A mildly controversial opinion

Read down for my comments about staged photos

I have decided I just can’t get excited about hellebores. The most common hellebore – Helleborus orientalis – in particular, but not exclusively so. Not in our conditions with its mild climate and the explosion of spring flowers we get before winter has even officially ended. I have seen them in colder climates and they are way more rewarding than here.

Orientalis as a garden plant just doesn’t spark joy for me

I have tried and so has Mark. I have mollycoddled them, replaced inferior performers with better selections, weeded out endless seedlings, scrupulously dead-headed them to reduce unwanted seeding and to hold the infestations of aphids at bay, removed unsightly foliage (it takes years for scruffy spent foliage to drop and decay of its own accord), given them compost, bought new selections and still they are underwhelming. Mark has raised many seedlings of controlled crosses to get cleaner colours and flower spikes that stand above the foliage and they can look very promising in nursery pots and very average in the garden.

I don’t know how many H. niger we have raised and planted out. It is the pretty, low-growing white with the upward-facing flowers held just on the foliage. It is a one season wonder for us. I was delighted with ‘Angel Glow’ but after three very pretty seasons, it has all but disappeared this year.

The temptation was too great. I floated flowers from the ‘Marbled Group’ but it is their all round performance as garden plants that impress.

They are not all without merit. I remain sold on the ‘Marbled Group’ from UK breeder, Rodney Davey. ‘Anna’s Red’ and ‘Penny’s Pink’ remain the best of that series in our garden but we also have ‘Molly’s White’, ‘Ruby Daydream’ and ‘Sophie’s Delight’. Just a word of warning: ‘Anna’s Red’ made a big and luscious plant so I thought I would divide it to use it further. It did not appreciate this treatment and has been slow to recover- as in a few years, not months. Mark informs me that hellebores do not generally like being dug and divided in the same way as other perennials. They can sulk somethin’ chronic.

Helleborus x sternii is a mainstay in the woodland garden and very easy care. All it ever needs is the spent flower spikes removed at the end of the season. So too with H. argutifolius which is one of the parents of x sternii. H. foetidus is fine – more utility than exciting and it can spread a bit but it has interesting foliage. What these three have in common is that they all have green flowers but hold their flower spikes up above the foliage.

The staged photo of cut blooms shows they are individually pretty but I do not generally rate them as garden plants in our conditions

And therein lies the problem. There are many lovely staged photos of picked blooms arranged to face upwards. I have done a few myself. But that is not what they look like in the garden where H. orientalis is characterised by downward facing blooms. And as soon as one gets into the popular double blooms, the extra weight drags them over even further. Also, the interest in the dark slate colours – the deeper purplish-black the better – is based on picking a flower and looking at it facing upwards. As a garden plant with those dark flowers, they just tend to meld into the backgound. The best I can say is that orientalis opens a wider colour range than the other types we grow.

This sight sparks more delight for me than rather lacklustre H. orientalis – and comes at the same time of the season

While I am in awe at the far-reaching and long-standing enthusiasm that has made H. orientalis such a popular plant, they are best in cold climates which don’t have the same options we have. Colder, drier climates are even better. With calanthe orchids and Hippeastrum aulicum both in full bloom at the same time, I am not convinced that the utility hellebores that grow in similar conditions are worth more effort on my part. If you really want to grow them in softer climates like ours, keep them in a pot. They seem to perform better in controlled conditions. I don’t love them enough to give them that sort of special attention.

Yet another staged photo. I see I have done a few of these over the years.

From our bubble to yours

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Here we are again, in lockdown across the whole country. Where we are in Taranaki, we haven’t been in any form of lockdown since May 12 last year, which must seem pretty astounding to most of the world. I think it is 170 days since we last had a Covid case in the community anywhere in the country, though there have been plenty caught and isolated in mandatory quarantine at the border. Despite the evidence to the contrary, some still persist in describing our Covid status as dumb luck. I am not alone with an uncomfortable feeling that there are people who would be delighted to see us fail. Some of them even live in NZ – an example of political allegiance taking precedence over common sense and humanity, perhaps?

