The Magnoliafication

The Magnoliafication – we made it up. A bit like The Rapture, perhaps, but with its roots firmly in the soil, showier and more socialist in concept so not, in fact, like The Rapture at all. It was the process by which we distributed our surplus nursery stock free of charge in our local town of Waitara.

Every plant nursery ends up with surplus stock, seconds and rejects. We had less than many nurseries, being smaller and focused on producing high-end products. But we still had them – lines we had over-produced and plants that did not make the quality grade and it seemed such a waste to burn or compost them. We had the occasional sale but when you are targeting the upper end of the market, sales are something of a betrayal of loyal customers who have already bought a plant at full price. We preferred to give the plants away.

Magnolia Vulcan as a street tree, but not planted by the Council

In the early days, Mark gave a lot of surplus magnolias and rhododendrons to local farmers in the hopes of beautifying the countryside and we still see some of those around the area. We also see properties which have since changed hands and new owners have come in and chainsawed out established trees with no awareness of what they are removing, but such is life. A few experiences made us feel we were being taken somewhat for granted so we stopped giving them to farmers. Instead, we had an arrangement with a charity shop on the main street of Waitara that they would collect plants when we had them and put them out on their front pavement for people to collect free. It worked well. Everything was taken and some of it at least would be planted.

There were a lot of Vulcans in flower around the town

A lot of what went down for collection were magnolias – some with inadequate root systems which would have needed nursing to recover, or misshapen plants which should have grown well, if a slightly odd shape. And a lot of those reject magnolias were ‘Felix Jury’ which took us a while to learn how to grow straight and tall. We also had a contract grower producing an export crop of the magnolias for us and his standards were not as high as ours so too many were unable to be exported. They went down to our magnolia distribution system outside the charity shop.

At the time, Mark quipped about the magnoliafication of Waitara.

Waitara has a lot of magnolias all coming into bloom. By no means did they all come from us, either as purchases or as freebies. When the powerhouse nursery, Duncan and Davies, was in full production on the other side of Waitara, it was a significant employer of locals as seasonal labour and it was also renowned for its huge end-of-season sales. There were also a number of other nurseries around, also producing magnolias and employing locals and some of the trees will have come from those sources.

The irony is that magnolias are generally seen as a high-end, prestige plant and Waitara can be described in many ways but elite is not one of them. Its post-colonial history has made it the poor relative in the district, at the low end of every socio-economic indicator. But it can sure grow magnolias well and I think it likely has more magnolias per capita than similar small towns.

I only drove around about 8 or 10 short streets this week, photographing magnolias from the roadside. I belong to a Facebook page which is mainly comprised of mad, keen magnoliaphiles in the more northerly parts of Europe. Most of the photographs they post are close-ups of blooms on small plants, often growing in challenging climatic conditions. I thought they would be interested to see them used more widely as a mainstream ornamental plant, planted by non-gardeners and gardeners alike. They were indeed surprised to see them in this context.

Three Magnolia Felix planted in a row

Given how many reject Magnolia ‘Felix’ we sent down, I was delighted when I found five planted in two gardens a couple of doors apart which were the right age and size to be from those. One had two trees planted side by side and the other house had three planted close together on their side boundary. I don’t know that they were our free ones, but given the high price tag on the premium product from both us and local garden centres we supplied, it seems unlikely that non-gardeners would go out and buy two or three at the same time.

I now plan to drive more extensively around the back streets of Waitara, playing ‘spot the magnolia’.

Finally, a wry observation about human nature. Friday was free plant day at the op shop, when we had plants to send down. One Thursday afternoon, two women drove in here in a modern car. They hadn’t come to buy plants, they had come hoping to get first dibs on picking over the free plants ready to go down to Waitara the next day. At the time we had a lovely, local man called Danny working here. He intercepted them and I hope they felt some shame at his incredulous response as he told them that was not how it worked. The nerve of some people.

This sight will not be seen again until July next year

Waitara has a splendid tree of the pink Magnolia campbellii which is one of my seasonal markers for the start of the magnolia season. It has finished flowering already but here is a photo I prepared earlier, which some of you may recognise. The tree did not come from us; it is likely it was a Duncan and Davies plant.  

A travesty, I say. A travesty of pruning on this magnolia on the main street but I wanted to give the poor specimen an award for bravery in flowering on.

