Autumn bulbs

While late winter and spring are the peak seasons for the many of the bulbs, the lesser known autumn flowering varieties offer fresh seasonal delight at a time when many flowering plants have finished or are passing over. The triggers for these bulbs are a drop in temperature, declining day length and summer rain. They are neither easily available nor widely grown but that may be a chicken or egg situation because many of them are not difficult or touchy.

Moraea polystachya – the autumn flowering peacock iris

The bulb that gives us the longest flowering season of all at this time of the year is the lovely lilac- blue, autumn Moraea polystachya from South Africa. Each flower is a dainty iris and while individual blooms are brief, new ones open down the stem for many weeks on end, stretching into months. The foliage is fine and light and the wiry flower stems can reach about 50 cm high. It grows from corms and will gently seed down without becoming an undesirable weed. It is particularly attractive popping up in cracks between pavers or on the edges of paths. The problem will be sourcing corms to buy. If you see one growing in somebody else’s garden, ask for seed which is easily raised and should flower in its third year.

Haemanthus coccineus

Haemanthus coccineus is most valued for its striking winter foliage – enormous, fleshy leaves which lie flat to the ground, giving the plant its common name of elephant ears. But in early autumn, up pop bristly red flowers looking somewhat like a dish brush head. In fact they are a large cluster of red stamens, each tipped with a generous amount of golden pollen and all encased in six petals that almost resemble a plastic cup. Flowering is triggered by rain and comes just before the new foliage starts to emerge. Plants need excellent drainage and some protection from heavy frosts but will thrive in semi shade.

Colchicum autumnale

Colchicums are often referred to as autumn crocus, but they are only distant relatives at best and are generally much larger flowered toughies that are easy to grow. Most are so vigorous that they can be established in grass for the meadow look, but keep them away from mown areas because the foliage hangs on right through to spring. Each flower is a cup with six petals and while not long lived, a bulb can put up a succession of blooms. It flowers well before the foliage appears. Most colchicums hail from Europe and are in lilac pink to purple shades. For those who prefer all their flowers in white, there is a white form available but purists may prefer to stay with the dominant colours of the European meadows. The major drawback to the colchicums is that the foliage takes such a long time to die off that it can have a protracted scruffy period but it does at least have lush foliage in the bare winter months.

Nerines sarniensis hybrids

Despite their common name of the “Guernsey lily”, nerines hail from South Africa. While there are over 30 different species, the ones most widely available include N. fothergillii (scarlet flowers often referred to as the ‘spider lily’), N. bowdenii (late season flowering, sugar pink with long stems) and N. sarniensis hybrids. It is the hybrids that bring the larger flowers in desirable colours which can range from smoky hues, purple, salmon apricot and across the whole spectrum of shades associated with pink and red. There are white cultivars though I would have to say that we have never found a good pure white form which performs well. All make excellent cut flowers and have a long record of use in floristry.

Nerines have large bulbs which like to sit half in the soil and half baking in the sun. They will struggle in very cold, wet conditions and won’t flower in the shade.

Cyclamen hederafolium

Cyclamen hederafolium is one of the star performers for us, opening its first flowers as early as January and continuing through late summer to peak in autumn. Once the flowering is finished, the lovely heart shaped dark green leaves which are lightly marbled in silver remain a feature through winter. Flowers vary in colour from pure white, pale pink to dark pink, though not on the same tuber. As long as the tuber does not rot out, it can get very large over time – at least as big as a bread and butter plate. It is best nestled into the soil, as opposed to buried beneath. In C. hederafolium, the roots, flower stems and leaves all sprout afresh each year from the top of the tuber so you need to plant it the right way up. It will grow in full sun through semi shade to woodland conditions of high shade and, when happy, it will seed down over time and naturalise – as long as you don’t garden around it with weed spray. Good drainage is the key.

