Garden Lore

“It takes a while to grasp that not all failures are self-imposed, the result of ignorance, carelessness or inexperience. It takes a while to grasp that a garden isn’t a testing ground for character and to stop asking, what did I do wrong? Maybe nothing.”

Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts (1981).

Japanese black trifele tomatoes

Japanese black trifele tomatoes

Heirloom and heritage seed varieties

I see Kings Seeds define “heirloom” seed varieties as being selected strains dating back to pre-1960s. Anything grown from seed will be a selected cultivar from the original species over time and may be very different from wild forms. While, by definition, heirloom varieties are open pollinated (by insects or wind), so too is the vast majority of seed we grow. I tried to work out whether there is an agreed difference between “heirloom” and “heritage” but generally the terms seem to be used loosely and interchangeably.

A number of people and organisations have been working for years to preserve our heirloom varieties in this country but none more so than the Koanga Institute and Kay Baxter in particular. Why does it matter? It is really important to keep genetic diversity in a world where commercial production is driven by other imperatives – particularly high productivity. The kiwifruit industry is a clear example of the perils of depending on a single cultivar of yellow fruit. If disease (PSA, in that case) takes it out, the impact is devastating.

Heirloom is not a synonym for high health. Some will be, some won’t and some will not perform well outside their original area. While most of us like to think it is synonymous with better flavour, that is not always true, either. It has nothing to do with being organic although many organic gardeners will favour heirloom varieties. Essentially, all “heirloom seed” means is that a particular seed strain has shown sufficient merit in some area of performance for people to keep it going for over fifty years. And long may we continue to preserve these different strains of seed.

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

New Year’s Gardening Resolutions for 2014

Plant food for the bees. Collectively, gardeners can make a difference

Plant food for the bees. Collectively, gardeners can make a difference

I failed on the Christmas-themed column. I am not big on poinsettias and I couldn’t think of anything new to say about Christmas trees. But New Year’s resolutions – these are different. If you are making garden resolutions, you may like to consider some of the following.

Lawns are a shocker when it comes to good environmental practice. There is nothing sustainable and healthy about most lawns but the vast majority of us have them for a variety of reasons. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that if you cut your lawn really short, it will mean you have to mow it less often. Not true. You stress the grass and open it up to weed invasions. Set the level on the lawnmower a little higher to keep a green sward. Good lawns invariably have longer grass.

Next time you buy a lawnmower, choose one that mulches the clippings. That way you don’t have to remove the clippings to get a tidy finish and if you are not removing the grass, then you don’t need to feed the lawn to keep it looking healthy. It reduces your inputs and therefore reduces both time and cost.

We are encouraging clover back into our lawns. It stays green, doesn't need mowing as often and feeds the bees

We are encouraging clover back into our lawns. It stays green, doesn’t need mowing as often and feeds the bees

Be cautious about lawn sprays and read the label information carefully. We are not fans of lawn sprays at all here. Year in and year out, we field enquiries about plant damage which is attributable to spray drift from lawn sprays. If you are using a spray which has a six month withholding period before it is safe to use on food crops (and that is common), you may want to think again about how environmentally sound is your gardening practice. Putting it through the compost process will not make the clippings safe for use. It might even be time to move on from the Chemical Ali generation. We are going back to encouraging the clover here. It used to be popular in days gone by and it has many merits.

Mulch. Mulch well, but only after the soil is wet through. If you lay mulch on top of dry soil, it stays drier longer. The rains this week may have been a reprieve for those who missed getting mulch laid in spring. If you lay the mulch on top of relatively weed-free soils, it will save you a lot of work later because it should suppress many of the germinating weed seeds that lurk in all our soils.

While on the subject of weeds, if they really worry you (and they do worry most of us even though, as the old saying goes, a weed is merely a plant in the wrong place), remember the old adage that one year’s seeding gives rise to seven year’s weeding. It is best to weed before the plant sets seed if you want to save yourself work down the track. If you weed with the push hoe, you need to remove seed heads that have formed already. You can leave the rest of the plant to wither in the sun but the seed heads will just continue to ripen and then germinate.

