Category Archives: Abbie’s column

Abbie’s newspaper columns

Garden assessment and the NZGT

Mark, nose pressed to the window (or door, in this case). On the outside looking in.

Mark, nose pressed to the window (or door, in this case). On the outside looking in.

Hamilton is playing host to some good gardeners this weekend. It is the New Zealand Gardens Trust (NZGT) having its annual conference in the city. This is the parent organisation of many, but not all, open gardens in this country. We are not attending. We were enthusiastic founder members. Indeed, we even contributed $2000 to get the thing up and running. There is nothing like resigning on principle and being totally ignored to remind one not to get ideas above one’s station.

The purpose of the trust is to vet gardens, rank them and give garden visitors an accurate idea of what to expect. Along the way, it aims to provide a pleasant membership club of collegial conviviality for the garden openers and this is really the only aspect we miss.

There aren’t many circumstances where garden assessment is required. There is the occasional local competition which invariably gives lie to the idea that gardening is a non competitive activity – for some at least. There are plenty of people who would like to claim the biggest pumpkin, tallest sunflower, prettiest road frontage, or the best vegetable or flower garden. Winning can be wonderfully affirming.

Some of the garden festivals around the country insist on vetting gardens before accepting them. In this case, assessment is only setting the base line for inclusion. It can be alarmingly controversial but anybody with experience knows just how necessary the process is. Too many gardeners wear rose tinted glasses where their own patch of dirt is concerned.

Show gardens such as seen at the Ellerslie Flower Show are judged and there are some excellent international precedents for how these are assessed, emanating particularly from Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society. Interestingly, the RHS is taking a close look at its assessment processes right now.

And there is our national scheme for ranking gardens, administered by the aforementioned NZGT. Of course you can still open your garden independently, as we do these days, but from the point of view of the garden visitor, some credible outside endorsement and ranking can be helpful. Originally, this open garden scheme had three categories with the top tier being grandly named: Gardens of National Significance. We were really honoured to be named one of only six private gardens to carry this elevated status in the first year. That meant something. These days, with a huge number of gardens in the top categories, it doesn’t seem anywhere near as prestigious. Do we really have over sixty two top tier gardens, of national significance and a few even described with great puffery as being of INTERnational significance, in this country?

Equally, it seems really odd that the next tier of gardens down numbers a mere thirty six. One might expect a pyramid shape – fewer top gardens and a whole lot more in the next layer who would like to move up. Either the organisation is singularly bad at retaining membership below the top tiers, or it gives out its rankings way too cheaply.

The problem, I would suggest, is likely to stem from too heavy a dependence on a points based system. By that, I mean allocating so many points for the state of your lawns, your paved surfaces, how neatly your hedges are clipped, how you support and tie up plants, plant combinations, plant health and so on. It matters not a whit if you are scoring out of 10, 100 or 300.

In practice, slavish adherence to a points based system can mean a damned ordinary or downright awful garden lacking in any charm or originality can get through as long as it scores highly in sufficient categories. The sum of the parts is sometimes greater than the whole. We saw it happen a few years ago when someone with a good level of knowledge trotted around a number of local gardens, clipboard and marking schedule in hand. “When I got to the end,” he told us, “and added up the points, I was astonished at who came out with the highest score.” As indeed we were, too.

A marking schedule is just one tool, not an end in itself. Neither is it a shield to hide behind, to justify decisions. It needs to be used in conjunction with clear definitions, agreed frameworks, some bigger picture thinking about downstream outcomes, maybe a mediated process and preferably in the hands of a convenor. Done well, assessment can even be an empowering experience for the candidate.

I have no idea whether NZGT is now employing a wider range of strategies in assessment. They certainly didn’t in the past. From my current position out in the cold with my nose pressed up against the window pane, the current outcomes are not suggesting that there has been significant change.

Notwithstanding those reservations, one hopes that the keen and dedicated gardeners visiting Hamilton this weekend will encounter fine weather, wine and gardens to be enjoyed in convivial company.

Before becoming a garden writer, Abbie Jury spent 18 years working in education, across all sectors before specialising in adult learning. She was appointed to an advisory committee to the Minister of Education, to a standing committee of NZQA and was awarded a Commonwealth Relations Trust bursary to study alternative forms of assessment of adults in the UK.

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

Three years ago, I published the reasons for our resignation from the New Zealand Gardens Trust. Despite being widely read then and in the intervening years, those comments appear to have fallen into an abyss.

Eight years ago, I wrote in strong support of the NZGT. That does seem rather a long time ago now.

