Category Archives: Abbie’s column

Abbie’s newspaper columns

Biodynamics – the homeopathy of the gardening world

A mutinous threat from Zephyr and Spike

A mutinous threat from Zephyr and Spike

Being a SNAW (that is a Sensitive New Age Woman, but of course you knew that), I am all for religious tolerance. That is, as long as nobody comes knocking on my door thinking I may need to be converted of a Saturday morning. I could perhaps do with being renovated, but not converted.

Similarly, when the personal faiths of others start to intrude on me, especially by claiming to occupy the higher moral ground, I get a little twitchy and few are worse at this than homeopaths, lunar planters and biodynamics converts.

Adding to my twitchiness, Spike and Zephyr, our surviving pets, are seeking legal advice. They are threatening to take out an injunction to prevent us exhuming their former colleagues for preparation 505. That is the one where a skull of a domesticated animal is stuffed with oak chips and immersed in fresh water for three months. Spike and Zephs are appalled at the thought that we may be wanting to stuff skulls with oak chips. Not only do they want to protect their former colleagues, but they are not offering to make the ultimate sacrifice, proffering up their own skulls to test the efficacy of this soil conditioner. They have been known to harumph and suggest that in this country, we should surely be stuffing bird skulls with totara chips seeing as we lack both native mammals and oak trees. And don’t be thinking any old oak tree will do. It has to be Quercus robur which is of course native to Rudolf Steiner’s homeland of Austria.

Preparation 502 is giving me much anxiety. That is the one where you stuff the bladder of a red deer with achillea flowers and bury it for months on end. There is a definite shortage of fresh deer bladders (or even frozen ones) here and local supermarkets don’t seem to stock them. I notice there is a stag where I buy my free range eggs and I pondered asking the owner how she would feel about donating its internal organ to improve our soils. But I am not sure that it is a red deer (it appears to make a difference to compound 502) and as she was hand feeding the stag when I called in one day, I feared she may not react well to my request. I think we may do better with preparation 503 (that is chamomile blossoms stuffed into the small intestines of cattle and overwintered in the ground – must remember to mark where I bury it). And preparation 506 looks manageable – dandelions stuffed in the peritoneum (sounds nasty) of cattle and similarly overwintered.

Prep 501 has powdered quartz stored in the horn of a cow (minus the cow) and buried over summer (note: summer burial, not winter, for this one). In autumn you dig it up and mix it with water at a dilution rate of one tablespoon of quartz powder to 250 litres of water (starting to sound dangerously homeopathic…). But before you spray it, you have to stir the solution for an hour and the method and direction of stirring is prescribed. You can not stint on the stirring because some see the vortex created by methodical stirring as acting like a funnel to imbue the solution with cosmic energy, making it more efficacious. Quartz is largely insoluble in water and spraying a chemically inert substance in microscopic traces over a wide area is of no discernible value whatever but let not these facts get in the way of passionate belief.

The best known prep 500 (a cow horn stuffed with the excrement of a lactating cow and buried over winter in the ground) receives similar treatment to 501 and is diluted to the same extent. Preps 502 to 508 are added to the compost heap at a rate, give or take, of around a teaspoon per cubic metre. Faith goes a long way. Apparently.

Rudolf Steiner was a philosopher and it is most unlikely that he ever got his hands in the soil. Put succinctly, Steiner came from a strong background of esoteric theosophy and when he split from the European theosophical mainstream at the turn of last century, he evolved his own world view which he styled anthroposophy. And that might be described simplistically as an attempt to synthesize mysticism and science. Lost? Don’t worry. I don’t think it matters. I would guess that Steiner, a man who spent his life thinking and in philosophical discourse, likely saw his theories on agriculture and care for the soils as merely part of a much larger universal whole. He might be slightly stunned were he around today to see how this particular side shoot to his core philosophies has taken on a life of its own as biodynamics.

Biodynamics seems to have taken a greatly simplified interpretation of Steiner’s elaborate world view and repackaged it as pseudo science to give it a credibility which it lacks. You really are back in the realms of mysticism without the science once you are into focusing cosmic rays to harness the spiritual energy of the universe. Cows’ horns and deer antlers are apparently particularly good receptors acting as a cross between a satellite dish and a storage battery for cosmic energy and cosmic wisdom. Yet, if you set aside the biodynamic preparations, the other underpinning principles of modern biodynamics are sound organics. You can not fault practices such as:
* Stocking with several different animal species to vary grazing patterns and reduce pasture borne parasites.
* Widening the range of pasture species.
* Planting trees for multiple purposes.
* Crop rotation designs to enhance soil fertility and control weeds and plant pests which include the use of green manures.
* Recycling of organic wastes, where possible, by large scale composting.
* Changing from chemical pest control to prevention strategies based on good plant and animal nutrition and careful cultivar selection.

