Plant Collector: Daphne bholua

Daphne bholua - oh the fragrance

Daphne bholua – oh the fragrance

It is a rare plant that can stop you in your tracks from several metres out and have you sniffing the air to locate the source of scent. The Himalayan D. bholua is one of those plants. In our experience it is the strongest and sweetest of any of the daphnes and it has a very long flowering season because it sets buds down its stems. It is also very hardy. That is about the sum total of its merits.

As a garden plant, it becomes leggy, scruffy and untidy with age. It seeds down too freely and suckers around the place so when you think you have dug out one plant, it is just as likely that the suckers will pop up all around to confound you. It is semi deciduous. In cold conditions, it will drop all its leaves. In temperate conditions it drops some and of those it retains, only half look healthy while the other half look as if they are dying. Its natural form is upright but twiggy and untidy. Even the named cultivars we have tried are no better.

But we would not be without it. Oh, that scent. It all comes down to placement. Basically, you need to hide the plants behind something more attractive so you enjoy the scent while not expecting to admire the plant. I cut back and try and shape some of our larger plants from time to time, but it does not make a lot of difference to the overall appearance. You can never have too many fragrant daphnes in a garden and the narrow, upright habit of bholua means those plants are not going to hog too much space.

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

Garden lore

“Of all the ugly things, nothing is worse than the variegated conifer, which usually perishes as soon as all its variegated parts die, the half dead tree often becoming a bush full of wisps of hay.”

William Robinson ,The English Flower Garden (sixth edition, 1898).

Crop rotation

Crop rotation has been followed for many hundreds of years for good reasons. Those medieval agriculturists knew a thing or two when they practiced crop rotation, including a fallow year – one in seven, if my memory serves me right. Planting quick maturing green crops and using compost can remove the need for the fallow year (which was all about returning fertility to the soils). The crop rotation part remains important because if you keep planting the same type of vegetables in the same place every year, you will get a build up of pests and diseases.

There is a wealth of information on crop rotation, but in its simplest form, think about plant families, not individual vegetables. There are the solanums (potatoes, capsicums, aubergines, tomatoes), the brassicas, (cabbage, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, many of the Asian greens and broccoli), legumes (peas and beans), other leafy greens and beets, alliums (onions and garlic), the carrot, celery and parsley family of Apiaceae (or Umbelliferae), and the cucurbits (pumpkin, cucumber, courgettes, melons).

There are six families above plus a few like sweet corn which don’t fit anywhere. Rotate them round the veg patch every year and you will get a break of several years (minimum of four is desirable) before they end up back in the same spot. That simple process will greatly reduce your need to resort to intervention with sprays and powders.

If it all sounds too complicated, just keep the brassicas and the solanums moving. They are the most vulnerable crops.

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

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Fruit hedges

Psidium littorale or strawberry guava

Psidium littorale or strawberry guava

“Write about fruit hedges.” That was a request that had me thinking but good options are not that easy.

You can plant anything in a row and call it a hedge. If you live in the country and it gets tall, it is then called a shelter belt. If it is a double row it becomes an avenue. A grid-planted orchard with social pretensions is a phalanx. If the hedge is comprised of all the same plants and clipped at least once a year, it is a formal hedge. If it is comprised of different fruiting plants it becomes (drum roll), a contemporary food forest. All the rage in some circles, are food forests.

As the enquiry came from a gardener on a very small town section, I think it likely that she wanted the formality of a smaller hedge combined with the function of an edible crop. There aren’t many candidates for that. The problem is that if you clip hard, you will frequently be trimming off next year’s fruiting stems. Added to that, most fruiting plants thrive best with maximum sun, plenty of air movement and away from root competition. That is pretty much the antithesis of a hedging situation.

The other issue is to consider how many of a particular plant you want. It has to be delicious to warrant having a whole hedge line in one fruit though it is more likely that most people chose on criteria of being edible and tolerant of conditions, rather than hugely delectable.

Ugni molinae or NZ cranberry

Ugni molinae or NZ cranberry

If you live way down south, you could probably hedge gooseberries (a bit prickly) or currants but these are not happy or rewarding crops in the more temperate north. Some swear by Ugni molinae (also known as Myrtus ugni, the NZ cranberry or the Chilean guava). I love the sweet little fruit and think every family garden needs a plant. A plant, singular. But as a hedging option, you would have to keep working hard to have it looking good. It is a bit sparse and twiggy and is prone to infestation from thrips.

The other guava (Psidium littorale, also known as the Chilean guava or the strawberry guava) is probably the single best evergreen, fruiting option we can think of for hedging. It is a lot more forgiving when it comes to clipping and pruning and could be kept to a tidy hedge below 200cm. The problem with it is that you want to grow one (or maybe two – a red one and a yellow one) to feed browsing children, attract kereru which love the fruit, and to make the odd jar of jelly. But few of us would think they are sufficiently delicious to want a whole row of them.