Raised beds and to dig or not to dig, that is the question.

Raised beds have their place, but not necessarily every place (Photo Joe Mabel, Wikimedia Commons)

Raised beds have their place, but not necessarily every place (Photo Joe Mabel, Wikimedia Commons)

Maybe the gardening world divides into diggers and non diggers. The non diggers favour raised vegetable beds and no dig gardening methods. We old diggers, on the other hand, are closer to our peasant ancestry.

Digging is not an activity to be feared. The physical effort is terribly good for you and it is only hard the first time. The more you work the soil, the easier it becomes. One of our vegetable gardens has been tilled for anything up to ten decades in some places and it is like working in potting mix. While Mark prefers to dig with a shovel, I swear by a good, sharp spade. People often neglect sharpening their spade but it makes a huge difference if you keep a good cutting edge on it.

Being of the digging persuasion, we have never felt the need for raised beds. If you put some effort into turning over the soil of your raised bed, it will fly in every direction, spoiling your surrounding paths. Lesson number one, should you decide you want them, is to keep the soil level lower than the surrounds and leave room to build up further as you add compost, green crops and all the additions which keep it fertile and friable over time.

Raised vegetable gardens have their uses in certain situations. Obviously they are of inestimable value for disabled gardeners or those who cannot bend comfortably. They can be useful where you are trying to garden in an area choked with old tree roots or with really bad drainage. They are, my daughter tells me, particularly useful in Canberra where a combination of clay, a new puppy and a heavy population of ground birds named choughs (pronounced chuffs) condemn any vegetables at ground level. But in the main, if you have halfway decent soil, I think it is actually easier to follow the traditional way and garden at ground level. The current vegetable garden craze has seen a building boom for raised beds and too little questioning of the rationale.

For starters, there are issues related to the construction of raised beds. Brick or concrete block is permanent and relatively expensive – devilishly difficult if you change your mind about your garden layout further down the track. Hardwood railway sleepers are expensive and heavy to handle. Most people end up with pine. Herein lies a major problem. If you use untreated pine in a high rainfall climate, it is going to start breaking down within a couple of years. Don’t forget it is permanently wet on the inside of the bed. So what about tanalised pine?

“No,” said my scientist daughter in Canberra. I trust her judgement in these matters and she did spend one summer as a chemistry student looking at sap staining on tanalised timber. She comments that the information on the internet is not particularly up to date, and in the absence of scientific evidence proving safety, she certainly would not want to be growing anything edible near tanalised timber. She points out that the preservative was, and may still be, a mixture of arsenic and chrome and plants are very good at absorbing and holding heavy metals. She wouldn’t risk it. She is constructing her raised beds out of untreated pallet timber which will break down in due course but is at least free, recycled and will last longer in her dry climate than here. She has also coated it with linseed oil.

The conventional approach to vegetable gardens, though one hopes the timber sides are not tanalised

The conventional approach to vegetable gardens, though one hopes the timber sides are not tanalised

Once you have built your raised bed, you have the problem of filling it. Too often, I have seen people on TV wheeling in large, heavy grade plastic bags, each containing 40 litres of soil mix bought from the garden centre. I can’t think of much that is less environmentally friendly. If you are not going to go down the expensive, convenience route, you are going to have to find or create your own soil. It takes a much greater volume than you would ever dream of to fill a raised bed. Then you have to shovel or lift the soil in. Don’t underestimate the size of the task.

At this point, some advocate going the no dig route. I know the theory, but being diggers, we have never done it. It consists of layering a mixture of compostable materials and leaving the worms to do the task of breaking it down. So you layer green material (but avoid weeds, seeding plants and anything diseased such as mildewed tomatoes) alternately with dry matter (fine twigs, newspaper, even old woollen carpet, straw and the likes). Essentially you are building a cold compost heap. It takes time for it all to break down and form a tilth and longer term, it matters a great deal what your proportion of green matter to dried matter is. Kay Baxter of Koanga Institute has written about this and why she chose to abandon the no dig approach after many years to return to old fashioned double digging.

If you want to hasten your no-dig garden, you end up adding large quantities of compost and humus and this is where my vegetable growing husband draws the line. We make large quantities of hot compost here and as far as he is concerned, that compost is destined to be spread annually to a depth of no more than 5cm across as much garden as possible – thereby feeding and conditioning the soil while acting as mulch. There is no way he will allow a single garden bed, whether raised or not, to absorb more than its allotted share just to avoid having to dig the soil.