The species cyclamen have a delicate charm which has long gone from the pot hybrids sold as indoor plants. C. hederafolium is the easiest and most reliable of the species. There is nothing rare about it, except I failed to find anybody selling it this season. It is easy to raise from seed if you know of somebody with a plant. Harvest the seed in late spring and sow it in a pot or tray immediately. It can reach flowering size in as little as 18 months.

Ornamental oxalis

Oxalis. Spare a thought for the poor, maligned oxalis family which gets dismissed out of hand because of a few bad eggs. Call them by their romantic common name of wood sorrel if it makes you feel better. There are over 800 members of the family and by no means are they all invasive weeds. Neither are they all worthwhile garden plants either, but some of them are autumn stars for us. All oxalis need full sun because they only open their flowers in the bright light. If you remain nervous about them, plant them in wide, shallow pots and place them on sunny steps to give you a seasonal display. When you repot them after a year, you can see clearly which ones show invasive potential because they will have formed multitudes of babies. These ones are best kept in pots forever but others are perfectly garden safe.

Over the years, we gathered up maybe 30 different oxalis species and you can often find dry bulbs of different ones offered for sale on Trade Me. Some have very short flowering seasons and I am not sure it is worth my time to repot them each year. Others are exceptionally good. The best of all is O. purpurea alba. It has an abundance of very large, glistening pure white flowers with a golden centre and it flowers over a very long period. The foliage is a flat mat of green, slightly hairy, clover-like leaves. We have had it in the garden here for decades and it has never been badly behaved or shown invasive tendencies. There are other forms of O. purpurea with pink flowers and with burgundy red foliage (O. purpurea ‘Nigrescens’). While these are also very showy, they can be a bit too rampant and are best kept in pots.

Other personal favourites are O. massoniana (feathery foliage and masses of pretty flowers in apricot with a yellow eye), O. hirta lavender and the sunny yellow O.luteola. There are no blue or green flowered oxalis, as far as I know, but they come in pretty much every other colour.

Other autumn flowering bulbs which we value, but which will be even harder to source are Lycoris aurea (which looks like a golden nerine), Rhodophiala bifida and some of the autumnal tricyrtus, particularly T. macrantha.

The Guernsey Lily

Guernsey’s only claim to nerines is cut flower production. The exact method of arrival to the Channel Islands is unknown but there are records of N. sarniensis growing, and presumably flowering, in Paris as early as 1630. By the 1800s, Guernsey already had a flower export trade in full swing and was sending nerines to England. The local folklore version, laying claim to the nerine, has charm.

The Guernsey lily folk tale from the Visit Guernsey website:

Legend holds that a handsome fairy prince met and fell madly in love with Michelle de Garis, a beautiful Guernsey girl. Michelle left her cottage early one morning to see to her cows. As she entered the meadow, she was surprised to find a young man asleep on the grass. He had a particularly small stature, was finely proportioned, and remarkably handsome.

Michelle stood and admired the small man dressed in green and with bow and arrow. When he awoke he told Michelle that he was a fairy prince from England and asked for her hand in marriage, as they had both instantly fallen in love. She agreed but as they headed to Fairyland she asked that she leave a token to reassure her family. The prince gave her a bulb, which she planted.

Michelle’s mother later discovered a beautiful flower above Vazon bay, on the west coast of Guernsey. It was the colour of Michelle’s shawl and sprinkled with elfin gold – the Guernsey lily.

Sometime later on, many fairy men came from Fairyland, entranced by Michelle’s beauty and looking for a Guernsey girl of their own. They asked that Guernseymen gave up their wives and daughters, which ended in many battles between the fairies and Guernseymen. The Rouge Rue (Red Road) is said to have been named after a particularly fierce battle.

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

Farewell to the trees

To the left has been “beautified”. To the right are the 60 year old trees to be clear-felled for more such “beautification”

“Imagine if trees gave off wi-fi signals, we’d be planting so many trees and we would probably save the planet too. Too bad they only produce the oxygen we breathe.” So runs the meme that swept social media recently. Truly we despair here at how hard it is to keep established trees and how ready are so many people to take the chainsaw to them.

