Author Archives: Abbie Jury

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About Abbie Jury

jury.co.nz Tikorangi The Jury Garden Taranaki NZ

I dream of hostas with a snail free leaf

Hostas have been preoccupying me for the past fortnight. First up, Mark and I volunteered to take a workshop on the topic during our recent festival and were a little taken aback at how many people turned up to hear our pearls of wisdom on the topic. And secondly, I have spent this week dividing and repotting hostas in the nursery. I have reached the point where I even dream about them which may be a sad commentary on the state of my life at the moment. But there are probably worse subjects to dream about than hostas.

When we used to sell plants by mail order, we were often surprised by the number of people who fail to understand that hostas are deciduous – in other words they disappear underground in autumn to re-emerge in all their glory in spring. And it is all that fresh spring growth which is their greatest appeal. That and their endearing tolerance of shaded conditions, even dry shade.

The worst example of hosta ignorance came from a new customer in Auckland. We despatched her order by courier in late autumn and she faxed back to say that the carton had arrived and all the plants were in excellent order, bar the hostas. I can still recall her words: “It appears there has been a rabbit in the carton eating the hosta foliage. Or if the hostas are meant to be like this, then I don’t want them.” I can not remember how we resolved the situation but I am pretty certain we never sent her another plant list. Some customers, as Mark has been known to observe, put the cuss into the word customer.

As with most other plant genus, hosta aficionados like to search out the new or the different (and in the hosta world, new does not always equal visibly different) so a full hosta collection can become rather large. But we are tending the other way and weeding out varieties which have minor variations at best. In fact I find it impossible to tell the difference between Patriot (itself a sport of Francee) and Minute Man. All three varieties are green with a white edge and googling hostas throws up a host of other minor variations of the same original plant. Hostas are not all stable in type and some varieties tend to throw up what are known as sports – aberrations or variations. Occasionally it will be something worth having but that is rare… The flip side of the coin is that the variegated hostas can tend to revert to a plain colour and that reverted part of the clump will often be stronger growing so will take over in time. So if you have a fancy hosta with a plain section, it pays to cut out that reversion. As most of the newer varieties in this country have come in as tissue cultured plantlets (in other words they have not been divided from an established clump but have been increased in a laboratory from cell divisions and grown on agar), the problem of reversions is becoming more common. Tissue culture is not always stable and can throw up variations or reversions.

The most common mistake made by less experienced gardeners is to be seduced by all the wacky variegations and to plant them together – the green with white edging, the reverse variegation of white with a green edging, the blue and yellow both ways and the green and gold options. After all, who wants to buy a plain coloured hosta, especially if it is plain green or a low key blue toned one? My rule of thumb is that every variegated hosta needs at least two plain coloured ones to set it off. So a showy big blue hosta with a yellow edging is going to look a great deal more effective if it is grouped with a small plain yellow and a mid sized plain blue plant. It is the variation in size, leaf shape and some level of restraint in combining patterned leaves which makes a hosta patch pleasing to the eye.

If you can’t bring yourself to buy plainer hostas and nobody is offering you divisions, raise seed. No matter what parent plant you collect the seed from, the vast majority of offspring will return to plain colours, mostly green.

Hostas are predominantly for shady areas of your garden. They are tolerant of very dry shade under trees but equally they will be happy in damper areas with heavy soils. What they don’t like are light soils in full sun – their foliage will just burn and the plants will fail to thrive. You can get away with reasonable light levels on the margins of sunny areas but the paler variegations (the plants with white or pale yellows) will burn and crisp around the edges in direct sun.

The greatest problem with growing good hostas, as every gardener knows, is slugs and snails which feed voraciously on the leaves. I spoke to many garden visitors, particularly from Auckland and Hamilton, who talked about walking out at night and crunching their way across snails and I can remember seeing the phenomenon once in Palmerston North where it was like a horror movie (The Invasion of the Snails, perhaps, or Snails’ Revenge) with literally hundreds of them teaming across a concrete pathway. If you have a snail problem of this magnitude, forget growing anything that is snail fodder. But if you have only a moderate issue with these herbivores, a combination of good selection and good management can keep the problem within manageable bounds. Choose hostas with thicker, tougher leaves rather than the soft and wispy types. Slimy crawlers do not appear to like slithering over gritty surfaces so circling plants with sand, sawdust, baker’s bran or similar will often deflect them elsewhere. We have little problem under our rimu trees with the thick carpet of rimu needles. Yes you can use slug bait, but it is not very nice stuff and can poison dogs, hedgehogs and birds so be very sparing – one bait per plant is all that is required. If you head out with a torch on a misty or rainy night after a dry period, you will often find the hungry offenders on the move.

Given that every discussion about hostas comes down to slug and snail control in the end, I leave you with the thought that most of the slugs in this country and all of our icky snails must have come in on plant material. What I do not understand is why, on those early boats bringing settlers to New Zealand along with all their trappings to remind them of home (blackbirds, thrushes, sparrows, trees and plants), they did not usefully employ themselves on the long sea voyage exercising digital control to ensure that not a single pesky slug or snail survived. It would have saved us a great deal of trouble in the garden.

