Found! Low maintenance gardening (of a sort)

The magnolia and te maunga

Magnolia campbellii, the Quaker Mason form

For me, the start of a new gardening year is marked by the opening of the first magnolia bloom. It is a very personal measure of time. This year, it happened this very week. Magnolia campbellii has opened her first blooms on the tree in our park. So I start a new season series of The Magnolia and Te Maunga – ‘te maunga’ being ‘the mountain’ in Maori. Our magnificent Mount Taranaki is commonly referred to simply as ‘the mountain’ by locals because it stands alone and is part of the very being of anyone who was born or now lives within sight of its presence. It is, by the way, an active volcano. With other volcanoes erupting in the world, Mark was moved to comment last week that we do at least live far enough away to get some warning if we ever need to evacuate. I have ascertained that the distance between our magnolia and the peak is 36km as the crow flies, so it is at the limits of my camera zoom.

Beneath the mighty rimu trees

Earlier in the year, we rashly agreed to open the garden for the annual conference of the NZ Camellia Society. I say rashly, only because the August date is coming closer. We closed our garden to the public coming up to five years ago now. While we maintain it to a standard that we are happy with, opening it to others requires a higher standard of presentation. I am beginning to feel the pressure. This week, I started working my way along the garden we call the rimu avenue. It is an area about 100 metres long and up to 25 metres wide, so large enough to accommodate a fair number of townhouses, were it in a major city. Fortunately, we are in the country, so instead of townhouses we have a backbone of 14 majestic rimu trees, now nearing 150 years old. Rimu are a native podocarp, botanically Dacrydium cupressinum. Mark’s great grandfather planted them back in the 1870s and photos show that they have doubled in size in Mark’s lifetime.

Beneath these rimu, we have what is probably the most complex planting of anywhere in our garden. Oddly, it occurred to me this week that it is the least demanding in terms of regular maintenance. This is not related to the complexity of the planting; it is to do with the fact that it is all in dry shade and also to the plant selection over time. In the last five years, we have gone through it and pulled out fallen branches and a bit of occasional debris but it has not had the loving attention to detail that I am currently giving it.

Over time, this area has become a largely self-maintaining matrix planting, an ecosystem in its own right. There is a little bit of seeding down, but not too much. The *volunteer plants* that arrive are largely ferns, nikau palms, native collospermum and other astelias. The most common weeds are the occasional germinating Prunus campanulata and the cursed bangalow palms. Most weeds need more light. That in itself is worth knowing. If you hate weeding, go for shade gardening.

Piling the debris onto the meandering paths

All I am doing to jazz it up is going through and removing much of the fallen rimu leaf litter and debris which builds up over time, taking out the spent heads of bromeliads, thinning clumps where necessary, a bit of cutting back of shrubby begonias, zygocactus, thinning the thuggish Monstera deliciosa and Philodendron bipinnatifidum and general tidying up. It looks a great deal better for it.

For those who are wondering what plants we have growing in the rimu avenue, I will tell you that when we first went into the enormous subtropical glasshouse at Kew Gardens in London, we felt right at home. There seemed to be a large number of plants growing under glass that we grow under the rimu, an area that is completely frost free. We have a whole range of shade palms, schefflera, vireya rhododendrons, dendrobium orchids, many clivias red, orange and yellow, species hippeastrum bulbs, Crinum moorei, bromeliads galore, ferns and a whole lot more. Everything is interplanted so it is complex and layered full, interesting year-round, as well as low maintenance. Mark’s father first starting planting this area in the late 1950s so it has only taken 60 years of active management to reach this state of gardening nirvana.

