Sometimes life can throw up little surprises. I saw a clip from Coronation Street come down my social media, a tribute to the victims of the 2017 bombing at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. Gail Platt and Eileen Grimshaw were laying flowers at a bench commemorating Martyn and other victims. Martyn Hett, a real life victim of the bombing and a great Corrie fan reportedly had a tattoo of Deidre Barlow. It is a poignant moment on that long running television soap opera.
Yellow Wave! In poll position centre foreground
What caught my attention was the plant of Phormium ‘Yellow Wave’ in prime position in the scene. Ha! A little bit of Tikorangi on Corrie! ‘Yellow Wave’ is one of the earliest of Felix Jury’s plant breeding efforts and arguably the most widely grown internationally, although not so often attributed to the breeder. All one minute 21 seconds of the clip can be found on Facebook here and on YouTube here.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, we know the phormiums as flax in English or harakeke in Maori. They grow widely throughout the country but ‘Yellow Wave’ was one of the very first compact. variegated cultivars to be released on the market. It wasn’t released by Felix. He was never a nurseryman and he never received a single cent for the plant. This was back in the late 1960s or early 1970s before there was any provision to claim plant variety rights or a plant patent over a new cultivar. We have always quipped that such is its international popularity, had he received just one cent per plant sold, he would have been a rich man. It received an Award of Garden Merit from the UK Royal Horticultural Society.
I made Mark pose beside Phormuium Yellow Wave at RHS Rosemoor in the UK in 2017
In this country, the flaxes tend to get a spotting on the foliage that rather detracts from their looks but they keep very clean foliage in other climates. Maybe this is why we prefer the newer dark burgundy and black phormium cultivars as garden plants? Also, we do not have a love affair with variegated plants.
I have used some of the newer burgundy to black phormiums in the new Court Garden
Felix went on to breed with astelias and cordylines in preference to the phormiums and Cordyline ‘Red Fountain’ continues to be very successful internationally. It is likely that in total numbers produced, sold and grown, ‘Yellow Wave’ eclipses that and we have often seen it growing overseas. I just did not expect to see it on Coronation Street.
After I posted last week’s piece about Matariki – the Maori new year, the winter solstice and Magnolia campbellii, a loyal reader commented that no magnolias are opening where he lives so he went looking to see what could be his Matariki flower. He settled on Mark’s Camellia ‘Fairy Blush’ which felt like an honour to us.
I like the idea of people determining their Matariki flower. We had our first ever public holiday to mark Matariki last Friday and for many of us, it was special. Not only does it mark a point in time that is significant both spiritually and scientifically to the first people of the land here, it is the only public holiday that has a nation gazing at the stars and taking an interest in astronomy.
Friends invited us to lunch to celebrate the occasion. Home entertaining is back in these Covid times, at least for our demographic. I took a bunch of Hippeastrum aulicumand our hostess commented that she had no flowers in her garden. This wasn’t quite true. She had Alstromeria ‘Indian Summer’ still blooming but nothing else I could see. It inspired me to come home and walk around the garden with my camera to capture some of the flowers we have in the depths of mid-winter.
A vireya rhododendron seedling
The subtropical rhododendrons are blithely unaware of the seasons, except for frost which makes them turn up their toes, and we have them in flower all year round. We have a mix of species, named hybrids and unnamed seedlings from crosses Mark has made. This is an R. hellwiggi seedling which means it is also sweetly scented.
Constant companion, new dog Ralph
Everywhere I go in the garden, Ralph is at my side. He does not, alas, show any respect for the garden at all and this morning knocked off the first open flower on a dainty dwarf narcissus. We have some work to do teaching him to respect garden boundaries.
Luculia ‘Fragrant Cloud’
It is luculia season and my favourite of these is the almond pink, scented blooms of ‘Fragrant Cloud’ which has a very long flowering season but generally flops if I cut them to bring indoors. I could do without the yellow totara to the left of the scene but the red form of our native cordyline works well. This luculia is rangy, brittle and lacks any merit in its form as a shrub but all is forgiven when it flowers.
Schlumbergera or chain cactus
Right at home under the rimu trees is the schlumbergera, commonly called chain cactus. We have a few different colours but this cerise form is easily the most obliging and showiest of them. These are plants that thrive in dry shade and, despite the cactus reference, have no prickles and spines. They are also dead easy to increase by just snipping off a length and tucking into a crevice with a bit of leaf litter to root into.
