Author Archives: Abbie Jury

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About Abbie Jury

jury.co.nz Tikorangi The Jury Garden Taranaki NZ

Countdown to Festival – June update

In Stratford, June and Colin Lees at Cairnhill Garden have battened down the hatches for winter. Given the severity of inland frosts, they have moved their stoneware birds in under cover. Last winter one of the herons suffered a severe head injury, literally splitting in two. Fortunately potter and fellow garden opener, Joyce Young, put it back together in time for Festival. June is learning how to handle the blue Himalayan poppies. She bought a couple of plants a few years ago from a Wanaka grower and one has achieved perennial status (even the Lingholm strain can be short-lived) impressing garden visitors and setting prolific amounts of seed. There are few garden plants to equal the pure blue of these poppies so June is determined to nurture the many seedlings to flowering size.

Havenview vegetable gardener supreme, Maree Rowe on Kent Road has all her garlic planted and fed with copious amounts of compost to keep this gross feeding crop happy. She reports that her Queensland Blue pumpkin harvest this year was huge and weighty after growing them in one of the compost bins. She has completed the annual review to maintain her certification as a member of Organic Farm NZ, a process which is both rigorous yet supportive and encouraging. And Maree claims that her building skills are improving and she gained some practice extending the chook pens and runs for her new chicken additions. Now she is waiting in anticipation of plenty of fresh eggs being laid every day in spring.

In Kakaramea, Jacq Dwyer at Te Rata has been planting more fruit trees in the orchard, including a damson plum to encourage sister Michelle’s efforts making her Dam Fine Damson Gin. Michelle brought back a bottle of sloe gin (sloes are a small bitter fruit, actually a member of the prunus family, often found in hedgerows) from the UK but her efforts with damsons eclipse that liquor. With a six week turnaround, her recipe is considerably faster than the minimum twelve months required by the recipe I have tried. Jacq has also been lifting big clumps of native grasses, grooming out the dead strands and replanting divisions.

On Heta Road at Thorveton, Mary and Barry Vinnicomb are delighted with their new family member – a little silver blue kitten. Mary felt she deserved a special name such as Penelope, but really she is named as much for the memory of the honesty seed heads referred to as silver pennies in Mary’s childhood. Alas Mary is struggling to keep her roadside beautification efforts going in the face of drunken vandals. It is just a little garden around a concrete power pole with a colourful pelargonium and orange Californian poppies but even that proved too tempting to late night revellers who had to destroy it, along with smashing a pair of pots from inside the Vinnicomb. driveway. However, they tangle with Mary at their peril. Not one to give up easily, she now plans to plant the power pole in the prickliest rugosa rose she can find. Rugosas are known for being both high health and incredibly prickly.

Also in town, Coleen Peri of La Rosaleda complains that she is dying to get onto her rose pruning (an enormous task in her garden where she grows a large number of them) but by the time she kits up to go outside, the rain has started again. It was with triumph that she managed the feat of getting her new 170kg statue of Diana the Huntress and a concrete bench seat of similar weight into position in the garden. She did have to hire in some brawn, grease a hand or two and supply a couple of bottles of wine to carry out the task. It is likely that Diana has found her permanent home amongst the trees..

At Festival HQ, work on this year’s programme is well down the track and it will be available at the official launch which takes place at the TSB Showplace on July 8. The inimitable Ruud Kleinpaste will be the guest at the launch. While he is best known as the Bugman, we can vouch for the fact that he is no slug when it comes to gardening either.

Tikorangi Notes: June 11, 2010

Latest posts:
1) In the depths of winter, it tends to sap the motivation to get out to the garden but in our hints this week, we discuss why we have never included planting celery in our garden diary and we admire our visiting kereru.
2) Flowering this week is the delightfully scented and somewhat understated Camellia lutchuensis.
3) Outdoor Classroom this week is on pruning raspberries. Our new resident pigeons (of the homing pigeon variety, not the native pigeon) were not overly impressed by the intrusion into their quarters which they are currently sharing with the raspberries.

The gentle ring neck doves are altogether too trusting

Tikorangi Notes
One of the gentle sounds of England for us is the soft cooing of the pigeons. No matter that they may be described as rats on wings, that sound is so completely evocative, that I can pick it immediately, even on television. Our native wood pigeon , the kereru, is a very large bird, cumbersome even, of small brain but highly prized as a garden visitor and completely protected by legislation because of dwindling numbers. But it doesn’t coo like the English ones. We tried ring neck doves which coo beautifully and are pretty little birds. Alas they are completely trusting and spend much time on the ground so are vulnerable to predators. The late Buffy took out quite a few and we have to keep the surviving two in the raspberry coop at night for their own protection. It does not look as if we will ever manage a big flock of ring neck doves, though we would like to.

Mark

In his Jack Duckworth moments, Mark is very fond of his pigeons (I think they are the homing pigeon variety) which we can have flying free. He had to go to the bird show recently and buy another half dozen because even this resilient, quick breeding type fell to the ravages of our rare, endangered and totally protected falcon. We seem to have one falcon which has been around for years and clearly outlived his natural lifespan, possibly because of the raiding parties he makes regularly on Mark’s pigeons. Our dog, Zephyr, actually recognises the silhouette of the falcon circling above and barks a warning, which is a pretty impressive party trick for a dog.

