A step by step guide by Abbie and Mark Jury first published in the Taranaki Daily News and reproduced here with permission as a PDF.
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The Jury Plants – Cordyline Red Fountain
CORDYLINE RED FOUNTAIN (syn. Festival Grass and Festival Burgundy).
A flagship Jury plant, this one, the result of many years of effort which started with two different plant genus altogether. Initially there was the work Felix did with coloured and variegated flaxes (phormium). One of the most successful plants internationally became Phormium Yellow Wave – widely grown to this day in British gardens. We have always joked that had Felix received just one cent royalty for every Yellow Wave sold, we would never have had to earn a living but back in the 1960s, there was no protection of intellectual property rights and no expectation that a breeder be rewarded financially. There were other coloured cultivars (including Misty Sunrise and Pinky) from the breeding flurry but these have not stayed in the marketplace as Yellow Wave has. However, these coloured phormiums perform better in other places than our climate with its high humidity. We struggle to keep good foliage and they look pretty tatty and badly marked by insect and rust damage along with growing too large for a small garden. So Felix moved on to the next plant genus which offered similar clumping habit and pointed leaves without being spiky.
Over 30 years ago, Felix and Mark were both fascinated by the habit and appearance of our native Astelia chathamica (often sold under a cultivar name of Silver Spear). There was little that needed improving in the pointed silver leaves of this clump forming plant, but both father and son saw the potential in trying to create a different colour-way with red foliage. So began a twenty year effort before Mark pulled the plug and decided that his red astelias were simply too difficult and too unreliable to market widely. We still have them in cultivation in the garden here and a few of the selected clone were released by us onto the market. Other seedlings found their way onto the market by devious means on the part of a third party (that is a story best kept in-house) but clearly others found the plant just as difficult to build up – and indeed to keep alive at all – because it has never been a huge commercial hit despite the demand. Sometimes breeding directions are more blind alley than interesting path and Mark reluctantly abandoned the red astelia.
Undeterred, Felix looked to the cordyline genus where he crossed two lesser known NZ forms – banksii and pumilio. In this country where Cordyline australis is by far and away the most common form around (called cabbage trees and an icon of our country), cordylines are expected to have trunks and grow several metres tall. When Mark raised the seed from this cross, there was the lucky break which came to be called Red Fountain in the first instance (but also marketed in the US as Festival Grass and Festival Burgundy).
It is clumping, rarely putting up a trunk much above 10cm with exceptionally good colouring in shiny burgundy red which lasts all year round. The narrow strappy leaves are relatively soft and fountain out around the base. In early summer, the tall, arching flower spikes are in pale lilac and highly fragrant.
- Cordyline Red Fountain – one of our flagship plants here
We have been delighted at the success of this cultivar on the international market, thanks to the efforts of Anthony Tesselaar International in the capacity of our agent. Less delighted, one might say with the efforts of competitors to come in behind it with ring-ins and substitutes, some even raised from Red Fountain (how we wish they would show some originality and come up with their own ideas) but we are confident that nothing has yet appeared that is the equal of Red Fountain.
Mark has continued with the cordyline breeding, but with the market being flooded with different cordylines from other sources, many proving difficult and unreliable, he has put any further releases on hold.
A Worm's Tale
Presumably called tiger worms because of their stripes, not their size or ferocity
Mark has been having fun with tiger worm jokes. Tiger worms are what you commonly have in your worm farm and they are voracious devourers of vegetative waste. But we found in Radio New Zealand’s archives an interview from last year where Kim Hill interrogated her gardening guest on a range of topics including aforementioned tiger worms. Said guest was badly out of her depth although she knew a smidgen more than Kim (who is clearly no gardener) so she survived on a degree of bluff. But the suggestion that you want to try and keep your tiger worms in your worm farm and that if they escape to your garden they may eat your root vegetables (as in, they may have eaten Kim’s missing radishes) had us snortling in derision. Yes snortling – that is a combination of snorting and chortling.
Mark has taken to issuing warnings. Round up your tiger worms now and corral them back to the worm farm. Tiger worms are so-called because they have jaws with sharp teeth. The reason why you should never put meat in your compost is because the tiger worms develop a taste for it. Haven’t you heard about the elderly gardener who tripped and fell by her worm farm and all they found was a skeleton after the tiger worms had finished? Licences are about to be issued before you are allowed to have tiger worms on your premises and an inspector will ensure that you have them suitably housed and restrained.