Laying cut lengths beneath

and spreading the mulched leafy waste – yellow because it was mostly berberis

While I am working ‘up the top’, as we say, Mark and Lloyd have been down in the park doing a tidy up of fallen branches and dead shrubs and trees. Chainsaw and mulcher work, mostly. For those who read these posts looking for handy hints, I photographed their techniques for dealing with the waste on site. While they may have removed the bigger pieces for firewood, the smaller lengths of branch and trunk are chainsawed into short lengths and laid beneath large shrubs or trees. Line the lengths up in the same direction and they look neater and more purposeful than being tossed higgledy piggledy. The leafage and finer material has been mulched on site and raked out over a bed of dormant herbaceous planting. These are not techniques for formal or tightly groomed gardens but we find it an acceptable process in informal and more naturalistic areas. And we like the philosophy of keeping the cycle of growth, death and then decay nourishing further fresh growth in the same location.

A garden for all seasons

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Is it possible to have a garden for all seasons? In our soft climate, yes, it is. But is it possible to have a garden that is at its peak for 12 months of the year? That is what many folk visualise when they think of a garden for all seasons. And the answer is no.

You can have a garden that looks more or less the same all year round. This is achieved by lots of hard structure, heavily trained and clipped plants, very little seasonal interest and constant maintenance or garden grooming. Seasonal interest (flowers, bulbs, autumn colour and suchlike) is messy and alters the tidy picture.

A reader left a comment on a recent post which included “I’m hoping that you have invented the solution to the 4 season perennial garden by then.” (Here’s looking at you, Cath). It started a train of thought along the lines of whether this is even possible and whether I had ever seen it done. If by a four-season garden, is meant incidents of colour (usually flowers), then yes, you can do it. But not massed, peak performance all year round.

It is an old photo of us and the view out the window has recently changed. It is the border to the left of the coffee table that I have recently replanted in blocks for flowery interest

I replanted a border recently, aiming for year-round performance. About 20 metres long by just over a metre wide, it contains a few established shrubs which flower in spring and summer and I underplanted in large blocks – each at least a square metre, some larger – to get big splashes of colour through most of the year. It is a garden that we look out to from one of our favourite indoor seating positions for afternoon tea or an early evening drink. It now has a pretty blue scabiosa (dreadful name – the pincushion flower) for summer, Mark’s mother’s vintage Sweet Williams and hot pink Phlox paniculata for spring and early summer, large white flowered polyanthus for winter, blue asters for late summer and pink and white sedums for autumn. All interplanted with random bulbs I lifted from elsewhere. It doesn’t quite cover the full 12 months although it should have something showy, in bloom, for most of the year. But it is one block at a time, not the full border simultaneously.

Phlox paniculata, I think. Easy to grow, vibrant and seasonal

Elsewhere, we go more for matrix planting, rather than block planting. The new grass and perennial garden is strongly modelled on matrix principles but even so, as winter draws in, that garden is going into a rest phase. There is not much to carry it through the coldest weeks.

The magnolias, of which we have quite a few, do not all bloom at the same time. Nor do we want them to.

It is a conundrum. From time to time, we ponder reopening the garden for selected days through the year – snowdrop weekend, magnolias, lilies and the like. But while the snowdrops – or bluebells or lilies – have a defined and finite peak season which is relatively easy to determine, which weekend would we pick for the magnolias? They flower from July to the end of September here. No matter which date we select, some will have finished flowering and others will not have opened.

Early winter – just last week in fact. The view from our park.

I used to get so irritated by visitors at our annual festival who would go round the garden and come out saying of the rhododendrons, “It must have been gorgeous a few weeks ago,” or “There is a lot that have finished flowering, aren’t there?” I would quell my irritation and smile courteously, saying something bland along the lines of “there is always something different in bloom but yes, some have finished for the season and some are yet to open”. What they wanted was peak display when everything bloomed en masse, perfectly timed for the garden festival. This is what I saw at the Floriade tulip festival in Canberra and what, I understand, can be seen at the Butchart Gardens in Canada in their peak season of July and August. But ours is a private garden. Our rhododendrons flower from July until Christmas and what we want is something of interest every week of the year.

Late winter – as in August 9th.