There is nothing flaky in any of that. There is nothing spiritual either. It is just good, sustainable practice applicable to all aspects of gardening and agriculture.

I respect the right of bioydynamic converts to believe in cosmic energies and a holistic interpretation of their position in the universe. But I do wish they wouldn’t try and package it as science and, like lunar planting and homeopathy, such practices have gained a level of mainstream acceptance which is not founded on any scientific credibility at all. It can make it hard to disentangle what is sound environmental practice from what is religion.

Be bold with colour. White is not always right.

My first ever video upload (two minutes of a mass of tui in a campanulata cherry tree) and notes on the magnolias in flower have just been posted on www.jury.co.nz (our garden website).

Winter colour on the mandarin tree - and food for tui

Winter colour on the mandarin tree – and food for tui

It was most refreshing this week to receive an email from a reader seeking recommendations on a suitable sasanqua camellia for a hedge. “Anything but white,” was her request. I liked her instantly. White flowered camellia hedges can indeed look pretty and fresh but have become such a cliché in this country (especially as nine out of ten white sasanqua hedges are Setsugekka). It is most unusual for someone to specify colour.

We have a curious obsession with white flowers in this country. Why is Iceberg still the biggest selling rose here? Probably followed by the white Margaret Merrill or Rose Flower Carpet White. They are good plants but are they much better than other coloured options? No, they are just white. According to the Rose Flower Carpet agents, the coloured ones are much more popular overseas and it is mostly NZ that prizes the white. My informant put this down to our mild climate here and the fact that we are never snowbound. “If you spend months of the year looking at a white landscape,” he said, “the last thing you want is a garden of white flowers.”

I think it is conservatism. For the same reason, the trend is to have a near absence of colour on interior walls of the house (usually off white because pure white can be too stark and clinical to live with). Too often we play it safe in the garden. The garden backdrop of green is, for some curious reason, perceived as colour neutral and into that we drop another neutral in the form of white flowers. Call it serene, restful, stylish and sophisticated if you wish. In the right hands and at its best, it is. In lesser hands, it can be bland and dull. But safe. You can always be confident that your garden will be perceived by some as being in good taste if you keep to white, maybe with just the occasional colour thrown in as a feature (but just one colour, mind).

Fewer try the monochromatic scheme in other colours – though it is of course bichromatic (is there such a word?) because they are all plus green. Sissinghurst has its purple border, Hidcote its red border and both are beautiful in full summer bloom, but in NZ we tend to keep to white.

You can never have too much blue in the garden - especially if it is meconopsis

You can never have too much blue in the garden – especially if it is meconopsis

My first ever colour managed garden was to be all pinks, blues and whites. It looked pretty, but flat. Mark stood looking and said, “You need a touch of yellow.” He was so right. These days that garden remains predominantly pink, blue and white but it is the lemon and cerise (the latter, a surprisingly common colour in flowers) that give it some zing. Hence my choice of the Gertrude Jekyll quote below. Pastel gardens tend to be very feminine but they can be a little too “pastelle”, bordering on bland unless you get it absolutely right.

If you are unsure, go back to the colour wheel. It is touches of the opposite colour that will provide contrast. So yellow will be highlighted by purple, red by green and blue by orange. It does work. That said, I think blue flowers and foliage fit in with everything and you can never have too much blue in a garden. There is no theory to back that one up so it is entirely my personal opinion.

Colour to brighten a gloomy day - Magnolia Vulcan

Colour to brighten a gloomy day – Magnolia Vulcan

On a wintery day, however, I don’t want pastels or unrelieved green. Give me colour. The mandarin trees are a bright spot on a gloomy day, especially when populated by tui sucking the juice from damaged fruit. Most of our early flowering magnolias are in strong colours and can lift the spirits wonderfully with their over the top displays. The early flowering campanulata cherries lean to bright candy pink and cerise colours which are certainly a startling colour combination with the bright gold narcissi in bloom. There is no subtlety in any of those but I am not going to trade them for refined white flowers instead.

