Plant Collector: Camellia amplexicaulis

Camellia amplexicaulis

We missed the opportunity to buy Camellia amplexicaulis the one time it was offered commercially in New Zealand. That was by Peter Cave, before he closed down his nursery, if my memory serves me right. And when we saw it in China, we were disappointed that we had not picked it up at the time – though at least it is in the country so we should be able to get a scion at some stage.

It is one of the tropical camellias, a relatively recent discovery in Vietnam. We saw it growing outdoors at the botanic gardens* in Foshan, amongst the yellow camellia collection which is similarly tropical. It was reasonably substantial – a handsome, large shrub at maybe 2.5 metres tall. The foliage was striking with huge, lush, textured leaves while the flowers had very thick petals. The information board below said it flowered from summer to autumn and sometimes all year round. This would be because it is a tropical plant from a climate without marked seasonal change. We were viewing blooms in early spring.

Camellia amplexicaulis in bud

At Kunming Botanic Gardens, it was growing in a covered house with the yellow species. Presumably it is too cold in winter for it to be grown outdoors there (Foshan is coastal while Kunming is inland). The buds have a similar tight, round ball form to the yellow species – more on those in an upcoming article.

Whether our mild, temperate climate would suit Camellia amplexicaulis is not certain. We have trouble getting the tropical yellow species to bloom here. But it is such a handsome and interesting camellia that it is worth a try. And if it does flower here, it may bloom outside peak petal blight season and the heavy texture of the blooms means it would not be as prone to weather damage as many other softer textured camellias.

Not quite a forestry institute as we understand it – Foshan

*I refer to the botanic gardens in Foshan though the official itinerary names it as the Institute of Forestry Science. While we associate forestry with commercial production of Pinus radiata in this country, the southern Chinese forests contain many wild camellias and the forestry institutes appear to have a conservation responsibility for indigenous plants.

Postcards of China 3: Food!

Zoucheng Village – the Bai people’s “Eight Bowls of Dishes”

An army may march on its stomach. Tour groups do not march but food becomes extremely important. I was looking forward to the food in China and some of it did not disappoint.

An uninspired photo but my only one of the vege fields at Longxiadeng Village

We saw huge amounts of productive land growing seasonal crops – mostly what we call Asian greens in early spring. I returned home with an almost total lack of photographs of these but that is because we saw them from moving coaches. Around Dali, the plantings were on some of the best land and they remain in small plots. We were told that each individual was entitled to an area of 20 metres by 10 metres and the plots appeared to be a patchwork of those dimensions, worked largely by hand. We did not see mass production or amalgamation of plots, except at one Bai village.

On the long drive to Baotai Mountain, the steep hillsides were terraced and still being worked intensively for food production. It looked like an old painting but alas, the windows of the small coach were so dirty and we were pressing on at speed to keep up with the entourage making photography impossible.

Mark, feeling his own ageing body, took special note of the posture and techniques of the locals working their plots, hoping that he could learn from age-old techniques passed down countless generations of peasant farmers. He was disappointed to see them using their backs as cranes and making all the mistakes that have led to his dodgy back.

Newly-made American friends on the tour commented that they walked back to the hotel in Dali by a back route and passed an area of vegetable growing where, somewhat to their surprise, they were still using night soil as fertiliser. The stench, they said, was indescribable.

Crops growing on a very domestic scale on what appeared to be public land alongside the Mekong River

Down in Jinghong, Mark and I strolled along the Mekong River and were charmed to see that even public spaces like this are utilised by locals to grow produce, albeit in less than ideal conditions. It takes a lot of produce, of course, to feed a population the size of China’s.

We will draw a veil of silence over the hotel food that was served during the Camellia Congress itself. I have never been a fan of hotel food anywhere in the world, and catering for very large groups is always challenging. The most interesting new taste we experienced there were the scales of Lilium brownii which appeared on the salad bar – slightly sweet and crisp and altogether delicious. It would be worth growing as an addition to the diet.

Thai-influenced food down near the southern border in Jinghong – one of the most delicious meals we were served

Allegedly cured goose but it might equally have been cured beef except that we were rarely served beef . With orchid.

