Category Archives: Tikorangi notes

Dudley and the new season’s avocado crop

Behold our handsome Dudley. Or Dudders, to give him his cricketing name. I wrote about Dudley’s penchant for self-serve avocados two years ago in The Avocado Thief.

Last year the avocado pickings were very lean, bordering on non-existent, really. This year, we have a terrific crop of Fuerte avocados coming in right now and there is nothing wrong with Dudley’s memory. In the centre of a large area which we are developing into a new garden, I found his stash this morning. At this point the revolting lambs’ tails retrieved from the neighbours just across the fence outnumber the avocado stones but Dudley is working on that. Apparently he has designated this area as his outdoor dining space – not to be confused with his breakfast nook by the house where he receives his morning rations.

The evidence! Left: his stash of ageing lambs’ tails adjacent to his avocado stones on the right

Sometimes I read that one should not feed avocado to dogs as it is allegedly toxic. Dudley is a dog of many talents but he has failed to read these warnings and he has never shown any ill effects from an excess of avocado. The same cannot be said for an excess of lambs’ tails which can, at times, clog up in his gut though this does not appear to deter him for long. An excess of avocado flesh merely gives him a glossy coat. This was a townie dog that has adapted rather too well to life in the country.

Dudley’s outdoor dining area is in the middle of an area under development – loosely referred to here as the court garden because it currently resembles a tennis court in dimensions. The two year plan is for a wildflower garden. 

Canberra’s candyfloss cornus

The cornus or dogwoods were simply amazing in Canberra last week. I have never seen anything quite like them. They do not flower like that here. These trees were a mass of bloom and you could clearly get them in shades of sugar pink to apple blossom pink and or simple white. Viewed close up, they were like stylised paintings in their simplicity. Lovely bark, too.

The blooming season is not long, I was told – measured more in days than weeks of peak bloom. But the sight is so glorious that I did not hear anybody complaining about the short season.

As far as I could make out, they were generally C. florida – or maybe some were hybrids in which case likely crossed with C. nuttallii in order to get bigger flowers. ‘Florida’ means full of flowers, not that it comes from the state of Florida. In fact, it hails from the more north eastern areas.

The cornus or dogwood family is quite large. There seems some debate over how many species, but probably in excess of 50. If you take a swathe across the temperate northern hemisphere areas from China, Korea and Japan over to North America, you take in most of the areas of natural habitat.

Why do we not see cornus looking magnificent here? Too wet. Too mild (lacking a winter chill and summer heat). Too windy. And our native puriri moth appears to wreak havoc on the cornus family. We can grow many things really well here. It is just that cornus is not amongst them.

Cornus kousa flowering in June (so early summer) in England

Cornus kousa from China and Japan appears to be more adaptable than the American species. Our specimen finally succumbed to root rot – we literally pushed it over – but on our June visits to the UK, I have often photographed C. kousa in flower and there are a number of selections that have been named along with hybrids between it and C. florida.

Cornus controversa variegata

It was another cornus – C. controversa or the layered ‘wedding cake tree’ which became a fashion plant in this country in the 1990s. It is likely we can attribute this popularity to one person. The wonderful Irish gardener, Helen Dillon did a lecture tour through the country around that time showing slides of her garden (I am pretty sure we are pre-dating power point here) and she had a terrific specimen of Cornus controversa variegata. Everybody wanted one and even we produced some plants commercially though we never planted one out here. The trouble is that it needs to be in the open and full sun in order to develop the characteristic tiered growth habit but with a white variegation, it can often look a little burned and crispy in our bright, unfiltered sunlight. The light is much softer in southern Ireland.

The sweet beet conundrum

Not parsnips. Sugar beet, albeit planted a little late so the tubers are smaller than commercially grown crops

The row of sugar beet may not be a gourmet delight. Mark likes to try different vegetables and I felt obliged to give this new crop a fair trial in the kitchen. The relatively low number of recipes on the internet was a bit of a giveaway. Along with a Canadian friend who described the crop as stock feed. Indeed a fair proportion of the recipes on line were for using the green tops, not the white root.