November 21, 2008 Weekly Garden Guide

We are not great on growing annuals (my expensive packet of white cosmos seed failed to germinate), but if you use annuals for bedding, you will be wanting to get plants in now for a display when the family turn up for Christmas… If you can be bothered deadheading annuals, it greatly extends their display time because their instinct is to flower, set seed to ensure their continued survival and then die. So delaying the seeding stage forces them to put up more flowers.

  • Ornamental pots are remarkably cheap these days and a simple pot planted with annuals now can make a charming gift for Christmas Day – a good gift for widowed aunts or people who like flowers but do not garden much. If you want to do it well, buy a potting mix with a quick release fertiliser added, pop in the baby plants and keep watered and disbudded so the plants grow to fill the pot before you let them set flower buds a couple of weeks out from Christmas.
  • Wisterias can be rampant growers and are putting on their spring growth in a bid for world domination. Cut back the long, waving shoots to more manageable proportions – three or four leaf buds out from the branch is all they need. It is the same principle with apple trees which need an early summer prune as soon as the growths sprint away.
  • From here on, the ornamental garden is more about summer maintenance – pruning, shaping, mulching and staying on top of weeds. There is a limit to how much creative work and planting you can do over the summer months.
  • But it is all go in the vegetable garden where you should be sowing and planting successional crops of all the staples – corn, peas, beans and salad vegetables. Main crop potatoes, kumara, pumpkins and other cucurbits can all be planted. Watch out for pests such as whitefly, aphids, leaf roller caterpillars and the like. Early vigilance can hold them at bay and prevent major problems developing.
  • Queen wasps are still on the wing, building up their nests. Mark can be seen out with pyrethrum spray stalking both the queen wasps and the narcissi fly. Getting rid of the queens now holds wasp infestations at bay.
  • The one lawn weed worth spraying for is prickly Onehunga weed which makes it impossible to walk barefooted. We should have reminded you earlier to do it – if you have a problem with it, ask at your local garden centre for advice on which spray is currently recommended and permitted and make it a priority.

And a quote from Anon this week: God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done.

One Magic Square

Author: Lolo Houbein
Publisher: (Wakefield Press)
ISBN 978 1 86254 764 3 (pbk)

The whole principle of this book is that you can grow your own food on one square metre of garden. “My goodness,” said a friend. “If your garden is only one square metre, you could take it on holiday with you.”

If you are only going to have a garden which measures one metre by one metre, it is a bit of a moot point as to whether you need a book which runs to about 350 pages to tell you how to do it. Yes there are planting diagrams. There is the soup plot. There is the Aztec Plot (that is the one with a marigold in the centre). Then there is the plan for the pasta/pizza plot. How about the curry plot? Maybe you fancy the stir fry plot or the anti-oxidant plot.

If you have the gardening skills to work to this level, odds on you will want to expand beyond one square metre. There is quite a bit of additional information (but nothing that I have not seen before in other how-to guides) and it is written by a woman who is clearly enthusiastic about her topic and has a love of home grown vegetables. But honestly, I need a lot of convincing that it is possible to achieve self sufficiency and stave off famine on a mere square metre of vegetable garden. This book may appeal more to eccentrics rather than the target audience of novices.

November 14, 2008 Weekly Garden Guide

The sudden arrival of sunshine, heat and dry this week was slightly surprising after the severe cold of the previous week but we have been warning readers for some time about the need to get woody trees and shrubs into the ground as soon as possible. Make sure you soak plants in a bucket of water until the bubbles stop rising before planting, to ensure that the root ball is wet right through. If you are planting into full sun, you may need to acclimatise plants to the bright light by spending a few days having them in full sun for a couple of hours only. Many plants are grown in shady conditions (or under shade cloth) and can burn quickly in our bright sun.

  • You can keep on planting out perennials and annuals in the ornamental garden as long as you are willing to water regularly while they settle in. Perennials can be lifted and divided while they are in full growth.
  • Autumn flowering bulbs are generally going dormant now so you can lift them and fluff over them from now on if they looked as if they needed some attention earlier this year.
  • It is probably safe to mow off your daffodil foliage now even if they have not yet died down. Removing the foliage a little early reduces infestation by the dreaded narcissi fly which lays its eggs in the crown of the bulb so the larvae can hatch and eat it out.
  • Top priority this week should be getting mulch onto your garden if you have not yet done so. Bare earth is not good earth. Cover it with compost or some layer of humus to condition the soil and to reduce moisture loss.
  • Absolutely last chance to sow seed of delights such as melons, aubergines, tomatoes and capsicums if you hope to get a full crop through. Buying plants is a better option now because they need as long a growing season as possible.
  • Continue sowing corn, green beans and main crop potatoes.
  • Get a copper spray onto tomatoes to prevent blight.
  • Stay on top of the weeds. The push hoe is more friendly to the environment than glyphosate.
  • Monarch butterfly enthusiasts will need to keep an eye on over wintered swan plants. The yellow aphid is invading the plants and needs to be destroyed because they do not disappear on their own like other aphids. Digital control (squashing them between your fingers) is the first line of defence as the first of your monarch caterpillars will be coming through and spraying with pyrethrum will kill them as well as the aphids.

