Category Archives: Abbie’s column

Abbie’s newspaper columns

Rainbow Festival?

Our conversation started innocently enough. There was a piece in the Midweeker where Kevin Moore predicted the collapse of Western society over the next three years. Now, I don’t wish to denigrate Mr Moore’s beliefs in any way whatsoever. I am assured he is an intelligent and thinking man and it is clear that he believes deeply in his predictions. But I was raised by a mother who spent the better part of her life predicting the end of social order as we know it. She lived out well in excess of her three score years and ten and, if she but knew it, she died a disappointed woman having missed out on the growth of Islamic fundamentalism and the Twin Towers attack, let alone the election of George Dubya – all of which she would have seen as vindication of her dire outlook.

What caught our eye here was the quote from Kevin Moore where he said: “Anyone who plants rhododendron trees at this stage of the game is mentally ill. You can’t eat any ornamental trees.”

It is, we would like to state clearly, entirely coincidental that this particular piece of wisdom came at a time when we made our decision to exit the ornamental nursery production trade. It is not the fear that the market for ornamental plants will disappear entirely in the next three years that drove this decision on our part. Rather we decided we had too many things left to do in life that we had better get on with before we are too decrepit or elderly. Two of the passions we wish to have more time to pursue are gardening and plant breeding.

And what possibilities did this dismissal of one of our favourite ornamental plants generate? With the impending demise of the annual rhododendron festival in the face of the collapse of western society, Mark wondered about the possibility of producing rhododendrons where the flowers matured into apples. In a myriad of colours and sizes, we could see the opening for a Rainbow Festival. A useful marriage of beauty and productivity.

Should his rainbow plants succeed, he pondered camellias which then produced mandarins. Maybe flowering cherries which then produce the equivalent of luscious Black Dawsons. Magnolias which morph from flower to pear.

From there, we went on to a discussion about the gene which bestows the ability upon some fish to glow in the dark. My memory was of being told in the UK that glow in the dark fish were common around the outlets of nuclear power plants but this may have been inaccurate in the face of recent research which has isolated the glow in the dark gene.

Herein lies a quandary for environmental ethics and genetic purists. Imagine the potential of a glow in the dark plant. Not the financial potential (though we are pretty sure we could sell a glow in the dark plant to most New Zealand households). No. Such plants would be a huge boon to the environment and could eliminate almost entirely the sale of those cheap and tacky solar lights beloved by so many. When they first came on the market, solar garden lights were not cheap. I think I bought some from the Maruia Society who were, and probably still are, committed environmentalists. The lights were reasonably expensive but now they are so ludicrously cheap that they have become throwaway, despite the issues of used batteries.

Would an environmental advance such as a glow in the dark plant suitable for all climates justify the cross species genetic manipulation that would be required? I refer to introducing a fish gene to a plant. A bit of genetic engineering would be necessary, maybe even embryo rescue. We are still pondering this tricky, ethical matter.

There was also a letter to the editor last week advocating the planting of fruit trees and home vegetables and counselling the use of organic methods for growing them. We are in full agreement with the advice but the letter made the suggestion that gardeners should not buy hybrids because these are unsuitable for saving your own seed for next year. In fact most veggies are hybrids (the naturally occurring species can be poor specimens which many gardeners and cooks would reject out of hand). What the letter writer meant, we think, is that if you save seed from F1 hybrids you will get a variable result. Possibly one of the best known F1 hybrids is the original release of Honey and Pearl sweetcorn – a super sweet variety where the kernels can be yellow and creamy white on the same cob. F1 hybrids are first generation seed and if you keep selecting and raising seed from these, you can stabilise the form you want but that initial generation of seed will be patchy and variable. Most seed packets will identify if they are F1 hybrids.

There is no guarantee that heirloom fruit and vegetable are naturally occurring species either. They are simply old varieties and in many cases may have crossed in the wild or be the result of controlled crosses back in time.

And with the news that the Ellerslie Flower Show is moving to Christchurch (though it is unlikely that most of the exhibitors, northern visitors and many retailers will follow it there), we were hugely amused by the message left on our answerphone from a friend with a natural talent for mimicry. “Ah gidday. It’s Tim Shadbolt here. Ha Ha Ha. I was thinking that we might, ha ha, move the Taranaki Rhododendron Festival to Invercargill. Just let me know if you think it is a good idea, eh. Ha ha ha.” As Tim is apparently scheduled to visit our area before Christmas, maybe we had better batten down the hatches before we find our successful event has moved south too.

