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.
Ping ducks! Not the Yangtze River, but as soon as I saw these ducks, I recalled The Story About Ping. It dates back to 1933 so I am guessing it was part of my childhood. We certainly read it to our children and it must be in the bookcase somewhere to this day. I was shocked, shocked I tell you, that none of the others around me at the time had ever heard of Ping. They must have had deprived childhoods is all I can say. Ping ducks in China were a delight. I bought a little Chinese bird whistle – the sort where you blow through water and get bird warble rather than a piercing squeak – to gift with the book to our grandson in due course. (The Story About Ping by 
Sometimes Mark can surprise me with his knowledge. “It’s a tabebuia,” he said when he looked at this photo, though he had never seen one in real life. He then had second thoughts and wondered if it is Tecoma stans. A search on Wikipedia has us leaning to the tabebuia because it was more tree than shrub. Both tecoma and tabebuia are in the bignoniaceae family so there is a familial connection between them though they are not close relatives. The big yellow trumpets were a delight in the sub tropical climate of Jinghong, at a temple beside the Mekong River in Southern China.
Ha! Under planting can be as crass, random and ill thought out in China as in New Zealand. When I visited a group of open gardens at home, I noticed that the under planting was a major weakness but I did not feel able to use the photos I took because the owners might well recognise their place and feel hurt and betrayed – even if I did not name the location. But honestly, planting bedding plants in alternating colours or random arrangements rarely cuts the mustard. In some of our local gardens, I have seen alternating blue and yellow pansies as a border edging beneath well kept pink roses. Neither is alternating white alyssum with yellow pansies creative or classy and alternating two colours of petunias is no better. If you don’t want your garden to look like an amateur version of a traffic island, then be very circumspect with punnets of annuals from the garden centre.
There were no panda bears to be seen on our trip, but what can’t you do with bamboo? Here we saw it used as a walkway in what is described as a primitive forest in Xishuangbanna. It was also used in much wider expanses as decking over rough ground at the Jinhuo tourist village. It is a bit shaky to walk on and I have no idea about its longevity but the use of a traditional material that is fully biodegradable has some appeal in a modern world of concrete and plastic.
I have a sentimental attachment to bauhinias with a personal memory of Mark bringing me a bauhinia flower in our early days together. It was just the most exotic and beautiful bloom. So they caught my eye, growing in southern China in the Xishuangbanna area (near the border with Burma).
The bauhinia family is huge – around 500 different species – and in the fabaceae family (so a legume). I can’t unravel them to identify the ones I photographed, though the dark pink may be Bauhinia x blakeana, otherwise known as the Hong Kong Orchid Tree and the floral emblem of that island. They are not orchids, they just look as they should be. Or maybe exotic butterflies.
While on trophies, how can I not share the Dali camellia medal we brought home from the International Camellia Congress? There is no personal recognition attached to this medal. All overseas attendees were given one. This meant, of course, that we had two. As they are relatively substantial and heavy, we re-homed the second one and only carried one back.
Bear with, bear with on the slow reveal.
It is quite remarkable. And quite large.
“The invention of the wheelbarrow is usually traced to China’s Chuko Liang, and adviser to the Shu-Han Dynasty from AD 197 to 234, who had it developed as a means of transport for military supplies. The first evidence of wheelbarrows being used in Europe is found in illustrations in the thirteenth century.”
Remembering that odd piece of information from earlier use, I had to photograph a garden barrow when I came across it in Kunming Botanic Gardens in China last month. In fact these Chinese barrows are more like carts and they must be pulled, not pushed. If your definition of a wheelbarrow is that it be a single-wheeled cart, then these would not qualify, even though they are to be found in the original habitat.
Double wheeled barrows are, however, clearly more stable than our garden barrows, capable of holding a greater volume and decidedly versatile. We came across this building site in a small village in the south of China where it is a receptacle for winching bricks up to the second storey. There did not appear to be a New Zealand Workplace Safety Officer on site.
And then winched down again to be refilled.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 