Knowing this, we raised our eyebrows when Pukeiti Gardens, then a private trust, went to a great deal of effort to rebrand itself as “a garden for all seasons”. It seemed like an over-promise that they could never deliver. Its main focus was rhododendrons and yes, they flower from July til Christmas, but not all at once for all that time. Their location, at altitude, butting up to a national park means that winter is not a hospitable time for garden visitors – far from it – and being surrounded by evergreen, native forest means that autumn is never going to be as showy as in other places. It was – and probably still is – primarily a garden for spring and summer. Intrepid visitors outside those two seasons will still find much of interest, but not mass, seasonal display as implied by the catch line ‘a garden for all seasons’.

Large parts of the gardening world put their gardens to bed for winter and do not expect anything to happen during that rest period of chill. In our mild conditions, we have flowers in bloom all year round and actively garden for 12 months of the year. But, as I commented in my last post about vireya rhododendrons, it is a trade-off. You can have the big bang impact of peak season with mass blooming and all-round showiness, or you can have long performance of gentler display.

Do the maths. It is not even just the four seasons. Each season has its early, mid and late period. If you want year-round interest, then you have to allocate about one twelfth of the area and the plants to peak in each seasonal period. That is never going to give you the massed bangs for buck display at a single time. But it will give you garden interest all year round.

Today is brought to you… by the colour orange

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Orange is not my favourite colour. In this, I am unlike the bride who wore an orange wedding gown and themed her wedding on orange and brown. I mentally walked through every room in our house and there is no orange to be seen. Not a skerrick. And the only orange item in my wardrobe is a faded tee shirt. Clearly, orange is not a colour that I relate to in daily life.

But as late autumn draws in, the orange outside is very cheering. On Monday, I thought I must get out and photograph the dwarf Japanese maple that turns its raiment from modest green to blazing orange as winter approaches.

The day was grey with the sun attempting to break through, a light so unusual here that I also photographed it. I have only been to the UK once in December and I remember a similar light on the day we visited the Russell Page garden at Leeds Castle. The difference is that here, the sun did indeed come out and shine brightly – if intermittently – as the day progressed while my UK family said that was as good as it got there, closing in on the shortest day.

I became entirely focused on orange. Mind you, it is hard to ignore it as the citrus trees flaunt their wares. We are blessed to have a climate where we can grow citrus and also to have inherited a garden where the trees have large been included in the wider garden, rather than confined to an orchard situation. Citrus are both decorative and functional. I once wrote a fairly lengthy piece on growing citrus in our conditions if any readers in less traditional citrus areas are interested.

Vireya Rhododendron macgregoriae flowers like clockwork, as it has for nigh on sixty years now. That is a seriously advanced age for a vireya, which are not generally long lived, and this particular plant has a place in our family history, having been collected in the wild by Mark’s father, Felix, back in 1957. Orange is a common colour in vireyas and we have a number of other hybrids also in flower at the time. None mass flower like the species R. macgregoriae. It is a trade-off, I think. You can have either prolonged blooming over many months or mass flowering, but not both. At least when it comes to vireyas.

The maples and the flowering cherry trees produce many hues of orange and tend to colour in late autumn for us – or early winter as it is now. June usually feels autumnal for us, July is the bleakest month of winter and by August, we are bursting into spring growth and bloom. We really shouldn’t complain about a winter that is effectively about six or eight weeks in duration.

The first of the clivias are in bloom – looking a bit pink in this image but more soft orange in real life. I asked Mark which one this is and he thinks it is C. gardenii. It is nowhere near as showy as the C. miniata selections and some of the hybrids. But as I think an abundance of bright orange clivias can lead to the NABOC syndrome (Not Another Bloody Orange Clivia), the understated charm of this one pleases me.

The orange tones of autumn shone through the grey day. I looked around and thought yes! There is a time and a place for orange. It is in autumn and winter.

Lessons learned

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The stone mill wheel serves as a bird bath and is used often, this time by a tui

Were I starting a new garden from scratch, especially a large garden, I would reduce the number of beds and borders. And I would be more rigorous in separating the highly detailed areas from the broad sweeps of plantings.

Pleione orchids in spring. At this time of the year they are dormant and can be lifted, cleaned up and replanted.