What is disconcerting is to see the spiteful glee from some on social media. Mostly men from the UK, Canada and the USA, they are referred to on Twitter as ‘the northern hemisphere reply guys’ because they will pop into conversations to sneer and jeer, delighting in how our country is now grappling with a Covid incursion. It proves them right, you see. Given how many of them don’t even realise that Australia and NZ are actually different countries separated by an ocean (It is a 3 hour flight between), I think it may be time to dig out all those world maps that leave NZ off entirely. I would be quite happy if they just forgot we existed again. ***

Currently happy for our country to fall off world maps

It seems New Zealand is going to be splendid test case for whether it is actually possible to contain and then eliminate the Delta strain when it is loose in the community. If it can be done, we will do it over the next few weeks but at this stage, the outcome is unpredictable.

Like everybody else, my real life world has become much smaller again, focused inwards within the boundary of the bubble I share with Mark and Dudley dog.

That airy tree in the centre to the right of the tall tree fern is Camellia tsaii

Sometimes I get a reminder of my ignorance. Camellia tsaii is the one of those. It is a species camellia with tiny white flowers and small leaves with a serrated edge. We used to grow it in our nursery days and I see it is still produced commercially in New Zealand and often commended for its fragrance (more ‘light scent’ than fragrant, in my book) and its arching habit of growth with an estimated height of 2.5m.

Yes, those little blooms which measure about 2.5cm up are lightly scented but as they are a good 7 metres up, it is a bit irrelevant

I gathered a few of the fallen flowers to float in the old stone mill wheel which we use as a bird bath

Somehow, it took me a long time to make the connection between those tidy, bushy little plants about 80cm high and this plant in the garden. Behold Camellia tsaii, admittedly many decades old. It still has masses of tiny flowers – lightly scented – and feeds the tui. So too does it have the typical serrated foliage and graceful, arching growth. It is just that it is about seven metres high. I am sure the customers who bought a plant from us back when we used to retail were never advised that it had the potential to become a graceful, small tree.

Camellia tsaii – a tick for arching, graceful growth

It used to be larger but a chunk was brought down with a large branch falling from a tree above. Mark recalled a totally random piece of information. Most camellias make good firewood but tsaii was different. It was a much lighter wood and it sparked horrendously. Mark is a wood connoisseur, you understand, having been a woodturner back in his younger days and with decades of experience bringing the winter firewood into the house. He can always identify which wood we are burning and will balance the daily winter woodbaskets between quick-burning and slower-burning firewood. Tsaii originated in Vietnam, Burma and southern China, and I wonder whether the lighter wood is an indication of it being a lower canopy forest tree.

It is however a handsome little tree, our Camellia tsaii, is it not?

As viewed from the sunny side with a cloud of tiny white flowers

May you stay safe and well wherever you are. My totally non-scientific observations from social media tell me that cinnamon scrolls and cheese puffs are the dominant baking themes this lockdown. Given it was sourdough bread last time, these quicker options might suggest we are hoping to triumph over Covid sooner rather than later. All I can offer is the best cheese puff recipe I have tried. It does need tapioca flour which is more widely available now than it used to be. I haven’t been out but if your local Asian supermarket is still open, it seems to be a staple there if Countdown and New World don’t have it.

Kia kaha.

Abbie

This cheese puff recipe couldn’t be easier and has never failed me

*** Just as an example of how vile the spiteful glee can be, here is somebody called Matthew Lesh who writes for the Telegraph in the UK starting a gloat at NZ’s expense with “Poetic justice is beautiful”. What on earth is wrong with these people?

Starting the countdown to festival 2021

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Goodness, gracious me. Just eleven weeks until we open for the annual Taranaki Garden Festival. Well, ten weeks and five days to be precise. October 29 is D-Day.

A view down into the park yesterday with Magnolia sargentiana robusta in bloom and the neighbour’s winter grazing across the road in the background.

I am not starting to panic. No sirree. The advent of an extra pair of skilled and motivated hands in the form of our Zach has taken away the pressure I felt last year. Though last year, as I was getting stressed by how much I wanted to get done, we had no idea that Covid and the difficulty of overseas travel would result in the biggest festival ever for us. We had three times the number of people we were expecting. It was fine. Our garden is large enough to absorb a lot of people without it feeling crowded. It is just a challenge as far parking and toilet facilities go. The poocalypse was memorable.

