Garden fashion – from designer trend to cliche

I fear my scatter cushions are more of the shabby chic genre than designer...

I fear my scatter cushions are more of the shabby chic genre than designer...

I attended a really interesting garden lecture on Saturday. Some readers may know Neil Ross from his regular contributions to the NZ Gardener magazine. He spent some years as head gardener at Ayrlies in Auckland but these days is back gardening, designing and writing in the UK. His talk was loosely on gardening trends in Britain and I thought readers might enjoy a summary of what is going out of fashion and what is on the rise, based in part on his analysis of the cutting edge garden installations by leading designers at Britain’s superb garden shows – Chelsea, Tatton Park, Hampton Court and the like.

Passing over (so they will look dated very soon in your garden, should you be contemplating them) are painted walls – usually solid plastered walls installed as a garden feature and painted in a dramatic shade with colour toned plantings. Sorry, passé now, along with gabions, thank goodness. The latter are wire cages, usually filled with rocks but sometimes with au naturelle branches and trunks cut to length or even pine cones. We always thought that gabions looked better when used for their original purpose of slowing erosion. They are a bit too industrial altogether in a garden.

Dribbly water features that look like urinals (Neil’s description, not mine) are looking dated, irrespective of whether that trickle of water is flowing out of a terracotta head, a gargoyle of any description or just a modest pipe. Keep to ponds (lakes are better), natural streams or at least a decent gush of water if you feel the need for a water feature.

Box balls, Neil reports, have been so over-used as a formal feature that they have been done to death. Though he thought, in New Zealand it is not just buxus balls. It is the whole mini-Sissinghurst look of clipped buxus hedges and edges containing formal standard plants (be they roses, bay trees or choisya ternata) – a man after my own heart on this issue. Also done to death are designer scatter cushions accessorizing the display garden. I have to admit that I have been known to employ the scatter cushion on our rather unforgiving stone seats though mine are of the shabby chic genre (all my late mother’s tapestry, now heavily faded) rather than designer colours and textures. I only put them out when our garden is open and I went off that idea the time I forgot to bring them in and it rained….

The Missouri Meadow Garden at Wisley - perhaps the pinnacle of the prairie garden style

The Missouri Meadow Garden at Wisley - perhaps the pinnacle of the prairie garden style

The prairie garden is in danger of becoming yesterday’s design in England though we have never embraced this style in New Zealand. The Missouri Meadow at the RHS flagship garden, Wisley, south of London, is the finest example we have seen. But it relies on low rainfall and low fertility which hardly describes the dairy farming areas of New Zealand so we may never see prairie plantings popularised here.

If you want to be cutting edge, Neil’s advice is that the new trend is to keep chickens and indeed anything that is edible or food producing in the garden. I don’t think guinea pigs count. Beehives are all the rage, especially in cutsie-pie bee frames. Insect hotels are all the rage in English gardens though the research is that insects are happier in a natural environment (leave an old log to rot down) than in your designer Hilton.

Green walls are still a hot item but we agreed that they are expensive to install and a lot of work to maintain. It is easier to grow plants in the ground rather than in vertical frames, if you can.

Glass is in fashion, preferably exquisite, hand-blown glass features. At a pinch wine bottles might fit the bill in a creative wall construction which may suit the winos amongst us. But the suggestion I have seen to use old wine bottles as a garden edging is a really bad idea from a practical point of view, let alone the dodgy aesthetics. As you plunge your spade in to turn over the soil, you are just as likely to hit a bottle and break it.

Predicting the Return of the Conifer

Predicting the Return of the Conifer

And conifers are due to make a return. Not in a reincarnation of the awful 1970s style some readers may recall – a mass of prostrate junipers and the like plonked in through black plastic and then covered with that nasty red scoria. There were good reasons why that particular style of gardening fell from grace but the poor old conifers themselves did not deserve to be cast out to the wilderness along with the garden style. The conifer family is huge and there are many fine specimens from tiny treasures to handsome, long-lived landscape specimens. Used judiciously as accent plants throughout the garden, they can give a splendid year round shape and definition as well as variations in colour. Thank goodness we still have ours – after sixty years, some are getting venerable and we would not be without them.