Odd crops

Hakeke at the top with white oyster mushroom below

We are timid eaters of assorted mushrooms and fungi in this country, having been raised with a healthy fear of death cap mushrooms which look so innocent and edible. Generally we have a choice of brown Portobello mushrooms or white button mushrooms at the supermarket, so I leapt at the chance to try fresh oyster mushrooms when I saw them at the local farmers’ market.

We were a bit underwhelmed, which was disappointing. More textural than tasty, one might say. I decided to taste test the remaining ones beside the flabby brown fungus that grows freely around here and which played a very significant role in the early colonisation of Taranaki, where we live.

I am not sure that I have unravelled the complicated nomenclature of this flabby brown fungus. Mark has always known it as ‘woodear fungus’ but that is wrong. I couldn’t commit the original Maori name to my memory – hakekakeka – but it seems that is now synonymous with hakeke, which I can remember easily. It belongs to the Auricularia group, and it may be correctly identified as A. cornea but that seems to be interchanged freely with A. polytricha, which it probably shouldn’t. They are not synonymous. Anyway, it is common here and safe to eat. If you want to.

Mark found me some hakeke from the garden for my flavour experiment. I sliced both that and the oyster mushrooms into thin strips and cooked them in butter with a touch of olive oil (to stop the butter from burning) and some finely diced garlic, using separate frypans.

The verdict? Compared to the hakeke, the oyster mushroom was flavourful but it was the garlic butter that was the tastiest by a long shot. The hakeke is purely textural. The only use I could see for it in times when food is plentiful, is fried until it is crisp and then used as a garnish on, say, fried rice. I don’t think I will be adding it to our diet on a regular basis, even though we can gather it for free.

Wasabi in flower beneath the orange trees. With self-sown forget-me-nots.

We were given a small division of a wasabi plant last year. Despite the internet saying it was difficult to grow, we hit on ideal spot (fertile soil with overhead cover from a couple of orange trees) and the clump has grown. I could see some evidence of the swollen tubers that are the part that is grated to eat so I dug it up, only to find I was being a bit optimistic. It seems it is a two or three year crop in our conditions, to get big enough tubers to grate. We now have seven divisions, five replanted and two shared with others. 

You can see the tuberous parts forming which are the edible parts but I didn’t want to sacrifice too much of the plant by harvesting too early

Interestingly, I doubt that I have eaten genuine wasabi before. Outside of Japan, most of what is sold as wasabi paste is in fact horseradish, mustard and green food colouring. I did grate one little bit to try but it was too small a volume to detect subtle differences in quality and taste. It tasted wasabi-ish. I am sure that in time, freshly grated wasabi will lift my summer sushi to a new level.

Salted limes. In the past, I have done them whole but quartering them makes no difference and more fit to a jar.

In the kitchen, I am curing a jar of salted limes. I have been doing these for years to use in cooking, particularly in Middle Eastern and southern European dishes. They also add flavour when cooking grains like wheat, be it freekeh or bulgar, quinoa, rice or couscous. I dropped couscous when I realised how processed it is, but if you eat it, I can recommend adding a finely chopped salted lemon or lime to give it flavour. Limes and lemons are interchangeable when it comes to salting; I just use limes as they turn yellow because we have more and they are a better size if I am salting them whole, rather than quartered as here. The brine is so strong that they last up to a year in the fridge.

Fermented artichokes – I just looked up several recipes on line and worked out the general drift rather than keeping to one. Delicious raw in salads – and more digestible.

Salt also plays a role in fermenting foods. I have just completed a small jar of fermented Jerusalem artichokes and the reason to ferment this crop is that the process breaks down the inulin to a more easily digested form. It is the inulin that is responsible for this crop oft being referred to as  fartichokes. Fermenting means that you can eat, sweet, crispy artichokes without the unpleasant after effects. I like the taste of artichokes and they are heavy croppers for minimal to no effort but my stomach did not like them at all. Hence the fermentation. I did a big jar last year but we didn’t eat them fast enough and they don’t store as well as salted lemons. When some questionable moulds formed, I threw out the rest but I think we will get through the smaller jar.