Perhaps it is due to our recent pioneer history that we have failed to develop a reverence for big trees. That, and the fact that our houses are notoriously cold in winter and we want every bit of sun and warmth we can get.

There is no argument that large trees in suburban settings can be a problem for residents, especially as sections get ever smaller. That is why we have always advocated for trees in public areas where they have the space to reach maturity and to give grace to our environment. All power to council arborists and parks staff who are tasked with looking after such vegetative assets. For assets they are, although not in a financial sense. A tree can be chainsawed down in a morning but it may have taken a very long time for it to ever attain stature.

What would Cambridge be like without its street trees like these on Taylor Street (Photo: Michael Jeans)

Leave it to the populace – the ignorati – and we would have nothing taller than 3 metres and older than 20 years in urban settings. Can you imagine the main streets of Cambridge without the trees? I do not know the history of those trees but it is a fair bet that there have been efforts by some people over time to take the chainsaw to them. Thank goodness those tasked with the civic environment have stood firm for, without those trees, Cambridge would just be like any other unmemorable small town in New Zealand.

There is no doubt that trees can make a mess. It is called the cycle of nature. Do they make a bigger mess than humans? Would we rather live in paved, concrete wastelands to avoid the leaf drop, the seed dispersal, the spent flowers, birds’ nests and occasional fallen branches?

Imagine the lake scene at Te Ko Utu in Cambridge Domain without big trees (Photo: Michael Jeans)

I write from the heart. We are truly distressed because it appears that we have lost a local battle to save the row of handsome pohutukawa that line the Waitara riverbank. They are sixty years old, just achieving the beauty and stature of established trees, but they are to be clear felled.

“Those trees are past their use-by date.” Ah, no. Pohutukawa have no use-by date. They are a very long-lived tree. “We don’t want them getting too big.” “They are messy.” The fact that they are in a position where they do not shade any buildings and their natural fall of litter does not affect any private property is irrelevant to these folk. “They are not native to this area.” That argument is specious. Not only is the natural occurrence of pohutukawa a mere 10km north of here, but these same folk will think nothing of replacing them with a golden robinia or flowering cherry.

In a battle of jurisdiction between local authorities, where power has been vested in an engineer, the good burghers of our local community board have reportedly been out asking people: “Do you want to keep the trees or do you want the area beautified?” That is a Tui billboard moment.

There is no way to reason with people who see no merit in trees. There’s none so blind as those who will not see and minds have been made up. To such people, trees are completely expendable and of no beauty. They will be long dead before any replacement plants can reach maturity and in the interim there will be decades of a windswept, bare riverbank. It will have an expensive boardwalk and some seats painted sky blue, however, for beauty and history lie only in man-made objects. We could weep.

This is not a story unique to our area. It is repeated often up and down the country in some form or other. Trees need human protection if they are to hold the chainsaw massacre brigade at bay.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

POSTSCRIPT
I see back at the start of 2007, I wrote about these trees in the Taranaki Daily News, saying: “Waitara would be a bleak little town without these splendid trees.”

These trees were planted to hide the ugly sight of the old freezing works. Unfortunately the trees are to be removed but the arse-end of the freezing works will remain. This is, apparently, “beautifying the area”.

Garden Lore

“He that plants trees loves others besides himself.”

Thomas Fuller Gnomologia (1732)

Tightly clipped azalea hedge

Azalea hedges
I finally came across a gardening idea I have read about, even suggested, but had yet to see in person – a tightly clipped azalea hedge. This is in the garden at Wairere Nursery in Gordonton and it is delightful. It is Azalea ‘Kirin’ and the flowers were just opening a few weeks ago. It will be a swathe of colour as the season progresses.

