- It is pretty much the last call for heavy pruning on flowering cherries. These need their pruning done in summer to reduce disease. While you are about it, you can prune plums and other deciduous fruit trees straight after harvest. This encourages them to set more fruiting spurs for next year, rather than too much leafy growth.
- While you are watering container plants (should be done every day), don’t forget to top up the fish pond. Even robust goldfish get stressed if their water heats up too much.
- While planting in the ornamental garden is largely on hold until temperatures cool or we get some serious rain, mid summer can be a time to give lawns some attention. You can spray for flat weeds now or sprinkle sulphate of ammonia. If you are not keen on spraying, get out with an old carving knife and crawl around the lawn. This last activity is guaranteed to engender a rosy glow of virtue. Never feed a dry lawn – the fertiliser is more likely to burn the surviving grass. If you are planning on sowing new lawns, autumn is the optimum time for this but preparation can start now. The quality of a new lawn can be directly linked to the amount of effort put into preparation. Level the area, cultivate it, remove all green cover and keep hoeing off successive waves of germinating weeds.
- Vegetable gardens are all about forward planning so while some of us are enjoying full summer (and quite possibly worrying about how to stem the deluge of courgettes), organised home growers are already on the ball for winter. As summer crops are harvested, winter veg are sown and that takes in root crops of the carrots, beetroot, turnips variety and brassicas and leafy greens. Some people start sowing onions this early. You just have time to get a final sowing of green beans but do it asap.
- Because we maintain active websites (abbiejury.co.nz for published writings and jury.co.nz for garden and plant information), I track google search terms. This week saw somebody looking for advice on how to propagate swan plants (the food for monarch caterpillars) aka asclepias. Seed, preferably fresh seed is the answer. If you sow it at this time of the year and prevent the butterflies from laying eggs on the germinated seedlings and then the baby plants, you will have well established plants next summer which in turn will produce seed. If you have room in your veg garden, it is worth putting a row in. If you are buying swan plants from garden shops at this time of the year, you will end up raising some very expensive monarchs. The idea is to have large, well established plants (bushy and chest or head height) coming ready from now through autumn to enable the monarchs to linger longer into winter.
- I fear the naïf who googled asking if snails are good for kentia plants (presumably kentia palms) may not have a great future as a gardener. I can not think that snails are good for any plants at all unless squashed and feeding the soil.
In the garden, February 5, 2010
Some deciduous magnolias repeat flower in summer - this one is Apollo
- If you have deciduous magnolias which have flowers on them, this is not some freaky abnormality. It is all in the parentage. Some varieties repeat flower in summer. This second flowering is but a shadow of the early spring display but it is a bonus. Black Tulip has had particularly good, dark flowers this summer but proved too difficult to photograph.
- Naturally you will be attending to your bearded irises, as per today’s Outdoor Classroom. Just make sure that the replants don’t frazzle if we get a run of sunny, dry weather.
- Some readers may have seen the media coverage of the unfortunate arrival of the hadda beetle which so resembles the charming lady bird. In fact the potato and tomato psyllid that we referred to two weeks ago is already here, established and wreaking havoc. The psyllid attacks all solanums which includes tamarillos, cape gooseberries and capsicums. Sudden, unexplained deaths in any or all of the solanum family (which includes a range of ornamentals too) may indicate a psyllid presence. In the short term, worry more about the psyllid than the hadda beetle especially for those who prefer to garden organically. Garden centres should all be able to offer advice on controls but there is no simple answer to effective management of the psyllid.
- Spring bulbs in the garden are starting to show white roots which means they are breaking dormancy. If you were planning to lift any congested clumps of daffodils or the like, get onto the task without delay.
- In the vegetable garden, thoughts are turning to planting for winter. The idea is that most plants do their growing while temperatures are still warm and then they hold in the garden through winter so you can pick them fresh. So you can be sowing parsnips, carrots, dwarf beans and brassicas now for winter harvest.
- If your garlic harvest this year is poor, take heart. You are not alone. The wet and cold November and December probably did not help.
- Pinch back cucumbers, melons, courgettes, pumpkins and similar spreaders to keep them under control and to encourage fruit set. Tender pumpkin tips are delicious to eat, as are stuffed courgette flowers, if they are not infested with white fly. I have never seen any merit in the fruit of chokos, but we have always enjoyed eating the tender tips when lightly steamed as a fresh green.
- The rains this week and the warm, humid conditions means that the weeds will be growing and spitting out seed even as you turn your back. Ignore these at your peril.
Dividing bearded irises: step-by-step with Abbie and Mark Jury
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.
The Magical Carpet Garden
Magic at The Garden House in Devon
I wrote in my last column about redoing the rockery plantings here – a task finally completed after a good three weeks. When I say completed, I could just keep going on the margins and expanding onwards and outwards but other priorities call at this stage. In that column, I mentioned what we call the carpet garden as an alternative way to feature little treasures without the structure of individual pockets, raised beds and, in our case, several truck-loads of rocks.
I don’t know if this genre of gardening has a different name but if you think of an oversized Persian rug, or maybe a patchwork quilt of random design created from tiny treasures, you may get the picture. This is not in any way to be confused with its vulgar and strident cousin – the traffic island geometric bedding plant displays composed of annuals which have a debt to the Edwardians. The French have a long history of doing these bedding plant displays with more ooh la la francais panache but they are still combinations of bedding plants. If floral clocks composed of African marigolds, blue lobelia, red salvias and pink bedding begonias are your thing, then so be it but they leave me cold.
