Category Archives: Abbie’s column

Abbie’s newspaper columns

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.

Magnolias – Number One in the Plant World

By Abbie Jury

If I am ever asked what my favourite plant group is, it does tend to be whatever is freshly in flower at the time. There is no single minded loyalty to one genus of plants here. But overall, magnolias are probably number one here. There simply is nothing in my experience that can beat the sight of a large magnolia tree in full bloom. Set against a blue sky, it can take your breath away.

The recent run of fine early spring weather with little wind has given us a splendid flowering this year. I have never counted how many we have planted out here but it must be well into the hundreds now. Some are splendid large specimens imported from England by Mark’s father fifty to sixty years ago, some are named plants of more recent breeding and many are simply part of the ongoing breeding programme here.

For some reason we have not yet managed to fathom, we get much richer colour in New Zealand than is apparent in some other countries. When we looked at peak flowering in England, Italy and Switzerland a couple of years ago, we were a bit surprised to see how washed out the colours can be in their conditions. Named cultivars which we know here as rich pinks, purples and wine reds appeared to be much paler. It may be due to soil conditions there and our high light levels may also have something to do with it. While we have not yet seen the magnolia flowering in areas of the USA or in their native habitats of China and central Asia, we returned from Europe convinced that a New Zealand flowering is something special.

I am talking of deciduous magnolias here. The evergreen magnolias, mostly native to USA, are a different plant altogether and decidedly less spectacular in their flower power. I had a call this week from a woman (out of the readership area) who was trying to source a pink or red magnolia. She had a white one but she wanted another colour because she was planting her children’s placentas. (Did I need to know that? Not really.) I then ascertained that she wanted a pink or red evergreen magnolia. I restrained myself from commenting that the rest of the world wants one too. Despite the best efforts of some international breeders to get colour into the evergreens, they remain resolutely white in their flowers.

Evergreen magnolias have their place (as windbreaks and in cemeteries in my book, I am afraid) but they are unlikely to ever make you say “oh wow”.

Magnolias are one plant group which has benefited hugely from the interference or endeavours (depending on your point of view) of the modern plant breeders. Even fifty years ago, there was not a big range to chose from – campbellii, soulangeana, Rustica Rubra, liliiflora, kobus (the stellata or star magnolia) and not a huge amount more. Some you had to wait a good fifteen years or so to open a flower and some had a huge burst of wonderful blooms only to be over in about 10 days. And they were mostly pink or white unless you were American in which case you had the small flowered yellow species.

How times have changed. Now some magnolias will flower in the garden centre (bred to encourage flowering on juvenile plants) though it must be said that early blooms on very young plants aren’t always up to quality. Most modern hybrids will at least flower within a couple of years of planting out.

Many modern magnolias will extend the flowering season because they set flower buds down the stem, not just on the tips. This means that the flower buds develop at different rates and consequently the display lasts longer. A number of years ago, a very late and severe frost here turned Magnolia Iolanthe from a vision in pink and white to brown slush overnight. It was very discouraging but within a week she had opened a full set of fresh flowers and was back to her former glory. Iolanthe was one of the first modern large flowered cultivars to show this propensity to set buds down the stem and from first to last flowers can be as long as two months.

In New Zealand we tend to favour solid petals and more robust flower form which has to do with our wind. In countries where wind is not an issue, big floppy flowers are quite acceptable but they just blow to bits here. I am not so keen on the stellata or star magnolia types because the petals lack substance and can fall apart rather too quickly. They also tend to make multi trunked rather twiggy large shrubs to small trees which are not as appealing as a well shaped solid tree, in my eyes at least.

Modern breeding has also brought a wider range of smaller growing plants onto the market which means that you don’t need to own a very large section to be able to grow at least one tree. That said, the bigger the tree and the bigger the flower, the more spectacular they are. Some trees just get old and tired as they get bigger whereas magnolias go from strength to strength.

Mark will tell you that a watched bud does not open. He is popping up and down the hill several times a day in anticipation of a rather special cross which is about to burst into flower. It looks exciting with the promise of a colour break and the bud is satisfyingly large but the wretched thing still has not rewarded him by showing its true colour and form.

Those of you who grow magnolias will have seen the large furry sheath which encases the bud. When they were little, our children used to refer them as sleeping bags for mice.

Yes, magnolias are number one in the plant world for us here.

