Flowering this week – our rather rampant bougainvillea

Decidedly rampant, extremely spiny but quite spectacular - the bougainvillea

Decidedly rampant, extremely spiny but quite spectacular - the bougainvillea

Not, as we assumed, originating in the Bougainville Islands, but named for the French explorer, Louis Antoine de Bougainville and hailing from South America. We think this form is glabra, from Brazil. There is nothing rare about these scrambling climbers and they are appreciated throughout the temperate and tropical world for their display which can be all year round in latitudes close to the Equator. Here they peak in summer to autumn. It is not the insignificant flowers that make the show but the coloured bracts which surround the flowers and hang on for a long time. The colours range from the royal purple of this variety through cerise, red, pink, lilac, orange, gold and white. Left to their own devices , these can be formidable plants. Ours smothered a dead tree to around ten or fifteen metres high, and a little shy of that figure in both width and depth until the host tree rotted and fell over bringing down most of the bougainvillea with it. It then became a major mission because one of the other characteristics of this genus is its many sharp thorns.

Most of what are sold now are hybrids and they are not left to their own wayward habits as we have done. They are easy enough to trim and shape when small, sometimes trained as standards. We saw some really interested topiary specimens in Bali where three different colours had been grafted onto one stem and then trained to shape as a curious container plant. They are also recommended for hedging and with their thorny ways, they may be just the ticket to deter burglars in crime-prone areas with a mild climate.

In the Garden – April 16, 2010

  • Forward planning is needed if you want to move larger trees and shrubs in winter. This involves wrenching the plant, which is simply cutting the roots in a staggered sequence well in advance of the moving process. This will shock the plant but also encourage it to form fresh young roots. Move as large a root ball as you can physically manage. Make the first cuts now with a sharp spade around two sides of the plant. You will follow up with the next cut in two weeks or so.
  • Continue planting out in the ornamental garden and the orchard. Pretty well anything and everything can be planted successfully now though you may need to protect tender material for the first winter as it acclimatises to your conditions. Tender plants are those which do not like cold, wet or frosty conditions.
  • The autumn rains trigger a new round of weeds so try and stay on top of these to save work later on. Slugs and snails also become more active with wetter, still mild conditions. If you reduce numbers now, you may reduce the spring population explosion.
  • Autumn leaf fall is starting. Raking these into mounds or heaps and keeping them moist will accelerate their breakdown. You can then rake them back thinly over the area later in the season to nourish the soils with leaf litter. There is no excuse for burning leaves.
  • If you are harvesting pumpkins, they are best dried out before storage and eat the most blemished specimens first. The softer green skinned buttercup types don’t store anywhere near as long as the armour plated grey skinned ones.
  • By now you should have your winter vegetables in the ground. We are not far off planting for spring. You can get in broad beans, spring onions, winter spinach, peas and even leek plants (though they will only make small specimens now) and the ever faithful brassica family. You can start preparing the beds for garlic which can be planted from next month. Dig the area over incorporating compost and animal manures and then leave it to settle down until planting time.
  • Get any bare areas which are not going to be planted until spring sown down in green crops as soon as possible. We can not over-emphasise the value of green crops in terms of good, sustainable gardening practice. Vegetable gardening involves constant cropping, stripping goodness from the soil. You need to keep replenishing it and it is so much better to do it by compost, manure and green crops than synthetic fertilisers (which do nothing for the soil structure and the worms).
  • Shame on Te Radar. Delightful he may be, but we saw him on Sunday TV filling his new raised vegetable bed with plastic sacks of commercial mix. There is nothing sustainable about that practice.

Alternatives to buxus hedging

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.

New Outdoor Classrooms are uploaded fortnightly.

Tikorangi notes: Thursday 15 April, 2010

R.I.P. Buffy –
Farewell to a feisty character.

The end of a chapter. Buffy the cat, a part of our lives for over 10 years, is no more.

The end of a chapter. Buffy the cat, a part of our lives for over 10 years, is no more.

Tikorangi notes: April 9, 2010


LATEST POSTS
1) April 9, 2010 Our chaenomeles never get bletted – Abbie’s column.
2) April 9, 2010 Autumn is the best planting time here for the ornamental garden – garden tasks this week.
3) April 7, 2010 Summer has hardly waved goodbye but it must be autumn – the early camellias are in flower. Camellia brevistyla.

You wouldn’t credit how pleased I am with my new clothesline prop. While 95% of this country favours the rotary clothesline (originally styled the Hill’s Hoist, I am told), I quite like the nostalgia of the one wire strung between a dead tree trunk and another that looks as if it may be on the way out. This wire has served the house inhabitants well for 60 years and who am I to change traditions? The bamboo prop, however, requires replacement every five years or so. Fortunately we have a stand of this giant clumping variety on a small island in our park. Mark says he thinks this particular bamboo is one of the dendrocalamus family. There has been some resistance here to the suggestion that we could follow Asian traditions and build our own bamboo scaffolding when the upper story of the house next requires painting. The do-it-yourself ethos does not extend quite that far.