Category Archives: Abbie’s column

Abbie’s newspaper columns

Pensive thoughts on a rainy Saturday

I do not know whether it was the rainy Saturday that made me pensive or whether it was my somewhat melancholy state of mind. Either way, I took a damp walk around the area we call the park. While the autumn colours seem quite striking this year and relatively early considering we have only had two cold days so far, I am not sure that damp autumn days are uplifting to my soul.

But I have been pondering the differences between those of us who see gardening as a process and those who see it as a product. I am happier in the company of the former – those who enjoy the act of gardening and see it as a journey where there may be a destination in mind but experience says that such a goal will be but transient and fleeting and not an end point at all.  For a garden can never be static and frozen in time so will never be finished or full. I suspect these are the characteristics of a gardener.

There are many who see a garden as a product – a particular destination or point of achievement in a creation that can then be frozen in time. This, I think, is probably a viewpoint of a garden owner who is not a gardener by nature. I felt a passing pang of sympathy for landscape designers. I would guess the majority of their paying clients fall into this category. Some may come to understand the whims of nature but many more make a rod for their backs, requiring that a garden be preserved in pristine condition at a certain point of its development.

But Sunday dawned fine and dry which meant my usual cheerful disposition was restored. We cannot complain about an autumn which delivers us a  daytime temperature of 24 degrees Celsius and night time temperature still well into double figures. Behold Mark’s pride and joy – his luverly bunches o’ bananas. Several lovely bunches. We are super marginal when it comes to growing bananas for tropical we are not. These are the only plants we cover for winter – festooned in protective shade cloth suspended on a giant bamboo frame.

Drying and then cleaning the soy bean crop before weighing and storing

An unusually warm and long summer may well have helped. It has certainly given us the best ever second crop of figs with which we are barely keeping pace eating fresh. And a bumper soy bean crop. I mean, what are we meant to do with 20 kg of soy beans when there are only two of us? I have made the first batch of soy milk to see if we will enjoy using it as a dairy substitute and I am even contemplating trying my hand at making tofu. Readers who have met Mark may be amused to hear that he calculated his 20 kg of cleaned soy beans as a yield of 3.6 tonnes to the hectare and was gratified to find from a net search that this is on the good side when it comes to commercial yields. I admit that I am grateful that he only flirted briefly with the idea of growing lentils. Considering how cheap these are to buy, the potential yield per hectare seems remarkably low. But I did not realise that Canada is the main global producer of lentils until I did a did a net search.

Persimmons are probably more decorative than a must-have harvest

Otherwise, the autumn harvest here is all about avocados, yet more avocados (guacamole, anybody?), seemingly endless feijoas, the aforementioned figs and the impending deluge of persimmons. Dudley dog is looking so plump from his excessive consumption of avocados that his flesh how has ripples of fat and his ongoing issues with eczema have disappeared – quite possibly due to the high oil content of the avocados. Mark checks several times a day for windfalls in an attempt to outwit this dog thief.

It seems churlish to bemoan the occasional rainy autumn day.

The autumn camellias

Camellia sasanqua Crimson King in prime position

When Mark returned home to Tikorangi in 1980 bringing me and our first baby bump, the name Jury was synonymous with camellias. These days Jury = magnolias, but not back then. There is a whole chapter in the family history that is headed ‘Camellias’ but it is largely in the past now. Changing fashion, changing focus and the dreaded camellia petal blight has seen to that.

But every autumn, as the sasanquas come into flower we both derive huge delight, particularly from the Camellia Crimson King by the old mill wheel, which is just out from our back door beside the driveway. It is a picture of grace and charm.

Crimson King rests more on its merits of form and position than the beauty of individual blooms

Sasanquas are the unsung heroes of the camellia family, seen mostly as hedging plants, so utility rather than glorious. But if they are allowed to mature as specimens and gently shaped down the years, they stand on their own merits. Mark declared yesterday that it is the autumn flowering camellias that interest him now, not the late winter and spring varieties. For these autumn ones do not get petal blight whereas the later varieties are now a mere shadow of their former selves, faced by the extreme ravages wrought upon their blooms by blight. Our camellia trip to China in 2016 had us concluding that our mild, humid climate with high rainfall means that we suffer worse from petal blight in Taranaki than pretty much anywhere else, really. It is nowhere near as bad in dry climates.

