Flowering this week: Dombeya burgessiae

Dombeya burgessiae is more autumn flowering in its homelands but here it is blooming in mid winter

Dombeya burgessiae is more autumn flowering in its homelands but here it is blooming in mid winter

In the mid winter world of June, it is a little difficult to find flowering shrubs in the garden which are not camellias. Mind you, some parts of the gardening world don’t expect any foliage, let alone flowers, in their gardens in winter so we mustn’t complain. But our dombeya is looking very fetching this week. It has full heads of soft pink bells, each with a deep pink starburst in the centre and pure white stamens along with lovely velvety foliage. Apparently the common name for D. burgessiae is the pink wild pear but as we have never seen any fruit or seed pod that resembles a pear, wild or otherwise, this is a slight mystery to us. There are quite few different dombeyas, mostly from Madagascar, but not that many different ones in cultivation. Burgessiae occurs naturally in the Natal area up through Tanzania and is a plant for forest margins, much favoured as a food crop by black rhinos but we have been unable to test this claim in our garden with rhinos, black, white or any other colour.

The origin gives a clue: this genus is generally used to hotter, drier conditions and not suited to frost. We grow our pink dombeya in reasonably open conditions on a warm hillside but the hedge behind gives it some protection. Where frosts are heavier than a few degrees, it would need to be a conservatory plant. While not common in this country, the dombeya is easy enough to strike from cutting for the keen home gardener if you can find somebody with a plant.

In the Garden: June 18, 2010

Pleione bulbs

Pleione bulbs - discard the mushy, dark ones like the specimen to the left

  • The winter solstice or shortest day of the year is nigh – this coming Monday in fact. Alas the worst of the winter weather hits after the shortest day but at least you can console yourself with the thought that the days are lengthening again.
  • Traditionalists will be out planting their garlic (ours is in already). If you don’t have big fat cloves saved from last season, then make sure you only buy New Zealand garlic for planting. The cheap Chinese garlic comes from the wrong hemisphere so is out of its seasonal cycle and is reputedly riddled with virus which threatens our local garlic industry. You also have no idea what it has been treated with so it is all round bad practice to buy cheap imported garlic for planting.
  • Asparagus is a luxury crop for the home gardener because it is a permanent plant which takes up space all year for a harvest lasting only six weeks or so. It also takes a few years to start cropping well so is unsuitable unless you are planning on staying in the same place. But for those with space and the long term commitment, heading out to pick some spears in spring is a gourmet experience. If you have a patch, now is the time to clean it up and spread a blanket of compost to feed the crowns below the ground and to suppress weeds. If you have plans to plant an asparagus patch this spring, then get in now and dig the area. Then double dig it. Add as much compost and manure as you can and dig it yet again. Then let it rest and mature before planting in a couple of months time.
  • Winter is the time for pruning all deciduous plants except for cherries (both ornamental and edible) and plums which are summer pruned to prevent silver blight getting in. Gardeners in cold, frost-prone areas are best to leave their hydrangeas until last (pruning encourages growth which can then get burned by frost). But wisterias, roses, apples, grapevines and the rest can all be tackled over the next six weeks.
  • We did Outdoor Classrooms last year on pruning wisterias and grapevines (these are on http://www.abbiejury.co.nz and on Stuff (Deb, are these still accessible on the Fairfax site?) We will be looking at pruning roses and hydrangeas shortly. Don’t cut your wisteria off at ground level if you want flowers this spring.
  • Most spring bulbs are in growth already so it is time to look at planting or lifting and dividing the summer bulbs – particularly lilies.
  • Pleione orchids are spring flowering but now is the time to clean up clumps and repot because they are still dormant. These are a most attractive and hardy ground orchid, often called the teacup orchid. If you look after them, they build up quite quickly and we find them useful for carpeting woodland margins where conditions are open. The prized yellow ones like a winter chill so will do better inland and in the south but we find the pinks, lilacs and whites are equally at home in milder areas. It pays to clean them up now (discard the soft, mushy black bulbs and keep the fresh green or red ones, trimming off last season’s dead roots) because root disturbance on pleiones once they are in growth is a no-no.