Camellia ‘Mine No Yuki’ with hanging tillandsia
It is of course camellia season and this is why I don’t love Camellia sasanqua ‘Mine No Yuki’ at this time of year. It doesn’t shed its spent flowers because the foliage is so dense and they sit around looking brown and sludgy. We only keep the plant because for the rest of the year we clip it tightly into stacked clouds and it justifies its existence for the form of the plant and healthy foliage. The flowers are a disadvantage, not a bonus as far as I am concerned.
That is a fine form of Spanish moss or tillandsia threaded on inverted, old, wire hanging baskets – a trick I learned from an Auckland gardener several years ago. His were more loved than mine but they add a detail suspended from the camellia branches.
Camellia yuhsienensis
We love Camellia yuhsienensisfar more, enough to grow a fair number of them as specimen plants, particularly for winter interest in the Summer Gardens. It is meant to be strongly scented but it needs a warm day and a nose stuck right in the flowers to get much of a whiff so that is a bit hyperbolic. However, the bees love it and anything that feeds the bees in midwinter is a good thing.
Dudley and Ralph
I reached the the Summer Gardens and Dudley had risen from his retirement bed to join Ralph and me. Duds is a quiet, old dog and the arrival of Ralph has come as a bit of a shock to him but they co-exist harmoniously. Dudley has made it clear that ALL dog beds are his while Ralph has laid claim to all the dog toys and already destroyed some that had survived years of Dudley’s more gentle play.
The Court Gardens in midwinter
I was focusing on flowers that are coming out or at their peak in midwinter rather than the carryovers from autumn but I made an exception for the yellow Salvia madrensis which makes a great autumn/winter plant for frost-free areas with plenty of space and nothing delicate nearby for it to smother. It is showy but large and rangy.
Daphne Perfume Princess
I have to acknowledge Mark’s Daphne ‘Perfume Princess’. Sure, it is just a daphne but what a daphne. Vigorous, reliable, exceptionally large flowers and an exceptionally long flowering season. Very scented, of course, as daphnes should be. We had stock plants left in the nursery that I threaded through the house gardens so it is quite a dominant plant here for us at this time.
Lobelia physaloides
Look at those big, blue-purple berries on the Lobelia physaloides
Look at this lesser known NZ native – Lobelia physaloides! It is sometimes referred to as the NZ hydrangea, presumably because its lush foliage loosely resembles some of that plant family. To my shame, I missed the flowering on it but the photos on line do not show any resemblance to hydrangeas. It is the berries that are the most extraordinary feature, in both size and colour. It is another rare, endangered plant on our threatened list, mostly from loss of habitat. In the wild it is limited to our offshore, subtropical islands (Three Kings and a few others) and a few mainland spots in the far north. For the botanically inclined, there is a whole lot more information here about this interesting plant. We are very pleased to have three plants of it in the garden.
The early jonquils are promising spring
I didn’t focus on the bulbs this time. We are on the cusp of peak bulb season – the early snowdrops are opening, the first of the narcissi, lachenalias in red, yellow and orange, Cyclamen coum is at its peak. It may be midwinter but we are blessed with conditions that allow plant growth and flowering all year round.
Opening right on cue with Matariki and the winter solstice, Magnolia campbellii var campbellii, albeit against a leaden, wintry sky
The winter solstice this year is this coming Tuesday, 21 June. On Wednesday, we can wake in the knowledge that we are past the shortest day of the year. The days will grow longer again, imperceptibly at first but the cumulative effect means we will start to notice soon enough.
Next Friday, on June 24 we celebrate Matariki with a public holiday for the first time. Matariki marks the rising of the Pleiades star formation and the new moon which means that traditionally it covers a longer period but it has been narrowed to the one special day on the calendar of public holidays. It is the Maori new year and it is a source of awe to me that in pre-European settlement days, Maori determined the commencement of a new year which closely corresponds with the seasonality of the European new year with its arbitrary date of January 1.
For me, Matariki is synonymous with the flowering of the campbelliis and the start of a new year of gardening
I regard Matariki as a marker in time which is relevant to our country in a way that the northern new year and Queen’s Birthday are not. Because I am not a fan of winter, the declaration of hope that the year is changing and spring is just around the corner lifts my spirits. And my spirits certainly need lifting in the current run of unrelenting leaden skies punctuated by rain.
