Flowering this week – meconopsis or Himalayan blue poppy

A little weather beaten after the rains, but a small gardening triumph in our conditions - the blue poppy

The blue poppy must be one of the simplest and bluest of any flower anywhere. It is such a shame that it is so difficult to keep alive in our conditions because you can never have too many simple blue flowers in a garden. The meconopsis has as few as four petals (and they look like slightly crumpled tissue paper) surrounding a boss of golden stamens and the central ovary, but the blue can be a startling electric blue. A clump of meconopsis is a sight to behold.

The blue poppies hail from the Himalayas and surrounding areas which gives a hint to their preferred growing conditions – alpine meadows. Without a winter chill here and with high winter rainfall, it is more likely that they will rot out below ground and they simply never get the signal that tells them winter has gone (they are probably still waiting for it to arrive here) and to break dormancy. So most gardeners struggle to keep them going and they tend to be one season wonders (annuals) and never seed down. The fact that we now have clumps of them well established in a cold border in our park area and that those clumps are getting bigger and return each year (so are perennial) is testimony to some years of persistence on Mark’s part. He has been selecting stronger growing clumps and good blue tones over time, hand pollinating to increase seed set, raising seed in the nursery and generally taking great care of these blue babies to get them to naturalise. Of course if you come from a colder, somewhat drier area, you may wonder what all the fuss is about because they can be relatively easy to grow there but they are very rare indeed in warmer climates.

For the record, these plants have been hand pollinated so frequently that Mark has lost track of the genetic proportions but they are basically downstream sheldonii back crosses which means that they have varying proportions of betonicifolia (both blue and white forms) and grandis.

In the garden 04/12/2009

  • The rains this week will give rise to all manner of fungal attacks (moisture and warmth, even relative, encourages fungal growth). Watch tomatoes, potatoes, courgettes and other vines including grapes carefully. You may need to get an urgent copper spray onto them if you want a harvest later.
  • Roses will be similarly afflicted. If you don’t spray your roses (we don’t), keep working at light summer pruning, deadheading and removing diseased leaves. Good hygiene and air movement will help reduce the impact of fungal and bacterial attack.
  • Wisterias need frequent restraint as their tendrils are ensnaring anything around them. You do not have to be too particular with the summer prune and a pass over with the hedge clippers is fine. If you have a plant near a building, be vigilant. The time from fine tendril to embedded woody stem which is capable of lifting weatherboards and splitting the spouting is less than a season.
  • Convolvulus is rocketing away and can become a major problem alarmingly quickly. If you are not organic, Woody Weedkiller is the way to go. If you are organic, you will probably have to start unravelling the vinous growths and trace them back to ground level where you dig the whole thing out, taking care to get all the roots because any left behind will grow again.
  • Don’t ignore Wandering Jew either and the recommended chemical assault on this is Shortcut (sold in larger quantities as Buster). It is a systemic spray (gets absorbed into the plant’s circulatory system) and has a very quick kill. You can increase the hit rate by raking off as much foliage as you can first (but put these rakings into black plastic bags to rot because they are quite capable of growing again – every bit of it) and then spraying. Follow up with a spot spray a month later. Apparently Wandering Jew can cause terrible skin irritation to dogs and cats which is another good reason to clear it off your property. If you don’t want to use chemicals, you will have to hand pull every bit of it (wear gloves) and keep returning to the patch as it re-grows. Eventually you can clear it but it takes perseverance.
  • The rains this week mean you can continue digging and dividing perennials and clumping plants a little longer.
  • Vegetable planting continues with corn, beans, peas, salad veg, carrots and the like but lay off the brassicas now unless you are prepared to spray or cover them.
  • We are running out of time for pruning. Try and get this finished as soon as possible.
  • The Christmas hint this week is to try making flavoured vinegars and oils for gifts, using herbs from the garden. Wash and dry herbs such as sprays of rosemary, French tarragon (I wish), bay leaves, lime leaves, even thin parings of lemon rind. Leafy herbs like parsley don’t work so well and tend to go off. The rule of thumb is to bring the vinegar to the boil before pouring it over the herbs in the bottle. White vinegar is a neutral base for flavouring. For flavoured oils, use a neutral oil such as grape seed or rice bran and warm it before pouring into the bottle. A word of warning: the flavoured oils and vinegars in shops will be sterilised and sealed whereas home efforts are not. The liquid needs to cover the flavouring herbs. To be really safe, strain off the liquid after a few weeks or store in the fridge. If you have decorative smaller bottles, one bottle of white vinegar or grape seed oil can go a long way and make attractive and thoughtful gifts.

Pruning grapevines Pt:2: 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.

Flowering this week – we still call it Urceolina peruviana

From the alpine meadows of the Andes, Stenomesson miniatum

From the alpine meadows of the Andes, Stenomesson miniatum

I was all set to write about this little gem of a bulb from our rockery, which we have always known as Urceolina peruviana but a quick net search tells me that it is now called (wait for it) Stenomesson miniatum. At least the Peruvian reference gives a hint to its origin from the alpine meadows of the Andes but do not be thinking that this means it is extremely hardy. In fact the snow blankets it in winter, protecting it from the damaging effects of freezing. In our mild climate, it is largely evergreen although the occasional frost can turn the leaves to slush. It is completely deciduous in colder conditions.

Whether stenomesson or urceolina, it is a member of the amaryllis family and we appreciate it particularly for its timing. It flowers now when pretty well all the spring bulbs have finished so the hanging (or pendulous) trumpets in orange with even longer yellow stamens are a standout feature. It has a reasonably long flowering season over several weeks and if you have sufficient to enable picking, it lasts well in a vase. Also to its credit, there is a not a lot of choking leafy foliage for the months following flowering. In fact there is not a lot of foliage at all which makes it tidy in the garden. The bulbs don’t increase at a speedy rate so it is a plant to treasure if you can acquire it.

