Category Archives: Abbie’s column

Abbie’s newspaper columns

Weeding – just like outdoor vaccum cleaning, really

Edging tools, push hoes and our well-used petrol powered line trimmer

Weeding. It’s the garden equivalent of vacuuming really. Tedious, repetitive and while the place looks great when you have finished, all too soon you need to start again. I guess you could ignore the weeding part (if not the vacuuming) but most of us prefer a garden that is pretty much free of weeds. In fact most of us place a high priority on this state.

There is a much higher tolerance for weeds in some other gardening countries, particularly in Britain. This may well have something to do with the fact that the vast majority of our weeds in this country are imports and a fair number are in fact native to Britain and Europe – plants like dandelion and blackberry, for example. We are probably more tolerant of our self seeding native plants too. I don’t refer to the scores of nikau palms we pull out and dig out as weeds. They are merely self seeded plants in the wrong place whereas the buttercup and campanulata cherry seedlings are indubitably weeds.

I have to admit we weed spray here though Mark is trying to reduce the amount he does. Glyphosate is pretty much all that stands between us and claiming organic status, but in a large garden, glyphosate is oft described as the equivalent of a labour unit. It is much faster to whip around with the knapsack sprayer than to hand weed. Mark has spent the last decade gently worrying that research will come up with definitive arguments against the use of glyphosate. It hasn’t happened yet, to his relief. But in this day of heightened sensibilities, he is rarely to be spotted by any garden visitor with the knapsack on his back. He hides, dear Reader. True.

The rusted Niwashi, implement for flat weeds and aptly branded Wonder Weeder

We have a repertoire of weeding implements here and do a fair amount of hand weeding too. Others swear by the Niwashi weeder, to the extent that Mark bought one and it was relatively expensive as I recall. I asked him this week if he had ever used it because I never have. Neither has he, apparently, but somebody here must have because it made the trip right through the compost heaps emerging after about a year at the other end. Mark is a push hoe man and keeps his favourite two well sharpened. However push hoes come with a warning – refer to the quote of the day below! I have heard of one public garden which banned push hoes in the hands of volunteers because they caused so much damage. I favour the precision of close up work with the cheap and cheerful Wonder Weeder – so cheap that I have several and so sturdy that they can emerge from the compost heap pretty much unscathed. These implements work best in loose, friable soil. It is much harder work in compacted earth but a breeze where it is easy to scuff up the surface and hook out or sever weeds.

We also have edging tools – ones designed for both hard edges (where grass meets a solid surface like a path) and soft edges. And let’s not forget the petrol powered line trimmer but that is excessive unless you have a large section. These are because of a strongly held opinion on Mark’s part that little looks worse than sprayed edges. You know that dead brown line others have? Not here. The lawn weeder is also well used since we made the decision not to spray the lawns. Nothing works as well on flat weeds as this handy implement.

The bottom line of weeding is that vigilance and early intervention lessens the task. There is an old saying: “one year’s seeding, seven year’s weeding”. You can never completely eliminate weeding but if you can stop seeding, you certainly lessen the load considerably. We are lucky in that we took over this garden from Mark’s father who was a vigilant weeder. True, he leaned towards the chemical arsenal to carry this out as so many of that generation did. But at least we don’t have soils jampacked with weed seeds waiting to germinate. Where a patch may have got away from us and set seed heads, we usually have a bucket on hand to receive them. If you cut them off and leave them lying on the ground, the seeds can still ripen and live to germinate another day. For the same reason, gardening clothes with pockets can be handy.