If you want it, you may have to produce it yourself

So twenty years of Rhododendron and Garden Festival (or Rhodo Fest as participants tend to refer to it) has been and gone. Blink your eyes and it is over for another year. We could all have done without the unrelenting rain on the last Sunday but them’s the breaks. It is certainly not the first time that the weather has not cooperated and it won’t be the last.

And another year of eager beavers searching out particular rhododendron cultivars has gone. We assume R.elliottii was not flowering at Pukeiti this year because nobody asked for it. And we could tell that BriRee was not open this year because they used to have a spectacular rhododendron whose name escapes me offhand, that many people asked for. The trouble was that nobody but the good gardeners at BriRee could do much with this particular variety so it was not readily available.

No, it was Lemon Lodge that was at its peak flowering this year around the province and therefore much sought after. Lemon Lodge was selected and named by Pukeiti and it has big trusses of sublime lemon coloured flowers. The problem with Lemon Lodge is that it prefers a cooler climate and certainly will never be happy in Auckland or Whangarei. Even for us, with a warmer climate than Pukeiti, Lemon Lodge looks superb for its two weeks in full flower and pretty tatty for the rest of the year. It also has a fairly poor success rate from cuttings so is not easy to propagate.

Curiously, we were also asked for Lems Cameo several times this year so there must be at least one garden left with a good flowering specimen. Lems Cameo was the must-have plant of the late eighties and early nineties. It has a gorgeous flower in a colour range not really available in anything else of similar shape – big frilly flowers in apricot cream and pink. The trouble with Lems Cameo was that it was very difficult to propagate – had to be grafted and even then with poor success rate – and that it really wanted to live in a cold climate like Taupo or maybe Tekapo. Over the years most of the plants around this province have died, even the large specimen in our park which held on longer than most.

The big, fragrant pure white trumpets of the nuttalliis and nuttallii hybrids were also much admired and these are plants which are not readily available commercially, either. They rarely appear in garden centres because they don’t set flower buds on two and three year old plants and they don’t give much in the way of cutting material so they are not a starter for mass production.

The problem is that there are few, precious few, specialist rhododendron growers left in the country so we are seeing the range get smaller and smaller. The interesting species have all but disappeared from production. Varieties which require grafting or are difficult to propagate and grow in the nursery have also pretty well disappeared. Similarly, azalea mollis do not fit modern methods of mass production and are hard to find. The longstanding specialist nursery, Crosshills in Kimbolton is still flying the flag in the rhododendron world and probably the only source left for a number of cultivars. As far as I know, they still do mailorder too so are worth seeking out if you are after something special.

Mark is of the view that we may see a return to home propagation skills in the face of a declining plant range. For the past three decades, gardeners have expected to be able to source just about any plant they want, as long as it is in the country. Some are still of the view that the advent of the internet should make sourcing even easier but the bottom line is that you can only source a plant if it is actually being produced. With a contracting range, gardeners may have to return to learning how to propagate at home if they are to be able to grow the special plants they covet.

Sadly, dear Reader, there are easier plants to produce at home than most rhododendrons. The vireya rhododendron group are simple and many will root without special facilities. Similarly, evergreen azaleas are pretty easy. But the deciduous azaleas and the classic rhodos require more skill and better facilities. For the home gardener who lacks a hot bed with bottom heat and protection, layering is possibly the easiest method. Layering is simple, as long as you have a long enough branch. It involves pegging a branch to the ground (you can use a wire hoop or even a stone or brick) and being patient for two years or more, in the hope that where the stem is in contact with the ground, it will put out roots (like a sucker). When it has formed roots, you cut the branch from its parent and dig it up and move it. There is no substitute for patience here and you don’t always get the best shaped plant.

We may be seeing a return to the times of Bernie Hollard where you gave your layers away in exchange for other people’s special layers. Layering, of course, only works for plants which grow well on their own roots so it is not suitable for most grafted plants. Plants are often grafted because they don’t grow well on their own roots so grafting is a means of giving them a transplant of other root systems.