In place of prairies and meadows, more block planting of perennials is returning – check out the work of Tom Stuart Smith or Piet Oudolf.

The final caution comes not from Neil but from the Garden of Jury – beware of rills and obelisks. They are on the cusp of passing from innovative to hackneyed. It is a very short step.

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

GIY – Lettuces

I am married to the former Mr Buttercrunch Lettuce Man. For years he has favoured Buttercrunch as the most reliable lettuce for the home garden because it grows so well and can be harvested leaf by leaf over an extended period. This year he has tried a different product from Franchi Seeds who are Italian so it has the name of Misticanza di Lattughe (or just plain lettuce to most of us). It is a great mix of different lettuces of cut and come again varieties which mature at different rates – and it includes Buttercrunch. He is most impressed by the range and performance and his lettuce patch has been yielding an abundance of mixed leaves from the early thinnings (micro greens) through to mature plants. He is now a convert to this particular product which is distributed in NZ through www.italianseedspronto.co.nz and he is sowing in succession at about three weekly intervals.

Lettuces like friable soil with plenty of nitrogen to help them make all that leafy growth. This means they are an excellent crop to follow on from a heavily fertilised crop like corn. They also need plenty of water – a bitter taste is often due to drought. Most take around 60 days to mature. When first planted, we keep a close eye out for slugs and also for cutworm which can work its way along the row, eating the roots off. Diazinon prills are used against cutworm if necessary. We don’t worry about slugs later on which means that the leaves need thorough washing before use. In high summer, lettuces tend to bolt to seed rather than making leafy growth but you can keep sowing and cut them as young plants.

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

Tikorangi Notes: Friday October 28, 2011

Latest posts:
1) Scadoxus puniceus – another bulb delight from southern Africa in Plant Collector this week.
2) Where to start with garden design – Abbie’s column from the Waikato Times.
3) Grow it Yourself – green beans

The season is late this year - Prunus Pearly Shadows is still opening

The season is late this year - Prunus Pearly Shadows is still opening

Tikorangi Notes: Friday 28 October, 2011

The kind neighbours, erecting a temporary gazebo (with the doubly kind neighbour to the left who happens to own said item)

The kind neighbours, erecting a temporary gazebo (with the doubly kind neighbour to the left who happens to own said item)

Our garden festival starts today with a hiss and a roar – a full coachload of Probus members (from Levin, if my memory serves me right), a guided tour of the garden for any, all and sundry and a small Australian tour (that is few in number, not small of stature) all happening at about the same time in the morning. It has been a busy week sprucing up but we are feeling reasonably well prepared with an hour or two in the morning to finish the final touches. The season is later than usual which means that the bluebells are still in flower. We never worry too much about variations in seasons because there is always something blooming. Prunus Pearly Shadows in our entrance area is looking very fetching whereas it is normally passing over by now.

In a moment of great clarity, we have decided to give up on retailing plants after mid November so if you have been planning to purchase anything, you will have to get in quickly. From next year, we plan to retail for two weeks of the year only – from Labour Weekend until the end of our garden festival. And we will not be continuing with much in the way of woody trees and shrubs. However, we will be looking to offer more of the rare and interesting curiosities so there should be material that is interesting on offer for those two weeks this time next year. In the meantime, we are keen to clear out plants so there are bargains to be had – check the Plant Sales section. Most magnolias are currently half the listed price. When they are gone, they are gone. We don’t have crops coming through. We will hold prepaid orders until you can the plants collected, if required.

Garden design – a starting point

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

A sense of arrival - but keep it in proportion to the size of the property and the house

A sense of arrival - but keep it in proportion to the size of the property and the house

Garden design is certainly all the rage these days, but if you can’t afford or don’t want to pay a professional designer, where do you start? Without for one minute pretending that a brief column can do justice to design, I would suggest three principles as a starting point.

  1. A sense of arrival.
  2. A sense of journey.
  3. An underpinning principle of logic (with some common sense).

Stand back and look critically at your property from the point of entry or roadside. If you look at good gardens or handsome properties, most will convey a sense of arrival. You know you are in the right place and you can see clearly where you are to enter the property and which direction to follow. This is usually achieved by way of hard landscaping or structures – a fence or hedge (which rates as a green structure), maybe gateways, a driveway and paths. But those arrival features should be in keeping and appropriate to both your house and to the scale of the property. If your lot in life is a tiny, town section with in-fill housing, putting up an imposing gateway and fencing is more likely to make your place look like a prison. And if you own a little wooden cottage, tall brick or plastered walls will just look incongruous. So keep the scale appropriate. Materials used should relate to the house and outbuildings, though if yours is a corrugated iron garage, a hedge may be more pleasing.

