Feijoa mania in autumn. Every autumn.

Feijoa season! Very much a New Zealand experience, it seems.

There is something so innocent and wholesome about peak feijoa month in Aotearoa New Zealand. In a time when the world is chaotic and unpredictable, when problems seem to be mounting ever higher and the daily news is pretty darn bleak, this little green oval fruit appears in abundance and suddenly we are all talking about feijoas. Tables appear by gates as children gather the fruit and put them out with an honesty box. $2 a bag seems to be the going rate here, which is usually between a dollar and  $1.50 a kilo.

News outlets come out with the usual fluff pieces. “Today, we have a guest in the studio who has never tried a feijoa (collective gasp of shock) and we are ready with the fruit sliced and a teaspoon for him to have his first taste.” True, I heard that on Radio New Zealand this week. And an evening TV show put up a segment on what to do with your surplus feijoas. Reader, I can tell you there are no magic answers to that issue. All they came up with was to give away your surplus to less fortunate folk who do not have their own, stew them, make feijoa crumble, muffins or feijoa chutney and not much else. I stew some for the freezer, dehydrate them for using in baking and muesli and we eat huge amounts fresh but that is about as far as it goes.

Scooped with a teaspoon and stewed. I don’t add sugar because we find they are sweet enough without.

Predictably there are the naysayers who don’t like the taste or texture but they are a minority. While feijoas have a fairly widespread distribution throughout the country, being a warm temperate to subtropical plant, there are areas where they don’t grow or, if they grow, they don’t fruit consistently because of cold winters. People in those areas must wonder what feijoa mania is all about. But when it comes to home gardens across the nation, feijoas must rank close to lemons and daphnes as being one of the most ubiquitous plants grown.

This popularity has grown through the decades. They have been here since the 1920s but I had never heard of them until I moved from Dunedin to the North Island. With new and improved selections becoming available, their popularity and distribution have grown exponentially.

it is usual to wait until the fruit fall and then pick them up from the ground – for home growers at least – so it is best if the surface beneath them is fairly bare but with a good layer of leaf litter or mulch to give them a softer landing.

They are often referred to as the most democratic fruit or even a socialist fruit but Mark commented this week that really they are egalitarian more than democratic. Despite efforts over the years, they are not a high production commercial crop. They are so easy to grow and fruit so prolifically that their perceived dollar value is low and they bruise easily, making the repeated handling and shipping required by distribution chains problematic. There is an overseas market that is higher value but challenging to meet. The domestic market is very small because so many of us grow our own. Feijoas are something you share around; maybe they are our most socialist fruit after all.

Feijoa sellowiana syn Acca sellowiana is native to South America, particularly Brazil but apparently, we were the first country to introduce preferred selections as home garden plants. Why so popular? Because they are probably the easiest fruit of all to grow. They are evergreen. They don’t need feeding, they don’t need spraying, they don’t get diseased, they have few insect attacks and they are quite happy if you never prune them. You can just plant them in full to half sun and leave them. If you have a good variety and your winters are not extreme, they fruit generously every year.

The dark foliaged plant in the middle is the feijoa. I would describe it as a large shrub rather than a tree. We have four established plants of different named cultivars and have planted another three to cover both early and late season.

In days gone by, seedlings were often sold as hedging plants but honestly, seedlings are not worth having because they are extremely variable and usually have tiny fruit that are mostly skin. Buy named varieties from the garden centre. You won’t regret it. It can be the difference between fruit the size of your thumb versus fruit the size of duck eggs. If you live some distance from neighbours, you either need to buy a variety that is self-pollinating or grow at least two because not all feijoas are self-fertile. It is not generally a problem in urban areas because there are so many growing that your neighbours’ trees will be pollinators.

Sadly the guava moth has arrived in our country, likely blown over from Australia. It is another pest we could have done without. And in areas further north where it has become established, it spoils the reputation of the feijoa as the most easy-care of fruits. There is a lot of work being done on environmentally benign interventions to control guava moth infestations. The internet or your local garden centre will be able to advise you if you are finding fruit with nasty caterpillars and poo inside them. It hasn’t made its presence felt here in the mid-north but I am sure it will at some point in the future.

Even if we have to resort to pheromone traps or other techniques, it will be worth it to preserve our most egalitarian and generous fruit.

Notably nerines

Nerine sarniensis hybrids in the rockery

It is nerine season and they certainly put on a great display. I don’t love them in spring when the foliage is slow to die off and looks scruffy as all the spring bulbs light up the rockery, but, come April, all is forgiven.

I need to put a tie on the two pink ones which have inveigled their way amongst the orange-red so I can move them. While we are fine with the adjacent blocks of clashing colour, they look better to my eye if they are adjacent, not mixed together.