There is nothing subtle about the bright yellow of early narcissus

There is nothing subtle about the bright yellow of early narcissus

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

A blight upon your camellias

I married in to a camellia family. Long before the Jury name ever became associated with magnolias, it was known both in New Zealand and overseas for camellias. That is because there were two brothers working independently on camellias in the previous generation.

Les Jury (known here as Uncle Les, for obvious reasons) was the better known and some of his cultivars are classics in the camellia world – Anticipation, Debbie and Jury’s Yellow to name just three. Not far behind was Felix Jury who created Water Lily, Dream Boat, Rose Bouquet and many others.

Encouraged by his father and his uncle, my Mark was following suit. They were heady days and camellias ranked second only to roses in volume of plant sales in New Zealand. Both Mark and I remember the Day of Doom. Mark received an unannounced visit from senior members of the local Camellia Society bringing him the bad news that camellia petal blight had been found in Wellington. It took quite a while for the implications to sink in for me but Mark knew instantly what it meant and that was the day he stopped camellia breeding. Only now, more than twenty years down the track, is he starting to return to it as the picture has become clearer.

From these slightly blemished blooms...

From these slightly blemished blooms…

Camellia petal blight is endemic to China and Japan and has long been a problem on the west coast of the USA. More recently, it has struck the UK and Europe though apparently Australia is still free from it. A plant can’t carry it. It is transmitted on the flower or in the soil. Even back when it was first found in this country, standard practice was to ensure that all plants being shipped in or out of New Zealand were stripped of all flower buds and had their roots washed clean. It is quite possible that it entered this country inadvertently in a corsage somebody failed to discard safely or some similar incident. The discovery of infected blooms in Wellington Botanic Gardens and in two locations in the Hutt (if my memory serves me right) was hardly painted apple moth or Queensland fruit fly territory but its impact has certainly been very disappointing.

... to this in two short days

… to this in two short days

It is a fungus – Ciborinia camelliae, to be precise and the spore are dispersed through the air. The problem in this country is that the camellia is so ubiquitous and the distances from host plant to next potential host so short that the disease spread rapidly. For the same reason, you can’t eradicate it because you will just get reinfected. So we have learned to live with it.

We have always had botrytis which turns blooms dark brown but petal blight is much more rampant. What may be light brown speck on a bloom one day can show as riddled as the pox the following day and pale mush the day after. And it usually hangs on the plant, which is the worst aspect of all because blighted blooms look awful. A lot of modern breeding has been to get camellias that are self grooming – in other words they fall when finished. But not the blighted blooms.

If you want to check that you have it, flip a bloom over and peel off the calyx which holds the petals together in the centre. If it has a telltale white powdery ring inside the calyx, that is petal blight. If it is greyish black, it is botrytis.

The white ring of death - camellia petal blight

The white ring of death – camellia petal blight

Petal blight does not weaken the plant. It merely cuts the floral display. You won’t get as many blooms, though given camellias’ propensity for massive bud set, they will still out flower most other shrubs. You will probably have to do more of a clean up, maybe shake the bush as you pass and rake up the debris to keep them looking attractive. It is still a lot less than many other plants require.

Reticulata camellias (the ones with the huge blooms the size of lunch plates) tend to drop their blighted blooms because they are so heavy. And many are red which doesn’t show the brown blemishes as badly. But reticulatas are very hard to find for sale these days. Despite what some information on the internet says, we have never found petal blight on our sasanqua camelliaseither, and that is not for want of looking. As far as we are concerned they are clean.

The smaller flowered camellias with masses of shortlived blooms in succession are just as good as ever. We had a rush of blood to the head when Mark thought last week that petal blight was entirely absent from his Camellia Fairy Blush (the first camellia he ever named – a C. lutchuensis hybrid, not a sasanqua). He examined many spent blooms and finally found one with the telltale white ring. So not blight free, but unaffected in its display.

It is the bigger flowered, paler varieties that look the worst along with the ones bred for show blooms – fewer flowers but with perfect form. It has pretty well wrecked the traditions of camellia shows. Whether time and renewed efforts by plant breeders can replace these types with blight resistant options is still unknown.

Camellia Fairy Blush - not immune but the display is unaffected

Camellia Fairy Blush – not immune but the display is unaffected

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

The curse of the narcissus fly

A selection of early flowering narcissi from the garden this week

A selection of early flowering narcissi from the garden this week

The offending narcissi fly larva to the right of the blade point

The offending narcissi fly larva to the right of the blade point

Behold, the narcissus fly larvae. This creamy brown grub is not your garden friend. In fact, in the world of insects, grubs and greeblies that would have been better kept out of this country, the narcissus fly ranks up the scale. It is European in origin – what they call a hoverfly though not a desirable species.

