Petal Pushers – the Jury Michelias

Mark Jury standing on a carpet of fallen scented petals, surveying one of his early shelter belts planted with michelia hybrids

Mark Jury standing on a carpet of fallen scented petals, surveying an early shelter belts planted with michelia hybrids

All michelias are magnolias but not all magnolias are michelias. We have always known them as very close relatives to magnolias but they sat in a group of their own. Now there has been some international reassignment after DNA testing and they have become magnolias, which has led to some confusing name changes. In common usage, they are still often referred to michelias and we are a bit betwixt and between on names.

Until very recent times, there weren’t many different michelias in New Zealand. Doltsopa (the best known cultivar being named ‘Silver Cloud’) and figo (common name of port wine magnolia) have been here for a while. It was an early cross between these two by the late Oswald Blumhardt that gave us ‘Mixed Up Miss’ and ‘Bubbles’.

Interest started to grow when yunnanensis was brought in some twenty years ago. It has spawned a gazillion named selections because it sets seed readily, but just to confuse you, it is now correctly referred to as Magnolia laevifolia. There are a few other species which are not widely available, including maudiae, and some obscure ones that are of interest to collectors only. But our borders closed to new introductions so there are a number of recent discoveries in Asia that we don’t have here. Yes, new plants are still being discovered in this world of ours but we can only look at them from afar with our bio-security rules.

Fairy Magnolia White

Mark started hybridising them here back in the 1990s. He figured there was room to improve on them as garden plants. Figo’s flowers are a bit insignificant and the foliage tends to go yellow in full sun. ‘Silver Cloud’ has a wonderful fragrance but the flowers are very floppy and lack good form. It also grows too large for many town gardens and it can defoliate – dropping all its leaves – after flowering. Laevifola (yunnanensis) can defoliate too, in spring conditions which are wet and cold. These are evergreen plants so defoliation is not a great look. ‘Bubbles’ and ‘Mixed Up Miss’ look great as juvenile plants but are pretty ordinary when they get bigger and older. Mark could see possibilities.

September and October are exciting months for us as the michelias bloom. We live and breathe michelias and magnolias at this time of the year. There are six hundred new michelia seedlings ready to flower this spring alone, part of a long term breeding programme. Out of the thousands he has raised, only three have been named and released so far.

Fairy Magnolia Blush

There is a long way to go yet but some directions are emerging. Despite the vast majority of michelias being basically white, he has reached reds, purples and deep pinks and is working on deepening the pale yellows to get stronger colour. Along the way there are an awful lot of murky colour combinations that get the chop. There is a big range of flower form, foliage and growth habits. Perfume can be an issue when two of the most fragrant species spawn offspring with no scent at all. Bringing together all the different elements to get a new plant is an absorbing and time consuming occupation.

Along the way we have also learned that michelias are very tolerant of cutting and clipping and sprout again from bare wood. The row of lollipop Fairy Magnolia Blush at our entrance has been clipped and shaped over ten years now and we can keep it to the size we want by trimming just twice a year. They make excellent hedges and some of our roadside shelter belts are a feast of flower and fragrance at this time.

The sustainable wood lot

Regrowth

An unexpected bonus has been the sustainable woodlot. Because we heat our large house entirely with wood, we burn through a prodigious amount every winter. Mark had been thinking along the lines of establishing a sustainable woodlot for the future that we could harvest on a rotational basis. I even sourced a book on the very topic. But lo, he realised a few years ago that his reject michelia seedlings already filled that very niche, doing dual duty as winter feed for our very small herd of beefies that we keep to eat the paddock grass. I say very small herd – there are only four at the moment. Cut off close to the base, the plants soon shoot away again with long straight whips that could be used as poles or left to grow for firewood. Mark drags the branches into an adjacent paddock where the cattle enthusiastically eat the foliage. He then gathers the remaining trunks to cut up for next season’s firewood. It seems a good multi-purpose use of a plant breeding programme.

Fairy Magnolia Cream

Mark’s three michelia selections to date are sold under the Fairy Magnolia brand and are widely available in New Zealand garden centres and in some overseas countries. Blush is a soft pink, Cream is very fragrant and grows in a similar, compact manner to Blush. White is a larger grower and the first in the season to flower. Mark has always seen it as a garden-friendly alternative to “Silver Cloud” with good fragrance and beautiful flower form.

First published in the September issue of NZ Gardener and reprinted here with their permission.

Lollipop Fairy Magnolia Blush at our entranceway. The smaller michelia to the left is an unnamed figo hybrid with masses of creamy yellow flowers.

Pink and yellow. Together.