Most of our nerines are sarniensis hybrids which give the range of colours and full heads of flowers. Often referred to as ‘Guensey lilies’, their connection to Guernsey is solely due to the cut flower trade because they are native to the Cape area of South Africa.

One of Mark’s unnamed hybrids that matures to purple, planted amongst our native carex grasses. It is a very good head of flowers with long stems but the stems really need to be a little more sturdy to hold the big head upright.

The sarniensis hybrids need really good drainage, open conditions and sun. Because they are in leaf in winter, they aren’t suitable for areas that get heavy frosts. These are bulbs that want to grow where their bulbs can bake in the sun so the rule of thumb is to plant them to a depth of no more than half the bulb with the other half and the long neck above the soil. They are also happiest in a crowd and can form a clump above the soil. I will divide the clumps when they get too congested and I discard the many small bulbs before replanting the larger ones close together.

Smoky shades
Undeniably vibrant shades. I find the highlighter pink particularly so.

We have a few of the early Exbury hybrids and the rest are all the result of Mark’s dad, Felix, hybridising to get a wider range of colours, along with some by Mark in days gone by. Felix particularly liked the smoky shades and they have a subtle charm of their own, as do the ones that mature to blue-purple shades. That said, the vibrant orange, clear red and highlighter pink ones are unashamedly bold and make a loud statement of their own.

The sarniensis hybrids are not that easy to find for sale. Local readers might like to hop in their car right now and head out to the Inglewood Sunday car boot sale because I saw somebody selling a really good selection of different colours in bloom there last Sunday. It is likely they will be there again today and maybe next week while we are at peak bloom. Beyond that, I don’t know where they are available but don’t expect them to be cheap like mass produced daffodils and tulips.

As I gathered single flowers to show the range of colours we have here, I picked up a few that had been snapped off. The one in the centre I think I can blame on Ralph dog who is no respecter of gardens. The ones on the right were clearly leaning over onto the grass where they fell victim to the lawnmower. The ones on the left are weevil damage on the rockery. If you zoom in on the second left, you can see the telltale damage on the stem which eventually weakened it to the point of breaking and flopping near the flower. Notwithstanding an exuberant dog, lawnmower and our localised patches of weevils, there isn’t much else that attacks these plants.

Nerine pudica on the left and bowdenii on the right

While we favour the sarniensis hybrids as garden plants, we also have a fair swag of N. bowdenii seen here on the right. There was only stem open so far two days ago when I took these photographs because it comes into bloom a little later than the sarniensis. It is easier to grow with stems that are strong enough to hold up the truss of flowers and is certainly more widely available than most others. On the downside, its truss is not as full of flowers and it basically comes in shades of hot pink although there is a white form, the internet tells me.

On the left in the photo above is N. pudica which I had forgotten about until this stray pot in the nursery opened its blooms. Several years ago, I planted a whole lot out, mostly in the rockery, and I had forgotten about them because I can’t recall them ever flowering there. I think I have found one patch of them which I shall watch to see if they do bloom. The same thing happened with the Lycoris aurea that I planted in the rockery a decade ago. They have never flowered again which is a pity because they were lovely – a most attractive shade of yellow and looking just like a yellow nerine except they are a lycoris, not a nerine. I live in hope that they are still there and pretending to be a mound of non-flowering nerines, so they can spring forth one year and delight me.

A range of the colours we have from pure white (named ‘Sacred Heart’ from memory) through soft pinks to alarmingly bright pink, coral, smoky shades, blue tones, reds through to bright orange

Nerines became popular as a cut flower because they have long stems and last well in a vase – hence the ‘Guernsey lily’ moniker. I rarely pick them because they last longer in the garden and, when a bulb only puts up one flower stem, it feels like flowercide to cut it to bring indoors to die. They are not as easy to produce as many other flowers for the cut flower trade so I would not expect them to be cheap to buy.

‘Say it with flowers’

Back in the prehistoric times before the internet, sending flowers to somebody in another place usually happened through Interflora – organised by telephone (land line, of course) or in person. The Interflora group ran extensive advertising and their slogan was ‘say it with flowers’. I have been thinking about that all week in various contexts – letting the flowers tell the story.

The free-form version

When daylight saving ends here in the southern latitudes, we have to accept that autumn has arrived and this always happens around Easter. The rockery has its second coming and oh my, but it is pretty at this time of year.

Cyclamen with amaranath and the first nerines

In early spring, the highly detailed rockery is dominated by the yellow of dwarf narcissi and every lachenalia we can grow here, across the range of colours. In autumn, it is mostly pink and white with masses of Cyclamen hederafolium and the Nerine sarniensis hybrids we can grow well.

