Tikorangi Diary, September 9, 2011

Magnolia Felix Jury in its glory now

Magnolia Felix Jury in its glory now

Latest Posts: Friday 9 September, 2011
Back in business! Today sees the resumption of weekly series of posts, but this time first published in the Waikato Times. It feels good to be back into regular writing to deadlines, believe it or not.

1) Plant Collector – campanulata or Taiwanese cherry trees and a photo of a feeding tui which represents about the 40th attempt to capture the moment.

2) Blighted! I don’t even like buxus hedging, but in deference to all the searches I see looking for information on wretched buxus blight, herewith the essential information as far as I can decode it.

3) Finocchio – the first of a new series looking at a different vegetable crop each week.

4) The constructions at Paloma Gardens – not from the Waikato Times, this one, but a piece I wrote for Weekend Gardener looking at the constructions and creations of the enterprising Clive Higgie. It was very interesting watching Alan Titchmarsh talking about the Victorian garden on TV last week. There is a shade of those Victorian gardeners to Clive – the flamboyance, the drive to be genuinely original and the passion for collecting plants which are different, new and interesting.

Prunus Te Mara and a seedling magnolia in our carpark area

Prunus Te Mara and a seedling magnolia in our carpark area

Tikorangi Diary: Friday 9 September, 2011

The abnormally cold weather of late winter may have taken out the early magnolia display (well, it did, to be more precise) but a week of mild weather has brought on the next flush of blooms and the garden is full of colour, flowers, fragrance and birds. This is when magnolias which flower down the stem (like Felix Jury) come into their own. The first blooms were taken out by the weather, but fresh flowers have opened and they look wonderful whereas cultivars like Lanarth, which only set buds on the branch tips and open all at once, was a non-event this year. If you want to see the magnolias and early spring garden, we are offering one free adult garden entry with each magnolia purchase today and this weekend. You can check out what we have available under Plant Sales.

Prunus Te Mara has never looked as good. This is a semi evergreen cherry and I had been threatening it with the chainsaw because I was underwhelmed by it. The winter chill this season took most of the foliage off and the flowering is considerably more impressive. I would guess that this is cherry better suited to areas with colder winters.

Moraea spathulata

Moraea spathulata

In the bulbs, it is Moraea spathulata which has been a minor triumph. It is not that it is meant to be difficult to grow, just that it has taken several attempts to find the right place for it in the garden. Apparently the front row of the rockery suits it just fine because it is flowering in a most obliging fashion. M. spathulata grows from a bulb which is similar to its more refined siblings, villosa and polystachya, but it is evergreen and its exceptionally long, strappy green leaves can be a little scruffy in the wrong place. I can forgive that when I see the delicate yellow iris blooms.

Plant Collector – Prunus campanulata

It took many attempts to capture the tui in the campanulata cherry

It took many attempts to capture the tui in the campanulata cherry

The cherry trees which have been in flower in recent weeks are the campanulata or Taiwanese cherries. Sometimes you will still see them referred to as Formosan cherries which may require a lesson in history for anybody under the age of about 60. True, the colours can be a little harsh in carmine pink, cerise and sugar-candy pink tones but on a bleak early spring day, who is going to quibble about the mass of flowers which appear on bare branches? The biggest bonus of the campanulatas is their attraction to tui who feed on the nectar. Our native birds are wonderfully unconcerned about whether or not their food sources are indigenous plants. We can have upwards of 30 tui bickering and squabbling for territory in a single tree, but they don’t stay still long enough to count accurately.

Campanulata cherries are not as hardy as the later flowering Japanese types but this is rarely a problem except in the coldest parts of the country. They are also more disease resistant and healthier in our climate and don’t succumb to the dreaded witches broom which can be a problem in other types. If you plant several (and being a tree of light stature, they are easy to fit in alongside other trees), you can have them flowering in succession over many weeks which keeps the tui at home. The big disadvantage is that many forms set seed freely and germinate readily. They are such a problem that they are on the banned list in Northland unless it is a known sterile form which doesn’t set seed. If you border native bush or a national park, make sure you search out forms advertised as sterile but otherwise you just have to be vigilant with your weeding.

(first published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission)

Blighted!

Fortunately not our garden, but it has been pretty discouraging for the friends whose garden it is. Buxus blight on the rampage.

Fortunately not our garden, but it has been pretty discouraging for the friends whose garden it is. Buxus blight on the rampage.

