners may pick more holes in it than we spotted. The big problem that Mark noticed immediately is that the diagrams showing sowing times for marginal crops are way out. If you sow your melons or aubergines in December and January here, you won’t get a crop. They need a long growing season. This appears to be another design flaw. If you read the detail of the text, Steens is absolutely correct when he says they need to be sown from seed and started in small pots well in advance for planting out when the soils have warmed. But that is not what the dinky diagrams on each page tell you because they fail entirely to differentiate between sowing seed direct into the garden or using plants that you started under cover two months earlier.

Despite those reservations, this is certainly one of the better recent publications on the topic full of practical advice and a useful reference.

(Published by Bateman; ISBN 978 1 86953 761 6.)