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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The bean mountain started modestly enough. It was just the surplus from the summer crops that Mark didn’t want to waste a few years ago. Dried beans had not featured large in our diet. Homemade hummus yes, but always with bought chickpeas. At least I started with dried peas and not the instant tinned version. Beyond that, we had never really moved on from the trendy mixed bean salads of the late 1970s. But the beans started to mount up at a faster rate than we were eating them.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 