Raised beds and no dig gardening require higher inputs for the same, or often less output. We are waiting for practitioners with several decades of experience to convince us that these gardening techniques are an improvement, rather than recent converts.

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

Tarting up the veggie patch

Setting the standard, really. The ultimate potager in the parterres of Villandry (Wiki Commons photo)

Setting the standard, really. The ultimate potager in the parterres of Villandry (Wiki Commons photo)

The arrival of a book on ornamental edible gardening set us thinking and talking about tarting up the veggie patch (in the vernacular), or the role of the potager (for those who aspire to a touch more class).

Keen vegetable gardeners may throw their hands up in horror. For some, there is beauty in a well presented vegetable garden with good straight rows, obedient plants in healthy condition and a succession of crops. There are sound reasons for planting vegetables in rows, including ongoing maintenance with a push hoe which is not only effective for weed control but also keeps the surface well tilled. I doubt that any other method of vegetable gardening can rival the traditional techniques for productivity. It takes ongoing work to keep it all in tiptop condition but that is to be expected. Why, some veggie gardeners may wonder, would you want to turn it into an even higher maintenance, yet lower productivity style of gardening by imposing ornamental values on what is essentially an unpretentious, utilitarian activity?

The ornamental edible garden, or potager, is almost de rigeuer today. Here is the marriage of food production with traditional garden design and practice, right? Well, yes and no. If you look at the history, it is another gardening style that has its origins with the rich and powerful of Europe, now democratised. Another example of prole drift, one could say a little unkindly. The stylised and designated herb garden, often laid out on formal principles dates back to times when herbs were more about medicine than cooking. As such, the range of plants grown was considerably more extensive and these gardens belonged in monasteries or designated apothecary gardens attached to institutions.

A word about parterres and potagers. The parterre is a highly stylised form of gardening, laid out on lines of rigid symmetry, much favoured in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the grandest was created at Versailles for Louis XIV. The famous parterres of Villandry, also in France, are modern, dating back to the early 1900s. I liken the parterre to tapestry gardening. It is about building pleasing designs with plant blocks, originally planned for viewing by the lord from upper story windows. It doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the harvest, even when vegetables are included.

Potager is another French word, now widely applied to ornamental edible gardens. It is on a more domestic scale but its origins were also socially elevated. The peasants of yore would not have been growing in such a managed and decorative manner and the middle classes had yet to appear. So it was the upper echelons of society who could afford to indulge in creating formal gardens to grow edible crops in an ornamental style.

Rosemary Verey popularised the potager on a domestic scale (Photo: Brian Robert Marshall)

Rosemary Verey popularised the potager on a domestic scale (Photo: Brian Robert Marshall)

The late English gardener, Rosemary Verey, is credited with popularising the potager in the last twenty years and in her hands it became a marriage of formal garden design, herbaceous traditions and food production. However, she seemed to refer to it, in the main, as simply a vegetable garden. The English show mastery of understatement. There is a pleasing symmetry in a well cared for ornamental edible garden and the formality means such gardens photograph well. It is a particularly feminine style.

It is just not a style to which we aspire personally. It is not quite one thing or the other. The principal criterion for plant inclusion is that it be edible or possibly medicinal, not that one will actually harvest it. Frankly, how many bay leaves will you ever use? One bay tree has its place, a row of topiary laurus nobilis is technically fitting the edible criterion but is primarily ornamental. And if one is going to grow ornamentals, I’d rather have topiary michelias, camellias or something more interesting than boring bay trees.

If you are gardening for looks, then the whole block of highly decorative red cabbages is going to mature at the same time so, unless you are into pickled cabbage big time, most will end up on the compost heap. Besides, you spoil the effect if you harvest one at a time, as required.

And then there are those tidy buxus hedges defining garden beds. Leaving aside the ravages of buxus blight and the fact that these tidy hedges harbour snails, buxus has an invasive root system. It sucks the goodness out of the soil and as the roots reach further afield, it becomes problematic to get crops of lush, healthy vegetables in the middle.

Often lavender is used as an edging plant but any of those big, floppy types of edgers are a problem if you have narrow paths (brick is the favoured option) and a high rainfall climate. I prefer to pop out to the garden to pick a lemon or a lettuce without getting wet lower legs.