Can one ever have too many of the species cyclamen? I think not. They are seen here with the lilac blue of the autumn crocus from the C. serotinus group, maybe salzmanii. Our rockery is immediately in front of the house so we walk past it often every day and really it is very, very pretty at this time.

The Wild North Garden has largely become our gardener Zach’s domain and he is continuing to add suitable plants that are surplus to the more tightly managed garden areas. He was so pleased with how the Japanese anemones he planted last year have settled in that he is adding more this year.

The dahlias have also settled in well to this controlled wilderness. I am pretty sure this is Dr Keith Hammet’s Dahlia ‘Conundrum’ which certainly increases well and flowers for a very long time.

The Wild North Garden may be Zach’s special area but the summer gardens are mine and I love the Court Garden in early autumn as the tall helianthus come into flower and the sun drops lower in the sky to shine through the flower spikes of the tall grass, Miscanthus ‘Morning Light’.

Personally, I would have called it ‘Evening Light’ or maybe ‘Late Afternoon Light’ but that has to do with location and the direction of our lowering sun.

I captioned the top pastel pink, blue and white confection as ‘the free-form version’. This more explicit floral version of a flag would have worked better had Japanese anemones also come in pale blue as well as white and pale pink but we make do with what we have. It reminds me of the floral confections the very late Queen Mother used to wear. Some of you may remember her many appearances where it looked like she was wearing pretty hydrangeas on her head. I went looking for images but they were all copyrighted so if you are curious, google ‘Queen Mother’s petal hats’ to behold the visions.

Sometimes in life, we need to stand up to be counted and I will stand up and be counted in support of the extremely marginalised group this flag stands for as they face an onslaught from people who want to erase them from history, from the present and from the future.

Road cones on duty

I have come to the conclusion that road cones are like rabbits. They have gone forth and multiplied. Exponentially. Everywhere. Over the years even we have acquired maybe half a dozen road cones. Lost or abandoned by their previous owners, they found what they hoped would be their forever home with us. They found a useful new purpose in life, usually reserving space for coaches during the busy garden festival season. With the garden now closed permanently, I had wondered whether rehoming them would be a betrayal of trust, maybe putting them out with their mates in any number of places where road cones choose to congregate.

But no! They have a new role to play and much closer to our house. Every time I step out the back door, I get a minor visual jolt at the sight of them. Lloyd has placed two of them on the breaking concrete. For we have developed a sink hole and he was worried that it is now deep enough to catch any visitors’ cars that might not notice the tell-tale signs of concrete slabs askew.

The sink hole is a mystery and one we will have to live with until Lloyd returns to work in a couple of weeks and lifts the broken pieces to fully investigate the scale of the problem. I have poked around with a bamboo stake and it goes in at least 40 or 50cm so it is not a small issue.

The concrete is the parking and turning area in front of our carport and it must date back to when the house was built around 1951. Over the years, it has developed cracks and broken in a few places but it remains perfectly functional.

So why have we developed a sink hole? The gas wells that have been deviation drilled in our area are several kilometres below ground level so it won’t be those and there is no history of mine shafts in Tikorangi. We know where our house drains go and there aren’t any in that area. There is no spring water bubbling up anywhere. So we can probably rule out both human activity and water.

This leaves tree roots. Many of us have the experience of tree roots lifting paving but maybe not so many have the experience of tree roots of sufficient magnitude to collapse paving when they rot out entirely. It is not any tree that we have felled or lost during our time here but maybe it takes many decades for tree roots to rot out and the stump disappears first? I am hoping we can solve this mystery. And if it is tree roots, I am hoping this is a one-off and not an indicator of larger problems that may surface – or indeed cave in – over time.

In the meantime, the road cones stand as sentinels.

Finally, I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the species aster that I was attempting to eliminate from the twin borders. I see I relocated more than I remember to the Court Garden a few years ago and now I am having to remove most of those. I may end up resorting to total removal next year but at this stage, I am trying to restrict it to maybe three smaller areas. I took out the ones in this photograph this week even though it disturbed the very busy bees that were feeding on them. This path had become impassable because of intense bee activity once the morning sun had warmed up. Pretty, but hazardous as the bees buzzed above and the rampant root systems below were spreading in every direction.

“His Majesty The King’s Coronation Collection”

Mark’s Magnolia ‘Felix Jury’

It is a well-known fact that King Charles 111 is a very keen gardener and has been for a long time. We received confirmation this week that Mark’s Magnolia ‘Felix Jury’ was included in a collection of 25 carefully selected plants presented to him to mark his coronation.