The little mill wheel bed is a highly detailed area

I am perfectly happy doing highly detailed gardening. Micro gardening, I call it. As I lifted and divided big clumps of pleione orchids, I decided it was the gardening equivalent of surgery. But I want my areas of highly detailed gardening limited and confined. We have a large rockery which requires close attention, the sunken garden and the millwheel garden. It was the little millwheel garden that I was going through earlier this week. It is full of seasonal detail like the aforementioned pleiones, blue lachenalias, fritillarias, erythroniums, dactylorhiza orchids and similar tiny treasures along with a few choice shrubs like species camellias and small rhododendrons.

The mistake I made over time was to grab pots of such treasures from the nursery (in the days when we still did the full range for mail order) and tuck them into odd places here and there. Everywhere, really. Now I am trying to reverse that and lifting such little gems to relocate out of mixed borders.

Bolder plantings in bigger sweeps need treasures that are in scale to the other plantings, not small detail.

Away from these highly detailed areas of planting needing close maintenance, I want bigger sweeps of bolder planting. I love how our avenue gardens have shaped up with the bigger sweeps of interesting shade perennials. It is the itsy, bitsy, inbetween stuff that I do not enjoy doing. The mixed border – too often the hodge podge border – has a lot to answer for. We have too many borders and beds like that and they are hard going.

The round garden was a design aberration and has never been successful

Hand-hewn stone artefacts dating back to pioneer forebears

I didn’t just strip out the old rose garden. I am also nearing the end of clearing another design aberration – a round garden in the front lawn which had evolved over time to something less than satisfactory. The defining concrete mowing strip has been removed, as have the bulbs and smaller plants. It is just waiting for Mark to remove the dwarf lollipop camellias and the Graham Thomas rose. All that will remain is the umbrella Magnolia laevifolia in the centre and the stone artefacts which are of interest. One is a shaped corner stone which used to be placed to protect the early timber buildings in settler New Plymouth from being raked by passing cart wheels. Another is a small stone trough Mark’s mother collected, hand-shaped of course and the centrepiece is another mill wheel. This wheel is a small inner wheel from a domestic grain mill in the Te Henui stream area in New Plymouth. Mark’s parents gathered these historical pieces back in the 1950s when nobody else valued them and the records have been passed down orally. We don’t do much in the way of ornamentation in our garden but we appreciate our small collection of historic artefacts.

I am also eyeing up another three short lengths of garden border and thinking I may strip out the messy underplanting. There are sufficient shrubs in those borders to carry them without the need for ground cover detail as well. A mulch of leaf litter or compost is all that they need. It is just quite a bit of work to lift everything and reuse the plants and bulbs that are of value. If we gardened less with bulbs it would be easier but our bulbs represent many years of building up large numbers of different types, many rare and curious, and are a feature of our garden.

Not every wall, fence, pathway or building needs an edging border of planting. We had our first visible frost this week – we don’t get too many of these each winter.

There are several lessons I have learned through all this:

Gardens evolve over time and we often don’t step back to look with critical eyes at the current picture. Sometimes, they do just become a mishmash, especially if you are the sort of gardener who tucks plants in to fill spaces. Or they become dominated by thugs which take over and swamp out the more desirable plants.
Tiny treasures and small detail need to be accommodated in designated areas where they won’t get overtaken by competitors and where it is easier to carry out the more careful, intensive maintenance that they require.
It is still possible to get detail and variety into larger scale plantings but the detail needs to be larger in scale.
Not every area needs the oft recommended three layers of planting (ground cover, middle layer and upper canopy or backdrop (recommended, I think, to get the lush, well furnished look).
Not every pathway, driveway or building needs a side border to complete it. There can be too many bits and bobsy borders and beds. Fewer may be more effective and certainly makes for easier management.
Mixed borders are difficult to manage well in the long term (mixed borders being a mix of woody shrubs, perennials, climbers and sometimes bulbs).
Most perennials perform much better if you lift and divide them, replanting them in well-dug soil. Some, like polyanthus and pulmonaria, benefit from lifting and dividing every two or three years in our conditions. Others like hostas, can usually be left for about ten years before they start to go back (by ‘going back’, I mean they can reach a point where they get smaller, not larger).