If the pretty candy pink flowers are not to your taste, ‘Kirin’ one of the Kurume azalea group – small leafed, small flowered azaleas from the Kurume area of Japan. There is a range of colours in the Kurumes – well, azalea colours so we are talking white, pinks, salmons, lilacs through to deepest pink almost red. The Kurumes tend to have much smaller leaves than the Gumpo hybrids which is why they clip better as a hedge. When not flowering, it will look similar to a clipped buxus hedge – from a distance at least.

The beauty of azaleas for hedging is that they only need clipping once, maybe twice, a year and sprout again from bare wood so can take a hard hack if needed. The more you clip, the denser the hedge will be but you need to time it right so that you are not cutting off the flower buds. The flowers are nature-friendly, unlike buxus which contributes next to nothing to insect and birdlife, and they will light up a dark winter’s day, even more so if you go for colour rather than restrained white. The problem will be finding enough plants of one variety if you plan a longer hedge – you may have to be patient but the wait will be worthwhile to get such a pretty and practical effect.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Plant Collector – sasanqua camellias

028 Gardening is wonderfully cyclic on an annual basis. I know I have written about sasanqua camellias before but each year they flower prettily yet again. These are the Japanese camellias that light up the late autumn and early winter. There is a softness to the blooms which is in contrast to the stiffer japonicas that flower later in winter and early spring.

If you live in Auckland, it is the law to plant only Setsugekka, a big growing white sasanqua. I jest but that is the one you will see there at a ratio of about 20:1. In fact sasanquas come in all shades of pinks, bicolours and even reds as well as the fraightfully restrained whites. Going clockwise from left in the photo are: Elfin Rose, Gay Border, Bettie Patricia, Silver Dollar, Bert Jones and Crimson King. Some may no longer be available on the market but there is usually one that will look very similar.

Sasanquas can be slow to establish but left to their own devices, will make light, airy, large shrubs over time. They also clip very well so are ideal for hedging and topiary. When clipped regularly, the growth is much denser. The foliage is smaller and often darker green than many other types of camellias. Some describe them as fragrant. They have a distinctive mossy, slightly earthy sort of scent – it is one of the defining characteristics of a sasanqua.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Outdoor Classroom: multiplying succulents

If everybody realised just how easy it is to strike succulents from cutting, nobody would buy these plants unless they were new or exciting. This Crassula ovata (Jade Plant or money plant – very good for feng shui, apparently) could easily generate 30 good sized plants or many more smaller ones.
The ground-hugging types which form rosettes are easy to lift and divide. As long as they are replanted in full sun with excellent drainage and light soils, each little rosette will form new roots when nestled into the soil. Tidy up the rosette first by removing dead leaves to avoid them holding moisture in the rotting foliage.
Even succulents with well defined branches will grow. This is Aloe plicatilis or the fan aloe. Unlike usual leafy cuttings, succulents can be struck from very large pieces and you can expect close to 100% success rate. Cut to a balanced shape. Place the cutting in an airy spot and leave it for a few days to dry out. This reduces the chance of rotting before it creates roots.
Stick the cutting into a pot filled with a free draining potting mix (we use granulated bark) It is better to use a mix which does not have much fertiliser in it but this is not critical. You can equally put them straight into the garden in a free draining, dry position. It may be necessary to stake the top if you have a heavy cutting so that it remains standing. Do not try and keep it firm by compacting the soil or potting mix because you want maximum drainage.
Make sure that the cutting does not get waterlogged while you wait for it to form roots, but it will need an occasional wetting. In a few months, most plants will have started producing roots but it will take time for a large or heavy cutting to develop enough of a root ball to keep it standing upright.
Most succulents, including the popular burgundy black aeonium whose name few can remember and even fewer can spell (Aeonium arboreum ‘Zwartkop’ or ‘Schwartzkopf’), sempervivens, aloes and many cacti can be increased this way. It is a good activity to share with children.