It was when we were out and about that the food was a great deal more interesting – usually served at tables of 8 to 10. I like shared meals that are typical throughout much of Asia because it gives the opportunity to try many different dishes and avoids that typically Western envy where the person sitting opposite you always seems to have ordered something that looks more appealing than the dish you ordered. The sheer volume of food was daunting at times, especially when it appeared at lunch and at dinner and I was not alone in wondering what happened to the leftovers. However, in a country where many of the older people will still remember famine, I am sure it wasn’t wasted. I was surprised at the high protein content, especially in relation to the vegetable dishes, though that may have been a reflection of our honoured status. A meal usually involved chicken, duck, pork, somewhat indeterminate cured meats, fish and tofu though the pickings would have been lean for strict vegetarians (especially as the tofu was often part of the fish dish), let alone vegans, though paleos may have been happy.

As a New Zealander, the near total absence of any dairy products was interesting. Even the milk offered with tea or coffee was soy milk as often as UHT from a cow. I am not sure how easy it will be for NZ’s dairy industry to make huge inroads into the Chinese market beyond infant formula when it will involve changing the age-old dietary habits of a nation.

I think it may have been the lack of dairy that had a friend who was on the tour craving what he called “western food”. He later confided that when he took a day off to spend on his own, he found a cheesecake in a shop window and despite an exorbitant price (nearing $NZ 70), he fell upon it and consumed the lot.

Golden camellia tea

I miss my cup of good, strong, fresh coffee in mid-morning more than dairy and didn’t mind how much the coffee cost on the odd occasions when I found it – generally about $NZ 6.50 which was expensive for China. Tea, often green, was routinely served as part of the generous hospitality we were offered on many occasions. The golden camellia tea was a beautiful addition to the tea range.

elephant park (1) Finally a few snippets: If there is one thing I absolutely loathe on purchased fruit, it is the sticky little labels which do not even break down in the compost. I often peel them off in the shop and leave them behind. These apples solved the problems of labels but we have no idea how imprinting the branding on the skins is achieved.

I do not know if children’s Saturday sports matches continue to serve up segments of orange as half time refreshments (this may be a tradition that has died out at Saturday netball, rugby and hockey), but if they do, I feel that we could practice more class in the presentation….

Similarly, the displays of fresh produce in New Zealand can leave a lot to be desired when compared to the care taken with the street stalls that lined a road near Dali.

Kunming (3) Buddha fruit! Not carved. Grown in plastic moulds, the ever-useful internet tells me. There is a labour intensive way of growing a novelty crop. These may be pears. If your curiosity is whetted, there are many images on line including Chairman Mao shaped fruit. Only in China?

Chinese portaloo

Finally, what goes in must come out etc. Not only does food take on new meaning when travelling in a large group. So do loos. This was the immaculately clean Chinese version of the squat portaloo which amused me at the time. While the hotels we stayed at all had Western-styled toilets, the same was not the case when out and about. I did hear a few rueful comments from some of the older women who struggled with their thigh muscles and flexibility in this situation.

Postcards of China 2: Xishuangbanna area

Some things are not what they appear. This is not a dead leaf. It is in fact a butterfly – quite possibly Kallima inachus, also referred to as the orange oakleaf or dead leaf butterfly. We saw butterfly houses at both the Butterfly Spring in Dali and again in Xishuangbanna, though it was a cool spring so we didn’t see any in the wild.

I had thought that the advertisement on NZ television that features what appear to be blue as blue monarch butterflies might have undergone some computer intervention to change the colour, but no – they do exist. Though my perfunctory net search does not suggest they belong to the monarch family.

We must have been very miserable and ill in Singapore airport on the way home (we both went down with a bad bout of flu from China which laid us low for a good fortnight after we got home). I judge how ill we were by the fact that we spent the time in transit in Singapore in the pay-in lounge immediately adjacent to the butterfly house in the airport terminal and neither of us felt like moving. Not even the ephemeral appeal of butterflies was enough to entice us to while away an hour.

Jinghong (10)

As we flew into Xishuangbanna (on Lucky Air – not entirely sure of that branding), I wondered about the huge plantations visible from the air. Something twiggy. Rubber trees! I had not realised they were deciduous. I have always associated commercial rubber production with Malaya but maybe modern Malaysia has found palm oil more lucrative, leaving a substantial gap in the market for entrepreneurial Chinese. In fact the most common tree used for rubber, Hevea brasiliensis, originates from South America around the Amazon.

The Chinese plantings are monoculture on a massive scale and any monoculture brings environmental issues with it. South American leaf blight is a apparently a real threat to the rubber trees of South East Asia but maybe these recent plantings are of more resistant clones. Maybe. We could see evidence of traditional harvesting by tapping with the tins in place to collect the sap. Our local guide informed us that it was a lucrative crop for the plantation owners and it is one that can be grown on the very steep slopes typical of the area.