There is no hocus pocus to grafting or to propagation at home. It used to widely practiced by gardeners of previous generations and even Mark set up a little outdoor hotbox unit for cuttings in our first home, long before he went into a career in horticulture. If you anticipate wanting special plants, you might usefully employ your time looking through old books to see how it used to be done. It is not an expensive operation but it does require an outdoor power source and some heating cable. Now the internet might be the place where you can find step by step guides to home propagation, including grafting.

The alternative is that you will only ever get to admire many of the special plants seen in our region’s gardens in the last weeks.

Twenty years, no less.

We are marvelling at the thought that this weekend marks the twentieth anniversary of the Taranaki Rhododendron and Garden Festival. It is a remarkable achievement to have survived so long and to have gained such a foothold in the garden culture of this country. Even more remarkable is the accreditation of so many of our gardens as being rated as nationally or regionally significant – many more than any other province in the country.

We do not subscribe to the view that this external recognition is due to the innate superiority of our gardens here. No, we think it is a downstream effect of the Festival and ever rising standards. Twenty years ago, Taranaki was a major force in plant production (mostly due to Duncan and Davies) but not necessarily head and shoulders above the rest of the country in the quality of its private gardens. Sure we had some notable gardens, but only half a dozen and most other areas of the country can muster half a dozen. Now we have close to 20 which are recognised as top quality gardens nationally and probably close to the same number again on the path to similar recognition. It is an astounding achievement. Even more astounding when you consider that the majority of the gardens are privately owned and managed without great resources of wealth.

What we have here, however, is a wealth of experience in presenting gardens well and an open garden ethos. And while no garden pays its own way, the system which allows garden owners to charge is an incentive to pour more money into making the gardens better for next season.

Look back and remember what went twenty years ago. In those heady early years, pretty well everybody and anybody could and did open. Most were free back then and there was certainly little of the intensive grooming and presentation that marks out the open gardens today. It was more akin to real estate open homes and the majority of visitors were local. Owners were not expected to be present and many times garden visitors walked around the property with nobody at home. Mark would round up the sheep and get them out of our park a few days before opening.

I can’t recall how far down the track it began to seep into garden openers’ consciousness that maybe it wasn’t a good look to peg your washing on the line. That while we all do washing, when strangers are visiting your place, flapping sheets and (horrors) underwear displayed for all and sundry to see is a bit naff. It may have been around the time when there was a campaign to divest the Festival of the practice affected by some of greeting garden visitors while wearing a white lab coat and rattling an icecream container of coins. Elder Daughter, who gets to wear a white coat most days of her life now because she inhabits a laboratory, has always marvelled at how some people think that a white lab coat confers an air of authority. We never went in for the lab coat look here, nor the rattling of coins as people walked in the gate, but I will admit that I used to peg washing on the line. By this stage, I think Mark had taken to mowing tracks in the grass around our park with the old reel mower and there were increasing numbers of visitors from outside Taranaki.

The early nineties were the peak time for visitors. Back then, large coachloads would turn up at the weekend. The Wellington Evening Post ran an excursion train up to the Festival, transferring hundreds of passengers onto coaches which crisscrossed the province. I recall one Friday evening chasing around on the phone for some visitors from Auckland who had arrived without any accommodation booked. Elaine Gill, who in those days was Tourism Taranaki, found them the very last bed in New Plymouth. The city was booked out.

They were heady days of garden opening. Garden visiting was an enormously popular activity and Maggie’s Garden Show on TV (except it was probably Palmers Garden Show back then) was mandatory viewing for everyone.

Many other areas jumped on to the garden festival bandwagon. Our festival lost its novelty value and numbers fell back somewhat. But dedicated gardeners just worked harder to lift the standards so that visitors would not be disappointed in what they saw. Around this time, we banished the sheep once and for all from our park and bought a super fancy lawnmower which cost more than our car but was the only machine capable of mowing the area which has some steep banks and tight manoeuvres.

There have been ups and downs and some quite major shakedowns since. But after 20 years our Festival is still here. Only now it caters for as many out of towners as locals and is an established part of the tourist scene here. Some may mourn the loss of the early days when garden standards were loose at best and where most gardens were free. Nostalgia is fine thing, but had we resolutely stuck to that early formula, I think our festival would have quietly died a natural death some years ago. Locals stop visiting when the excitement and novelty wears off and outsiders demand more when they have very limited time and when they are spending quite a bit of money to visit.