The bottom lines are that while tiger worms are entirely suited to worm farms, they can be found elsewhere in the garden. Worms only process dead and decaying matter, not living plants. They have no teeth and jaws to chomp into your root vegetables. Slugs, snails and weevils will attack your plants but the faithful garden worm will not. There are many different types of worms and some, like the tiger worm or Eisenia foetida, are designed to accelerate the process of composting. Others prefer to live deeper in garden soils and these are the ones who help to aerate the ground by burrowing. A garden full of worms is a sign of good soil health and to be valued. If you spot the somewhat striped tiger worm in your garden soils, it is more likely to be an indication that you have a humus-rich layer of mulch on top.
I am sure it is a hard enough life being a worm without being accused of eating the vegetable crop. It is, by the way, apparently a myth that if you cut a worm in half, both halves will survive. They merely wriggle and die. While a worm can survive losing a bit off the end of its tail, it is not quite as resilient as many of us were brought up to believe. Oh dear, I wonder how many humble earth worms we gardeners sever in their prime or are we liberating them from life’s mortal coils?
Tikorangi Notes: May 21, 2010
Latest posts:
1) 21 May: A Worm’s Tale (subtitled: best not display your ignorance on National Radio).
2) 21 May: The perils of monochromatic garden colour schemes (subtitled: we were disappointed in Sissinghurst’s white garden and much preferred the blue and purple border).
3) 21 May: An evergreen member of the hydrangea family that flowers nigh on twelve months of the year: Dichroa versicolor.
4) 21 May: Counting down to our annual spring garden festival – a district round-up.
5) 21 May: Garden hints and recommended tasks for the upcoming week in our autumn conditions.
6) 21 May Autumn flowering sasanqua camellias are tried and true favourites in our climate.
We are not great territory for silver birches. They tend to defoliate long before the summer’s end. Their prodigious quantity of pollen causes hay fever, they seed down far too freely and they are messy darned plants, shedding twigs constantly in our winds. From time to time, we wonder about a death sentence on this betula near our entranceway. But when it is bare, the delicate tracery against the skies is a never ending source of delight. I can’t think of any deciduous tree that brings me such delight in silhouette and as it lacks much foliage for about eight months of the year, that is the dominant picture.
Flagging it on either side are large Queen palms (Syagrus romanzoffiana) now over 50 years old and probably up to 20 metres high. Felix Jury grew these from seed sourced from the Sydney Botanic Gardens. It is a bit of a meeting of two continents, Europe and Brazil – the betula and the palms side by side.
The perils of the monochromatic colour scheme in gardening
A random stranger in blue beside the blue and purple border at Sissinghurst
Back in the days when I first started writing this column and we were in the grip of seven day a week retail and mailorder plant supply, I used to despair at the numbers of well-heeled women in search of plants for their white garden. Mostly from Remmers, dear, and most had been to the ultimate white garden – designed and planted by Vita Sackville West at Sissinghurst in England. It was seen as the benchmark for restrained style and class and all wanted to emulate that standard. So all plants had to have white flowers and preferably be scented. Yellow stamens were permitted and cream was allowed but no other colour in the flowers. Fading out to white fell short and white flushed pink flowers were usually rejected as impure.
There were rules for foliage too. Green was fine, silver foliage even better. Variegations were acceptable as long as they were white and green with no yellow or red.
Apparently the secret of the white garden is revealed at night when all those pure flowers light up under moonlight to glow with ethereal beauty. Experienced gardeners realise instantly that this means it needs to be a summer garden because who wants to go out in winter or early spring to see the glowing white rhododendrons and camellias but not many white garden devotees of the early nineties were experienced. I recall reading a critique at the time that far too many of the white gardens were thrown together solely on the basis of colour. As long as it was white, it could be included. Gardens were criticised for the lack of thought given to planting combinations and inappropriate conditions for many of the plant subjects.
When we finally visited Sissinghurst, I was excited at the prospect of seeing the ultimate white garden put together with skill – where plant composition, shape and foliage combinations rule supreme, without the distraction of colours beyond white and green. Alas I was underwhelmed, disappointed. It rather looked to me like plants selected solely on flower and foliage colour bunged in together. So much for setting the standard. It may well have been different in the original days of Vita Sackville-West but in 2009 it didn’t quite cut the mustard.
Colour and flowers hide a multitude of sins. The purple border at Sissinghurst was far more successful on the day we were there and that in part could be attributed to the huge range of tones in blues and purples. There is not a lot of variation of hues of white and cream so it is harder to get visual oomph.
I suspect that monochromatic garden schemes are often the refuge of less experienced gardeners but in fact they require considerable knowledge and skill to get them looking good. They are not actually monochromatic because gardens have green as a base colour but that is generally treated as colour neutral. If you garden only with foliage or with foliage and only one additional colour, then form and texture are your tools and the plants you chose to complement each other and to fill the picture become critical. At its best, it is a restrained and disciplined approach to gardening which can be very restful to the eye. More often, alas, it is a hodgepodge – sometimes a pretentious hodgepodge – or downright dull.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 