Bright yellow kowhai and cerise campanulata cherry at Auckland Botanic

Two of the three plants on my most-disliked list are pink and yellow combinations. The first was a nasty spirea we saw in the UK several years ago. It was clearly a recent release as it was everywhere – a murky pink flower with yellow foliage. The second was a variegated oleander spotted in Spain, sporting the same colour combination but the foliage was a yellow variegation which may add yet another layer to the colour crime. The third is Rhododendron ‘President Roosevelt’ which also sports similarly freakish, variegated yellow foliage but it is more red-toned than murky pink. We are not fans of variegated foliage here, as a general rule.

Pink and yellow in Beth Chatto’s garden

In that magical garden that Beth Chatto has created, I did notice on our last visit that she quite often combined pink and yellow in combinations that would worry me in my own garden. So when I saw a bright campanulata cherry in full bloom at Auckland Botanic Gardens last week with a strong yellow kowhai planted in front, my reaction was to do a double-take. It is just not a colour combination that pleases me. As an aside, I did notice that the feeding tui much preferred the campanulata to the kowhai – which is to say that there were none in the kowhai but a whole mob coming and going in the campanulata. I take this as proof that tui lack political correctness and fail to appreciate that they are letting the side down by preferring the import to the native plant.

Pastel hued tulips at Eden Gardens

Pink vireya but with pastel yellow tulips

Because I was already thinking about that pink and yellow combo, the plantings at Eden Gardens immediately grabbed my attention. And there, the pink and yellow pleased me and I am sure that is because they were pastel and the pinks were clean hues. It is the combination of either cerise pinks, purplish pinks or muted Paris pink with bright yellow that worries me most, I decided. It is not that it should be avoided at all costs (unless it is yellow variegated foliage with murky pink flowers!), but that it fails more often than it works. A pale yellow is much easier to combine. Bright golden yellow needs more care – unless it is a narcissus. Vibrant orange needs even more caution.

Magnolia Felix Jury with colour-toned tulips at Eden Gardens

It was Peak Tulip at Eden Gardens. I have planted some tulips this year, but nothing on the scale of Eden. It is the inner conservationist conservative in me. My instincts are too frugal to be willing to buy in fresh bulbs each year, treating them like annuals to be discarded after blooming. I don’t even plant annuals. I expect my tulips to earn their keep and return each year, gently multiplying. This is, apparently, too optimistic for tulips, although I planted them deep in the soil with hope. I enquired at Eden Gardens and was told they start again with fresh bulbs each season which is why they were so showy. Away from pink and yellow, the colour-toned planting beneath Magnolia Felix Jury as one enters the garden was restrained and impeccable though it lacked the zing that can be achieved with more adventurous colour combinations.
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Garden lore – three hedging ideas for 2015

“My garden sweet, enclosed with walles strong,

Embanked with benches to sytt and take my rest:

The knots so enknotted, it cannot be exprest,

With arbors and alyes so pleasant and so dulce.”

George Cavendish (1499 – 1561).

How to punctuate the end of hedge with panache and style in 2015.

I was taken to see the gardens at The Kelliher Estate on Puketutu Island in Auckland last week. When we say island, it is connected by a causeway. No ferry crossings were required. The gardens have been undergoing a major renovation in the last few years. There is a difference between a restoration and a renovation. The former attempts to recreate the gardens as they were in their glory days. In our climate with rampant growth and a heavy dependence of woody trees and shrubs, restorations are somewhat ill-conceived, in my opinion.

Renovations are a reinterpretation of a garden and in public gardens can range from pedestrian to insensitive, from ego-driven (the modern gardener determined to ‘make his or her mark’) to compromise by committee. Occasionally they are carried out with genuinely creative flair and there were indubitably elements of this showing in the gardens at the Kelliher Estate.

I was simply delighted by the reworking of the formerly overgrown lilly pilly hedge at the entrance – cloud pruned. With panache. I am no expert on lilly pilly. In fact it is more akin a yawning gap in my knowledge, especially as there are a number of plants which carry this common name. But I am guessing that this particular lilly pilly was the Australian myrtle also known as Syzygium smithii syn Acmena smithii (see footnote). If you are going to try something like this at home, take your time. You can’t rush the process of finding the natural shape of each individual plant. And trim flush to the stem. Nothing looks worse than nubbly elbows poking out all over the place where you have lopped off branches.

Finally the wave hedging is a device I have seen in UK and Europe but not in this country before. It echoes the natural shapes of the landscape but gives some form without the regimented and straitjacketed predictability of the usual flat topped, formal hedge.

The one key element to remember if you decide to get more adventurous with your own hedges is to ensure that they will tolerate hard pruning and resprout from bare wood if you are going to reshape. Not all hedging plants do and conifers can be particularly touchy.

Postscript: Social media can be very helpful. The following more knowledgeable comment on lilly pillies was made on the garden Facebook page by Andrew from Twining Valley Nurseries:
“You’re not wrong with the naming of Lilly Pilly. I’ve been to garden centres and seen the same plant labeled with three different names!
The correct taxonomic names for the 3 most commonly grown Lilly Pilly’s in NZ are-
Waterhousia floribunda (Old name: Eugenia ventenatti or Syzygium floribundum) Common name: weeping Lilly Pilly
Syzygium australe (Old name: Eugenia australis) Common name: brush cherry or Australian rose apple and is the most common.
Acmena smithii (Old name: Eugenia smithii) Common name: Lilly Pilly (or weed!)”