I had to look it up because I only knew it as the narcissus fly. It is Merodon equestris, in case you want to know. On the wing, the adult looks inoffensive – a bit like a cross between a lean, mean bumblebee and a blow fly boasting a yellow back. It is its reproductive habits which are the problem. The female adult zips around at great speed, laying its eggs, usually one by one, at the base of the bulb foliage. When the egg hatches, the juvenile larva burrows down and makes a cosy home for itself inside the bulb where it sustains itself by eating it from the inside out, in preparation for hatching the following spring.

You can see the damage in the photograph. As I was redoing the rose garden, I was splitting clumps of bulbs in full growth (not generally recommended but I find it works out fine as long as I am replanting straight away into good conditions). Some of the bulbs were soft and sporting very few, if any, fresh roots. That is a sure sign of narcissus fly. There is something deeply compelling about squeezing the bulb and having the larva exude out the top, or splitting the bulb and digging it out. They are quite tough so difficult to squish between your fingers (I wear gardening gloves at all times, lest you recoil at the thought) but can emit a satisfying pop and explode in a very small way if you squish them below foot. Generally, there is only one per bulb.

The inoffensive adult fly (photo credit: Sandy Rae via Wiki Commons)

The inoffensive adult fly (photo credit: Sandy Rae via Wiki Commons)

While this critter is widely referred to as the narcissus fly, by no means does it limit its predations to daffodils. It attacks many members of the amaryllidaceae family. This is a fairly large family and includes snowdrops (galanthus), snowflakes (leucojum) and hippeastrums. According to bulb expert, Terry Hatch, it also attacks hyacinths but as we only have two hyacinths, we have never noticed. As an aside, hyacinths need a winter chill to flower well so are better in colder climates.

You can’t eradicate it. The fly is airborne and does not respect boundaries. A multi pronged defensive strategy is required. The fly does not like shade, so all our hippeastrums are now woodland plants because they were getting hammered by the larvae infestations. Now they are untouched.

We favour the early flowering narcissi because they are done, dusted and pretty much dormant by the time the fly is on the wing in late spring and summer. The galanthus are also back below ground by then, so it is never a major problem with them. It doesn’t seem to be a problem with the autumn flowering bulbs such as the nerines and the belladonnas, even though, sitting half in and half out of the ground, you would think they might be vulnerable.

Don’t let your daffodil bulbs become so congested they squeeze themselves above the ground and planting them in shallow bowls may be like a creche to a passing fly. Most of the advice is to leave the foliage on the bulb until it turns yellow and dies off naturally because this is how the bulb builds up strength to flower again next season. You are not meant to tie it in knots or plait it (as some tidy gardeners do) because that inhibits the photosynthesis process. However, a visiting daffodil breeder told us that in fact the bulbs only need 65 days to fortify themselves which is a great deal less than nature gives them. The daffies in our lawn are somewhere over 100 days. This is not universally acclaimed advice but if you have a problem with bulb fly, removing the foliage soon after two months and piling extra dirt or mulch on top of the bulbs may help to break the cycle. The worst that will happen is that your bulbs won’t flower well if you strip off the leaves too early.

Come spring, Mark can be found stalking narcissus fly in our rockery. They become active in the warmth of the day. They are very quick so it is hard to get them with a fly swat. He uses a little sprayer of Decis and squirts them. Decis is a synthetic pyrethroid (as is fly spray) so not a particularly nasty insecticide. Vigilance is what keeps the flies under some semblance of control here. Though he was a little wry on the day he told me he had been walking through the rockery minus his sprayer when he saw an offending fly. It was an open garden day so he looked around to check that no visitors were within view, took off his tee shirt and was stalking the offender to swat it when he noticed the woman at the side of the garden watching. “Eye candy,” I told him. “You are now officially eye candy.”


Left to right: a perfectly healthy bulb, an infested bulb which had already formed a healthy offset, the offending larva in front, and a second infested bulb with it’s larva still ensconced (but no longer – I squished it after its photo shoot).