The first sugar beet root that he brought into the house, we tried raw and grated but it had a bit of an aftertaste. I used the rest of that one in a vegetable stock. Reaching for the internet,  the only recipe I could find that appealed was for sugar beet latkes. I am not sure if there is any fundamental difference between latkes, rosti, hash browns or plain old potato pancakes but the sugar beet version required grating and then salting. During this process, it turned greyish so that by the time I added the other ingredients, it bore a distinct visual resemblance to the New Zealand treat of whitebait. It did not, however taste of whitebait (a very small grey fish with noticeable black eyes, for overseas readers). Following the recipe, I added grated fresh ginger and a pinch of cardamom.

Looking more like the NZ fishy delicacy of whitebait – sugar beet latkes

When it came to frying the latkes, they browned much faster than the potato latkes cooked alongside. That will be the high sugar content. They tasted fine when cooked. Perhaps rather sweet for our taste, gingery with a hint of cardamom. But not good enough to convince me we should make it a dietary staple.

I might try just boiling a couple of beets in water to get a sugar syrup. But as we don’t eat stewed fruit, I can’t really think we need sugar water. The sugar beet crop may be a one-off crop.

Advice on the matter of gardening gloves

Away from travel and garden trends for a moment and onto the practical matter of gardening gloves. We use these every day, washing them if they get too caked with mud to be comfortable. What I am looking for in a glove is one that stops my hands getting cold and wet in winter, that does not cause sweatiness in summer and that allows fine movement in my fingers. While accepting that the right hand glove always deteriorates first (being right handed), I also want reasonable longevity before the finger tips lose their protective coating and then develop holes.

I have stood before the gardening gloves display stand at Mitre 10 and there is a huge array to choose from. I don’t like gloves that are very stiff or large and cumbersome so I rule those out. That still leaves a large range of fabric types with the palms and fingers coated in PU, which is a polyeurethane. The problem is the price. I have tried the expensive brands and they are very good. They may last a bit longer than the cheap ones, but not hugely longer to justify the price.

I used to buy packs of three pairs at Mitre 10 and they kept us going for years. But when they changed the supplier and went to “one size fits all”, I stopped. One size does NOT fit all. One size generally fits a man with an average sized hand only. It forced me to look online. Trade Me is our NZ equivalent of EBay and indeed there are more economical options for gardening gloves.

The green gloves above are apparently bamboo fibre. 100% biodegradable they say, but I am not sure how that works with polyurethane coating on the fingers and palms. They are good. And cheap enough at $2.90 a pair plus freight. They have a similar life span to other similar gardening gloves I have tried over the years. I am happy to recommend them.

We were getting through our stash so I went on line to order more and found the white ones. A pack of 12 pair for $12. Add freight and they become $1.50 a pair. These are sold through a safety supplies company and touted as suitable for “electronics industry assembly, computer assembly, automotive assembly, precision operation, quality inspection, agriculture, etc.” The construction is the same as all the other fabric gloves with PU undersides, maybe slightly lighter grade. At $1.50 a pair delivered, they will do just fine. I am not at all convinced that the named brands are more than ten times better and more durable than these cheapies. They all perish on the finger tips, in my experience.

Gardening gloves are necessary but not exciting and will not make any hearts sing so I give you our maunga and magnolia as of 8.15am this morning. Mount Taranaki and Magnolia campbellii as seen (by the camera zoom, I admit) from our garden this morning.

 

Mostly Villas d’Este and Adriana – Postcards of Italy 2.

This Italy actually exists

Cliched though this scene may appear, it is not contrived. I just came across the view as we walked from Villa Adriana to the nearest coffee shop five minutes up the road. We wanted our morning caffeine hit before we tramped the ruins. Not only were there red poppies growing wild in the barley crop, the blue chicory and white convolvulus (field bindweed) were flowering alongside the stone wall that edged the road. I probably laughed out loud in delight.