Huhu grubs – reputed to taste a little like peanut butter

I have my limits. I know that huhu grubs, as we know them, were eaten in earlier times but I could not bring myself to gather these, even when I discovered a plentiful supply in a rotting stump. Huhu are a long horned beetle endemic to this country. We were often faced with a plate of cooked insects in the elaborate meals we were served in China and I did try a few. I think it is a cultural thing and it would take me a while to get over my gag reflex and to normalise eating insects, even while I know that they could be a valuable protein source and more environmentally sustainable than animal farming. If I am going to eat insects, I would rather start with them in a more anonymous form – cricket flour, perhaps – rather than launching straight into foraging at home and putting live, squirming bugs into a hot frying pan. I fed them to the birds.

The food we were served in China often included a plate of insects.

The legacy of Magnolia ‘Lanarth’ and modest Magnolia liliiflora ‘Nigra’

Not the best photo but I can assure you it was the best sight on its day – looking through trees to ‘Lanarth’ in the distance

As I paused to admire the glorious purple of Magnolia ‘Lanarth’ through the trees, the thought occurred to me that the vast majority of the red magnolias raised and released around the world since the mid 1980s have descended from this particular tree down by the stream in our park. Some are several generations down the line but they trace their genes back to our tree.

Our plant of Magnolia campbelllii var mollicomata ‘Lanarth’

Botanically, our Magnolia ‘Lanarth’ is the form distributed by leading UK nursery, Hilliers, back in the 1960s, Magnolia campbellii var. mollicomata ‘Lanarth’. Felix Jury imported it at considerable expense and thank goodness he did.

Magnolia liliiflora Nigra – red but otherwise unremarkable
and the shrubby tree of M liliiflora Nigra at about 60 years of age. It flowers later in the season so we think must have been the mother of the red hybrids, not the pollen donor.

To be fair, it wasn’t just ‘Lanarth’ that launched the platform for new generations of red magnolias. The plant of Magnolia liliiflora ‘Nigra’ in the garden border behind our house was the other parent, almost certainly the seed-setter. In the heady world of magnolias, liliiflora is not a showstopper. Our plant is more sturdy shrub than tree, the blooms are not large, typical liliiflora form which is not showy and the flower colour has none of the rich glow that magnolias can have. But it is red both inside and outside on the petals. Mark tells me we are reputed to have a particularly good form of liliiflora ‘Nigra’ in this country in terms of its solid red bloom without the inner petal being white.

Breeders and enthusiasts around the world had been trying to create good red magnolias before, like the optimistically named ‘Chyverton Red’,  ‘Pickard’s Ruby’ and ‘Pickard’s Garnet’. We have one example here but I only have one tiny photo of it and I have just found out that the name we have on it is wrong. I will have to take more notice of it when it flowers this year and try and work out what it is, only out of curiosity because it is not remarkable.  

Felix looked at his plant of ‘Lanarth’ and wondered if he could get a good-sized, red campbellii-type flower. He had already done his other breeding to reach ‘Iolanthe’, ‘Milky Way’, ‘Athene’ and the other four Felix Jury cultivars. And so he created ‘Vulcan’, a breakthrough in its day. ‘Lanarth’ contributed the flower size and form, solid colour inside and out but also the translucence, tree form and scent. M. liliiflora ‘Nigra’ contributed solid colour, smaller tree stature and, importantly, red.

Magnolia ‘Vulcan’ this morning

We first released ‘Vulcan’ in 1989, in that wonderfully under-stated way of that era. I don’t think we sent any plant material overseas at the time but bits of it soon winged their way around the world and the rest, as they say, is history. ‘Vulcan’ is not without its flaws. It flowers too early for frosty areas (as does ‘Lanarth’); it only achieves its density and purity of colour in warmer climates and even then tends to fade out to murky purple as the season progresses. But for its time, it was a breakthrough. It was the only plant we ever released that we could track its flowering from north to south of the country by the telephone calls we received. Even today, 35 years on, it is a showstopper at its best. I had two young tradeswomen painters in a couple of weeks ago and one of them asked me about the ‘black magnolia’ as she spotted the first buds opening, declaring she had never seen anything like it before.

Our mailorder catalogue from 1989

Felix didn’t go any further with breeding magnolias after ‘Vulcan’ but encouraged Mark in turn. And it was Mark who created the next generation which included ‘Black Tulip’ and ‘Felix Jury’.  Other NZ breeders followed suit – notably Vance Hooper and Ian Baldick.

It seems that ‘Black Tulip’ and Felix Jury’ have become two of the more significant breeder parents around the world. I see many, many red seedlings on international magnolia pages and they are clearly descended from those early red hybrids here.