The history of camellias from the middle of last century onwards has some parallels to the history of tulips – all about show and showy blooms. So it was predicated on the quest for the new – extending the boundaries of flower form, size and colour, prizing breakthroughs even when the results were more novelty than meritorious. Camellia societies had enormous flower shows where the staging of individual show blooms was the focus. It didn’t have much, if anything, to do with garden performance let alone longevity as garden plants. Sasanquas didn’t fit this show bench mould. They flowered too early in the season, individual blooms are often quite small, lacking rigid, defined form and falling apart when picked.

But fashions and conditions change and these days it is the softer look of the Japanese camellia family member, the sasanquas, that makes us stop and take notice more than the later flowering japonicas and hybrids on which the earlier family reputation was forged. The light airiness and grace of the sasanquas fits our style of gardening far better than the solid, chunkiness of many of the later varieties and the autumn flowers serve as another marker of the change of season.

The earliest of the sasanquas here – all named varieties

I did a walk around to see how many different blooms I could pick but it is still a little early in the season and some have yet to open. Some plants we leave entirely to their own devices, some we will clean up the canopy from time to time -to take out dead wood and create an umbrella effect, two we clip tightly once a year to a cloud pruned form. With their small leaves, the sasanquas clip well. It just pays to do it soon after they have made their new growth after flowering. Leave it until late spring and you will be clipping off all the flower buds set for next autumn.

Camellia Mine No Yuki

It takes a few decades of growth to get sufficient size to shape as we shape ‘Elfin Rose’ and ‘Mine No Yuki’ but these specimens now function as distinctive shapes within the garden all year round, rather than melding into the background as most camellias do when not in bloom.

Another one bites the dust

With an increasing number of what are called ‘extreme weather events’ in the face of climate change, we just have to accept that falling trees are a fact of life here. We have a garden created amongst large trees. But none are as vulnerable as our old man pines (Pinus radiata). Planted in the 1870s by Mark’s great grandfather, some tower as high as 45 or 50 metres. We just have to accept that they appear to be reaching the end of their life span. And as yet another one falls, the next trees in the row lose their shelter so may be weakened.

Totally uprooted, the Ficus antiarus which dates back to 1957

We usually say that it is amazing how cleanly big trees can fall, especially ones that don’t have a lot of big side branches or a great deal of foliage. But not the one that fell last night. It has clearly done substantial damage as it came down. The worst is the total uprooting of the rare Ficus antiarus which will require a major effort to get back upright and planted again. The macadamia nut tree is probably unable to be salvaged. Mark is a bit sorry that it only brought down part of the expendable Lombardy poplar and not all of it.

The tree tips, like a giant spider, descending on the new caterpillar garden area

And 50 metres of tree coming down as one long length extends… well, it extends 50 metres really. So this one lies through the avenue garden, across the intervening hedge, through part of Mark’s tropical palm border and the top landed in my recently planted perennial beds of what we call the caterpillar garden. I am not thrilled by this.

With Auckland being badly hit by falling trees in last night’s storm, I come back to my position on the chilly moral high ground. With these increasingly frequent events, it is not a sign that we should be felling all trees. Yes, it is important to keep a close eye on vulnerable trees and branches. But we need to match the felling or falling of trees with the planting of more trees in places where they have a reasonable chance of growing to maturity without causing problems to life and property. Which usually means on public reserves when it comes to cities. A dendrologist friend said that it should not be a one-for-one replacement but a five-for-one ratio to allow for those trees that die or are killed before they reach maturity. And that is just to maintain the status quo. We need to think about these issues because the planet needs more trees and city folks should not be consigned to living in concrete and tarmac environments where nothing is allowed to grow over two metres tall. The problems lie not with the trees themselves but with where they are planted, how they are maintained and which varieties are being grown.