Jinghong (24) Jinghong is branded as the peacock city – even to light fittings in one area. In the tour of “primitive forest” (I was not entirely sure how primitive it was now that it has been adapted to accommodate tens, nay hundreds of thousands of visitors) there were tethered peacocks. What happens when you cross a pure white with a traditional blue? Why, this interesting combination.

In the days just before digital cameras, we visited Isola Madre on Lake Maggiore in Italy. I much preferred it to the better known Isola Bella. One of my enduring memories (not captured on camera) is of the oh so elegant and refined pure white peacocks perching on the magnificent old stonework. It was the epitome of style.

Peacocks are glorious birds but if you are thinking they would be nice to have in your own garden, do some research first. Any creature that size is going to cause a lot of damage perching on plants and fossicking around. I recall a local gardener who targeted the wedding market telling me she had to get rid of her peacocks. The excrement is so large and abundant, it was an issue for wedding parties, especially the wedding gown trains.

kapok (2) Kapok flowers. Some of us are old enough to remember the days of kapok mattresses and pillows but I doubt that many of us knew that they were stuffed with the fluff from the seed pods of the kapok tree, Ceiba pentandra. However that species has flowers that are considerably less spectacular than the ornamental kapoks. We had seen kapoks used as street plantings in Hue in Vietnam some years ago but they were not in flower.

Since the exotic chorisia has been reclassified as a ceiba, there appear to be about 20 different species of the latter and we didn’t know which one this large flowered orange tree seen in southern China derived from. In our mild conditions in Tikorangi, we can grow some of these tropical trees but not necessarily get them flowering (this is the case with our chorisia, more correctly called Ceiba speciosa these days) although they will bloom in the warmer north of New Zealand.

Finally, I don’t know anything about tropical waterlilies but they made a lovely picture in the expansive pond (maybe a smallish lake) at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanics Garden where we spent a thoroughly delightful morning.

Rekindling childhood memories of chestnuts

IMG_8187 - Copy It is chestnut season.

I have childhood memories of roasting chestnuts on the fire, for I had a Dunedin childhood and an English mother. It was a seasonal treat, handling burning hot chestnuts to peel off the outer skin (usually burnt on one side) and then dipping them in butter and sprinkling with salt. As she bought the nuts at the fruiterer, it was always a bit of a lucky dip as to whether the one you had was going bad or not. These nuts have a short shelf life.

Mark too has childhood memories of gathering chestnuts from a neighbour’s tree but he recalls boiling them and then carrying them in his pocket as snack food. There was nothing, he says, like reaching into your pocket after school and finding a few chestnuts you had forgotten about.

This year we have been given free access to a couple of trees nearby and there are nuts in abundance. I realised that the difference in our childhood memories is that Dunedin has a colder climate so the chestnut season coincides with the lighting of winter fires. Here in the milder north, we have not yet started winter fires, which is probably why Mark had only tried boiled chestnuts when I met him. These nuts we are gathering are large and very fresh – no nasty surprises with the flesh going off. The trees will be named selections and the ease of handling larger nuts has convinced us that if you are going to plant a tree, it is worth paying the extra to get one which has been selected for its larger nuts.

We ate a dish in China recently of meatballs and chestnuts in a casserole and this inspired us to harvest more to freeze and eat later. Chestnuts are not the easiest crop to prepare. We have taken to parboiling them which means the hard outer casing can be peeled off (we cut the top point and then insert a sharp vegetable knife to lever off the casing) but the inner brown covering is not so easy to get rid of. Parboiling means the kernel holds its shape and we are freezing them at this stage. Gently frying or roasting them in a mixture of butter and oil and then adding a sprinkling of salt makes them delicious. I put some in a tagine over the weekend but the long slow cooking broke down the kernels. To keep the texture and shape, I will add them in the last 15 minutes of cooking in the future.

We had thought they would offer an additional source of protein in our diet, but I see online that they are basically all carbohydrate with very little protein or fat so really they are a taste and textural addition.

The edible chestnut grown here is the European tree – Castanea sativa. It is not to be confused (but still is by some folk) with the horse chestnut which is an aesculus. There is a similarity in appearance of the nuts but that is all. Horse chestnuts are inedible and moderately toxic though, in another memory dredged from my childhood, they are used in the game of conkers which we used to play. With a hole drilled through the centre and then suspended on a short string, they became a weapon to assault a similar conker held stationary by the adversary. The winner was the one whose conker did not split. My brother always won, as I recall.