Villa d’Este in Tivoli is known worldwide as one of the great Italian gardens. Built by The Man Who Would be Pope to compensate his thwarted ambition, it dates back to 1560. It was grand then. It is still grand today and water features throughout. His land excavations to achieve this garden would have put Capability Brown into the shade.

Formal but not strictly symmetrical at Villa d’Este

We have looked at some of the great Italian gardens on previous visits and had come to the conclusion that it is the settings, the hard landscaping – particularly the stonework – the history, the handling of space and proportions and the symmetry that makes these gardens endure as monuments to wealth, power and sometimes grace down the centuries. It is not so much to do with the plants or the maintenance. In a moment of profundity, as we walked through Villa d’Este, I noted that the symmetry is achieved through repetition, not through slavish measurement. It is that repetition and symmetry on a large scale that makes them so pleasing to the eye.

Attention to detail is not a strong point in Italian garden maintenance. Plants are not required to be immaculate. Irrigation hoses are often visible. It is okay to have plastic pots visible inside the terracotta pots. Water quality can leave a lot to be desired. Lawns are impossible in their climate. Some coarse grass kept green by watering is the best that one can hope for. The big picture is what matters. But, should you have grand visions of creating an “Italian-style” garden at home in New Zealand, maybe be aware that there is not one skerrick of tanalised timber – be they posts or plywood edgings or pergola beams – in any of these originals. Personally, I do not think that you can be Italianate or even Italianesque and use undisguised tanalised timber as a substitute for stone and terracotta. Ditto modern ‘dragonstone’ urns. And imposing suburban New Zealand values of pristine maintenance and velvet lawns takes such gardens even further away from the originals.

The straw broom brought a smile to our faces. Regular readers may remember me posting about the making of these in China.  Sometimes there is a charm to old ways. Besides, as Mark points out, these brooms work very well. Our first ever visit to Italy was back in the early 2000s when we went on an IDS tour of northern Italian gardens. It was there we first saw the widespread use of leaf blowers and came home and bought one. These days, Mark is using ours less and less. He is a bit of a purist, our Mark, and has become concerned at how dependent we have become on the internal combustion engine to maintain the garden.  If somebody would just make him a few straw brooms, he would be a happy man.

I am sure it takes a great deal of work to look like a modern-day princess, even more so when the temperature is over 30 Celsius and the location requires walking down and then up hundreds of steps. Mark noted that she was also behaving like a princess – the one with the pea under the mattress. I couldn’t possibly comment. Even when I was considerably younger, I do not think I ever managed the princess look.

Real life nymphs at Villa d’Este

I preferred the real-life nymphs. It transpired they were American art students doing an art history semester in Italy. Mark discreetly walked past them as they sketched and reported that they were extremely competent at drawing.

Villa Adriana – just one small view of a huge complex

Villa Adriana surprised us by its scale. It is the Emperor Hadrian’s retreat dating back to 200AD. The word villa encompasses a range of building styles and scale in Italy. The one at Villa d’Este is more akin to a palace. Villa Adriana is an entire small city of largely unrestored ruins encompassing about 250 acres. What is more, you can walk amongst them. I found a Roman toilet and an ancient olive grove that was simply astonishing. More on the olive grove another time. This was the Roman empire but it had an air of abandoned desolation even today, as though the tourist plans and archaeological aspirations of even a few years ago had fallen on hard times.

There was a fair amount of statuary of the armless, legless and formerly white variety but I think most of it was more recent reproduction already in decay. Much of the surviving, original statuary and marble had been raided 500 years ago by Cardinal Ippolito ll d’Este and relocated to his nearby pad but we did not know this when we went around Villa d’Este.

The wildflowers in the ruins of Adriana had a simple charm. In those drought-like conditions, the spring rains must bring a short-lived surge of germination and growth. The plants shoot straight into flower but conditions prevent them becoming invasive problems.

Finally, fields of sunflowers on the road to Ninfa. All facing the wrong way for the picture book image with the house and hills behind. Viewed from the other side, we lost the landscape context.

The light is so different in Italy