As I have said before, if there is an area of your garden where you avert your eyes every time you walk by, there is a problem that needs to be addressed. It won’t get better if you ignore it. Sometimes it needs drastic action.

A Week in the Garden of Jury

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Persimmons framed against the autumn blue sky

Our autumn days are not always like this. We have had a week of dreary, grey and cold weather interspersed with rain every day. It can be very dispiriting. But it is more common for us to have days like today’s glorious morning when the persimmons make a colourful sight. The intensity of light and colour we get all year round here is something we take for granted, in the main. It is not until I travel overseas that I realise this is not common in many other climates.

The persimmons are the old fashioned, astringent variety which need to be very soft and ripe to eat. I have a couple of trays ripening. This year I want to try mashing the flesh and semi-drying it as fruit leather to use in baking. Persimmons make a reasonable substitute for dried apricots. The birds are enjoying the majority of the crop which is still on the tree.

A barrow full of bangalow seed

I have written before about the invasive habits of the bangalow palm, Archontophoenix cunninghamiana, and why we think it should be on the banned list for commercial sale. Because ours are handsome plants, Mark has been loathe to get the chainsaw out to drop them but he does get the extension ladder out to cut off the seed. Behold a barrow full of seed, though Mark observes that many more fell off and are lying at the bottom of the trunk. The problem with the seed is that the birds spread it and it can out-compete our native nikau palm (Rhopalostylis sapida). I do wonder at what point Mark may reach for the chainsaw rather than the extension ladder, because allowing such prolific seed-set on plants we know are invasive is unacceptable in our personal gardening philosophy.

Bulding an extension to the banana frame, using giant bamboo

Protecting one of several bunches. We are currently eating our own, homegrown bananas

The extension ladder was also required for the covering of the bananas for winter. “I had to build an extension to the frame,” Mark said and that was no small task. The bananas are the one and only plant we cover for winter and with the best ever crop of ripening bananas, this was even more important this year. Being 5km from the coast as the crow flies, we are not quite frost free here. Most tender plants can cope with the occasional minor frost as long as we place them carefully, but the bananas are marginal at best and warrant the special attention if we want the crop.

As our maunga – or Mount Taranaki to non-NZ residents – has put her full winter raiment on this week, it was a close-run race between the covering of the bananas and the first cold snap of winter. Not that we have had a frost yet.

The ladybirds have moved inside to hibernate. They creep into the crevices of the upstairs wooden joinery which can make opening and shutting the windows challenging. I was fine with this annual event until a social media friend suggested that they looked to be the pest Harlequin ladybird which is a far grubbier and less desirable version of the charming, common ladybird. I suspect she is right, though the first reported incidence of the Harlequin ladybirds was up north in 2016 and we have had these hibernating critters for longer than that. So either they have been in the country longer than has been reported, or we have some other form of this beetle. I see there are 6000 different types of ladybirds so unravelling the different ones is beyond me. They are a bit messy, so I may flick them back out the windows with the duster.

Propping up the Ficus antiarus

I see it was April 11 when we had the last major treemageddon incident. Our Lloyd – our incredibly obliging and handy man here – did a fantastic job to get the clean-up to this stage. The poor Ficus antiarus is but a shadow of its former self after being completely uprooted. It remains to be seen how tough it is in longer term survival. The 140 years of straight Pinus radiata trunk may be destined for firewood after all. We have been unable to find anybody with a chainsaw mill who could mill it on site for us. The poor stripped remnant of a plant to the left of the trunk in the second photo is, or maybe was, a fruiting macadamia tree.