The Powderham Street campbelliis have a lovely location beside the Huatoki Stream and can be viewed from the road above so the dominant view is looking down or at least across at eye level
On the first cold day of winter here this week – the first day that has seen me needing to wear a coat – I went to town. And yes, right on cue, the campbellii magnolias are indeed in bloom. These are the pink Quaker Mason form of M. campbellii var campbelliiwhich is the most widely grown selection around here. I photograph and write about them every year and I am not at all sure that I have anything new add but the emotional response I have to seeing these magnificent trees coming into bloom on or near the darkest day of the year never dims.
As usual, the three trees on Powderham Street in New Plymouth by the Huatoki Stream have a fair number of blooms already open although they won’t be at their peak until mid July.
The last gasp of autumn – the golden Ginkgo biloba to the left of the church…
and the promise of spring with Magnolia campbellii to the right.
I think the tree in the grounds of St John the Baptist Church is Waitara is matching it for open blooms. All these trees are in sheltered positions, very close to the coast and, being urban, surrounded by large amounts of concrete and tarseal which warm the areas they are planted. I like the juxtaposition of the gingko to the left of the church in its golden raiment and the magnolia to the right opening to its pink glory. Autumn meets spring in the churchyard of Waitara.
The promise of much to come on our tree of M. campbellii
Our tree in the park is always later. We are about 5km inland and our tree is in a colder position and that can make a difference of ten days or more to the blooming. But we have the first few blooms showing colour although not yet fully open, with the promise of many more to come.
I managed to line up one of the first blooms just opening on our tree with a rare patch of blue this week
Spring is just around the corner.
The flower to the left is an immature Stenocarpus bloom. When fully open, it has long clusters of red stamens as seen just above
Unrelated, but picked up in our park, I like decayed leaf skeletons. In this case I think it is a leaf from Magnolia insignis, formerly Manglietia insignis. The curious pin-wheel item beside it is an immature flower from the Stenocarpus, probably sinuatus, or Queensland Firewheel Tree. To be honest, our specimen of this tree is so tall and the flowers are so high up that we largely notice them only as the fallen red stamens on the leaf litter below. They are sometimes used as street trees in warmer areas both in their homeland of Australia and California and, when pruned and shaped and in a warmer climate, the flowering appears to be showier than here. I assume this flower head was blown off the tree before it could open fully. How amazing is that structure of the flower cluster?
I do not subscribe to the notion of no maintenance gardening. There is low maintenance gardening, lower, lowish, high and very high maintenance gardening. The grasses are generally on the lower side of the spectrum.
Before on the Stipa gigantea
I certainly don’t groom ornamental grasses in wilder, more naturalistic settings but the Court Garden requires some quite precise maintenance to keep its looks, although it is not usually onerous. This train of thought came about because I have been grooming the Stipa gigantea and that has been more major than I anticipated. At least I have worked out that every established clump is putting up maybe 40 flower spikes which is a lot, really. But there are 24 large plants of it in that garden (yes, I counted!) and every one takes up to an hour for a thorough dead heading and grooming out the dead leaves with a few also needing to be reduced in size. It is not such low maintenance and it is entirely optional but the plants do look tidier for it.
and after on the Stipa gigantea. There is at least half a barrow load per plant removed.
The lowest maintenance option are the deciduous grasses that just get cut down to the ground. That is Miscanthus sinensis ‘Morning Light’. We also cut down Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ and ‘Overdam’ which are not deciduous but look pretty scruffy and of no merit by late autumn. We have plenty of other evergreen plant material in that garden that gives winter interest and, when cut down, the calamagrostis return with pristine fresh foliage in spring.
Cut to the ground. Maybe don’t try this with clumps that have yet to establish well because you may run the risk of them rotting out over winter but ours are now solid plants.
If you have a very sharp spade and sufficient strength, it is possible to reduce the size of the clumps when they are cut down without having to lift the plants and disturb the roots. I have our Zach with a sharp spade to do this very job, as he has done on the calamagrostis last week and will do on and miscanthus that are looking too large when we cut those down soon.
A simple tool, cheap enough and sometimes sold here as a flax cutter. Along with my homemade arm protectors and garden gloves.
For cutting down grasses or perennials, buy yourself one of these very handy little tools with serrated teeth and a curved blade. I think I bought my latest one described as a ‘flax cutter’.
Chionochloa flavicans at the front with an unnamed red phormium or flax and the rather large Austroderia fulvida or proper toetoe behind.