Magnolia ‘Vulcan’

Felix named one red magnolia, Mark has named and released three but there is a fourth in the pipeline. We are hoping it will be ready for release internationally next year or maybe 2026. We describe it as a ‘Vulcan’ upgrade. It flowers a little later and has an exceptionally long blooming season and is a different hue of red, without a tendency to the purple undertones inherited from ‘Lanarth’. Solid colour and cup and saucer form which is our preference – it stands out here as good and we have high hopes for it across a range of climates. I won’t share photos until we have a release date.

Magnolia campbelli var mollicomata ‘Lanarth’

The new selection also traces its origin to the lovely ‘Lanarth’ in our park. That ‘Lanarth’ originated from a seed collection by plant hunter, George Forrest, in 1924 in southeastern China, near the Burmese border. Only three seed germinated back in the UK and this one was the best, named for the garden where it was raised in Cornwall. Those are quite long odds for what turned out to be such a significant plant.

While we may only have named and released four red magnolias from the Garden of Jury, with one more to come, we have many, many magnolias on the property that come from the same breeding lines. This lovely one that won’t be selected for release is another seedling from the batch that gave both ‘Black Tulip’ and ‘Felix Jury’.

In praise of the humble tamarillo

A seedling tamarillo that appeared in the Wild North Garden

The unsung hero of our winter salads is tamarillo. We eat salads most days all year round and finding mixed contents in the depths of winter can be problematic. Mark is Chief Salad Maker here and he is a good forager. Perish the thought that we buy salad ingredients, especially out of season salad ingredients like tomatoes and cucumber. Winter salad staples include random foraged greens (from chickweed to amaranth leaves to juvenile beet foliage), avocado, bean sprouts, finely diced onions, citrus and… tamarillo.

Tamarillo*** are what the oldies amongst us may remember as tree tomatoes, a South American fruit renamed by in this country by a fruit marketing board, just as we renamed kiwifruit from China. Botanically, it is Solanum betaceum and the solanum tells you it is in the same family as tomatoes and potatoes, which means it is frost tender. This is not a plant for everybody, but for those who can grow one, it is worth it, fruiting as it does through the depths of winter.

If you buy one to plant, it should fruit for you within two years. Ours are self-sown seedlings so we really are foraging.

Stewing skinned tamarillos to make jelly

In my childhood, I think I was probably served them as dessert, stewed with a fairly large amount of added sugar. As a young adult, I encountered my mother-in-law’s winter salad standby of finely sliced onion, sliced raw tamarillo and a sprinkling of brown sugar. We have done away with the sugar now for salads. When we gather a surplus, I blanch them to remove the skins and then stew them before sieving them to remove the pips, adding gelatine and a small amount of sugar to turn them into a fresh fruit jelly. The usual way of eating them is to blanch them by pouring boiling water over to remove the skin and stem, slicing them and sprinkling them with sugar. I prefer them jellied to have with my breakfast muesli. They are very much a feature of our winter diet – both savoury and sweet.

The red form is way better known than the orange or yellow but we lean to a preference for the orange.

We are currently eating from two of three volunteer plants. In the depths of the Wild North Garden is a seedling that was presumably spread by a bird pooing on the wing. It is a red one, which is by far the most common form. On the wilder margins of the summer gardens, we have another two plants, one of which is an orange form which is milder and slightly sweeter to taste. Mark prefers to use the orange one for his dinner salad assemblages.

Red, orange and what we think is the result of the potato pysillid.

The third plant is a red which cropped brilliantly for a couple of years. Last year it surprised us with just as many fruit but they were tiny and this year they have remained tiny. We were puzzled why but now think it may have been affected by the dreaded potato psyllid which is a recent pest in this country that is cutting a swathe through commercial solanum crops.

Tamarillos are not long-lived plants but they are easy to root from cutting or raise from seed if you don’t want to buy one from the garden centre. We never spray or prune ours. They are not the world’s most exciting or delicious fruit but we have found them to be one of the most useful – trouble-free and adaptable at a time of the year when options are limited by winter.

The orange seedling starts out red but turns orange as the fruit ripens and ages to yellow

*** The name tamarillo is specific to Aotearoa New Zealand. This fruit is grown in mild to subtropical areas around the world and has many different common names, depending on which country they are in.

Ideas and observations – part two of two.