The gift was from the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), specifically from the Rhododendron, Camellia and Magnolia Group of which he has been the royal patron since 2018. Reportedly, he was delighted to receive the plants this week and they are destined for his Sandringham estate which is undergoing a major rejuvenation under his personal direction.

There are only three magnolias included in this collection and all are from Aotearoa New Zealand, which is a sign of this country’s standing in the heady world of international magnolias. Most of the collection is focused on rhododendrons with just three camellias included, one of which is also a NZ hybrid. ‘Festival of Lights’ was bred by the late Neville Haydon of Camellia Haven fame.

Magnolia ‘Genie’ bred by Vance Hooper

The other two magnolias are ‘Genie’ which is the best-known cultivar of breeder, Vance Hooper and the late Os Blumhardt of Whangarei’s ‘Starwars’.

‘Starwars’ dates back to the 1960s when Felix was also raising the first generation of Jury magnolia hybrids. We knew Os Blumhardt fairly well. He used to stay with us when he came to Taranaki and he was most encouraging to Mark in his early days of plant breeding and extraordinarily generous with his own material. We still have some very fine vireyas and camellias of his in our garden and his early, limited work with michelias (‘Mixed Up Miss’ and ‘Bubbles’ are his best known) laid the groundwork for Mark’s Fairy Magnolia series many years later. But we were less enamoured by his Magnolia ‘Starwars’ – until we made a magnolia trip to the UK, Italy and Switzerland back in the early 2000s.

Magnolia ‘Starwars’ bred by Os Blumhardt

At home, we have ‘Starwars’ planted on the roadside on our lower boundary in a row of other magnolias. It is pretty enough and puts on a good show but the flowers are a bit floppy and, to be brutal, it looks a bit dated compared to many of the magnolias we grow now. It was a different story in the UK and Europe. That was before any of Mark’s hybrids were available in that part of the world and we were tracking how his father’s varieties were performing. There is a huge difference in climate, growing conditions and light between here and over there and there is no guarantee that plants will look the same. We were a bit disappointed, particularly in ‘Iolanthe’ in those conditions.

‘Starwars’, on the other hand, was an absolute stand-out and it was being grown widely. Many of the international group we were travelling with assumed it was a Jury plant because it came from NZ. After we had seen several looking brilliant, Mark was moved to reply, “No, it isn’t one of ours but I wish it was.” I think it has earned its place in the Royal Collection as a proven performer.

Cordyline Red Fountain

This is not the first of our plants to grace the royal estates. The first we know of was when our Cordyline ‘Red Fountain’ was presented to the then Prince Charles in a ceremony at Auckland Regional Botanic Gardens – but not by us. While I have no doubt that the plant was a very fine specimen, we rather doubted that it had all the phytosanitary clearance and paperwork needed for plants to cross international borders. Mark quipped at the time that maybe we should alert Border Control that the royal entourage was carrying plant material. We have no way of knowing whether Royals are subject to the same regulations as travellers of lesser status or whether it even left the country. I hope it might be in his garden at Highgrove.

Next, there was a presentation of Mark’s Magnolia ‘Black Tulip’ to the late Queen in 2010. We don’t know which royal garden that plant ended up in – maybe Windsor?

Then there was the ceremonial planting of another specimen of Magnolia ‘Black Tulip’ by the Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi with the then Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall at their London residence of Clarence House in 2012.

That felt like a significant moment in history and to our great amusement, it is immortalised in a You Tube clip. That video shows it in a prime spot close to the residence. From memory, the magnolia they move over to look at was one planted by the Dalai Lama but I can’t remember what that variety was now – one of the species, maybe.

Magnolia Black Tulip

At the time, I wrote here: “We are honoured by this international recognition, though Mark would have preferred them to have planted his Magnolia Felix instead. It appears to be performing very well in the UK and the Royals’ gardens are large enough to take large flowered magnolias.”

We are very pleased that it will be ‘Felix Jury’ that will grace the Sandringham estate.

“The Rhododendron, Camellia and Magnolia Coronation Collection is a collection of

plants and trees gifted to His Majesty, to mark his Coronation. As our Royal Patron

it represents our appreciation of how much his support and interest in our genera is

valued by our members from around the world.

It tells the story of the Rhododendron, Camellia and Magnolia Group’s one hundred

and seven-year history. The twenty-five plants and trees provide a historical and

horticultural link between the genera and the Royal Family and represents the

legacy of great gardens, the passion of private breeders and having good plants

in the garden. The specially chosen plants form a tapestry of our beautiful genera

internationally.

The best of the past and of the future, old and new. We hope that His Majesty enjoys

these plants and that they give him great satisfaction in the years ahead.”

From the official release announcing this gift.