Garden Lore

“I fear I am a little impatient of the school of gardening that encourages the selection of plants merely as artistic furniture, chosen for colour only, like ribbons or embroidery silk. I feel sorry for plants that are obliged to make a struggle for life in uncongenial situations, because their owner wishes all things of those shades of pink, blue or orange to fit in next to the grey or crimson planting.”

Edward Augustus Bowles My Garden in Spring (1914)

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Garden Lore: arum lilies

Arum lilies are something of a scourge in this country. These are the remains of a selected white splashed-green flowered form called ‘Green Goddess’. I have just done what I hope is the final clean up in my eradication efforts. You can imagine the hollow laugh of disbelief from Mark when I informed him that ‘Green Goddess’ has an Award of Merit from Britain’s prestigious Royal Horticultural Society. It is clearly not a weed there, no sirree.

The common weedy arum here is from South Africa and is Zantedeschia aethiopica, although Z. italicum is also a problem. The issue is that these plants just do too well here. They are tolerant of a very wide range of conditions and, being toxic, stock won’t touch them so they can multiply even on grazed land. Not only do they spread by seed but you can see from the root system why they can be difficult to eradicate. The rhizome below ground has numerous offsets and every one has the potential to grow to a separate plant.

I eradicated by digging carefully and thoroughly gathering all the baby offsets. Don’t risk composting them. Either dry and then burn them or put them out in the rubbish for deep burial at landfill. Never, ever dump them on the roadside. I have just done what I hope is the final follow-up to root out the remaining stragglers after 3 years. If you want to go the chemical way, the Weedbusters website recommends metsulforon-methyl with glyphosate and penetrant (to make it stick). Or Escort is what Mark recommends – that is the metsulforon-methyl bit.

The smaller growing, coloured zantedeschias that are often known as calla lilies are generally derived from different species and do not show the same weedy inclination, being prized as cut flowers and making excellent garden plants. However, they are apparently all equally toxic so take care when handling them as their sap can burn.

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

Plant Collector: Dietes grandiflora

062There is nothing unusual about the dietes flowering at the moment, but don’t let the fact that it is much favoured by amenity landscapers put you off. The reason it is seen so often in shopping centre garden plots is because it is tough and easy care.

It is a South African wild iris. Originally it was thought to be a moraea – commonly known as peacock irises – but that family grows from corms whereas the dietes forms rhizomes. Its flowers link it to moraeas, its rooting structure to the iris. Apparently the word dietes means ‘having two relatives’. ‘Grandiflora’ just means large flower.

The foliage is narrow, upright and pointed and it is evergreen. For most of the year, it just looks anonymous and not very exciting but it has such pretty flowers at this time. These are short lived but, as with many other irises, there is a succession opening down the stem. If the blooms remind you of an exotic butterfly, you may be pleased to hear that it is sometimes referred to as a butterfly iris. It flowers best with sun. While the plant will grow in relatively shady positions, you won’t get anywhere near as many blooms so try for full sun or somewhat dappled light.

As a garden plant, unless you want your place to look like a supermarket carpark, veer away from mass planting in favour of interesting combinations. I think it looks wonderfully effective planted with the tractor seat ligularia (Ligularia reniformis) but any contrasting big, luscious foliage is going to work.
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First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Garden Lore

“Nature is the gardener’s opponent. The gardener who pretends he is in love with her, has to destroy her climaxes of vegetation and make…an alliance with her which she will be the first to break without warning, in the most treasonable way she can. She sneaks in, she inserts her weeds, her couch-grass, her ground elder, her plantain, her greenfly and her slugs behind his back. The bitch.”

Geoffrey Grigson “Gardenage” 1952.

051Garden lore: raising dahlias from seed

These cheerful single dahlia blooms all came from open pollinated seed gathered from a simple yellow variety. While dahlias are easy to increase by lifting and dividing the tubers when dormant in winter, any new plants raised that way will be identical to the original plant. Raising seed gives variation and in some situations, that variation is interesting to have. We didn’t start with many dahlias here so we were surprised at the range of colour from near white, through yellow, orange, bright pink to deep red. Some of the seedlings flowered in the first year from sowing and all flowered by the second summer so it is an economical way of building up numbers for planting larger areas.

“Open pollinated seed” just means that we left the bees to pollinate the flowers and gathered the seed when it was ripe. It is what happens every day in the natural environment. It is not likely that we will ever get a brilliant seedling through – something stand-out, different and worth commercialising, but that is not what we are after. Nor will we get some of the remarkable forms that are prized by dahlia aficionados – collerette, pompom, cactus, anemone and others. The vast majority of seedlings will be singles but the percentage of doubles will increase if you are collecting the seed from a double parent. We just wanted them as fillers for the summer garden and we personally prefer the single blooms which also feed the bees and the butterflies.

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

The folly of the quest for garden perfection

Rhodohypoxis are to be in drifts, not clumps, thank you.

Rhodohypoxis are to be in drifts, not clumps, thank you.

I commented to a photographer once about the immaculate interiors featured in glossy magazines and how our home could never look like that. She laughed and said she once went back to get some extra photos for a feature and the place did not look the same at all. Oh, so this is how they usually live, she thought.

It is an illusion made possible by the fact that photographs capture a single moment in time and it applies equally to gardens as to house interiors. I do it when I take photos. I look at the first image and then I will rearrange or remove something to get a clearer, more pleasing shot. The folly is when we think we can achieve and maintain that in real life. It is a trap to which many of us fall victim.