Palm trees are iconic in the south of France. There are only two native palm trees but imports are now the backbone of the landscape. Alas, the red palm beetle (Rhynchophorus ferrugineus) is likely to change that. It only arrived in France in 2006 but is so rampant that it is cutting a swathe through the trees and killing them. Many have been removed.

Dead palms in Perpignan which is across the other side of France but I saw plenty in the Riviera, too.

Apparently, it is possible to spray for it but as soon as the spraying stops, it returns and spraying tall palm trees must require a cherry picker and some heavy-duty insecticides. A horticulturist told me that the only hope for the future is finding selections that are resistant to the palm beetle. We may rail against our border controls here and in Australia but oh my goodness, this is another destructive pest that we don’t want hitching a ride here. What will the Côte d’Azur be like without its palm trees if the beetle is left unchecked?

Vetiver grass products

I have only ever seen vetiver grass used in this country once and I admit I was surprised our biosecurity even let it in, given that it can put its roots down to four metres deep in the first year alone. It seems that its abundant production of leaf blades can be turned to good use and there is not much danger of running out of raw material. I saw these on a market stall at the cherry festival in Céret, near the French border with Spain. They were very charming but comparatively expensive. You don’t have to have vetiver grass to make something similar. It occurred to me that, were I still of the craft-y persuasion, some of our native grasses with leaves that have some substance – Chionochloa rubra and Carex buchananii come to mind – would likely work just as well. I had a friend who was keen to try weaving with pine needles and I sent her some of the exceptionally long needles that fall from our Pinus montezumae. But she never sent a photo of the finished product so it may not have been as successful as she hoped.

The cherries may not have been up to much but how charming is the little town of Céret?

Sadly, I have to report that the cherries at the cherry festival were a disappointment. After an unusually wet spring, they were watery, splitting and lacking sweetness, bearing no resemblance to the fleshy Black Dawson cherries I pay an arm and a leg for in season here, but there were plenty of them and the French do street festivals very well. They do love a brass band – or four or five of them on street corners in this case.

The graceful design of split steps
And a smaller version, also from the Ephrussi de Rotshschild garden
We could have done more with these casual steps, had we thought of it at the time.

In the Ephrussi de Rothschild garden, the Baroness who created it clearly liked split steps. There were at least three, maybe more. If you do a net search for split stairs, also known as bifurcated stairs, you will see many examples in internal situations, mostly from USA and in modern, opulent homes. I have seen them used externally on grand old villas in Italy and always thought them particularly graceful. Executed in stone – or even concrete – they are a feature in themselves which would not be appropriate in our more informal garden. It is the form I like and there is no reason why they could not be constructed in a more naturalistic style. I am rather regretting that we never even considered something more ambitious for steps in our garden. You need gradient but also space and I am pondering where we might adapt some steps to try an informal version.

Synthetic screening in Nice
Presumably a cheap and nasty domestic version, already threadbare and dropping synthetic fibres onto the ground below.

The French do many things well but these ghastly synthetic fences and screens are not one of them. No, no. Just no. They are really awful, both visually and environmentally. People lacking all aesthetic sense seem to think that the blue tones of synthetic green will ‘tone with the environment’, on account of being green. I see the same thinking down at the new roundabout finally completed where our country road joins the state highway. I get that the landowner who lost the corner of their property wanted windbreak but did it have to be so very high, built like Fort Knox but in tanalised timber and then wrapped in synthetic green netting? Black would have blended with the environment much better. Still ugly, but utilitarian ugly, not an assault on the visual senses.

No, that green netting does not blend in visually, in New Zealand as here, or in France.
Stopped by rush hour traffic by a decidedly extraordinary commercial building

Also related to assaults on visual senses, these two commercial buildings in and near Nice were impossible to miss. I am sure they are as controversial for locals as for visitors.

I had to photograph this second one from a moving coach so you may miss the fact that the head looks mighty like it was modelled on King Charles. The similarity was unmissable. I am surprised it hasn’t  sparked a fresh outbreak of the Hundred Years War of old.

Outside of tourist areas, much of France closes on Sundays. We wandered through the near-deserted city square in Perpignan where all the outdoor furniture remained outdoors, albeit loosely tied to make it clear they were not free for the taking. Just as I marveled at the use of ceramic pots with topiaries planted in them to block off a road (instead of traffic cones?) in Malaysia, this level of trust in human decency and good behaviour made me ponder where we have gone wrong in this country.

Pinus montezumae may be suitable for weaving into craft-y baskets.