I am not the world’s greatest fan of buxus hedging. But I have some sympathy for the multitude of gardeners who are watching their prized box hedges turn brown. Judging by the Google search terms, it is an alarmingly common problem at the moment. “My buxus has no leaves. Is it dead?” Basically, yes. Buxus is an evergreen plant which never loses all its leaves. “Buxus turning brown.” It is dying. If it is any consolation, Prince Charles is reportedly having the same problem at Highgrove.

The problem is buxus blight – cylindrocladium. It is a fungus so it spreads by spore and it has dispersed extensively across the globe. It is particularly troublesome because it is not affected by temperature – hot or cold, its progress is undeterred, particularly in wet or humid conditions. I have yet to see any information on how far the spore can be carried by wind but it is more likely to be kilometres rather than metres. So unless you are in the country, isolated from other buxus, odds on that your buxus will become infected sooner or later, if it isn’t already. You will know if you have it. The leaves turn brown and fall off and it can spread rapidly. Left to follow its natural course, it is generally terminal.

You can treat buxus blight but you don’t seem to be able to eradicate it. This means you will have to continue treating it for the life of the plants. The best you can hope is to hold it at bay because the spore can survive for a year, maybe two, on the dead leaves and I defy anybody to succeed in removing every single blighted leaf.

A blight upon your buxus

A blight upon your buxus

If you are going to try and salvage your existing buxus, first up you need to thin and clean out the accumulated debris. I am well aware that this is easier said than done, especially when you have a mature hedge which has become so dense you can almost sit on it. A blower vac is pretty much the one only way to go with blasting out the debris, which must then be removed. And thinning is a painstaking task with secateurs. What you are trying to do is to enable the leaves to shed water as quickly as possible and to allow more air movement. These techniques may slow the spread but they won’t treat the existing condition. You will have to spray. It is a fungus, so you need an anti fungal spray. I don’t know of any specific sprays developed to target this condition, but any of the broad spectrum fungicides might work. Anecdotally, I am told that copper works but I am guessing that you have to get it in the early stages for copper and you may have to spray more frequently.

The bottom line is whether you are willing to commit to repeated spraying to save your buxus hedge. For us, the unequivocal answer is no. We just think it is really bad environmental practice. There is evidence that repeated use of copper is not good for the soils. Amongst other things, it kills earth worms which leads to soil compaction and copper residue is cumulative over time. An occasional application is fine, but committing to ongoing spraying is different. Besides, the whole thing about buxus was that it required minimal maintenance – a clip twice a year kept it in shape. Would you choose it knowing that it requires frequent spraying just to keep it alive?

Suffruticosa (the very low growing baby one) appears to be the worst hit, probably because it is the densest grower. Sempervirens is also badly affected and that is by far the most common form around. Be wary of advice that the Asian forms from Japan and Korea don’t get blight. They are Buxus microphylla and microphylla var. koreana or Buxus sinica. Being larger leaved and a little more open in growth, they may shed the water more quickly and be less affected but overseas research says that no buxus species are immune.

It should be pretty obvious at this point that there is no point whatever in taking out affected plants and replacing them with fresh ones of the same variety. The problem is not the individual plants – it is the fungal spores swirling around.

As if the news of buxus blight is not bad enough, there is a further quandary when it comes to a substitute. Put simply, there is no like for like swap. Space does not allow me to look at the alternatives here, but if you want to know more, you will find some options on Buxus Alternatives for Garden Hedges. The bottom line is that there is no other single option which is cheap to buy, grows in sun and shade, has good dark green colour, will re-sprout from bare wood and only requires clipping once or twice a year. Personally, I think it is an opportunity to stand back and rethink garden designs which have leaned far too heavily on defining form by endless box hedging and I will return to this theme in the future.

If you haven’t got buxus blight, be grateful and be vigilant.

(first published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission)

Grow it Yourself – Florence fennel or finocchio

In this country we have been a bit slow to catch on to the European favourite of finocchio or Florence fennel and it is only very recently that it has sometimes become available at the fruit and veg counter. But we rate it very highly as a crop to grow at home and regard it somewhat like celery to eat (which is not at all easy to grow well). It can be finely sliced or grated and eaten raw in salads, it is delicious roasted whole like a parsnip or used in stirfries. It is genuinely versatile and has a good crisp texture raw or lightly cooked without the strong aniseed aroma of the seeding fennel (which is foeniculum vulgare). Florence fennel is foeniculum vulgare azoricum and it produces a fleshy, bulbous base to the stems. This is the section that is eaten.