The horse chestnut is a very decorative tree. We have the smaller growing Aesculus x carnea in our park and it is particularly pretty in flower with its red plumes. Water chestnuts (Eleocharis dulcis) are different again, being a grassy reed or sedge, traditionally grown in water. They are not a nut because what are eaten are the nodules on the roots. Apparently it is in New Zealand and Mark has a yen to try growing them when we track down a plant.

Rock on – our rockery in autumn

Nerine sarniensis hybrids blooming in the rockery

When I am old and maybe decrepit, needing to draw in the boundaries of the garden, I shall fluff around in the rockery. I really enjoy this area and, as we enter autumn, my heart sings with the new season blooms.

Traditionally, rockeries are for growing alpines and sometimes retaining banks. However, we can’t grow alpines in our climate and our rockery is on the flat. It is pure 1950s vintage, built from a combination of rocks of various sizes, concrete and some brick, with sunken paths and raised beds divided into many hundreds of little pockets of soil. It is designed for highly detailed gardening and at about 20 metres by 10 metres, it is relatively large.

The purpose of the multitude of small beds is to keep bulbs separate and to confine the more invasive ones. Most of the pockets have two or three different types of bulbs in them to give seasonal interest.

There is always something to see, though summer is the toughest season. Because there is so much stone and the beds are elevated, parts of it dry out almost to dust. We have dwarf conifers, cycads, and a few other small shrubs to give both all year round structure and summer shade. There are a few smaller perennials and a limited range of annuals and biennials but generally, the rockery is about the bulb collection.

The range of nerine colours at one time

As we enter autumn, it is as if the rockery heaves a sigh of relief and leaps back into life. All the bulbs whose growth is triggered by autumn rains start to move.

As a general rule, we find that the species bulbs look better. They are usually smaller flowered and more delicate in appearance than the showy hybrids which can look out of scale and even vulgar in this particular context. The exception is the nerines which peak this month. While we grow some nerine species, it is the sarniensis hybrids that dominate. A few of these are of Exbury origin but most are the result of breeding efforts by both Felix and Mark Jury. The colour range is delightful – from white, through every shade of pink including near iridescent highlighter pink, to purple, corals, almost apricot, oranges and reds. Unlike the floristry business, we want shorter, squatter stems so that the heavy heads are held upright even through autumnal weather.

Cyclamen hederafolium

Also lighting up the autumn is Cyclamen hederafolium (formerly known as C. neapolitanum) which hails from southern Europe and Turkey. This is the easiest of the dainty species cyclamen to grow and it has gently naturalised itself here. It throws its first brave flowers up in January but peaks this month. It is one of a number of autumn bulbs that bloom first before the leaves appear. Others are most of the nerines, colchicums and Haemanthus coccineus.

Moraea polystachya

The pretty autumn flowering peacock iris, Moraea polystachya, outdoes almost every other bulb with its long flowering season. It seeds down gently into the cracks between the rocks without becoming an invasive menace. Some of the ornamental oxalis also give extended displays of colour but not all oxalis are born equal and neither are they all born with good manners. The most reliable performers in our rockery are O. purpurea ‘Alba’, O. luteola and O. lobata. They have been here for decades and never looked threatening.

O. luteola and purpurea ‘Alba’

Colchicum autumnale

Then there are the bulbs with a much shorter season. Colchicum autumnale makes a bold statement with its big lilac chalices held above bare soil. Hippeastrum bifida is a transient delight for us. We have it in both pink and red and the blooms look as if they have been touched with gold leaf when the sun shines through. The autumn flowering leucojum is one of the daintiest and prettiest of tiny blooms and the crocus also delight.

Autumn crocus (species unknown) with cyclamen hederafolium

The rockery is not what I would call low maintenance. The more time I put into it, the better it looks. In spring I completely replaced the soil in maybe a dozen pockets in my efforts to eradicate the pretty but invasive Geissorhiza aspera. I do not lie when I tell you that we have battling it for well over 25 years, hence my extreme action in replacing the soil in the worst affected areas. We have to be vigilant on weeds, slugs, snails, narcissi fly and weevils. I wire brush the rocks from time to time to stop the moss growth from hiding their shapes. There is plenty there to keep me busy in my dotage and, with the raised beds, I can do a lot of it sitting on a stool. Sometimes it is the detail and the little pictures in the garden that delight.

First published in the NZ Gardener April edition and reprinted here with their permission.

Tikorangi The Jury Garden

Mark and Abbie Jury

Plant Collector: Camellia amplexicaulis

Postcards of China 3: Food!

Postcards of China 2: Xishuangbanna area

Rekindling childhood memories of chestnuts

Rock on – our rockery in autumn

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