Spitting cress

Get ‘em when they are small and much easier to deal with. Soon after germinating is the best time, before they have well established root systems. They are far easier to hoick out of the ground and far more likely to die instantly at that tender stage. While the saying that a weed is merely a plant in the wrong place is repeated so often it has become a cliché, I can not think that the nasty spitting cress fits this kind interpretation. Every gardener knows it – the little flat weed which can go from first appearance to setting seed in a matter of days in full summer. As soon as you touch it, it jet propels its seeds around to ensure immortality. Vigilance – that is the single most important mantra. Target the worst offenders and maybe be a bit more relaxed about some of the others.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Orchids as garden plants

Referred to here as the Aussie dendrobes – dendrobiums

We are at the peak of orchid season in the garden. There can be few plants which carry the aura of luxury and exotica accorded to orchids. They belong to a huge and complex family, second only to the daisy family in number and go well beyond the common cymbidium. Yet they are not a plant that is common in New Zealand gardens.

Besotted by calanthes

The calanthe orchids are particularly rewarding as garden plants but you need to take the long view. We use them mainly as woodland plants. The blooms are a bit frost tender. Some we had on the margins were once hit by a memorable late frost but that was a one-off event. After about five decades of building them up, we have large swathes or drifts. In fact we have so many that a gardening ingénue who saw them recently drew the conclusion that they must be an unusual but easy bedding plant. Ah, no. But for those who have the time and inclination, they are a very rewarding branch of the family. Over time, they form a string of back bulbs below ground and can be increased from these.

For orchid enthusiasts who want the technical data, we understand that it is mostly forms of striata that are showiest for us. We have a pale lemon one which flowers in early spring and a much brighter yellow form that comes later. We used to have them under different species names but have come to the conclusion that they are more likely just different striata forms. Note: I have now been informed that the pale yellow calanthe shown is in fact Calanthe ‘Higo’ (C. sieboldii x C. aristulifera) which makes sense to us. We also use the white C. arisanensis but alas we failed with a lovely lilac species and appear to have lost it. All of these are evergreen varieties, though I understand there are deciduous species as well. The fresh spring leaves are large and could, at a pinch, be thought of as looking like pleated hosta leaves. A fair number of garden visitors over the years have asked us about the yellow flowered hostas. (Hint: hostas only flower in white or shades of lilac to purple.)

The Australian dendrobiums make compact, clumping plants with many smaller flowers and are pretty as a picture in the subtropical woodland areas. They combine very well with bromeliads and ferns and are an easy care garden plant. We have them in pinks, lilacs, white and yellow. We don’t know much about the hardiness of these. Ours are in positions where they never get frosted but they will get cold and they never turn a hair. They are probably similar to cymbidiums in hardiness.

Cymbidiums give long lived blooms, even outdoors

DIY bamboo stake

Cymbidiums are the usual florist’s choice and are surprisingly easy as garden plants, given the right conditions. All of ours are grown in the ground, not containers. We don’t get florist quality blooms but they last an amazingly long time in flower and put on a splendid show as long as I remember to stake the flower spikes at the right time. I see I started photographing the flower spikes a full two months ago and those same flowers are now a little weather beaten but still showy. These days I harvest stems of green bamboo which still have convenient leaf axils because I can gently engage the flower spikes in the leaf axils and don’t have to tie each one which makes staking much faster and more discreet. I admit this only works if you have a convenient stand of bamboo to harvest.

The jury is still out on whether we can get the disa orchids naturalised by the stream. They were fine for the first two seasons but the proof of the pudding is in the five to ten year cycle – whether they are still strong and flowering after that time. At this point it is not looking good. The native English field orchid, Dactylorhiza maculata, has gently ticked on here for decades but is romping away more enthusiastically now we are trying cooler, damper positions. We didn’t succeed with the masdevallias (though we probably didn’t try very hard) and the tropical orchids like phalaenopsis (moth orchids) won’t do as garden plants for us.

One of the easiest orchids to grow – pleiones

This week it is the pleiones which are the stars. Their flowering season is nowhere near as extended as some of the other orchids, but they form pretty carpets, are not at all tender and are dead easy to increase. Most bulbs will make one or two offsets a year. Along with the dactylorhiza, they are deciduous, becoming dormant in autumn. The yellow pleiones want more of a winter chill and have gradually died out for us but we have an abundance of purest white ones and an array of lilacs and purples.