I wryly suggested to Mark that maybe we should be renaming our Avenue Gardens the Pine Log Gardens and he quipped that our stumpery is growing. We will follow our practice of clearing paths, removing all the side branches and cleaning up the collateral damage but leaving the body of the trunk where it fell and gardening around it. As more huge trees fall, we  have a stumpery by chance, not design.

 

 

Originality – a rare quality

It is Sunday morning which means my thoughts have been focussed on the morning garden discussion with Tony Murrell on Radio Live Home and Garden Show. It is a little easier to be focussed at 7.45am than it used to be at our earlier time slot of 6.30am, even though we have less time now.  This morning the topic was originality in gardens. Is it over-hyped and how many truly original gardens have you seen?

I have seen a fair number of gardens now and met many gardeners who regard their own patch as showing great originality. While some show genuine creativity, that is different to originality. I only came up with four gardens that I have personally visited that I would describe as originals.

For most of us – and I include Mark and I in this – our gardens are a grab-bag of ideas from all over the place and from throughout history. The skills lie in how we reinterpret those ideas and make them our own. Some people don’t do even that. They just grab the ideas they have seen somewhere or read about and try and reproduce that at home. There is not much creativity in that.

Even Sissinghurst, that famous garden that has arguably had a greater influence on New Zealand domestic gardening than any other, is not an original. Hidcote was started 20 or 30 years before Sissinghurst and shows a similar approach to garden rooms in the Arts and Crafts genre. And if you go and look at the Moorish gardens of Andalusian Spain (the Alhambra is the most famous), you can see intimate garden rooms from a much earlier era.

One photo can not do justice to a large, complex garden

So which four gardens did I come up with that have struck me as genuinely original without clear influences from identifiable places or earlier times? Two are in New Zealand. Paloma, near Wanganui, is the creation of Clive and Nicki Higgie and it is remarkable. Unique, even, and I do not hand out that accolade lightly. Not only is there exceptional plantsmanship looking well into the future, and a very personal creativity bordering at times on the quirky, it is what I would call an original vision. I can not think of any other garden that is like Paloma.

The same goes for Grahame Dawson’s industrial chic garden on a small urban section in Mount Eden, Auckland. I have never seen anything like it, before or since. It is what I would call an original created with great flair and panache.

Overseas, Le Jardin Plume in Normandy (near, or near-ish, to Rouen) has stuck in my memory with great clarity. Other people have wave hedges but they tend to be of the undulating hummock style whereas Plume has these sharp-edged waves evocative of the sea breaking on the shoreline. The contrast with the loose plantings of tall, perennials is stark and effective. So too are their parterres of meadow an entirely new take on old forms. It is an innovative garden with some ideas that were completely fresh to us. Though, in the interests of accuracy, there were also areas which were not as unique.

It may come as no surprise to regular readers that I also chose Wildside as one of the few totally original gardens we have seen. Keith Wiley has entirely resculptured his landscape on a surprising scale to accommodate his plants by creating different microclimates and habitats. He would be one of the most exceptional plantsmen we have ever met but also with a passion for colour, texture and putting the plants together to create vibrant pictures. We have not seen another garden like it.

What all these four gardens have in common is that they are private owned and gardened with great passion, joy and commitment by their owners. They don’t have sole claim to those attributes but it is also allied to personal visions that are as close to individual and unique as I have seen. Many of us are craftspeople in our garden, at times with considerable skill, flair and the ability to put our own stamp of creativity on the ideas and visions we have in our heads and hearts as well as to push boundaries. But to a rare few is given the ability to come up with something entirely fresh and new. Maybe they are the ground-breaking artists? In their own quiet way, in the quiet space of their own garden at least. And that element of originality is not always comfortable for garden visitors.

Postscript thoughts:

I have not included sculpture gardens because in most cases, the garden is the venue for the dominant art, not a situation where the garden can stand on its own as showing original vision.