This year is shaping up to be another boomer of a festival, if early bookings and programme requests are anything to go by. It is not that we can’t travel overseas from NZ. We are not like Australia where they have to request permission giving sufficiently important reasons to be allowed to travel offshore. We can leave. It is getting back into the country that is the barrier – trying to book a place in MIQ (as we call our managed quarantine programme for almost everybody entering the country) is so difficult that few people want to risk it. And even more of us don’t want to travel overseas at this time. NZ seems a very safe haven. There is always the risk of Delta getting in but so far so good. I will be really miffed, though, if we get an outbreak just before the festival…. It is already disappointing enough that Covid in the community in Australia will probably keep that travel bubble closed, making it impossible for any Australians to cross the Tasman this spring.

An unnamed seedling magnolia of Mark’s down by Lloyd’s latest bridge. It is actually red but my camera has rendered it bright cerise.

We have never been so well prepared this far in advance. Ten weeks and we have broken the back of the major preparation work. We just need four weeks at the end to do the final round of presentation so all seems well in hand at this time.

Lloyd’s latest bridge needs some work on the approaches

Lloyd has built the last bridge essential for access around the new Wild North garden. He has had to make this one higher because the ground is boggy beneath so is now constructing some all-weather access to it. Because we live rurally on a reasonably large property, we have room to store materials that we may need one day. Who knew that the brick and concrete edging to a garden bed we dismantled some years ago would be just the ticket for retaining the edges of the access paths? We will have to buy in some pit metal, though, to get a safe surface to that area of path.

Zach was pleased to find a stack of big rocks to build his accidental rockery on the steep zig-zag path down to the park. I say an accidental rockery because he really only started by trying to retain the soil on the steep bank so it didn’t scour out and wash down onto the path below in heavy rains. It was part-way through that it became clear that he was actually constructing a semi-shaded rockery. I found him assorted suitable plants to fill it – the Australian native Veronica perfoliata, trilliums, snowdrops, Mark’s arisaema hybrids, little narcissi – to add to the Solomon Seal and green mondo grass that are already doing an excellent job of holding the soil.

… and calanthe orchids two. There are many more in the garden but just these two varieties in bloom at this time.

It is a lovely time of year, despite winter’s last gasps and storm fronts. Where I am working on the margins of the Avenue Garden, the calanthe orchids are at their charming peak. In fact, everywhere I look, there are spring flowers out and a whole lot more in bud. We are on the cusp of peak magnolia season. Mark is spending many hours doing his circuits of his magnolia and michelia seedlings to assess performance.

We are busy but on track. And oh my, I couldn’t think of a lovelier place to be busy.

A reminder about our Festival workshops:

There is a whole lot more to meadows and wild gardens than just letting plants grow. It takes a shift in thinking, a fresh view and different approaches to managing the garden. They are less demanding on maintenance but they still require management. “Tidying nature”, Mark is fond of saying.

We have spent a lot of time considering the less environmentally friendly aspects of domestic gardening – the use of nitrogen fertilisers, sprays to manage weeds, pests and fungi, the costs both financially and environmentally of achieving top quality lawns, meeting human expectations of tidiness and order, let alone the use of internal combustion engines like the lawnmower, hedge trimmer, weed-eater, chainsaw, rotary hoe and more.

We want our garden to be lower maintenance so it is sustainable into the future, more environmentally friendly yet still be beautiful to our eyes. It is why we have moved some areas of the garden to being managed meadows. Added to that, this year we are opening the new four acre Wild North Garden. I say new, but work started on it thirty years ago when Mark began planting up his father’s old cow paddock. Only now do we have it to the point where we are happy for others to see it, a new area of much looser maintenance with a wilder, more romantic feel to it.

My workshop this festival is entitled ‘A Gentler Way to Garden’ but it could be sub-titled ‘Lowering our garden carbon hoofprint’. If you are interested in walking more gently on the land but still creating a beautiful garden that can make your heart sing, you are very welcome to join this workshop on Sunday 31 October. You do, however, need to book. Details are here.

A view through to the summer Court Garden, though it looks good in later spring and right through autumn, too

The other workshop we are offering is ‘New Directions with Sunny Perennials’. It all started with our desire for summer colour here, masses of summer colour when our extensive woodlands are largely restful green. We have had a fairly close look at contemporary trends in gardening particularly in the UK but also parts of Europe – alas not quite as close as it would have been had we been able to make our most recent trip in July last year. But over several years, we have distilled our learning, so to speak, and experimented and trialled to come up with summer gardens that work in our situation and the NZ climate.