These are not generally plants that you will find offered for sale at garden centres (which may be why they are not often seen in gardens). You probably need to find your nearest Orchid Society and enquire about sales tables. Orchid enthusiasts tend to be a different breed. At the risk of making sweeping generalisations, Orchid Society people are more often collectors than gardeners. More than any other horticultural group we have come across, orchid people have well above average technical knowledge and like to show off their treasures in bloom. They are also generous and encouraging to any novice who shows an interest. Much of our collection has come from Orchid Society people over the years. We cannot speak highly enough of them as a repository of knowledge about a very complex plant genus.

For details on how to multiply calanthe orchids, check out our earlier Outdoor Classroom on the topic.

First published by the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Living in petrochemical heartland

Heavy transport passing our entrance

Because we live in the country, free farming newspapers appear in our letterbox. They can be surprisingly interesting, even to a non farmer like myself. An article in the latest Farmers Weekly (Sept 10) caught my attention. The chief executive of the NZ Petroleum Exploration and Production Association was reported.

“Chief executive David Robinson says ‘passionate’ climate change campaigners had set out to create a bleak picture of the industry….

There had been exploration in NZ for more than 100 years and industry had been working ‘extremely well’ in and around farming country in Taranaki for several generations.

Good relationships had been formed, characterised not only by compensation for farm access and improved entranceways.”

Really?

I am sure the industry is pleased with how well things are going around the farming country in Taranaki. That is because locals are, in the main, astonishingly polite and stoic. But I wonder if those industry people have even bothered to ask local residents how well it is working for them? In fact, I doubt that they could even find one local resident who would say that their life has been enhanced by the developments but they could find many whose lives have been adversely affected.

What really beggars belief is the rewriting of history. The bully-boy tactics employed by some of the petrochemical men is still very recent. I wish David Robinson had been a fly on the wall when a sick, elderly man in his seventies from down the road sat at our dining room table and explained why he had signed a consent for Fletcher Challenge (a planned development in the heart of Tikorangi that we actually managed to stop). You see, he’d been told that if he didn’t sign, they’d hop over the fence to his neighbour’s property and he didn’t trust his neighbour. He thought he’d have more control if it was on his own place. And pitching neighbour against neighbour was common practice, compounded by confidentiality agreements.

I sat in public meetings and heard the same petrochem men tell bare-faced lies.

New power pylons marching over the landscape, solely to service the petrochem industry

I wish David Robinson had been present when another neighbour wistfully said to me earlier this year that she just wished the company would come and sit in her lounge and see what they now look at out their window. See, they built their dream home on family land with soaring views across farmland to the sea. Now they are the closest house to a major industrial development which is undergoing construction 24/7 and that is what they see and hear from their lounge.

Because we protested so publicly about the earlier Fletcher Challenge proposals, the accompanying seismic survey saw the helicopters on a flight path directly above our house. The choppers started as early as 5.30am in the morning, even on Good Friday, and continued all day. It was highly illegal flying over our house with loads suspended below and we believe it was also deliberate intimidation by subcontractors. There was nothing we could do. We don’t forget.

Around that time, another neighbour from up the road who had a lot of well sites on his farm rang me and said he couldn’t speak out publicly because he was in so deep with the companies but I should stick to my guns. I still recall his telling comment: “If I knew then what I know now, I would never have let them in at the beginning”.

The site of the Otaraua protest

When Otaraua hapu staged a protest over many weeks on Ngatimaru Road a couple of years ago, the company involved simply did not have a clue how deeply insulting it was to turn up with a slab of beer for them. Otaraua had declared their occupation site drug and alcohol free and I recall a gentle kuia saying to me: “What next, beads and blankets?” Because of course the unspoken implication in the beer was that they were Maori so they would be partying and boozing.