Taranaki gardeners can stand tall. The Festival is still here and in the end it is the individual home gardeners who are lifting the bar higher every year, presenting their gardens better and hosting visitors with friendliness.

Those of us who open know that it is a wonderful incentive to make you get your garden looking right. I love it when we are all tightly groomed and presented at our best here. And even if visitor numbers these days are more likely to be measured in the late hundreds for most, rather than the earlier days when they were knocking on the door of thousands, the bottom line is that it is really lovely to have many hundreds of people turn up, ready to enjoy themselves and admiring all your efforts. It sure has the feel good factor.

Long may the Festival continue. It is pretty special for our province and has made us a senior player on the garden scene in this country.

The Jury Gospel on Garden Ornamentation

Garden ornamentation is a matter of personal taste. It is a pretty clear statement about the owner, just as the interior of somebody’s home gives a very good indication of the personalities and interests of those who live there.

I talked about my conversation with the landscaper in a recent column where he gave me food for thought on relationships of space and gardens. Another comment he made also made me stop and think. Waving an arm airily down a potential vista, he threw off the comment, “and you need a focal point at the end. A plant will not give a strong enough focal point.”

Hmmm. I know what he means. It is hard to get a plant which makes a strong visual statement twelve months of the year. But we struggle here with dropping inorganic focal points into our garden.

We have had many conversations about sculpture in gardens. There are a number of gardens around the country which feature sculpture and some where an annual exhibition of sculpture is a major visitor drawcard. A piece of sculpture can certainly provide an instant focal point and there are any number of splendid garden photographs which focus on examples of this.

It is just not a look we favour personally. A splendid piece of sculpture shouts “Look at me! Look at me!” The garden and the plants become support players to this new star. We are happy to see the garden as the stage, but prefer special plants to be the stars. Ornamentation we see as part of the stage setting or, to extend the theatre analogy, as taking on a cameo character role. So we are more likely to drop it discreetly into the undergrowth so it is a surprise discovery.

It is, as I started, all a matter of personal taste.

Mark’s rule of thumb is that any garden feature should have a logical sense to it and an appropriate identity. So a gazebo or summerhouse should be in a place where the owner is most likely to use it which may not be where the designer might think it will look best as a feature. Similarly, seats should be in the best locations for sitting which is not necessarily the same thing as being in the best locations as focal points. For the same reason, Mark opposes using ornamentation which is a direct copy of overseas styles in our garden. Too derivative. So we will not be getting Italianate statues, Asian figurines or Grecian urns. He wants carefully chosen pieces which are relevant to us and to the country we live in. So we remain steadfastly in the “less is more” school of garden ornamentation at this time.

Readers who have the October issue of the New Zealand Gardener to hand might have noticed the photo feature entitled “Pastoral Artistry”. I really like the large black spider’s web with paua shellls shown in a Paekakariki garden. It was created from a coil of black rope found washed up on the local beach and is now a garden feature well anchored in its local environment. I also like the windy wandy bullrush sculptures shown, just as I have always admired the nikau sculptures outside Wellington City Council even if the other half’s response was to ask why I might want bronze nikaus when we have plenty of the real thing.

But no matter where your personal taste lies, there are some standard guidelines for the use of ornamentation in gardens. Placement – if you are going to create a feature or a focal point it needs to be in a position that justifies being highlighted. And the object that is the feature also needs to justify its existence by being worthy of being made into a star attraction.

Stark white and bright colours look best in cutting edge, new or hard edged gardens. They just look garish in older, softer gardens whereas they can look dramatic in more contemporary settings.

Wit and whimsy are great if they are one-off, original wit and whimsy. Take a look at Paloma Garden in Wanganui for genuinely creative wit and whimsy. But anything mass produced, by definition, is not original and is unlikely to be creative. You can not expect to buy quirkiness at the Warehouse.

Ornamentation used to be the preserve of the well heeled and rank and file garden owners simply could not afford it thirty years ago. Now every man and their dog has big pots everywhere, repro classical sculptures and garden seats – some more stylish than others. In this embarrassment of riches, it is really hard to predict what will become the valued antiques of the future, but we would hazard a guess that in New Zealand gardens, it will be ornamentation that reflects our own country and style, not that copied from overseas.