Set about softening the entrance with plants. Whether you use formal, matched pairs, an avenue or a froth of pretty flowers is entirely a matter of taste. It is the structures and paving that give form, but it is the plantings which make it appear welcoming and give the interesting detail.

The promise of a journey is possible even on very small sites like in the town garden of Thorveton

The promise of a journey is possible even on very small sites like in the town garden of Thorveton

Creating a sense of anticipation, maybe even mystery, is dependent on making sure that the whole garden is not visible at first glance. It sounds simple, but if you walk along any city street, you will see many gardens where all is revealed from the frontage. There is no invitation to explore or sense of journey. What you see is what you get.

The larger your garden, the easier it is to achieve that promise of journey, to hold back discoveries until you venture further. You may think it is impossible to do on a small, flat section. Not so. It takes a bit more skill and thought, but it can be achieved with a mix of strategically placed plantings and maybe some structures.

But it is the underpinning principle of logical sense which we always keep at the forefront of our minds whenever we plan developments in our garden. Too often have we seen design mistakes where people have dropped in a feature because they feel they need a focal point without thinking about whether it has logic to its selection and placement, beyond being a contrived focal point. The most common and reasonably expensive mistake is summerhouses and gazebos. These structures are all about entertaining and socialising which involves food and drink. If you site it more than 20 metres from your kitchen, odds on you will rarely use it. It just becomes a redundant structure with little purpose. Unless of course you have servants to do the fetching and carrying.

The same goes for garden seats though you may carry your coffee mug 30 metres in this case. A seat is for sitting upon – make sure seating is located where you want to sit, not just to look good from afar.

One pet dislike here is contrived water features where the use of a pump has cascading water flowing from a dry hill or mound, magnified by the sound of the pump and the installation of a fake waterfall. Water does not flow from dry mounds and the installation of such a feature is more often unsubtle fakery which lacks any logic. It is a lot of trouble to go to when you are probably better off with a simple pond, whether it be formal (imposed upon the landscape) or natural in appearance. But if you are going for a natural looking pond, logic says it should be at a lower point of your property.

If you have a large garden, it makes sense to have your intensively gardened and detailed areas closest to the house and living areas. As you move further away, a more natural, loosely maintained style is entirely appropriate. It can look very odd to drop in a formal or highly structured feature in the outer reaches of the property. And common sense says you will never maintain it as tightly as you should, simply because you don’t pass it every day.

How you choose to garden within the design framework is entirely up to personal taste, as is the choice on going with straight lines to give formality or looser curves to evoke a more romantic naturalism. But essentially, good design will mean your garden is an extension of your living space and not just a matter of keeping up appearances.

Plant Collector: Scadoxus puniceus

Scadoxus puniceus - another gem from the bulb wonderland of southern Africa

Scadoxus puniceus - another gem from the bulb wonderland of southern Africa

The bulb wonderland of southern Africa gives us this mid to late spring flowering treasure from Natal. Scadoxus puniceus is not often seen in the country and rarely offered for sale but well worth having if you find it. The bulbs are large fist-sized affairs and slow to increase, but if you find somebody with a plant, it sets seed and as long as you are working with fresh seed, it germinates readily.

Usually the flower stem appears first in late winter, followed soon after by the lush pale lettuce green foliage. The relatively large flowers consist of a mass of orange stamens surrounded by a maroon outer petal casing, which is not a common colour combination in any plant. It is happy in woodland or semi shade conditions which never get hot and dry in summer or cold and wet in winter. The former will force it into early dormancy whereas the latter will rot out the bulb.

It is the same family as Scadoxus multiflorus ssp. katherinae which is far more readily available. Katherinae has large spherical flower heads in red which look like a mass of spidery stamens and runs about three months behind puniceus. It is just coming into growth now and will flower in mid to late summer making a real feature in the summer garden.