Altogether more refined is the plantsmanship in achieving mats of dwarf perennials. The finest example of this that we have seen is at The Garden House in Devon, on the edge of Dartmoor. Admittedly we were instantly won over by The Garden House on arrival because the very first significant plant we saw, in pride of place as one enters, was none other than Mark’s magnolia named for his father, Magnolia Felix Jury. It was an auspicious start for antipodean visitors and we felt a rosy glow of pride which I think was entirely justifiable. Leaving that aside, what is designated The Quarry Garden caught our attention. In this case it is an undulating carpet, planted through the site of a small quarry with some contour to the land. On a summer’s day in June, it was an entrancing patchwork quilt. We are talking plants such as the prostrate thymes, alpine phlox, spreading euphorbias, cistus and roscoea with the occasional vertical exclamation mark from echiums (which are more prized in UK gardens than here). I didn’t take plant notes, unfortunately, but I am pretty sure there were dwarf bulbs in there too. Little treasures again, featured in a garden style which allows them to flourish and to have their place. It is a style of alpine gardening, as is the traditional rockery, so it needs open conditions and to be kept free of bullying thugs of plants.
Underwhelmed at Sissinghurst
The other example of carpet gardens that we saw was at Sissinghurst and these, alas, were not memorable. Best guess is that they were designed to feature the prostrate thymes. As dead flat concrete rectangles surrounded by flat paving and lawn, they had all the panache and style of children’s sandpits given a new use. At a time of year when they should have been brimful of interlocking mats of ground cover, they were instead sparse and somewhat barren. We were underwhelmed.
Naturally I wanted to come home and try a carpet garden in the style of the Quarry Garden we saw in Devon. I even mentally located it in a sunny, open position in our new North Garden. But ever the pragmatist, Mark pointed out that this style is extremely high maintenance. Not only is plant selection critical, when a garden is filled with ground hugging miniature plants, weed control is of the essence. You can’t be out with the push hoe or glyphosate in this type of garden. Nor can you rely on compost mulch to suppress unwanted germination. Upon reflection, I had to agree that he is right. It is a place which requires you to pick your way through gently, ever useful wonder weeder in one hand and bucket in the other, taking care where you place your feet. Readers who have tried planting chamomile or thyme lawns will know what I mean. We have one stretch where we have a carpet of prostrate thyme softening the edges between concrete pathway and our driveway. It always seems remarkable to me that the thyme will grow on the concrete path with a mere few millimetres of accumulated dirt to set roots. But I work on that thyme carpet constantly to prevent weeds from getting established. The nasty little bitter cress can creep in, as can a dwarf poa (grass), summer grass and the creeping yellow oxalis. If I didn’t keep onto it, it would not take long to turn into a carpet of thyme and weeds.
Constant maintenance is needed on our thyme edging. The yellow flowers are zephyranthes, known as the rain lily from central America
So my advice on the carpet garden concept is, first and foremost, don’t even think about it unless you are a very precise and fastidious gardener who is prepared for eternal vigilance and intervention. This is not for laissez faire gardeners at all. Not only that, but you have to constantly remove fallen leaves and debris. Immaculate maintenance is a critical part of keeping it looking good. Turn your back on it all for a season and you will likely have a scruffy, weedy mess. At this stage, I have shelved my ideas for trying one. Maybe it could be a little project in retirement.
However, should you wish to try one, think ground hugging (prostrate) plants and miniatures along with dwarf bulbs. Little and low is the key. We are not alpine here so you will probably fare best with some of the thymes, baby campanulas, trailing lobelia for fillers, the true mini irises, small growing sysirinchium (there is a very nice little blue flowered one called Devon Skies that we bought from a local garden centre), dianthus, our native helichrysum which we have under the cultivar name of Silver Cushion (may be a selection of H. bellidioides) and the like. You could use verbascums for vertical accents and there are assorted bulbs which will grow tall but without large spreading foliage to smother surrounding plants. Albuca juncifolia fills this role well, in our experience. The long and the short of it is that you are going to have to be a bit of a plant collector as well as a careful gardener. Add in excellent drainage, open conditions and the traditional mulch of coarse gravel. There is no mystery to the carpet garden – just attention to detail if it is to achieve the magic status we saw at The Garden House.
Flowering this week: Eucomis or pineapple lily
Neither pineapple nor lily, this burgundy coloured eucomis is a feature in our summer garden
Our best guess is that this is a good form of Eucomis comosa, possibly a hybrid. It actually has nothing to do with pineapples or lilies because it is a bulb from South Africa and belongs to the hyacinth family. But the flower with top knot is seen as resembling a pineapple and that may be more PC than referencing caricatures of certain indigenous tribes who favoured top knots. The bulbs are big fist-sized affairs and build up quite readily in well drained, sunny positions. Each bulb makes a large clump so it is a plant for the summer herbaceous border where it has room to spread out and where it doesn’t matter that it leaves a bare area when it dies off in autumn. The long-lived flowers are apparently widely used in floral work and because the eucomis is happy to grow in covered houses, flowering seasons can be extended.
Our eucomis has leaves which are a subtle blend of burgundy and brown with a green undertone, bright burgundy flower stems and buds opening to a scented lilac flower with lovely yellow anthers. Green forms of eucomis are more common and there has been a range of dwarf eucomis hybrids introduced in recent years. This is a genus that lends itself to hybridising and it is generally an easy garden plant in our favoured conditions here in Taranaki.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 