The ubiquitous feijoa

The ubiquitous feijoa

Feijoas, I hear some of you saying. Yes, feijoas make an excellent hedge but if you keep them well clipped you will be cutting off next year’s fruiting stems. These are plants which are best grown with plenty of space, just given the occasional light thinning or pruning and left to their own devices. That is not hedging. When our children were small, we owned a property with a row of four mature feijoas. They ripened in succession so we had fruit for months and the children would head outside with a teaspoon each in their little hands and sit beneath, scooping out the pulp to eat. They also occupied a space that probably measured close to 10 metres by 4 metres. As a productive road boundary planting, they were great. But a hedge, they were not.

If you follow English garden trends, you may have seen step-over espaliers. They appear to be a hot ticket addition. Generally apples or pears, these are beaten into submission by training along wires at knee height. Being deciduous trees, there will be no winter foliage but apparently you can get a worthwhile crop if you manage it right and you can ring your productive garden with these step-overs which therefore function as a type of hedge.

Do we think this is a good idea? Not really. For starters, the fruit is going to be at just the right height for the dog to cock its leg and pee on it. Or the neighbour’s dog, if you don’t have one. It is also a dry climate technique. With the relatively heavy rains most of us experience in the mid north, soil splash is a problem and will spread disease. Good air circulation, full sun and being above the splash zone will reduce problems. We are certainly not rushing into trying step-over espaliers.

In the end, fruit trees are probably most productive and healthy when grown as individual specimens. Fruiting hedges? Not such a practical option, in the greater scheme of things.

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

Plant Collector: Galanthus S Arnott

What can be prettier than snowdrops in the depths of winter?

What can be prettier than snowdrops in the depths of winter?

Are there any bulbs more charming than proper English snowdrops? Except that they are not English at all, having been introduced from Europe where they have a wide distribution. I had thought they were called ‘snowdrops’ because they often peek through snow (a light covering, I assume because they only grow about 15 to 20cm high) to herald the coming of spring, but I see the botanical name translates from Greek as milk flower. Because we lack the chilly temperatures and snow here, we are limited in the range of galanthus that we can grow well. There is such a word as a “galanthophile” – one who is obsessed with the genus but you would have a hard job earning that epithet here in the mid north. Easily the best performing snowdrop for us is Galanthus S. Arnott which never fails to delight and increases satisfyingly well. We keep gently increasing its spread around the garden and that also staggers the flowering because it will come in later in colder parts.

You don’t get a long flowering season but oh they are so very charming. The proper snowdrop has a little inner trumpet of three petals surrounded by a skirt of three outer petals which look like little wings. Sometimes people refer to the stronger growing snowflake, often seen in paddocks, as a snowdrop. But it is not. It only has the inner trumpet of petals and lacks the delicate charm. It is also a different genus, being a leucojum.

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

Garden lore

“Some ladies asked me why their plant had died. They had got it from the very best place, and they were sure they had done their very best for it… They had made a nice hole with their new trowel, and for its sole benefit they had bought a tin of Concentrated Fertilizer. This they had emptied into the hole, put in the plant, and covered it up and given it lots of water, and – it had died! And yet these were the best and kindest of women, who would never have dreamed of feeding a new-born infant on beefsteaks and raw brandy.”

Gertrude Jekyll, Wood and Garden (1899).

Cutting back to bare wood

Cutting back to bare wood

Renovating old camellias
Not all big old camellias are things of beauty. But they are one of the easiest plants to renovate and now is the right time to carry out drastic pruning. If you cut a camellia off at ground level, most will resprout and come again. Even glyphosate doesn’t kill them. However, if you want to keep the plant, don’t cut it back to the ground because what you will get is a thicket of new shoots in spring. Look for the natural shape of the plant and cut off just above where the branches are well formed – usually about a metre up on an old plant. This means that when it flushes into growth, you will have an attractive and established shape already.

You can cut right back to bare wood with no foliage left at all. It is only the very occasional, contrary camellia that will die instead of rushing into growth.

The plant will respond by pushing out a mass of new leaves and you should have reasonable cover by the end of the first summer and a lovely bushy specimen which is flowering again a year later. If you can see mottling or variegation on the leaves, make sure you disinfect your pruning tools before you touch any other camellias. Camellias are susceptible to virus but that is not necessarily bad. It is what gives variegated blooms. However, you don’t want to transfer virus to specimens that are free of it, hence cleaning your tools. Household bleach will suffice as a disinfectant.

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