More meadow garden than potager here

More meadow garden than potager here

We are pragmatic here. We would rather have good crops of vegetables, easily planted, tended and able to be harvested as required, with more permanent plantings of ornamentals elsewhere. That said, our vegetable gardens are by no means limited to vegetables. By this time in late summer, they are more akin to meadow gardens. Mark is fond of growing annuals for butterfly food but zinnias, marigolds and the like do not sit comfortably in our more restrained ornamental gardens so they get bedded in and allowed to seed amongst the vegetables. For us, the meadow has more romance than the potager. Besides, in this day and age when two raised beds out of tantalised timber and a citrus tree in a pot are claimed to be a potager, we would rather tread a different path.

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

Please, value trees

A totara, torn apart by strong winds

A totara, torn apart by strong winds

A fierce storm delivered us a sharp reminder last week. Avoid forked trunks in trees. Half a totara split out entirely. It had stood and grown for fifty years. Alas, early in life, the trunk had divided into two leaders and that meant a major structural weakness. The wind tunnel created as a result saw a triple trunked Picea omorika drop one of its leaders. It too was over fifty years old. Early intervention on both trees would have saved us a great deal of work and ensured that what remained was in better shape.

In years of retailing plants, I saw countless people debating over the selection of trees and seeking advice as to whether one tidy little specimen was going to be better than another equally tidy specimen of the same variety. It was very hard to sell a plant with what we call a hockey stick bend at the base. Sometimes this can occur with budded or grafted plants. I rarely bothered trying to explain that a hockey stick on a tree where the trunk is 2.5cm through will not be an issue at all when the trunk is 25cm in diameter. It may be true but it sounded too much like hard sell. The same goes for minor kinks in trunks on juvenile plants. They don’t look the best for the first year but it is not a long term problem. However, forked trunks are a different matter.

The dreaded hockey stick shaping

The dreaded hockey stick shaping

We are too cavalier in our attitude to trees in this country. Notwithstanding the customer angst about small imperfections, most people spend a great deal more time choosing the right carpet or curtains for their house than in deciding an appropriate variety of tree. Yet those furnishings will long have deteriorated to shabbiness and need replacing before a beautiful tree reaches maturity. You can’t magic up maturity in trees but they are frequently treated as disposable commodities. A combination of ridiculously cheap prices and extraordinarily rapid growth rates in this country has devalued them in the eyes of many.

That said, by no means are all trees equal. City council regulations which set a height above which resource consent is required before trees can be touched have an inbuilt contradiction. Such a rule catches all – trees worth protecting and valuing, trees simply planted in the wrong places and cheap nurse trees of neither long term value nor aesthetic merit.

There is no substitute for a little knowledge. Making an unwise choice may only cost a few dollars at the time of purchase but if it is a rapid growing, brittle variety or one that is shortlived in our conditions, you can pay dearly when it outgrows its allotted space or, in the case of filler trees, outlives its use. Not everybody has a handy person on site with chainsaw, trailer and mulcher and it is very expensive if you have to pay somebody to come in and do it for you.

The forked trunk - an inherent structural weakness

The forked trunk - an inherent structural weakness

Similarly, planting trees and leaving them to their own devices can cause major issues further down the track. For the want of a five minute job keeping our Picea omorika and totara to single leaders some fifty years ago, we have faced a cleanup taking at least two days. Some trees naturally multi trunk like an overgrown shrub but most are better kept to a single leader. The sooner you carry out the shaping on such trees, the easier it is. At the really early stage, you can do it with secateurs. Select out the better or best looking leader and either remove competing growths entirely or shorten them to reduce competition for dominance. The longer you leave the situation, the more major the progression of tools becomes – to loppers, a pruning saw and then a chainsaw. Never having mastered the chainsaw, I am a strong advocate for a good quality pruning saw.

While some respond to these issues by deciding that trees are altogether too much of a potential problem and nothing will be allowed to grow beyond two metres in their garden, thank you very much, I would urge you to look beyond these gardening Philistines. I do not think any garden or landscape is complete without trees. It is just a matter of choosing the right ones appropriate to the situation and looking after them while they get established. Spend at least as much time on finding out about suitable selections as you would to choosing something major for your house. I try not to bag garden centre staff, but you might be placing altogether too much trust in many if you think they can give you expert advice on trees as well as on carrot seed. Either find someone who is genuinely knowledgeable or look to books. Some of the very best gardening books I know are about trees and one of the strongest and most knowledgable international horticulture societies is devoted to trees – the IDS or International Dendrology Society. The information is there to find.

Few of us will leave any legacy of note when we shuffle off the mortal coils. But good long term trees planted in the right situation and cared for during the early years of establishment are a fine legacy, to my mind.