It is not a proud history of cooperation at all. At least that bully-boy stuff is not as common these days. I think we have three, maybe four companies operating around our area. We are in Todd territory ourselves, and for that we are grateful. There are conversations around the area as to which company is better to deal with and there appears to be some consensus that we are lucky to be in Todderangi. They don’t bully, they are courteous and communicative. But that communication is simply telling us what they are going to do – the next intrusions on our formerly quiet country area. The impact remains very high.

Our quiet country roads here are now like main highways with large amounts of traffic and constant heavy trucks. Every one passes along one of our road boundaries and about 50% of them pass along two. And lucky us, the roads are being upgraded so the traffic can travel even faster. We have adjacent properties, separated by the main access route – there are many times now when crossing that road is downright dangerous.

Cos every farmer yearns for an “improved entranceway” like this bisecting the farm?

The “improved entranceway” opens from this small country road

The photo above is of the neighbour’s “improved entranceway”. It meets a small country road. Because every farmer covets an “improved entranceway” like this, don’t they, Mr Robinson? Except it is not the entranceway to the farm, it is a security controlled access to a major well site development and it actually bisects the farm.

Compensation for farm access is mentioned as a benefit. I don’t know what the current going rate is for compo but it certainly used to be pathetically low. It is hard to find out the figures because usual practice is for the companies to lock the landowner into a confidentiality agreement.

I do know that the most recent going rate for a seismic survey shot hole was $12 (2012 prices). For that, the company’s contractors get to bring a drilling rig onto your property and from then until the explosive charge is detonated, which may be a couple of weeks later, the affected paddocks can’t be grazed. This causes problems for farmers’ grazing cycles. Then there are the helicopters working on the survey, any hour of the day, any day of the week. For $12 a shot hole? Ridiculous. Seismic surveys are one of the most intrusive aspects for the largest number of people.

To the left is one of our road boundaries. Below right is the neighbour across the road. Until earlier this year, it was well treed, including mature kahikatea and tawa. That was all cleared to make way for huge power pylons to bring a secure power supply to the petrochem developments. We are lucky. We can’t see this from our property but others are not so fortunate. Their rural outlooks now feature pylons marching across the landscape. And guess what, the stringing of the wires was done by helicopter. It felt like Apocalypse Now living here on those days.

So please don’t tell us that everything is hunky dory here and always has been because it isn’t. There is just nothing we can do about it. Mr Robinson might do better to come and talk to locals here, rather than only talking to companies and to the overly sympathetic councils in Taranaki. I very much doubt that the elected councillors understand at all what the impact is like for locals. They are just thrilled to accept financial gifts for civic projects which are some distance away in New Plymouth. And councils have abdicated any planning role. Basically what they do is approve applications from the companies.

All that is without even touching on the environmental impact of oil and gas extraction and the controversial practice of fracking.

In the meantime, I offer drive-by tours of the petrochemical developments in my local area to anyone that is interested. You can see very clearly what the negative effect is for locals. And frankly, nobody seems to care much at all about that and Mr Robinson reinterprets history to give a rosy glow to petrochemical development in Taranaki.

For an earlier post on this same topic, check “Tikorangi – the new Texas?”

Helicopters are part of it all

Reviewing accepted garden practice

Lawncare – one of the worst culprits in environmental vandalism

I caught most of an extended interview with Fiona Eadie on National Radio last Monday. She is the head gardener at Larnach’s Castle just outside Dunedin. For me, the most interesting aspect was when she commented that much of our traditional gardening practice is bad. Just bad. Hear the clanging of bells, dear gardening readers. Change is coming.

It has been interesting to see the speed at which criticism of modern dairying practice has gathered momentum. It used to be that farmers held a pretty unassailable position, immune to criticism. Not any longer – environmental practices are coming under the microscope and the sure sign of pressure is the growing defensiveness in the sector.