Countdown to Festival – June update

In Stratford, June and Colin Lees at Cairnhill Garden have battened down the hatches for winter. Given the severity of inland frosts, they have moved their stoneware birds in under cover. Last winter one of the herons suffered a severe head injury, literally splitting in two. Fortunately potter and fellow garden opener, Joyce Young, put it back together in time for Festival. June is learning how to handle the blue Himalayan poppies. She bought a couple of plants a few years ago from a Wanaka grower and one has achieved perennial status (even the Lingholm strain can be short-lived) impressing garden visitors and setting prolific amounts of seed. There are few garden plants to equal the pure blue of these poppies so June is determined to nurture the many seedlings to flowering size.

Havenview vegetable gardener supreme, Maree Rowe on Kent Road has all her garlic planted and fed with copious amounts of compost to keep this gross feeding crop happy. She reports that her Queensland Blue pumpkin harvest this year was huge and weighty after growing them in one of the compost bins. She has completed the annual review to maintain her certification as a member of Organic Farm NZ, a process which is both rigorous yet supportive and encouraging. And Maree claims that her building skills are improving and she gained some practice extending the chook pens and runs for her new chicken additions. Now she is waiting in anticipation of plenty of fresh eggs being laid every day in spring.

In Kakaramea, Jacq Dwyer at Te Rata has been planting more fruit trees in the orchard, including a damson plum to encourage sister Michelle’s efforts making her Dam Fine Damson Gin. Michelle brought back a bottle of sloe gin (sloes are a small bitter fruit, actually a member of the prunus family, often found in hedgerows) from the UK but her efforts with damsons eclipse that liquor. With a six week turnaround, her recipe is considerably faster than the minimum twelve months required by the recipe I have tried. Jacq has also been lifting big clumps of native grasses, grooming out the dead strands and replanting divisions.

On Heta Road at Thorveton, Mary and Barry Vinnicomb are delighted with their new family member – a little silver blue kitten. Mary felt she deserved a special name such as Penelope, but really she is named as much for the memory of the honesty seed heads referred to as silver pennies in Mary’s childhood. Alas Mary is struggling to keep her roadside beautification efforts going in the face of drunken vandals. It is just a little garden around a concrete power pole with a colourful pelargonium and orange Californian poppies but even that proved too tempting to late night revellers who had to destroy it, along with smashing a pair of pots from inside the Vinnicomb. driveway. However, they tangle with Mary at their peril. Not one to give up easily, she now plans to plant the power pole in the prickliest rugosa rose she can find. Rugosas are known for being both high health and incredibly prickly.

Also in town, Coleen Peri of La Rosaleda complains that she is dying to get onto her rose pruning (an enormous task in her garden where she grows a large number of them) but by the time she kits up to go outside, the rain has started again. It was with triumph that she managed the feat of getting her new 170kg statue of Diana the Huntress and a concrete bench seat of similar weight into position in the garden. She did have to hire in some brawn, grease a hand or two and supply a couple of bottles of wine to carry out the task. It is likely that Diana has found her permanent home amongst the trees..

At Festival HQ, work on this year’s programme is well down the track and it will be available at the official launch which takes place at the TSB Showplace on July 8. The inimitable Ruud Kleinpaste will be the guest at the launch. While he is best known as the Bugman, we can vouch for the fact that he is no slug when it comes to gardening either.

Tikorangi Notes: June 11, 2010

Latest posts:
1) In the depths of winter, it tends to sap the motivation to get out to the garden but in our hints this week, we discuss why we have never included planting celery in our garden diary and we admire our visiting kereru.
2) Flowering this week is the delightfully scented and somewhat understated Camellia lutchuensis.
3) Outdoor Classroom this week is on pruning raspberries. Our new resident pigeons (of the homing pigeon variety, not the native pigeon) were not overly impressed by the intrusion into their quarters which they are currently sharing with the raspberries.