This is the same workshop that many people missed out on last year (numbers are restricted) but with the benefit of another year of experience in handling these styles of perennial gardening. We are offering it twice, Monday 1 and Saturday 6 November, as part of the Taranaki Garden Festival. More details and booking here.

Borders, more New Perennials in style than classic twin borders

Gardening magazines from nearly 80 years ago

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Totally unrelated but prettier – the tui are holding their annual convention in our Taiwanese cherry trees (Prunus campanulata)

On wet and bleak days, I have been sorting through our bookcases. Not all books are precious, I decided, and not all are worth keeping. The substantial hardback books that were released annually by the American Camellia Society had probably not been looked at since the year they arrived. They took up two shelves and dated from the late 1940s through until the early 1980s. I asked Mark years ago if we needed to keep them and he thought we should but this year, he agreed they could go. I managed to rehome them with a friend who is a camellia aficionado. He assured me there was a lot of interesting reading in them. True, I sweetened the rehoming exercise by also supplying him with a surplus bookcase from here to hold them.

Some books do not age well. World atlases go out of date. We had a surprising number of those and really, I just need to go and buy a single up to date one for the times when I want to hold a map in my hand, not look on a screen.

There are some fairly large gaps appearing in our bookcases

The internet has rendered many reference books unnecessary. Mark still reaches for books to look up details on a plant but that is because he resolutely remains a technophobe, despite my efforts to upskill him. I don’t use reference books much now, preferring the ease and immediacy of a Google search.

Some books we keep for inspiration, some for sentimental reasons, some for family reasons, some because they are simply beautiful books and some because we are sure one of us will read them one day. There is a lot of surplus dross that we will never miss between those books that justify being retained.

But then there are the odd forgotten treasures. So it was with the issues of ‘My Garden’, very early issues of the ‘New Zealand Gardener’ from the 1950s and the ‘Amateur Gardening Annuals’ from 1954 to 1957.

There are an uncomfortably large number of advertisments like this one where you, too, can nuke your lawn with a mix of 2 4 D and 2 4 5 T – often known as Agent Orange which was used to lay waste to the forests of Vietnam. Such a bargain at 35c!

‘The New Zealand Gardener’ was actually started in 1944 and is still produced today although it is unrecognisable in production values, tone and content. I could relate to a letter from a defensive nurseryman, justifying plant prices by comparing pre-1900 wages and prices to those of 1955. He had started in 1896 on 5/- a week (5 shillings, for post decimal generations, was 50c) but now his firm paid £2/16/- ($5.60) to apprentices and ‘journeymen’ were paid £12/1/- ($24.10). I may once have written on a similar theme myself, pointing out that the real price of plants has declined a great deal over time but I do not think I matched his final comment:

“We find that those who complain about the price of a few plants think nothing about going into a shop and paying £5 for a hat!”

We appear to have a few more issues of the English ‘My Garden’ edited by Theo A. Stephens. The fact that the August 1950 one proudly proclaims it is the 200^th issue suggests it started publication in late 1933 or maybe January 1934 but our earliest copies are from 1943. It is subtitled ‘An Intimate Magazine for Garden Lovers’. I did wonder if it was a forerunner to the Royal Horticultural Society journal named ‘The Garden’ but I don’t think so. My quick browse of Theo Stephens’ publication on line simply showed me that there is a thriving international market for early copies but I am not looking to sell our ours. Looking at an issue from March 1943 – written in the midst of WW2 – was oddly haunting with parallels to the current state of our world in a global pandemic.

‘The Law and the Gardener’, in case you wish to know, is largely a scholarly dissertation on English case law related to boundary trees including whether it is legal to pick fruit that is overhanging the boundary.

“This war is giving us many new experiences and teaching us much. One thing it is bringing home to us in a way we have never experienced before is the worthlessness of money until you can translate it into some form of goods or services….
At the present time I have money which I want to exchange for services which are necessary. Where my garden normally calls for two gardeners I am quite prepared to carry on with one, and in view of the number of people I could, and would, keep supplied with vegetables, eggs, and meat, this one would be justified – but I can’t find him.”