Nor have we visited the Garden of Cosmic Speculation or any of the Wirtz gardens. Landform as sculpture is a different aspect altogether and I haven’t seen enough to comment. I have seen one garden that took this approach in a naturalistic style and I have never forgotten it (years ago – read the fifth para down for a description). We usually seek out gardens that combine design with plantsmanship and working with nature to achieve beauty whereas it seems that landform gardens use the materials of nature to create sculptural form, often with minimal plant interest. When time is short, one has to set priorities in garden visiting.

Paloma is open by appointment and their website gives contact details. Grahame Dawson opens occasionally for the Heroic Festival in late summer but is not generally open. Le Jardin Plume and Wildside both have websites that detail their open days.

 

 

 

 

 

‘A sense of arrival’

A sense of arrival. But empty. 

Mark and I have longstanding running jokes about garden car parks. This, I admit, may not be a common source of amusement to many others. It all came about when we were recruited to a small group in an effort to preserve the spirit of the trust gardens being taken over by one of our local councils. It was not a positive experience in any way, shape or form. In fact it scarred most in our small group of maybe eight or ten leading private gardeners. Our involvement was not welcomed. Not. In. Any. Way. We were left in no doubt of that. But the experience gave us the car park jokes.

This is because, in that typically bureaucratic way of local government in this country, the council commissioned many expensive consultants’ reports and convened a TAG – a technical advisory group which rather appeared to be hand-picked to give them the outcomes they wanted. I can’t recall offhand how much they spent on these reports but I am pretty sure it was into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And one theme that came through repeatedly was the need, apparently, to establish a sense of arrival at the gardens.

That sense of arrival was, it appeared, mostly about car parking. For what do you see first when you arrive? The car park. All three trust gardens ended up with pretty detailed car parks as a high priority.

We have done a fair amount of garden visiting in our time, including overseas and have seen some pretty rudimentary, though functional, car parks. When an official from that council went on a fact-finding mission to look at the infrastructure of major UK gardens, I wanted to comment to him on his return, “You must have been very disappointed in their car parks” but Mark wouldn’t let me. My recollection is that the car park at Hidcote was modest, at Great Dixter it was informal and at Sissinghurst, we were simply worried about whether we would even find a vacant space.

The car parking area at Giardino di Ninfa

The most gorgeous car park of all was the grove of trees at Ninfa, south of Rome. Ours was the only car on the day we were there because we had the place to ourselves. I understand on their official open days, the crowds are such that one shuffles along in line so presumably the car park is chocka block. We have one tree in our car parking area – Prunus Pearly Shadows – and it is a bit surprising that people manage to reverse into it, given it is fairly obvious. I wonder how much rear bumper damage happens at Ninfa.

From memory, I think we worked out that we can park 27 cars in our car park area, if we manage it carefully. Prunus Pearly Shadows in the middle is apparently a hazard. Several drivers have failed to see it. 

We have a small car park because when we open the garden, it is a safety matter to get the vehicles off our dangerous road. We know quite a bit about the vagaries of parking habits. In fact the general public shows a lamentable lack of common sense when it comes to parking. But we did soon learn that if we parked the first car in the right place at the right angle, others followed suit so we would sometimes put our own car out in the car park to set the tone for the day. This is why you often see car parks sealed with painted lines – the supermarket look. Of course, if you want painted lines, you have to seal the area. As soon as you put in large areas of seal (and cars take up a lot of space, camper vans and coaches even more), you also have to put in drainage systems to deal with the run-off because there is no ground absorption. The aforementioned council rose to this challenge with a very tidy set-up which I bet was expensive. But there is nothing environmentally friendly about large expanses of seal. Nothing cheap, either.

Dealing to the storm water in the somewhat grand but indubitably stylish car park at the council garden

A more modest approach to dealing with car parking in unsealed areas at Pensthorpe – a busy tourist attraction in Norfolk

I once asked Mark what he thought gave the greatest sense of arrival at a garden. “A FULL car park,” he replied. It is hard to argue with that.

Part of the coach parking area at Monet’s garden in Giverny. Those coaches were parked up to three deep.

We are more modest back home. But the retired senior government minister who came in saying “It’s just like Sissinghurst” (referring to the trouble he had finding a car park), endeared himself to us forever, despite his subsequent and very public fall from grace.