The gentle ring neck doves are altogether too trusting

Tikorangi Notes
One of the gentle sounds of England for us is the soft cooing of the pigeons. No matter that they may be described as rats on wings, that sound is so completely evocative, that I can pick it immediately, even on television. Our native wood pigeon , the kereru, is a very large bird, cumbersome even, of small brain but highly prized as a garden visitor and completely protected by legislation because of dwindling numbers. But it doesn’t coo like the English ones. We tried ring neck doves which coo beautifully and are pretty little birds. Alas they are completely trusting and spend much time on the ground so are vulnerable to predators. The late Buffy took out quite a few and we have to keep the surviving two in the raspberry coop at night for their own protection. It does not look as if we will ever manage a big flock of ring neck doves, though we would like to.

Mark

In his Jack Duckworth moments, Mark is very fond of his pigeons (I think they are the homing pigeon variety) which we can have flying free. He had to go to the bird show recently and buy another half dozen because even this resilient, quick breeding type fell to the ravages of our rare, endangered and totally protected falcon. We seem to have one falcon which has been around for years and clearly outlived his natural lifespan, possibly because of the raiding parties he makes regularly on Mark’s pigeons. Our dog, Zephyr, actually recognises the silhouette of the falcon circling above and barks a warning, which is a pretty impressive party trick for a dog.

In the garden this week: June 11, 2010

Our kereru in the apple tree

  • Tuesday’s bitter cold,  coming as it did after a cold and rainy Queen’s Birthday, was a reminder of why really keen gardeners like to have both a good, weather-proof shed and a glasshouse. A glasshouse makes raising micro veg, mesclun mix and rocket in trays over winter a great deal easier. It also enables you to plan ahead, sow seed and have plants in little pots ready to go out to the garden as soon as conditions are right.
  • Sitting around of a winter’s morning drinking coffee and discussing celery (as we do here), I realised that we have never even mentioned celery in these weekly hints. That is because it can be a very difficult crop to grow well and in the combined experience of growing vegetables here, totalling about 60 years between Mark and Lloyd, both agreed that it is hardly worth the effort for the stringy green stems that result. And if you try blanching the stems to reduce the greening which makes it strongly flavoured and tough, it tends to create a lovely home for slugs. Then leaf diseases defoliate the plants.  We have long figured that it is easier to buy the clean stems from the supermarket when required even if they are hardly organic.
  • If you want the taste and texture of celery at home, celeriac gives the flavour and is a great deal easier to grow successfully.  And Florence fennel or finnochio is a reasonable substitute for the texture (and actually more delicious in our opinion). Both celeriac and fennel also hold very well in the garden, giving a longer season. You can sow celeriac and fennel seed from late August onwards, earlier if in pots under cover. If you want to try celery, you can start it at the same time for summer harvest and follow up with a sowing around Christmas for winter harvest. Treat all three crops as gross feeding, green leafy crops not root vegetables.
  • Plant garlic, shallots, broad beans and the unfussy brassicas.
  • We have a kereru (wood pigeon) which comes in repeatedly to feed from the remnant apple leaves still on our espaliered apple trees outside the kitchen window. There are always tui visible, currently feeding from the early camellias (they need to be simple, single flowers with visible stamens to feed the birds), monarch butterflies are cold but still here and ladybirds are creeping in our wooden joinery to hibernate in the folds of the curtains. We have to take care not to vacuum the ladybirds up when they fall. One of the pleasures of having a garden is the chain of nature it can encourage.
  • Keep an eye on your favourite garden centres to see what new stock they are taking delivery of at this time. It should include fruit trees, new season’s roses, strawberries, all the deciduous crops such as magnolias and cherry trees along with a range of shrubs – all suitable for immediate planting.