Thanks Andrew.

Do we take the award for the prettiest roadsides this week?

Looking along Tikorangi Road

I was mooching around down at our corner yesterday afternoon. It being Sunday, there was little traffic but there are plenty of magnolias in bloom. With the large white michelias alongside, scent lies heavy in the air. Most of the roadside plantings are seedlings from Mark’s breeding programmes. He is always looking for space to site good plants and all our boundaries are ringed with flowering trees. Every year, the display gets more spectacular.

You will just have to imagine the fragrance from all that bloom

Generally speaking, people talk to us about our boundaries full of flower and scent because they really like them. Indeed we often hear vehicles slowing down to get a better view at this time of year.

So I admit I am still scarred by the local resident who accused us last year of causing a traffic hazard with our overgrowth and ‘debris’. In terms of insults, this just might go down in our history as the worst ever levelled at us. I get that some folk will drive past without even noticing. Indeed, yesterday as I was on the road with my camera, a truck driver stopped to ask me if I was photographing the undermining of the corner by the recent flood. It has still not been repaired nine weeks on but we don’t mind because it means the heavy traffic is a lot slower and more careful when it comes to turning that corner. He looked a little surprised when I said no, I was photographing our trees.

But to want to see this planting removed as an alleged traffic hazard? That I find simply beyond comprehension. Goodness, even our little herd of beef cattle show more appreciation of our planting efforts than that local farmer. Maybe in time, I will get over the shock of his comments.

Looking back up Otaraoa Road

Pretty hellebores

Sunday was wet and gloomy so I picked hellebores to photograph indoors. And what a wonderful subject for photography they are. All I did was collect one representative bloom from a number of plants. This was more illustrative in intention than artistic endeavour.

Too often the reality of the hellebore plant can look like this

These are all H. orientalis or orientalis hybrids, a mix of plants in the garden and some selections Mark has raised. We have been talking about them recently because our main 30 metre hellebore border is in dire need of major work. It has passed over from being a pretty, low maintenance area to being patchy and underperforming with too few blooms and too many of those are murky colours. We plan to gut it, replace some of the soil and replant with strong, new plants – each standing in its own space rather than aiming for the uninterrupted carpet look. This is because we have noticed that the plants we have thriving in other areas are in well cultivated soil, each on its own and not competing with its neighbours for space. We will fill the gaps between bulbs – Cyclamen hederafolium, narcissi and bluebells all combine well with hellebores.

Mark has been raising hellebores in the nursery, in preparation for the upgrade. And he is interested in whether he can get better performing selections for our conditions. Generally, hellebores like a colder climate and the best ones we have seen are in areas with much more winter chill. The very dark flowered ones with bluish tones – referred to as slate – are not exactly booming here. Similarly, the doubles that we, and every other keen gardener at the time, rushed to purchase don’t seem to get much larger and showier than they were when we bought them over a decade ago. Mark’s seedlings may perform better though the wonderfully large pink with petaloids is probably blown up by nursery conditions. In the garden, the flowers may scale down.

The merits of longer stems

What he is most keen on is getting strong stems which hold the flowers above the foliage. So far, that seems to be one of the most desirable features of the recent releases out of the UK – Anna’s Red and Anna’s Pink. They display their blooms well. Because the reality is that when you pick hellebores and display them face up, they are hugely charming as seen in photos. But more often, they are nodding downwards and barely visible in the garden. You could of course follow the lead of a hellebore enthusiast we once met who had a mirror on a long pole so he could view the flowers without bending. Or you could glue mirrors to your shoes – but take care, gentlemen, never to wear such footwear to town lest the reason for the mirrors be misconstrued.
We have worked out that the desirable dark colours display far better as garden plants with the contrast of white flowers alongside. We will also banish all the murky ones to the compost heap. While clean pastel pink and green can be a charming combination, in hellebores these often lean to muted shades which are frankly of no merit. We also want plants that will fade gracefully and not to that dirty greenish brown which does not lift the soul.

We would like the hellebore border to shine again with the gentle charm that this plant family offers.

Earlier posts about hellebores include:
Hellebore Anna’s Red
The autumn trim (removing all the old foliage)
Helleborus x sternii – one of the few green flowers Mark is happy to accommodate here.
The double hellebores.

Tikorangi The Jury Garden

Mark and Abbie Jury

Petal Pushers – the Jury Michelias

Pink and yellow. Together.

Garden lore – three hedging ideas for 2015

Do we take the award for the prettiest roadsides this week?

Pretty hellebores

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