A tui in a cherry tree

What a joy are the tuis in the cherry trees at this time of the year. They won’t sit still for us to count, but there are times when we guess around 40 to 50 of them are fighting for the nectar. The trees can look as if they are exploding with birds. Being strongly territorial, they spend as much time bickering and squabbling and giving each other their marching orders (or is that, flying orders?) as they do feeding.

Mark found one tui which had apparently overindulged, lying in the park looking distinctly glazed about the eyes and very wobbly. He placed the somewhat floppy bird in a safer spot where it had some cover and wondered aloud to me as to whether he should be trying to get it to drink water. I was not at all sure how he planned to get the bird to drink. Nor was I convinced that the metabolic system of a drunk bird is similar to that of a drunk human.

Whatever, when he returned a little later to check on its welfare, the tui had perked up considerably and was not going to let him come near it again.

It is the campanulata cherries which feed the native birds in late winter. They are sometimes referred to as the Taiwanese or Formosan cherry. Presumably when the intrepid British plant hunters went out collecting, the island was still known as Formosa. They also occur naturally in areas of southern Japan and south China.

The campanulatas are small flowered in sugar pink or cerise red tones and they flower long before most other cherry trees. A tree in flower is just a mass of bloom and the leaves start to appear towards the end of flowering. Because they flower and come into leaf so early, they are regarded internationally as only suitable for very mild climates but they will grow through most of our area.

We had a very knowledgeable visitor from England this week and he was delighted by the sight of the campanulatas which he says can’t be grown in the UK because it is too cold. Now that he is building a garden in Normandy, he thought maybe he could try growing them. He was a bit stunned when we told him they are a noxious weed in Northland and on the banned list.

herein lies the problem with camapanulata cherries. They are a joy at this time of the year and they provide plenty of food for tuis and honey bees. But many will set seed and Mark will tell you that wildling cherries are one of the main weeds he deals to on our property.

I talked to a couple of garden centres in the hope that they would tell me whether anyone has selected sterile carmine red forms so they don’t set seed. Sadly no. There is a great project for someone. But in the absence of hard information, we would advise people to err on the conservative side and not plant campanulatas of unknown seeding status if their property adjoins the national park or a bush reserve.

A sterile plant which does not set viable seed allows the best of both worlds – food for native birds along with colour impact at this time of the year. Three of the most common cultivars on the market are of Felix Jury’s breeding – Pink Clouds, Mimosa and (what else?) Felix Jury. As far as we know, Pink Clouds and Mimosa are both sterile but they are the sugar pink colour range. In the desirable carmine red range, such as Prunus Felix Jury, most appear to be far too fertile. The one sterile tree we have in the garden here is far too large for most gardens, already being in excess of 10 metres tall.

Cherry trees, or prunus, are a huge family with about 400 different species from around the world and many more named selections and hybrids. But as a general rule in this country, it is the Taiwanese ones flowering now and the Japanese ones flowering later in the season. The ones from Japan are generally small trees, often selected for their big fluffy flowers. Varieties such as Tai Haku, Mount Fuji and Kanzan are well known. Gorgeous these Japanese ones may be, but sadly they don’t feed the birds. Nor do they tend to be long lived in our climate, often succumbing to bacterial blast.

Unfortunately fruiting cherries such as the big beautiful Black Dawsons do not like our mild and damp climate. There are good reasons why they do so well in Central Otago and why the fruit sells for around $5 a kilo there whereas we rarely see it under $15 a kilo here. Believe me, we have tried growing fruiting cherries here and if we could, we would be producing them. But we can’t so we gave up.

Foliage for the Contemporary New Zealand Garden, Julian Matthews (Random House, $39.99) Reviewed by Abbie Jury.

Essentially this book is a collection of 114 different plants which have nice leaves and are liked by the author. Each plant is given an eyecatching photograph with the facing page giving relevant plant information.

The photographs are beautiful and my only quibble would be that there is usually no indication of scale within the image and it isn’t always easy to pick because they are all close ups. Given that the range of plants is vast – from the large ginkgo biloba tree down to a ground cover ajuga, relative size may be challenging to new comers.

What lifts this book above a simple, pretty coffee table tome is the writing. The author is experienced in both gardening and in writing. He does not shy away from using botanical names but he writes with such enthusiasm and clarity that novices will not be confused. His advice on plant combinations is what makes this book worth having.

It is a shame the publisher economised on the quality of the cover. It has a cheapskate cover which creases and curls and is unlikely to last the distance should you keep this book on your coffee table for inspiration.