Our native Chionochloa flavicans (dwarf toe toe) has a reputation for ‘whiffing off’, as Mark is wont to say. In other words, it grows beautifully for a few years and then starts dying out. I feel that the proper toetoe we grow – Austroderia fulvida – is showing signs of the same trait and I put it down to a build-up of detritus and dead foliage in the middle of the plants. In the wild, it will be part of the natural cycle; in the garden, we don’t want to cope with half dead plants needing replacement. My theory is that if I keep the plants cleaned out, they won’t suffer that fate. Ask me in five years’ time if I am right on that. I cleaned the plants up in summer, after flowering. The chionochloa were fine to do and did look better for it. The mature toetoe were not much fun to groom because, like a number of our native grasses, they are a form of cutty grass and cut they do. I always wear gloves and I also covered my arms but my ears, my ears! Those very long leaves can cut ears readily. At least it is only a once-a-year job.
The adjustable metal leaf rake, long handled hand rake and flax cutter
The Stipa gigantea does not cut flesh and is probably fine to be left without intensive grooming. I have never done it this thoroughly before so maybe it is overkill or maybe just something to do every few years. You can take the Monty Don of BBC ‘Gardener’s World’ approach and just use your hands as a comb to pull out the dead leaves. He doesn’t even wear gloves that I have seen so I guess they don’t have cutty grasses. I have used the metal leaf rake before and that does a pretty good job when you have room to move around the plants. This time I got in for a thorough clean using our useful little hand rake that you won’t be able to buy at the garden centre. Mark tells me it once belonged to his father but that he replaced the broken handle with a beautifully whittled, sanded and oiled handle that is longer than the original. Not only is this a useful implement for getting in to plants, it is also very nice to handle.
Chionochloa rubra
Anemanthele lessoniana
A few of the grasses don’t need much attention at all – notably our native Chionochloa rubra (red tussock) and Anemanthele lessoniana (gossamer grass). They may need digging and dividing every few years to reduce their size in a garden situation, but they don’t need routine maintenance, bar weeding out the many self-sown seedlings of anemanthele. It is the only prolific seeder we are using in the Court Garden. The miscanthus throws a few seedlings; the stipa is sterile; the others I have yet to find seedlings of (a thick mulch discourages seed germination) but the anemanthele… It is just as well it is both native and has merit because it certainly seeds down.
Ralph
Finally, may I introduce Ralph? Ralph came to us from the city pound. He is a little larger than our usual grade of dog but he has settled in here instantly with no doubt that this is his home. Life is terribly exciting for Ralph with so many interesting smells. He is constantly on the move outside and most of my photos end up being a passing blur. But he makes us laugh and it seems that everybody loves a scruffy dog. Come the evening, tired Ralph decides he is now a lap dog and that can be a bit challenging with one his size. Engaging but challenging.
Ralph, briefly sitting down to order, in the Wild North Garden – or dog heaven as he prefers to call it
First published in the May issue of Woman magazine. This is what one might call a retrospective view of the impact of Cyclone Dovi back in February and what it might indicate for the future with climate change.
“Imagine if trees gave off wifi signals, we would be planting so many trees, we would probably save the planet, too. Too bad they only produce the oxygen we breathe.”
social media meme
I did not have ‘hit by cyclone’ on my personal bingo card of climate change risk. Rising sea levels, flooding, mini tornado (we get a few of those in our area), slips, droughts – I had mentally considered all those scenarios.
We dropped the large abies two years ago as a precautionary move lest it fall on the house and when Dovi hit, we were very glad of that.
Indeed, we made the decision two years ago to drop the one big tree that could fall on our house and pretty much demolish it. It was a handsome Abies procera glauca, also known as the blue Noble Fir, planted by my late father-in-law about 70 years ago. We were sad to see it go but it seemed a wise precaution at the time.
It seemed an even wiser decision when we took a direct hit from Cyclone Dovi in mid February. As massive trees crashed down around us, we could at least take comfort from the thought the abies was not going to fall on us as we sheltered indoors.
When Cyclone Bola hit parts of Taranaki and then the East Coast in 1988, it largely bypassed our little corner of the countryside. The winds were strong but nothing too far out of the ordinary. New Zealand is a windy country and we are used to that, but there hadn’t been any cyclones in our area in the intervening 34 years which is why I hadn’t put it on my mental bingo card.
At 150 years old, our massive old Pinus radiata trees are weighed down with epiphytes and nearing the end of their life.