Felling of the Picea omorika by strong wind

Felling of the Picea omorika by strong wind

Recommended books on trees include:
New Zealand’s Native Trees by John Dawson and Rob Lucas (Craig Potton Publishing)
New Trees. Recent Introductions to Cultivation by John Grimshaw, Ross Bayton and Hazel Wilks (Kew)
Trees and their Bark by John and Bunny Mortimer (Taitua Books)
Trees and Shrubs for Flowers/ Fragrance/ Foliage. 3 volumes all by Glyn Church (Batemans)

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

Lower maintenance gardening

The raised beds are going - to be replaced by wider steps

The raised beds are going - to be replaced by wider steps

I have been forced to look at practical lower maintenance gardening this week. Most of the time, we are practitioners of relatively high maintenance gardening on a large scale. I think it was the late Christopher Lloyd (he of Great Dixter fame) who made a comment that the more experienced one is, the more one realises that a high maintenance garden is a great more interesting. But there are times when a low maintenance one is required, particularly with rental properties.

For our sins, we are landlords. Just the one rental house and it is one we used to live in ourselves. There was a certain irony when we bought the property many years ago. We were doing a little land amalgamation at the time and Mark had exchanged quite a few plants with a previous owner for some work with his handy little bob-cat. When we came to buy the property, the valuation mentioned the high quality plantings. We certainly paid dearly to get our own plants back.

While living in the house, we duly extended the gardens and plantings to the point where they were reasonably expansive. When it came to letting the house, we realised the scope of the lawns and gardens were beyond what most tenants would manage, so part of the successive tenancy agreements has been that we will mow the lawns and loosely maintain the gardens as required.

Mowing tenants’ lawns is not a bad thing. We mow pretty much every Friday and it gets you onto the property on a regular basis so you can keep a discreet eye on things. It operates as an early warning system, so to speak.

But gardens are another thing. Few tenants garden. A few scratch around from time to time, but none we have met take as good care as we did. It is a fact of life. In this hiatus between tenants, we are doing a major clean out and simplification in the garden. Once it has been reduced to bare bones, the onus will be on the incoming tenants to maintain the gardens at that standard. There will be nothing too demanding.

Simplification has been ongoing but reached its zenith this time. The only garden borders left are the two defined by concrete paths alongside the house. A previous property owner had put in a number of raised garden beds. The last two are going now. Out with garden beds. They just look messy if not maintained.

The designated vegetable garden needs clearing but is being retained

The designated vegetable garden needs clearing but is being retained

The designated and fenced vegetable garden is staying. In this day and age, it is probably an asset and it has good soil, is an appropriate size and is sheltered but in full sun. It will be ready for a tenant to plant. We just need to clear it first. Similarly, the citrus trees can stay. They are fine with total neglect.

The extensive perimeter plantings have matured to shrubbery and they are staying. If you want low maintenance, long term plantings, go for shrubberies. Over time, shrubs and small trees will gently mesh and knit together to provide a green and flowery undulating wall of foliage. Being relatively dense, few weeds grow beneath. The herbaceous plantings we had there have long gone but that is fine. All we have to do from time to time in the shrubberies is to go through with a pruning saw and trim anything that is getting too large. In return, the mixed plantings of camellias, rhododendrons, magnolias, maples, self sown pongas, feijoas and the rest provide a soft and pleasing backdrop to the property. They stop it from being too austere and bare.

Any plants that require regular attention have gone. The last of the roses are on the burning heap. The espaliered camellias have gone. The devastatingly rampant wisteria has gone. It put up a brave fight but truly, wisterias are unsuitable plants to leave in a situation where they are not actively managed. This beautiful Blue Sapphire had put out its runners a good 20 metres away.

I have replanted the remaining, tiny house borders. I couldn’t stop myself especially as I found spring bulbs. But I have gone for simple mass plantings. A shaded, dry border which is a pathetic 20cm wide (honestly, who would make a permanent border 20cm wide?) is now mass planted with green mondo grass and bedding begonias. Utility and easy to maintain by non gardeners. The one hot, dry border retained its existing vireya rhododendrons which have survived total neglect and fifteen years of tenants, underplanted en masse with a compact yellow sedum. That is it for herbaceous material. As the one who does the knapsack spraying, Mark approved the mondo grass and sedums as being largely resistant to glyphosate so he could spray amongst them if necessary.

When you are preparing a property for sale, it is often about good looks in the short term – as we have all learned from those property makeover programmes on TV. When you are preparing a rental, it is about easy care, easy living in the long term. It can be done.

The shrubbery is the lowest maintenance form of gardening I know

The shrubbery is the lowest maintenance form of gardening I know

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