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

Modern perennial plantings – more in the style of Braque than Mondrian

A simple but very pleasing combination of Helleborus niger for winter flowers, Calanthe arisarnensis for spring, some random dwarf narcissi - and interesting foliage all summer

A simple but very pleasing combination of Helleborus niger for winter flowers, Calanthe arisarnensis for spring, some random dwarf narcissi – and interesting foliage all summer

Last week, I wrote about the major makeover in the rose garden and mentioned the fun I was having with the perennials. While the rains have interrupted progress (it is difficult to dig and divide in waterlogged conditions), we have spent a great deal of time discussing perennials and their use here. Indeed, we even dedicated a gardening trip to the UK to look at techniques.

Traditionally, English perennial gardening has been dominated by the herbaceous border organised on what I had been calling the mix and match approach but which I have just seen described as tapestry gardening. And that seems appropriate – it is like building up an entire picture but from a multitude of different plants instead of coloured threads. At its best, it is magnificent but it is also very labour intensive and takes a lot of skill to put together well. Too often both the ongoing labour and the skill levels are lacking and it just looks a mess.

In the nineties when we saw the gardening scene hijacked by the landscape fraternity in this country, that sort of detailed gardening was thrown out. “The Look” became the dominant feature. Gone was tapestry gardening and any value placed on plantsmanship or plant detail. Now perennial gardening became “underplanting” and just as patterned carpets have been shunned in favour of the same plain carpet throughout the entire house, so too was underplanting to be a utility carpet, usually comprising only one plant variety. So rose gardens were carpeted with nepeta (catmint), or maybe stachys (lamb’s ear). Liriope was fine as long as it was en masse, or any other utility perennial that could form a reliable carpet. It is an approach to gardening that we have shunned as deathly dull.

Piet Oudolf’s rivers of perennials at Wisley were a revelation to us. Here was a contemporary take on perennial planting on a large scale. Each river or stripe is composed of three or four different plants, often repeated in other combinations elsewhere in the border. Tom Stuart-Smith’s plantings in the same RHS garden were a reinterpretation of the type of block planting first espoused by Gertrude Jekyll, especially with her later work when her eyesight was failing and she needed more defined form. When I use the word “blocky”, we are talking more freeform shapes than geometric, more Braque than Mondrian.

The upshot of this thinking was that when Neil Ross suggested I look to reorganising the perennial plantings in our rose garden to more contemporary blocky plantings with simple combinations, I had a mental framework to fit it into. While the area is hard landscaped into a formal design, I didn’t want formal geometric plantings. We strive for a spring and summer froth of pretties – roses and perennials – with touches of plant interest to extend the seasons into autumn and winter. So my blocks are random but nothing less than a square metre and nothing more than three square metres. And each block has three, sometimes four different plants in it. The fun has been in deciding the combinations block by block. It is a bit like creating a multitude of mini gardens and linking them together.

I have bought no new plants. All I have done is to lift, divide and recompose what I had in the garden. So they are just arranged differently. In each block, I have tried to combine plants which I think will be compatible in close company with each other – in other words nothing that is going to overwhelm its companions above ground by smothering them or underground by over-competing. I have considered the time of the season that each plant peaks to try and cover a good span of the year and also to get interesting combinations of foliage and flowers within each block.

A carpet of blue asters in late summer and autumn

A carpet of blue asters in late summer and autumn

Nothing is more boring than endless plant lists so I will just give a couple of examples. One block is the common liriope (grassy foliage and blue flowers in summer) with a taller, pure white Siberian iris (for spring flowers) and one of the strong growing, mat-forming Kippenberg asters with lovely blue daisy flowers in autumn. Elsewhere, I have another block which repeats the white iris but this time combining it with a compact bright blue campanula and a little pure white scuttelaria which flowers most of the time.

If one block doesn’t work, then it will be easy to address the problems in that section. Some will need lifting and dividing more often than others. The whole area has been dug over thoroughly so the plants are in friable and fluffy soil which most perennials appreciate and I have laid a mulch of compost on top. These are optimal conditions and, while the area is very new right now, I have planted divisions and plants close together so I expect rapid results as soil temperatures rise in spring. If it doesn’t close up and fill the beds with a riotous froth in time for our peak garden visitor season, I may have to be in there with emergency plugging of gaps but I hope that is not going to be required. I am also expecting that the self seeded annuals will also come away quickly and fill gaps. The pretty nigella (love in a mist), linaria pink and lilac, blue poelmonium (Jacob’s Ladder) and common old blue pansies are all welcome to stage a return wherever they wish, to soften the divisions between the blocks.

Now it is just a question of waiting to see the results.

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

Planted - patience is now required as I wait for soil temperatures to rise

Planted – patience is now required as I wait for soil temperatures to rise