It is not difficult to grow and it holds well in the garden. As with most vegetables, it needs to be sown into well cultivated soil in full sun. As it germinates, thin out the baby plants to about 20cm spacings. The thinnings can be eaten as fresh greens. Seed sown now will be ready to harvest in summer. We usually sow again between the end of January to early March for winter harvest. It is pretty forgiving as a crop so timing is not critical but seeds sown from late October onwards will tend to bolt too quickly in summer, before they have formed the edible bulb. However, if those plants are cut back and left, they will come again and be edible the following winter. The fluffy green tops look similar to ordinary fennel but lack its flavour so are really only good for a garnish. If you can’t find seed at your garden centre, try Kings Seeds or Italian Seeds Pronto who both have websites for on line ordering.

(first published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission)

The constructions at Paloma

First printed in the Weekend Gardener issue 322 and reproduced here with their permission.

Clive Higgie and his slightly surprising small companion, the irrepressible Pablo.

Clive Higgie and his slightly surprising small companion, the irrepressible Pablo.

Over the years, Clive and Nicki Higgie have amassed one of this country’s foremost collections of plants and turned them into a remarkable garden at Fordell, near Wanganui. With his farming background, Clive is both practical and innovative and enjoys turning his hand to both construction and sculptural installations for the garden. He is not afraid to mix and match different styles and the results can be both surprising and original.

Some of Clive’s work is edgy, even flamboyant, and pushes boundaries in unexpected ways. A plain board fence at the entrance has been transformed into a statement by using witty wall writing – it is rather too whimsical and well executed to be described as graffiti.

The seating deck built out over the large pond area is also a little edgy. There is something a little insecure about sitting in such an exposed position even if the water is shallow. Clive says he made a few design mistakes on this small platform, particularly making it so low that leaves accumulate below the deck. Clive also constructs the seats. He calls them his Barebum Chairs, which I originally misread as Ba-ree/-bum.

The boathouse is a work in progress. Showing typical ingenuity, Clive has used a concrete water tank as foundations for the structure. The roof is made from fibreglass matting coated with acrylic while the balls are ceramic.

The Iona Cross is distinctly monumental construction made by Clive, standing nearly two and a half metres tall. It is concrete and was poured flat before being moved to its location. By contrast, the Polynesian influenced vertical panel was boxed up and poured in its final location. These are just two of a series of installations surrounding his earth labyrinth which reference the ancestry of Clive and Nicki’s first grandchild.

Paloma Six

Clive is pleased with his recent constructions of simple concrete plinths. “I add a bit of oxide to colour the concrete and to stop it being that glaring white of fresh concrete. I really like the plinths. Sometimes a small vase or sculpture can get lost in a garden setting but the plinths make them stand out.”

The ribbed pillars have a clear debt to ancient times but have been created using labour saving modern techniques. The mould was simply a product called baby iron (small profile corrugated iron) bent in a circle and filled with concrete. These have reinforcing rods down the centre and are boxed up and poured in their final location.

Paloma orange

Elsewhere in the garden, Clive has made extensive use of pillars constructed from terracotta field tiles. He first saw the technique used at Tupare in New Plymouth. He explains: “The pipes are irregular so I mortared them together before filling them with concrete. The mortar joins give structural strength. They didn’t do that at Tupare and many of their pipes had cracked and split.”

Not all construction is in concrete. Clive used ponga longs of irregular shapes and sizes to build a simple stumpery installation. The pongas vary from waist height to around 3 metres.

In his new Garden of Death, his friend, sculptor Steuart Welch, made the hanging crucibles which he calls Dracula pots. Clive has filled them with bleached animal skulls to complement the theme of the garden which is based around the social history of poisonous plants.

The attractive large planters came from a quarry stone crusher and, originally, the smooth sided bowl fitted inside the ribbed one, breaking large stones down to form road gravel. Being magnesium steel, they were of no scrap value but now contain large plantings of ornamental oxalis.

Clive is pleased with his simple solution for the side gate leading from the lower garden to the Matchless Arboretum. Because sheep graze beneath the trees, it is important that the gate be kept closed. A simple system of a counterweight pulls it shut behind visitors.

Paloma Gardens are open to the public all year round. For further information, check out their website: http://www.paloma.co.nz, email clive.nicki@paloma.co.nz or phone 06 342 7857 For my earlier story on Paloma, check Breaking the Mould of the Modern New Zealand Garden – the Dreams at Paloma.