In the garden this week: June 11, 2010

Our kereru in the apple tree

  • Tuesday’s bitter cold,  coming as it did after a cold and rainy Queen’s Birthday, was a reminder of why really keen gardeners like to have both a good, weather-proof shed and a glasshouse. A glasshouse makes raising micro veg, mesclun mix and rocket in trays over winter a great deal easier. It also enables you to plan ahead, sow seed and have plants in little pots ready to go out to the garden as soon as conditions are right.
  • Sitting around of a winter’s morning drinking coffee and discussing celery (as we do here), I realised that we have never even mentioned celery in these weekly hints. That is because it can be a very difficult crop to grow well and in the combined experience of growing vegetables here, totalling about 60 years between Mark and Lloyd, both agreed that it is hardly worth the effort for the stringy green stems that result. And if you try blanching the stems to reduce the greening which makes it strongly flavoured and tough, it tends to create a lovely home for slugs. Then leaf diseases defoliate the plants.  We have long figured that it is easier to buy the clean stems from the supermarket when required even if they are hardly organic.
  • If you want the taste and texture of celery at home, celeriac gives the flavour and is a great deal easier to grow successfully.  And Florence fennel or finnochio is a reasonable substitute for the texture (and actually more delicious in our opinion). Both celeriac and fennel also hold very well in the garden, giving a longer season. You can sow celeriac and fennel seed from late August onwards, earlier if in pots under cover. If you want to try celery, you can start it at the same time for summer harvest and follow up with a sowing around Christmas for winter harvest. Treat all three crops as gross feeding, green leafy crops not root vegetables.
  • Plant garlic, shallots, broad beans and the unfussy brassicas.
  • We have a kereru (wood pigeon) which comes in repeatedly to feed from the remnant apple leaves still on our espaliered apple trees outside the kitchen window. There are always tui visible, currently feeding from the early camellias (they need to be simple, single flowers with visible stamens to feed the birds), monarch butterflies are cold but still here and ladybirds are creeping in our wooden joinery to hibernate in the folds of the curtains. We have to take care not to vacuum the ladybirds up when they fall. One of the pleasures of having a garden is the chain of nature it can encourage.
  • Keep an eye on your favourite garden centres to see what new stock they are taking delivery of at this time. It should include fruit trees, new season’s roses, strawberries, all the deciduous crops such as magnolias and cherry trees along with a range of shrubs – all suitable for immediate planting.

Flowering this week: Camellia lutchuensis

Camellia lutchuensis - a triumph of refinement and style rather than bold statement

In the crowded class of camellia species with small, white, single flowers, Camellia lutchuensis has a special property which sets it apart – it has the sweetest scent of any camellia. In fact, lutchuensis is the parent of  the scented cultivars (some of which are better scented than others but few are as good as their parent). While not quite into the heady fragrance of daphnes, lutchuensis has a lovely scent which can be detected as you walk past the bush.

There is nothing blowsy or showy about this little camellia but some of us like the simple charm of the creamy white cups which, at only a couple of centimetres across, are never going to shout look at me, look at me. The buds are also very pretty. It is best viewed in close-up as opposed to a landscape statement. Added to that, the foliage (which is smaller than more common japonica camellias) goes a bit yellow in high light levels, so this is a plant for semi shade or open woodland. It is definitely for those of more refined tastes – but what would you expect from a species native to Japan, that country which reveres simplicity in nature and gardening? It also occurs naturally in Taiwan which is another island that has given us some really interesting plants across a range of genus.

Flowering this week: Luculia pinceana Fragrant Pearl

The sweet fragrance of Luculia Fragrant Pearl through autumn and winter

The sweet fragrance of Luculia Fragrant Pearl through autumn and winter

Fragrant Pearl was a breakthrough in a world of winter pink luculias. The summer flowering white luculia is grandiflora (a different species), the hard candy pink form in flower now is gratissima. The most common form of pinceana is Fragrant Cloud which reaches for the clouds but has beautiful late flowers in soft almond pink with a white eye. Fragrant Pearl is white, very fragrant, has very large individual flowers and if you have a good plant, it will flower from the end of March to the end of June. It does get some size to it if you don’t keep it pruned and pinched out – as in 3m x 3m. Luculias have a wide distribution throughout Asia, including parts of China and northern India but basically they won’t tolerate hard frost and very cold temperatures, they don’t like too much heat but they are happy in moist and friable soils – which is pretty much describes the conditions in much of Taranaki.

We have our colleague, Glyn Church, to thank for introducing the white pinceana luculias here. Some years ago he brought in seed and Fragrant Pearl is a selection which we purchased from him as part of that seed raised batch. It was so good that we started propagating it from cuttings (to keep it true and avoid seedling variation) and put a cultivar name on it. It roots easily from cuttings taken in late spring or early summer and grows rapidly so if you can find a plant in a friend’s garden, you can grow your own.