Single flowers with visible pollen and stamens feed the bees and indeed the butterflies

Single flowers with visible pollen and stamens feed the bees and indeed the butterflies

Grow plants with flowers for the bees. This means any flowers with visible stamens and pollen. We all know the bees are under deep stress, here in New Zealand as well as the rest of the world. We need the bees for pollination even more than honey. Every gardener’s contribution counts and collectively, we can make a difference to their food supplies. Fortunately, most of us have moved on from the austerity of the 1990s minimalist garden which contributed a big fat zero to the natural environment.

I am of the view that gardening should be two things above all else. It should be a pleasure. At its best, it can make your heart sing at the beauty. At a more mundane level, it can be quietly satisfying. If you get neither pleasure nor satisfaction from your garden, if it is all a great, big, tedious chore then review what you have and what you are doing.

If you really don’t enjoy gardening, then keep it very simple. It is much easier to maintain, especially if you can’t afford to pay someone to come and do it for you. If all you have to do is maintain edges, sweep paved areas, mow the lawns and do a seasonal round of tightly defined garden beds in order to keep it looking tidy, then it becomes more manageable for the reluctant gardener. Alternatively, move to an upper floor apartment.

Secondly, I think we should be gardening WITH nature, not in spite of it. Gardening shouldn’t be about imposing human will over nature, controlling and suppressing it, establishing dominance. Too much gardening practice is an imposition on the landscape, a battle with nature. Happy gardeners are often those who have managed to carve out a more constructive relationship with the natural world.

On which note, I wish readers a happy gardening year in 2014.

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

Plant Collector: Pachystegia insignis

Pachystegia insignis - one of our loveliest native plants

Pachystegia insignis – one of our loveliest native plants

We do a good line in native daisies in this country but few, if any are lovelier than this Marlborough rock daisy. The flowers are pristine white, but even when it is not flowering season, the leaves are big, rounded and heavy textured – glossy green on the upper side and felted white on the under side. That felting is called indumentum (sometimes tomentum).

In the wild, P. insignis grows on the eastern side of Marlborough. Apparently you can see it as you drive down the state highway but the only times I have driven it in recent times, I have been behind the wheel with my eyes fixed firmly on the road. It hangs onto the rocky banks, coping with drought and salt spray. This means it is not the easiest of plants to grow in a lush garden situation. It needs perfect drainage and an open, exposed site. Even then, we find mature plants can keel over and suddenly die from time to time.

To our ongoing embarrassment, our particularly good form here was stolen by my late mother from the Dunedin Botanic Gardens. She died 12 years ago (almost to the day), but her legacy lives on here. Pachystegias are small shrubs belonging to the asteraceae family. The “insignis” seems to mean distinguished or remarkable in this context.

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

Toxic plants and natural remedies

Brunfelsia, or the Yesterday Today Tomorrow plant, is highly toxic to dogs but fortunately few dogs eat flowers.

Brunfelsia, or the Yesterday Today Tomorrow plant, is highly toxic to dogs but fortunately few dogs eat flowers.

My mention of the toxicity of oleander in Plant Collector last week yielded the following comment via Twitter:
“I remember seeing a photo as a kid of someone who had made a bonfire with oleander. Poor guy looked like he had been doused in acid. He inhaled some smoke and wound up in intensive care with lung damage.”

Before you rush out to dispose of your oleander – if you have one – you may like to ponder that if you are determined to rid your garden of all poisonous and therefore dangerous plants, you will have to remove all daphnes, laburnum, alocasias, rhus, karaka, brunfelsia, aroids, colchicums, tulips and a whole lot more. You will end up removing half your garden. There is a certain folly to thinking that you can make your garden safe for small children and dogs by only growing non-toxic plants. Goodness, even oak and yew can be toxic to dogs.

The plant kingdom is still the prime source for most of our pharmaceutical compounds and our poisons. Aspirin was derived from willows, morphine from poppies. When a natural compound to treat cancer was isolated in Taxus baccata, British gardeners were urged to deliver their yew clippings to depots for a few years so researchers could isolate the relevant chemical compound.

Fortunately for the plant kingdom, scientists then set about re-creating the desired plant sequence in laboratories to avoid the problems of depleting natural resources.