Expect the same thing to happen in gardening. We have been talking about garden practices here for quite a long time and gently changing our ways. A trip to the UK a few years ago was a wake-up call. In the gardening sector, there was a lot more talk and action on beneficial gardening and sound environmental practice. It comes through most of the UK gardening programmes we get here (the main reason we subscribe to Sky) and also through their garden print media. It is a snowball that is gathering size and speed.

It may not be that long before a near perfect lawn is no longer a badge of honour but a sign that you are an environmental vandal. There is a direct correlation – the better your lawn, the worse your environmental score card. You cannot achieve that perfection without major intervention in the form of very frequent mowing (twice a week, I just read someone claim), removing all clippings which means you have to apply nitrogen based fertiliser frequently (once a month, the aforementioned lawn owner said) spraying, scarifying, summer watering and generally maintaining a complete monoculture. At its most extreme, even the worms are poisoned off. After all, worm casings spoil the green velvet. In fact none of this is good practice at all. While we appreciate the restful green interlude that lawns give, we have long since abandoned anything other than mowing with a mulcher mower and a bit of judicious hand weeding. Our lawns are less than perfect but at least they are non toxic. Greater purists abandon lawns altogether but that is a step too far for us.

Roses need considerable intervention to stay lush through summer

Similarly, perfect luscious looking roses without a hint of disease in high summer and autumn may become an advertisement for your bad practice rather than a sign of care. You can’t achieve that state without regular spraying and heavy supplementary feeding and watering. The healthy buxus hedge in urban areas may be frowned upon in due course now that the dreaded blight has taken such firm hold. A healthy appearance is likely to be a sign of regular chemical intervention.

Gardeners have substantially reduced the use of sprays, in part because the Government has placed so many restrictions on the availability of many that were in routine use. That happened because many are either highly dangerous or downright environmentally bad. So the gardener who told me she drenched her alpines weekly with fungicide to keep them alive in lowland conditions may soon be accused of bad practice rather than cleverness in keeping such plants alive and healthy outside their natural habitat. At least we have moved on (I hope) from the Paraquat days when that highly toxic weekiller was used interchangeably with the much safer glyphosate. Mark remembers a neighbour in our Dunedin days whose Friday routine was to spray all edges, paths and any visible weeds with Paraquat. We have been frowning at brown sprayed edges for years – not a good look in a garden and not good practice.

I hope we will see a change from the rampant consumerism promoted by many garden centres sooner rather than later. Fertiliser use needs a good hard look. Frankly it is no more acceptable to routinely use chemical fertilisers in the garden than it is to saturate farmland in the quest for increased production. The very notion that the slow release bubble fertilisers, some of which are encased in a non biodegradable coating, are suitable for garden use is a shocker. They are developed for container growing (and are expensive) but I have seen garden centres promoting their use in garden situations.

My local garden centre has a major display at its entranceway of heavy duty plastic bags filled with all manner of mulches and mixes. It is one thing buying the occasional bag of seed raising mix or potting mix. It is quite another to load large numbers of these prepackaged consumable commodities onto your trailer so you can fill your new raised bed with a soil mix trucked halfway across the island and then mulch with peastraw shipped from a similar distance in the other direction.

It’s all about sustainability – making sure that our quest for beauty in our gardens does not come at the cost of degrading the environment. We have a long way to go with this debate in New Zealand but it was heartening to hear Fiona Eadie bringing a similar message. Maybe the time has come to review practices we have taken for granted and to take steps to ensure that our gardens actually enhance nature instead of wounding it.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Repetition – unifying a garden or downright dull?

A surfeit of renga renga lilies repeated throughout your garden is highly unlikely to unify it

How often have you heard the advice to repeat the same plant in your garden to achieve continuity? It has almost achieved truism status though I would argue that this is one piece of so-called garden wisdom that too few people ever question. In fact I would go so far as to suggest that you are better to cast that piece of clichéd advice out to the wilderness and ignore it.

I don’t know where it originated, though I would hazard a guess it was from within the landscape sector. Now it is just repeated mindlessly as a golden rule.