If it is all too much for male readers, heed the advice of one T.H. Everett (whoever he may have been): A man should never plant a garden larger than his wife can take care of.

The view of the washing in the garden

I am of the clothes line generation. A clothes drier is extremely rarely used here. I have been known to take pride in the fact that I raised three children in cloth nappies and never owned a drier. I bought one cheaply in a garage sale some years ago but old habits die hard and it is banished to an outside shed where it is used maybe once or twice a year, and not at all in the last twelve months. Years of relative poverty taught me to conserve power and old habits die hard.

But I find clothes lines reasonably fascinating and it is an ongoing issue to which many garden openers will relate. The bottom line is that it is not okay for garden visitors to be greeted by the sight of your smalls flapping in the wind. Some things are best kept private. We figured some years ago that we could no longer peg the washing on the line during peak garden visiting times. In our case it is exacerbated by the fact that our washing line is a genuine old fashioned model (none of the new fangled rotary types here) which consists of a long wire strung between two trees in a relatively conspicuous position close to the back door with good air movement for optimum drying and all held up by a bamboo prop which we cut as required from our giant bamboo stand down in the park. I like it. It is old fashioned and suits our situation and has served the house inhabitants here well for coming up to 60 years.

We had an elderly friend visited recently and her companion stayed in the car near my washing line (acquaintances and strangers tend to use the car park which is some way distant) while we made our greetings and she asked if they could look around the garden. The companion hopped out of the car and commented that she had been studying my washing on the line. I looked. Being an old school type of person in some ways, I still wash my whites and pales separately and it was a white and pale day. But arthritic fingers (not great for a gardener) mean that I have delegated the task of pegging out the washing on cold days to the other half and I must say that we agreed he had done a splendid job of it and his pegging out was most creditable.

This is not always the case with many men. Back in my earlier days, I used to do some facilitation (goodness knows what it is called in modern parlance) of women’s discussion groups and one of the most successful icebreakers in my repertoire was to get each participant to talk about pegging out the washing. It probably wouldn’t work these days as the clothes drier has replaced the washing line in many households and maybe domestic tasks are shared more equitably, but 20 years ago women used to light up and talk readily about this routine task that we all performed on a daily basis.

Every group would have participants who bemoaned the dreadful job their husbands did if they pegged out the washing. Untidy, misaligned, disordered, tee shirts stretched and all the rest of a multitude of crimes against laundry. All the participants had their own particular style. Some still adhered to that wonderful suburban value that underwear must always be pegged on the inside rows of a rotary clothesline so that it is not visible to anybody who visited during the day. It is difficult to know what to do with bras and knickers if your line is the classic one wire between trees. I met women who had to colour tone their pegs. Ah, pegs. That is a whole new topic of great concern. What sort of peg you like can be very personal. I recall one whose favoured peg was not available in Taranaki. In fact you had to get up to the King Country to find them so every time she travelled north, she would buy a spare packet.

I don’t recall that I was an isolated case in that I could ignore pegs and groups of like items, but I would often (not always) colour tone the arrangement. I still do on occasion. All the blue items adjacent to the striped or spotted green and blue items leading into the greens, the browns, yellows, reds and so to the blacks at the end. A truly multi coloured item could be a source of angst as to where it best fitted in the chain of colour.

This would never suit the perfectionist who wants to group items by use – all tea towels together, all socks in a row matched in pairs and all tee shirts followed by skirts and trousers.

As he has gained more practice in routine pegging out, I notice my other half tends towards that orderly approach and he has mastered skills which are equal to mine in the pegging stakes. Not only that, but he usually brings the washing in and what is more, he folds it as he takes it off the line. I never fail to be impressed.

With only two of us left at home these days, it is a great deal easier to manage staying up to date with the laundry while hiding all evidence from garden visitors over the busy garden open season. Clothes horses do a fine job and I still don’t use the drier. But it may come as no surprise to those who know the Govett Brewster Art Gallery’s permanent collection to hear that Christine Hellyer’s blue washing line installation is a favourite of mine.

I have seen garden designers struggle with placing washing lines in gardens, banishing them to areas around the back, screened from view. The problem is that around the back is often south facing and lacking in adequate sunshine or air movement so it is not an effective solution for drying. The retractable clothes lines which tuck back neatly into a box attached to a wall look to be a tidy solution if you have a suitable building to anchor them but I doubt that many are large enough for family use. And they are not suitable in our situation where the only location would see it stretched over the driveway. Besides, I am fond of my historic one wire with bamboo prop.

But this issue has been around for a fair while. Readers who knew Mark’s late mother may remember her as a woman not lacking in a sense of humour but definitely strong on propriety. I can recall being here about thirty years ago to help her and Felix with hosting an international coach tour. We farewelled them all after a longish visit and walked back to the house where Mimosa was absolutely mortified to see her washing basket sitting on the door step with her lace and nylon bloomers draped out to dry for all the world to see. She had forgotten to move them out of sight. She did have the grace to laugh at herself.