Tried and True – heucheras

Heucheras - burgundy and lime shades

Heucheras - burgundy and lime shades

• Widely available in garden centres.
• Evergreen and generally hardy.
• Interesting range of colours and foliage markings.

Heucheras have gone through something resembling a makeover in recent years, thanks mainly to American plant breeders, and are now a stock line in every garden centre. I have never heard them go under a common name in this country, but they are the clumping perennials with frilly, maple-shaped leaves often with mottled or frosted markings. They do flower but the tiny blooms are secondary to the wonderful foliage. Being native to North America, heucheras are reasonably hardy, even though they are evergreen. It was the lovely burgundy and purple shades which made most of us take notice of this plant genus here. Since then there have been a range of amber, gold and almost ginger shades as well and there is a lovely little lime green.

Heucheras in autumn tones

Heucheras in autumn tones

It took me a while to learn how to grow heucheras successfully. It was a little irritating to admire them in other people’s gardens and to have their owners smile smugly and say that they had no difficulty with them, all the while seeing my own plants get smaller, not larger. The secret, which they did not tell me at the time, is that heucheras are not a perennial that you can plant and leave for years. They thrive on being lifted and divided regularly (late winter to early spring is the best time for this) and replanted in well cultivated soil with plenty of humus added. I also find they do better in a colder, open area of the garden where they get plenty of light but they are not baked in the summer sun. In good conditions, the divisions reward you by making satisfyingly big clumps within the season with foliage which keeps its colour well and is generally untroubled by pests and diseases.

Winter pruning apple trees: step-by-step guide Abbie Jury and Colin Spicer

Apple trees benefit from a little attention in winter and in summer – easy care summer strategies for apples.

1) This dwarf apple tree has not has not had any attention other than a light haircut in winter and again in summer for many years. It is congested and overgrown and while it still fruits, the quality of the crop will improve in better conditions.

2) Select the branches which will give the tree its framework. Keep the main leader in the centre of the plant and choose branches which are well spaced to allow for air movement and maximum light. Remove all surplus growth not needed for this framework, including branches which cross each other. We are pruning for a tree which is more or less an espalier shape – two dimensional with height and width but little depth because it grows in a narrow border beside our driveway.

3) Now that the basic shape of the tree has been restored, thin out the clusters of fruiting spurs. Apples will continue to set fruit on old spurs for several years, but best results will be on growths from one to three years old. Where a spur is cut off, the plant will usually push out a fresh growth in spring.

4) This shoot shows two years of growth. The lower half was new growth made in spring two years ago and the upper half is growth from last spring. You can see the fruiting spurs forming on the 2008 growth. These will flower and set fruit this year. If you make the mistake of always pruning by trimming off the long whippy new growths, you are cutting off all the fresh fruiting spurs. Try to get a mix of fresh spurs and already established spurs so that you are encouraging gradual replacement.

5) Sealing the cuts is optional but strongly recommended by our visiting pruning expert. He applies Bacseal which is an antibacterial sealant. Avoid getting this on your hands and always wait until you have finished all the pruning to avoid brushing wet surfaces with your skin or clothing.

6) A spray of lime sulphur will clean up the heavy lichen infestation. Follow up with a copper spray at winter strength in three weeks time to get the tree into a much healthier state. Follow the instructions on the containers for dilution rates for both sprays.

Tikorangi Notes: July 20, 2010

The first flowers of the season are opening on Magnolia campbellii

The first bud on Vulcan to show colour

Tikorangi Notes

Magnolia season is just starting. Of all the plant families we love, the ten weeks or so of deciduous magnolia flowering is the highlight each year. Magnolia campbellii in our park has opened its first few flowers. These flowers are quite some distance up from the ground. Vulcan is just opening the first red bud in the nursery but has yet to show colour on the trees in the garden. A few of Mark’s early season seedlings are opening and he is waging daily war on possums and rats which can attack the flower buds of plants, particularly those planted near our bush. Not to be left out, the earliest michelias are also opening the first flowers. This signals the time we re-open the garden to visitors at the start of August when the magnolias are really coming on stream.

Tikorangi notes: Friday 16 July

Latest posts
1) Early, frilly and fragrant – one of the first rhododendrons for this season is R. cubittii.
2) Exotic trees versus native plants – Abbie’s column (spare me from politically correct ignorance).
3) Cranberry update
4) In the garden – tasks for this week.

Our magnificent Podocarpus henkelii will see the nursery capillary beds surrounding it both come and go in its lifetime

Tikorangi update:
I was listening to a radio interview last weekend with Peter Arthur, a keen dendrologist and NZ’s foremost retailer of garden and plant books. In a country where it is currently quite difficult to sell any plant which is not a vegetable or a fruit tree, he was asked to predict what the next big gardening craze will be. He didn’t hesitate: trees. A return to trees.

I thought of Peter’s comment as I looked at a beautiful specimen of Podocarpus henkelii. When Mark established the nursery here, he worked around existing trees on site so we have tended to have obstacles – a citrus tree amongst the vireya rhododendrons with the overhead shade cloth cut around to fit, an eriobotrya in the hosta block – and this magnificent African podocarpus set amongst the capillary beds. Now the day has come, as we wind up the nursery, that the capillary beds will go and the P. henkelii will be accorded the status it deserves as part of a planned new garden. It will have to share the limelight with the planned Palm Walk but it has at least four decades on the palms and will no doubt retain its status as the senior plant in this new area for our lifetime. I hope Peter Arthur is right and we will see a wider appreciation of the magnificence of trees. A utility apple tree is not, I think, a match for our P. Henkelii.

Flowering this week: Rhododendron cubittii

Early, frilly and fragrant - Rhododendron cubittii

Early, frilly and fragrant - Rhododendron cubittii

The early rhododendrons are just starting to flower and amongst them is the gorgeous R.cubittii. We tend to take our ability to grow these delights for granted but there are many rhododendron enthusiasts in the world who would sell their soul to be able to have these strongly scented and somewhat exotic types in their gardens. Cubittii hails from Burma, first collected around 1875 – long before that country became renamed Myanmar and shut its borders. Rhododendron buds at the point of opening are a lovely feature in themselves and cubittii has buds in dusky pink which open to big, frilly flowers, mostly white with a yellow throat and pink flush on the backs of the petals. The scent is sufficiently strong to hang in the air around it.

Cubittii is one of the better options for warmer areas because it is largely resistant to the dreaded thrips which turn leaves silver. Grown in full sun, it makes a compact shrub of about 1.5m x 1.5m (the sun encourages bushier, lower growth whereas shrubs tend to stretch and reach for the light in shadier conditions). I have always advised people in cold, frost-prone areas to shy away from this variety but I am told on excellent authority that it does well in Palmerston North in sheltered positions. If it grows well there, it can be grown pretty much anywhere in Taranaki, bar sub alpine areas or the coldest inland valleys. Just plant it in the lea of some trees to protect the early blooms from frosts.