Grammar pedants may notice the use of the Oxford comma in that quote. True, few of us need to hire one, let alone two gardeners but the labour shortage in NZ is real and the daily lives of so many people everywhere have changed in a multitude of ways as we are forced to adapt rapidly, if reluctantly, to a world that has changed dramatically in the last 20 months.

All these publications share certain characteristics. The writing content rules supreme. Photos are few in number, small and in black and white. There is next to no humour, wit or levity and very little that is personal. This transmission of information is a serious business and of a technical complexity and range that would befuddle modern gardeners. The Amateur Gardening Annual from 1954 has 54 erudite articles ranging from stump-rooted carrots to the classification of dahlias, from apple maggots to jacobinias to Australian gum trees and 49 other specialised topics. The level of technical knowledge and expertise in the average home gardener was much higher back then, apparently with a thirst for more information.

Modern garden magazines are more about entertainment, image and aspiration but maybe they will acquire some quaint, nostalgic charm when viewed from 2090?

Narcissus ‘Peeping Tom’ and Carex buchananii

A pair of kereru villains discussing which magnolia has the best tasting petals

And a pair of tui discussing which campanulata in the garden has the best nectar

Giving thanks for when midwinter turns to the cusp of spring

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I was going to limit myself to a theme of red and yellow but te mounga (the mountain, Mount Taranaki) was looking so very beautiful, I wanted to share the glorious sight again

I have twice heard our government give a strong message to New Zealanders to get home urgently while they still can. The first time was in March last year when then deputy prime minister, Winston Peters, said it and it was certainly chilling. At the time, I wondered if he was being overly dramatic. He wasn’t. Within days, flights had slowed and then they stopped entirely for a time.

We heard the same message from our Prime Minister on Friday, this time aimed at New Zealanders in Australia. It was just as chilling. Get home in the next seven days or risk being stranded indefinitely.

And Magnolia campbellii is coming to its peak flowering

I saw a tweet come down my line from a journalist that made me laugh – in that ‘if you don’t laugh, you will cry’ sort of desperation. I went to look for it this morning to screenshot it for this post but it has gone. She must have decided it was too flippant when there are thousands of our citizens in Australia scrambling frantically to find flights and then get negative Covid tests within the required time frame. It showed two small boats with people on them and the caption read: ‘Is this our Dunkirk moment?’

Covid is not done with us yet. Even though Mark and I are Pfully Pfizered, as I say, I am deeply grateful to be in one of the very, very few countries in the world that has no Covid past the border and my gratitude for how our government has managed it so far remains strong. I just wish we didn’t have so many whingers and moaners looking for fault. Just look beyond our borders to see how bad it could have been here, too.

Narcissis Twilight – blooming their little hearts out down in the park

On a perfect morning like yesterday, I could not think of a better place to be. Magnolia season has started, the narcissi are coming into bloom and we are at peak snowdrop. It may still be midwinter here but we are on the cusp of spring. All I have to offer is colour. And flowers.

Magnolia Vulcan – where the passion for red magnolias started here

And then came Burgundy Star, shown here, and Black Tulip which is not yet showing its full colour

We always get the best red shades on the earliest blooms each season and we get the very best shades of red overall. They don’t look this colour in all climates and soils across the world.

While the red magnolias dominate the early season, when it comes to lachenalias, it is the yellow and oranges as well as red that bloom first. We have to wait for later in the season to see the less vigorous but arguably more desirable blues, lilacs, pinks and whites.

Still with the bulbs, the first hippeastrums are opening. We don’t go in for the hybrids much, preferring the evergreen species of H.aulicum and H. papilio which have settled in very happily to their permanent homes in the woodland.

It is, of course, camellia season. I spent some time this week writing a piece about camellias for an overseas publication so I am a bit camellia-d out but the yellow species never fail to thrill, even if they are not as floriferous as the more usual varieties.

The big-leafed rhododendrons down in the park are just starting to break bud and show colour but the sub-tropical vireya rhododendrons in the upper gardens flower intermittently all year so we always have some in bloom. This a scented red which Mark raised for the garden that has never been named or put on the market.

In the chaos of the wider world, home has never looked safer or offered more solace for the soul.

Tikorangi The Jury Garden

Mark and Abbie Jury

A mildly controversial opinion

From our bubble to yours

Starting the countdown to festival 2021

Gardening magazines from nearly 80 years ago

Giving thanks for when midwinter turns to the cusp of spring

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