I am sure it was Agatha Christie who alerted her readers to the fact that laburnum seeds are highly toxic and can in fact be used to poison off one’s enemy. But there are so many other sources of poisons. Cyanide is a natural compound, found in peach and apricot kernels, cassava, even apple pips along with many other sources. Ricin, one of the deadliest natural toxins, is derived from the seed of the castor plant (Ricinus communis) – as indeed is castor oil. The castor plant is highly decorative and still found in some gardens and public plantings. It was ricin that was used to murder Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, in London back in 1978. He was poked with an umbrella spike in the street which transferred the poison capsule into the back of his thigh. It took three days for him to die.

Most of the alocasias are toxic but this one particularly so. We are cautious handling it in the garden

Most of the alocasias are toxic but this one particularly so. We are cautious handling it in the garden

All this gives lie to the feel-good myth that “if it is natural, it must be good for us”. These can be powerful substances with unexpected side effects for the unwary. The potential for enthusiastic amateurs to get it wrong is just as great today as earlier.

The world has been grappling with the thin line between safety and danger in plants for over two millennia. It was the Ancient Greek Theophrastus, back before Christ was born, who is credited with first starting to try and sort out the plant kingdom into some comprehensible form, a task that was not completed until Carl Linnaeus in the 1700s. When humankind depended entirely on wild-gathered plant material for medicine, the potential for matters to go badly wrong was enormous. The majority of the populace has some difficulty in recognising different plants, even more so if they look similar. It is highly likely that there were a fair number of people out there a-diggin’ (for roots or bulbs), a-cuttin’ (for foliage or flowers) and a-gatherin’ (seeds) who subscribed to the “near enough is good enough” school of thought, especially when collecting for payment.

The pharmaceutical industry comes in for a huge amount of bad press but at least it has standardised product removed from the vagaries of human error. My elder daughter is a synthetic organic chemist who spent her later university years working on replicating a compound of great potential that had been identified in a plant native to Thailand. I was discussing herbal remedies with her recently and her comment was that, certainly when it came to ingesting a remedy, she’d rather buy it ready-made because then there is more certainty about the accuracy of the source plants and the dosage. For of course the time of the year when plant material is gathered can have a dramatic effect on the concentrations of a desired compound, let alone growing conditions. There will be much greater margin of error when it comes to home-prepared topical applications – in other words applied directly to the skin. But I would be very cautious and want certainty when it comes to swallowing or inhaling.

We are raised in this country to fear most mushrooms and toadstools. The dangers of misidentification can be fatal when it comes to eating them. That caution is not always extended to the plant world. Natural is not a synonym for safe and healthy. If you want wild gathered food skewers, use sticks of a rosemary bush not daphne or, as mentioned last week, oleander.

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

Garden Lore

“May I assure the gentleman who writes to me (quite often) from a Priory in Sussex that I am not the armchair, library-fireside gardener he evidently suspects…and that for the last forty years of my life I have broken my back, my fingernails and sometimes my heart, in practical pursuit of my favourite occupation!”

Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962)

Ready to use weed killer
Ready to use weed killer

It is so exciting, the rare occasions when I receive a free sample, even if it is weed killer. The garden writer’s lot is not blessed with an abundance of samples. This was Kiwicare’s “Direct Hit” in their Weed Weapon range – aka glyphosate (formerly known by its brand name of Round Up) combined with saflufenacil which gives it a much quicker response in killing vegetation. What makes it different to the earlier “Weed Weapon” (which came in a spray bottle like shower cleaner) is that this is an aerosol foam which means you can see where it has landed.

Does it work? Yes, it will kill most weeds quickly. Is it economical? I doubt it. I didn’t get a price but you will be paying for the convenience of having it packaged in a can like fly spray. Would I recommend it? No. And no again. Being a foam makes it much harder to control the direction of the application than a spray and I suspect the level in the can will drop very quickly. It is also vital to wear protective gloves because I doubt you can use this product without getting foam on your trigger finger. Gardening gloves are not protective gloves. You need disposables or dishwashing gloves.

What was frankly alarming to us (and Mark reeled in horror when I showed him) is that the foam looks like shaving foam or that cream substitute you can squirt from an aerosol. Children would find it simply irresistible. No matter how careful you are, we doubt the wisdom of packaging weed killer that way. If you feel the need of instant weed killer in your life, I would recommend keeping to the earlier “Weed Weapon” in the spray bottle.

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