Dining al fresco – furniture options

Getting my eye in for outdoor furniture options

I see that summer officially starts on Tuesday but our thoughts turned to the first of the summer wines a few weeks ago. That is to say that I floated the idea of some new outdoor furniture for us to sit in greater comfort with glass in hand. My Mark is a man of many talents but shopping is not one of them. When it comes to larger purchases, I have to do the legwork in advance, narrow it down to a preferred option plus a back up position and then psyche us both up for a joint shopping expedition. So I have been getting my eye in on current options, both in shops and on line.

Wooden furniture largely falls into two camps: Indonesian teak and kwila (hardwoods) or Cape Cod style which is more commonly made in tanalised pine and often painted. We have an existing teak table and eight chairs which are fine but I have another use for them and I want more comfort. I have a twinge of conscience each time I look at the current furniture. I suspect an orang-utan may have been made homeless in order to supply the timber for my patio furniture. Back about eight to ten years ago when we bought it, sustainable logging was not a key selling point. Now it is a huge issue and every purveyor of Indonesian hardwood outdoor furniture from the cheapest to the considerably more upmarket outlets claims that their source is sustainably managed. Call me a cynic, but I wonder if in fact all these offshore buyers were not booked in for consecutive days to visit the one and same model plantation with the claim that it is a fine example of wonderful environmental management and their furniture is being made exclusively from timber milled from this location. The bottom line is that Indonesia’s hard wood forests are disappearing at a completely alarming rate and the timber is going somewhere. It may be optimistic to think that they are not going to supply the decking and outdoor furniture for wealthy Western al fresco living. It is more likely that sustainable logging in heartland Indonesia means cutting out the hardwood forest to replant in high yield palms.

I won’t be buying more furniture made from Indonesian hardwoods at this stage. If you have some (and who hasn’t), you may like to try extending its life by painting it with a mix of about half raw linseed oil and half turpentine. If the mix is a little thick, add more turps. The proportions are not critical. The turps helps the mix get absorbed readily and stops the timber from being sticky. Sadly, I must warn that you can’t put it in a huffer bottle and spray it on (I tried but the mix is too viscous) so you need to brush it or apply it with a rag. It will wreck the brush and if you use a rag, be cautious what you do with it afterwards because it can combust. However it is a great deal cheaper and just as effective as expensive wood preservers sold for the same purpose, though it will darken the wood.

The Cape Cod furniture is allegedly in the American style (fairly loosely speaking, I suspect) favoured on that peninsular of Massachusetts. Personally I think the common style of chair looks as if it were designed for the human equivalent of Jack Russell dogs – long in the upper leg (deep seats) but extremely short in the lower leg (close to the ground) and with a sharply angled back to the chair which looks really bad for posture. They are quite cute to look at in that picket fence sort of genre and it appears to be fashionable to have them painted in alarming garish colours, rather than in gently weathering timber but at least they are made from ethical timber.

Next is that tubular aluminium and nylon look. At its best, it is very stylish in its contemporary appearance with clean lines and it is probably very practical. At its worst, it just looks utility and cheap – and there are very cheap options from some outlets. It is not for me but if I lived in a penthouse apartment with lots of shiny stainless steel and, perspex panels and glass, I would probably feel it was entirely appropriate to the environment but I would only want the more upmarket quality of this style.

So to the French provincial look (sometimes Italian), marketed these days as shabby chic. It is usually cast iron, sometimes wrought iron and I admit I love the look. When we bought our old wooden suite, what I would really have adored was the French provincial dining table and eight chairs which was a mere $6000 close to a decade ago. It wasn’t overly comfortable, it couldn’t accommodate a sun umbrella and it certainly wasn’t practical (the heavy chairs would have been difficult to push in and out on our imperfect, outdoor surface) but it was stylish. These days the price has dropped (the quality too) and alas shabby chic has come to mean chipped paintwork in pastel colours peppered with rust. I don’t want chipped paintwork and rust and I do want comfort. Shabby chic is founded on the real McCoy – weathered by time and of undeniable quality. Repro shabby chic does not do it for me.

Finally we come to the option of African colonial which is outdoor wicker. Proper wicker is a wonderfully organic and aesthetically pleasing material (though it can descend from chic to plain shabby alarmingly quickly) but it is designed for a very dry climate. So what is on offer here is made from synthetic materials. I was surprised to find that if you buy good quality, the guarantee runs to five years which is a lot longer than I expected. African colonial probably takes the prize for all round comfort – clearly the gin drinking representatives of HM Government in that continent knew a thing or two about comfort.
We have yet to make our decision but certainly my forays on the topic have highlighted three points:

1) Like most things in life, you get the quality you pay for.
2) The really, really, really stylish options are found on the internet and are divine but out of our league altogether. I may even rather have the new car I could buy with the money instead.
3) Bringing your outdoor furniture under cover at the end of summer greatly extends the life expectancy of same.

I did not see any of the polyester resin furniture that I have maligned over a period of many years. Maybe it has gone – I wish. I will not even deign to comment on the naff swinging love seats under their own little awnings which look like a floral surrey with a fringe on top. But I would comment that the cantilevered umbrellas that are for sale everywhere this year are desirable. We haven’t owned one yet but we have used one and they completely eliminate the intrusive presence of an umbrella pole in the middle of everything. We are looking forward to being well set up shortly for the summer wines.