The first time I was aware of a plant being repeated through a garden was with Dahlia Bonne Esperance. It is a baby dahlia with pink daisy flowers and increases readily (lights should be flashing here for you, dear Reader) and it featured throughout this person’s garden. Far from giving continuity, in fact it looked like a cheap, gaudy dot plant (as in dotted around everywhere). Therein lies the problem. When the advice is dispensed so glibly that you should repeat a plant to give continuity, there never seems to be any corresponding advice as to what types of plant are most effective. And in the absence of such advice, too many gardeners fall upon an option that is cheap to start with and easy to increase.

Acanthus mollis or bears’ breeches – too close to weed status to be a desirable repeat planting

I am sorry to say that many plantings of renga renga lilies are not going to enhance and unify your garden. The same goes for mondo grass, liriope, catmint (nepeta), the dreaded aluminium plant (lamium), common hostas which bulk up readily, Acanthus mollis, or Ligularia ‘Britt-Marie Crawford’. They are just going to look boring and repetitive when used again and again throughout.

Truly, you can have too much, even of a good thing. I have seen gardens which suffer from the ABC syndrome (another bloody clivia), or the oh no, TMBBH trait (too many big blue hostas). You need a deft hand and very good eye to make it work well.

There may be a difference between large and small gardens here. It is a long time since I have had a small garden but I can see that restricting the plant palette and using a repeating motif could help mitigate the bitsy effect so many gardens suffer from. But if you are determined to repeat a plant, try and make it a choice one. Trilliums are good. Paris, too. Though there is a possibility that the originator of the recommendation was thinking more in terms of pencil cypress or topiary yew – a woody plant rather than a perennial. I am fairly sure he or she was not thinking of Dahlia Bonne Esperance or renga rengas.

In a large garden, hmmm. As far as I am concerned, a large garden succeeds better when it has distinct changes of mood and style. To repeat a plant or plants throughout renders it too much the same and that is when large gardens become rambling, indistinct, and not very memorable. Unless you want to be remembered as, “Oh, that was the garden with all the orange clivias/acanthus mollis/buxus hedging/catmint/day lilies.” (Strike out those which do not apply.) We prefer to aim for different groups of plants in different areas, rather than mixing and matching throughout or streaming one particular plant through the lot.

That said, there are exceptions. We are steadily drifting English snowdrops throughout (on the grounds that you can’t have too many fleeting seasonal wonders and they are satisfyingly compatible with most situations – and transient, not year round). Mark has observed before that it is rhododendrons that form a backbone of continuity to our garden. But it is not just the one rhododendron that we have repeated. While we favour the nuttalliis (the rhodo equivalent of trilliums, one could say), we have multiple different varieties used in different combinations throughout. I don’t think that is what is meant by repeating a plant for continuity.

If I have failed to convince you that the interest in a garden lies in different plant combinations, interesting plants and variety, then I would at least make a plea for considering seedling variation. Mark and I looked at a planting in a garden – a hillside of red rhododendrons all the same. They will be showy in flower and look unified in conformity when not in bloom. They are also, to our eyes, dull, utility and public sector amenity planting (and it was a public garden too). What sets a private garden apart is the opportunity and scope to detail such a planting. Had it been done in seedling raised rhododendrons (collected from the same parent plant), there would have been the overall unity but subtle variation to add interest. The same goes for a range of plants – from pohutukawa to hostas. Raising them from seed takes time but gives interest and detail which is lacking when you order in a mass of one plant only.

But then we never have been fans of mass planting and massed display. The devil may be in the detail but so is the gardening interest.

If you are determined to unify through repeat planting, at least pick something with bragging rights – desirable dark red trilliums, perhaps

First published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.

Tikorangi The Jury Garden

Mark and Abbie Jury

Category Archives: Abbie’s column

Weeding – just like outdoor vaccum cleaning, really

Orchids as garden plants

Living in petrochemical heartland

Reviewing accepted garden practice

Repetition – unifying a garden or downright dull?

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