Mark is now looking in askance at the splendid specimen of Abies procera ‘Glauca’, a magnificent tree that he is worrying may be a ticking time bomb here. We are usually philosophical about large trees that fall but that is because their location means they will fall without damaging power lines, drainage pipes or buildings. The abies, alas, is more likely to fall on our house and cause major damage. He is wondering if it is time for us to make the hard call and fell it in a safe direction. Every time he mentions this, he expresses regret that his father planted it so close to the house. But that is so often the story with big trees – most people never factor in their potential size as they reach maturity.

The Theatre of the Banana, as I describe the protection of the only plant we wrap for winter

The times, they are a-demandin’ change

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Currently a bit forlorn, but give it a few months and it will look very different

The rose garden has gone. Gorn forever. Henceforth this area will be known as the sunken garden. Because the centrepiece is the sunken garden area – Felix and Mimosa’s DIY colonial Lutyens effort, as I have described it. It is all fashioned from granite, marble and brick. Mark once water blasted it and it came up an alarming shade of white.

An undated photo but best guess is around the mid 1950s. The marble lining is still white

I, too, could get it looking pretty but it took a lot of work and it didn’t stay looking pretty for long enough to warrant the effort

It was the rose garden because it used to house Mimosa’s old rose collection. I think I can recall it as being fantastically opulent, voluptuous and romantic with the air hanging heavy with scent – but only for a couple of weeks in spring. The rest of the time, it could look pretty scruffy. By the time I came onto the scene here in the eighties, it was already past its peak. This particular garden has probably had more attention lavished upon it in the last 30 years than any other area. Major makeovers, not just regular maintenance. At least four major makeovers that I can recall doing myself. And no matter how hard I tried, it looked okay in winter, really pretty for a few weeks in spring but scruffy in summer and autumn. I could not keep it looking good all year and it finally reached the point where I avoided looking closely, preferring to skirt around the outside rather than walking through it.

We have a date on this photo – 1961

Felix, down to his woollen singlet but still wearing his tweed hat putting in the stone millwheel table and benches. The wheel is the inner, turning centre of the mill, used for grinding papa to make a low quality brick on a neighbouring farm. Felix traded two sacks of potatoes for the wheel. The date of this photo must be mid to late 1950s

It is obvious what the problem is when I look at the old photos. When Mimosa started and had the area at its peak in the late 1950s and 1960s, conditions were very different. It was open and sunny and the plants grew without competition. In the 70 years since she started, the backbone rimu trees have doubled in size and their root systems have grown to match. Half the area is now always bone dry, sucked out of nutrients and plants have to compete with the rimu roots. The area has also become enclosed, very sheltered and the sunshine hours have been reduced by a whole range of perimeter plants.

I wrote about this area back in March when I was into full-on stripping out. It would have been easier had I been composting the plants but I recycled most of them. It would also have been easier had I not planted quite so many bulbs through it over the years. Clearing the area was a major operation and has generated many, many more square metres of ground cover than I started with to use elsewhere. There is much to be said for digging and dividing. The good picking roses have been relocated to the vegetable garden where it does not matter that they get black spot and suffer from defoliation. I can at least pick the flowers. We do not have a good climate for roses.

Finally, the last plants were gone at the weekend and the area was bare. Lloyd, our extraordinarily handy and obliging man about the garden, has moved in extra topsoil and raked and levelled to get it ready for sowing in grass. The eight camellias and two maples will stay and be shaped into gnarly, character, feature plants. We normally avoid growing plants in mown lawn areas and I know I will have to hand-trim the grass around the trunks but I am willing to do that. We do not like the weed-sprayed brown look of lank grass around trunks and I have no desire for the tidy, suburban look of encasing each trunk in a tidy round concrete circle planted with pansies. For those of you who want to know what the camellias are, two are the gorgeous species C. yuhsienensis, two are Mark’s ‘Pearly Cascade’ (C. pitardii hybrid) and the four standards are one of Mark’s hybrids that we never released but we refer to as ‘Pink Poppet’.

I am anticipating that once the grass grows we will have something far more sculptural to look at. And that seems a more appropriate look for the next era of this garden. Gardeners must look forward, not try forever to recapture the recalled magic moments of the past.