Of Moss and Things

I had an interesting garden visitor at the weekend. While he called in at our place to enjoy the garden and is entranced by magnolias, he is even more besotted by mosses. Possibly he doesn’t find many people whose eyes light up at the sight of different mosses because as we talked, he kept producing various mosses to give to us for planting.

I know next to nothing about mosses and indeed to most gardeners, they are a sign of compacted soil and neglected lawn. But they can be really exciting, in an understated sort of way. I can not see myself getting so inspired that I need to become an expert on them. They must rank alongside orchids as one of the most complicated and extensive plant genus. In fact I read that there are over 10 000 different known mosses and yes, we do have forms indigenous to New Zealand.

In case some of this sounds familiar to readers, the garden visitor was Allan Paterson who is featured in the September issue of The Gardener with his shared business sustainably harvesting mosses. Sphagnum moss is the best known harvest and is widely used in hanging baskets and with potted orchids. There are large reserves of it on the West Coast. But Allan and his partner also harvest various other mosses and lichens for sale to florists. It was when I said that Mark fancied planting some mosses in his developing bog garden area that Allan whipped out a couple of display boxes of samples to give me. They are a wonderfully tactile product and we keep patting them as we walk past the boxes.

The Japanese have a long tradition of revering moss and indeed there are famous gardens there which are essentially moss gardens. I don’t think we see ourselves attempting to re-create the Goblin Forest on Mount Taranaki’s slopes (so-called, I think, because the plants are festooned in mosses and lichens). While we could probably manage the general effect without having to resort to too much misting and watering over summer, your average New Zealand garden visitor is perhaps less impressed by swathes of mosses covering trees and ground than your average Japanese visitor. We might just keep to the mossy bog.

A moss garden needs shelter, shade and cover along with reasonable levels of moisture. Mark is still pondering how he is going to achieve these optimum conditions for the unexpected gift of assorted mosses.

That said, moss gardens are not synonymous with mossy gardens. I have just spent the better part of three days going through our rockery rubbing much of the moss off the rocks. A bit of moss is perfectly natural and picturesque. And lichen is a sign of clean air (it is one of the first organisms to disappear when the atmosphere is polluted). But lots of moss and lichen can make a rockery look neglected and you start to lose the shapes of the rocks under the green carpet. And we all know about the problems of moss on paths. It is, by the way, the reason why picturesque brick pathways are better in very dry climates. In our humid and moist conditions, they fast become picturesque but dangerous brick and moss skating strips.

I keep noticing the extended television advertisement for the product which you spray on your paths to get rid of moss. I think it is named something like “Thirty Seconds”. That, I assume, is the time it takes you to spray a square metre or so. Presumably it is not the time it takes to kill the moss because in small print, it states “May take up to two months in some conditions”!

Mossy lawns are often a source of concern to gardeners. Mosses will colonise in shady areas or where soil is compacted, damp and hungry. While you can spray out the moss if it bothers you, you also need to change the conditions or it will just return. I think I prefer the Alan Titchmarsh approach. I can not find my copy of his early publication, “The Avant Gardener” so with apologies to the author, I will have to paraphrase the words of this great English gardener and broadcaster from modern times.

Lawns, he said, belong to council houses where there are rows of alternating coloured marigolds and salvias staked up straight. Avant gardeners don’t have lawns. They have grass, and the more the grass the invaded by daisies and moss the prettier it is.

* * * *

On another topic, keen gardeners and garden readers might be interested in a new quarterly publication scheduled for its first release in a few months’ time. “The Gardener’s Journal” is closely modelled on the English publication “The Garden” with extended articles on a wide range of topics of interest to New Zealand gardeners. The first edition promises around 120 pages with minimal advertising. The leading article will be by extremely famous English gardener, Beth Chatto (I didn’t know she was still alive…) along with contributions on various gardens and gardening people in this country, “Adventures with Paeonia Mlokoswitschii”, “Return of the Native”, “A Late Autumn Treasury” and lots more. It promises to be a meatier diet than current publications in the market.

If you want to know more, or better, to order the first copy or take out a year’s subscription, contact the editor, Margaret Long on margaretlong@xtra.co.nz, 139 Old Tai Tapu Rd, Halswell, Christchurch.