This train of thought came about recently as I spent a day redoing a garden bed. In my mind, I know exactly what I want and yet again, I am on a quest to make it happen. In this case, it is a bed with five clipped and shaped small camellias in it, backed by a clipped hedge. How much can you do with about 12 square metres of garden? A lot, it turns out.

This bed, in full sun, started as a cottage garden themed on red and yellow, full of roses, perennials and annuals. It looked lovely for 3 weeks of the year and messy for the remaining 49 weeks. It then went formal(ish) and I wrestled with finding the perfect ground cover. Rubus pentalobus (‘the orangeberry plant’) was too invasive. Violets were too vigorous. Cyclamen hederafolium were lovely for about 8 months of the year but were dying off during our peak visitor season. We changed the hedge last year from clipped buxus to clipped Camellia transnokoensis (tiny white flowers and small leaves). I reduced the number topiaried camellias which give the structure. I started inter-planting the cyclamen with rhodohypoxis for spring colour and a little ground hugging perennial called scutellaria with white flowers for summer cover.

How ironic that I still went searching for a photograph to show the garden bed looking good - but had to settle for Spike the dog creating a dust bath in the reworked ground covers. This is a long way from the mental image I have of what it is to look like.

How ironic that I still went searching for a photograph to show the garden bed looking good – but had to settle for Spike the dog creating a dust bath in the reworked ground covers. This is a long way from the mental image I have of what it is to look like.

My most recent effort was because the rhodohypoxis were looking too clumpy and I wanted them drifty, not clumpy so I spread them out, while trying to make sure that the cyclamen were sufficient in number to make an uninterrupted winter carpet. It is still looking dry and dusty at the moment but will it work?

Yes and no. It will, I hope, closely match my mental image at some points in the next year or two – but it won’t stay that way. Gardens have plants and plants are not static. The mistake is thinking that we can create constant pictures in our gardens and that when it most closely matches the mental image we have, that we can then keep it that way.

It is possible to achieve something nearing perfection in a garden. For a couple of weeks. For 52 weeks? Without an army of able staff and a stand out area of replacement plants “out the back” somewhere, I doubt it. None of us own Versailles where, reportedly, the entire colour scheme of the extensive parterre gardens could be changed overnight. Even Sissinghurst today has a large nursery out of sight, full of plants to bring in as required to spruce up the displays in the garden.

Does the answer lie in a very formal garden? Not unless you are going to use artificial plants. I have seen formal gardens where the hedges and shapes have lost their sharp edge because the wretched plants will insist on putting out fresh growth. When you lose the sharp edges in a formal garden, there’s not much of interest left.

It would be much better, surely, to rid ourselves of this idea that we can achieve photographic perfection in real life gardens. But that is easier said than done, as evidenced by my repeated efforts in the garden border mentioned above. When all is said and done, I am still worried about the scutellaria which may be better in partial shade than full sun.

Cyclamen hederfolium give pretty flowers from summer through autumn and carpet of attractive foliage until mid spring

Cyclamen hederfolium give pretty flowers from summer through autumn and carpet of attractive foliage until mid spring

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

Gardening 101: Dividing perennials

0011) Clumping perennials can get overcrowded and start to deteriorate over time. Some will stop holding their flowers up well, some can die out from the middle while others just look tired and messy. Some need digging and dividing relatively frequently to stay looking their best. This clump of pulmonaria (unromantically known as lungwort) probably started as a single crown two years ago but grows rapidly.
0022) Dig out the clump, shaking off the soil. If you are not sure what you are doing, hosing off the dirt can make it easier to see the structure of the root system which varies between different plants.
0033) Part the leaves to find the separate sections growing from the centre or crown of the plant. Some plants just pull apart. An old carving knife is helpful and a meat cleaver is good for larger clumps with tough crowns. You can use a spade but it is hard to get accurate cuts. The pulmonaria yielded at least 15 divisions, all of which would grow as separate plants if I wanted that many.
0044) Replant the strongest divisions into soil which is well dug and friable. If you are only lifting and dividing every 10 years or longer, this can be a major task as soils compact over time. If you are doing it more often, it is easy as the soil stays looser. Spread the roots evenly and cover to the same level it was earlier. We like to add compost mulch and then water thoroughly but gently. Removing some leaves reduces the stress on the plant.
0055) These three perennials also benefit from lifting and dividing every few years. From left to right: an aster which just pulls apart into separate sections, mondo grass (ophiopogon) which also pulls apart but sometimes needs the runners snipped, and polyanthus which usually needs to be cut through the crown to ensure that each piece has roots attached.
0066) This patch of stachys (lambs’ ears) was dug and divided three weeks ago and has already recovered well because it is in full growth. Timing is not critical in our mild climate but done in midsummer, care needs to be taken to avoid the roots drying out and plants will need thorough watering for the first week.

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

“A good soil, like good food, must not be either too fat, or heavy, or cold, or wet, or dry, or greasy, or hard, or gritty, or raw; it ought to be like bread, like gingerbread, like a cake, like leavened dough; it should crumble, but not break into lumps; under the spade it ought to crack, but not to squelch; it must not make slabs, or blocks, or honeycombs, or dumplings; but, when you turn it over with a full spade, it ought to breathe with pleasure and fall into a fine and puffy tilth. That is a tasty and edible soil, cultured and noble, deep and moist, permeable, breathing and soft – in short, a good soil is like good people, and as is well known there is nothing better in this vale of tears.”

Karel Capek, The Gardener’s Year (1929)