I garden on a fairly expansive scale, with my husband, Mark. It is a property that has been handed down the generations of his family since 1870 and we know who planted which trees and when. Some of the trees are now 150 years old, planted by Thomas Jury, and we know the old pine trees are pretty much at the end of their life. They are not helped by the fact Thomas’s son, Bertrum Jury, topped them at about 10 metres high in the early years of last century. It didn’t stop the pines from growing and the biggest are now up to 45 metres but with a weak point where Bertrum cut them. We have had some snap off at that point and others that uproot entirely and fall.
Why, you may wonder, do we not bite the bullet and get all the pines felled? It is just too big a job. We can’t get heavy machinery into that part of the property and it would probably have to be done by a massive logging helicopter. We are not in that financial league and, where those trees are, when they fall, it is only our property that gets damaged so they are not a risk to others.
The belladonna lilies flowered on, unperturbed by the fallen gum tree. I measured the diameter of the tree and the main section was two metres across. We cut the root ball and base free from the trunk and used heavy machinery to push the base back upright to create a more attractive gardening environment.
Besides, we can cope when big trees fall one at a time. We are used to that and can go in and do an efficient and speedy clean-up. Losing several at once, as we did with Cyclone Dovi, was rather different. It wasn’t just the damage from falling pine trees; we also lost a giant gum (eucalyptus) at our road entrance that was also 150 years old and Mark literally had tears in his eyes when he found another abies – a baby at just 70 years but one of our most handsome trees – uprooted in the park and lying over our high bridge. Those were just the largest trees. There were smaller trees and branches down everywhere.
The sheer scale of damage from fallen trees after Cyclone Dovi left us paralysed by shock for two days.
Mark and I went into shock for the first two days, paralysed by the scale of the clean-up task that lay ahead. Fortunately, most of it was garden damage, not structural damage, and we have good people around us. It did not look so overwhelming when we eventually got power and running water restored and the most urgent areas were being cleared. A fair number of homes in our local town of Waitara will be heated by firewood and pine cones after I offered both free, on a local Facebook page.
We cut back the fallen pine on the left to clear the path and it will eventually collapse to the ground but it perches somewhat like a giant lizard in the midst of woodland garden.
When big trees fall, our approach is now tried and true. Attempting to remove the fallen tree in its entirety would cause huge amounts of additional damage to the area and add considerable expense. We go in and remove all the debris, the foliage and side branches on the tree. We will cut through the trunk where it is blocking paths or access but we leave the main length lying where it fell.
I use ‘we’ in the royal sense. I do not chainsaw and I would not like to mislead with a mental image of me in work boots and ear muffs wielding a noisy chainsaw. My strengths lie more in the lighter aspects of cleaning up and reinstating gardens around the remaining trunks.
These two pine trees fell eight or nine years ago and we left the main lengths where they lay, gardening around them and allowing epiphytes to establish as they gently decay.
Within a year, we can have those fallen trunks nestled into the garden with plants thriving on and around them and they can gently decay over the years. Instant, unplanned stumperies, one could say, or a pragmatic gardening solution.
The conundrum is that we know one of the ways to mitigate climate change is to plant many trees. Big trees. Long-lived trees. A dwarf apple or maple is not going to contribute to saving the world. But with climate change, we know also that we will get more extreme weather events and that can bring those big trees down.
Power companies and linesmen are not tree-lovers. I can understand why when I saw trees on three roads around us bring down lines in the cyclone. I was relieved that none of them were our trees. It is a fine line to tread. We monitor our trees that could endanger power lines or buildings and have already dropped some that we deemed too risky.
The answers seem to be: plant trees, lots of trees if you have space, not just for future generations and to help the planet but also for the pleasure of watching them grow. But choose the spots carefully so that they have a chance of reaching maturity without threatening power lines or buildings and without casting unwanted shade on either your own house or the neighbours.
Circles of pine trunk now define the edges of a pathway
Don’t believe the heights given on commercial plant labels – these are often conjured out of thin air to make the tree seem less threatening to the customer or, at best, are what might be expected in the short to mid-term. If space is limited, consider narrow, columnar trees that give height and grace without spreading or casting much shade. Trees which stay lower often spread widely instead, taking up much more space without giving stature in a garden.
Think long term. Some trees can live hundreds of years. While a tree can achieve some size in 20 years, they are not mature – not by a long shot. From about 40 years on, you can start to claim you have mature trees. Trees are generally low maintenance, but that does not mean no maintenance.
We will be keeping a closer eye on our higher risk trees after Cyclone Dovi.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 