Flowering this week – Prunus Pearly Shadows

The flowers on Pearly Shadows are at least two weeks early this season

The flowers on Pearly Shadows are at least two weeks early this season

The disconcerting aspect about the pale pink froth of Prunus Pearly Shadows this week is that it normally happens around Labour Weekend which is still two weeks away. The flowering is early all round the garden this spring. So the drifting pink petals like snow flakes on a breeze may all be over by the time our garden festival starts at the end of the month. At least the new growth is an attractive and distinctive bronze though hardly as pretty as the flowers.

Pearly Shadows is a Japanese cherry with very full, fluffy double flowers. While Felix Jury named it, he did not breed it. The tree is too good just to be a chance seedling so it is a fair bet that it may have a proper Japanese name in Japan but nobody has ever been able to tell us what it is.

Pearly Shadows has a very useful shape as a tree, being like a capital Y which gets the upper branches out of the way. Some other Japanese cherries tend to grow more in the shape of capital T with low, spreading branches. A Y shape makes a better tree to line a driveway than a T shape.

Japanese cherries are pretty as a picture and make a quick growing impact tree but they are rarely long-lived in local Taranaki conditions. We are too damp and they can develop root problems and up and die unexpectedly. They also have a tendency to develop witches broom which can be seen as very dense foliar growth with no flowers. The witches broom will take over the tree if you don’t stay on top of it and cut it out in summer. By that stage, the entire tree is in full leaf and unless you have marked the offending sections, you will probably have forgotten which bits to take out.

A useful Y shape for a driveway tree

A useful Y shape for a driveway tree

October 9, 2008 In the Garden

  • We had a cold snap around the same time last year although we do not recall it being quite as cold as last Sunday and Monday. But this is why you don’t rush out to plant tender vegetables such as tomatoes, aubergines, capsicums, kumara and the like for another two weeks or so.
  • On a freezing cold jaunt around a few garden centres last Sunday morning, we noticed deciduous azaleas (azalea mollis) in stock. These are not always easy to find so if you have been wanting some, don’t delay – get out and buy them while they are available. Deciduous azaleas are more tolerant of poorer soil conditions than their aristocratic rhododendron cousins (they will even take quite wet conditions in heavy soils) and will smother themselves in flowers before any sign of leaves. Some, but not all, are the most outrageous colours in shades of burnt orange, cerise, saffron yellow and tangerine. Others are more demure but have wonderful fragrance.
  • If you have formal hedges, now is the time to get out and give them a light prune to keep sharp lines. The hedge clipping expert here (which is neither of us) uses a string line to keep even short lengths of hedges straight. He has also just clipped our one surviving yew tree. Yew are the classic clipping plant in England but, like flowering cherries, they find our rainfall levels too high and develop root problems which are nearly always terminal. If you are after the longevity and class of the English yew tree in this area, plant our native totara or miro instead.
  • Deadhead hellebores to stop aphids from setting up camp in the spent blooms. Sometimes even whitefly will join the gatherings and because the flowers face downwards, you may not notice the assembling hordes until you have a real problem. Removing the host is a pre-emptive move. If you are saving hellebore seed, sow it straight away. It doesn’t last long before it gets considerably more difficult to germinate.
  • Sow seeds of basil in pots or a tray for planting out in a few weeks but keep them somewhere warm and sheltered. If you want to grow melons of the rock, water or cantaloupe types, it pays to start these in pots as early as possible. They need a long, hot growing season and you want to make the most of every day if you want a good crop in our marginal conditions.
  • Most people will need to spray potatoes with copper from time to time, starting now. Taties are vulnerable to blight (the cause of the Irish potato famine) and if you get a bad case of it, the whole crop will succumb. Some modern varieties are a great deal more resistant and do not believe the myth that heirloom or heritage potatoes are by definition healthier and more resistance. This does not apply to potatoes (ask the Irish). We have a touch of blight showing here on the Jersey Bennes but Liseta is looking clean.
  • Plant Florence fennel, climbing and dwarf beans, carrots, peas, cauli, broc, beetroot, spinach and salad veg. These can all go directly into the garden as seeds or plants. If you want to hurry them along, use a cloche.

The New Zealand Plant Doctor, Andrew Maloy

A friend and colleague suggested that maybe I could be offering a garden problems section on the garden pages of the Taranaki Daily News and I recoiled a little so I was really pleased to get a copy of this book which lets me off the hook. It is cheap and cheerful (though on a nice quality of paper) and it will answer many of your queries about common garden problems. Most importantly, the advice given is good – knowledgeable, practical and not driven by sponsor’s products. Organic solutions are given where there is good evidence that they will work. Readers who subscribe to the Weekend Gardener magazine will recognise the content. It is pretty much a cut and paste collation of the author’s problem solving column in that publication but what makes it useful and accessible is having it in one book with a good index at the back. I read the section on buxus blight and, to my relief, the advice was very much in line with what I have previously written. If you want to know why your citrus have warty skins, your carrots grow forked or how to deal with narcissus fly – the answers are all here. There was nothing on witches broom in cherry trees but there is pretty good coverage of many common problems. Worth having on the bookshelf so go out and buy yourself a copy.

(New Holland, ISBN: 978 1 86966 273 8) Advertised price $NZ24.99

All About New Zealand Plants by Dave Gunson

I was going to be a little kind at least about this book which tries to make information on some of the plants growing in New Zealand available in a form suitable for people aged about 6 or 7 years on though to inexperienced adults. I could almost accept the random selection of plants which ranges through kauri and pingao to gorse and macrocarpa without ever discussing the difference between native and introduced plants, at least not that I could find. I was starting to have some issues with the classifications. It is pretty dodgy listing clover under Weeds but it just bizarre to put moss and lichen in the weed category. But it was when I looked at the pages on the so-called Penwiper Plant, Vegetable Sheep and the Mount Cook Lily that I immediately dismissed this book out of hand. Raoulia eximia is sometimes referred to as vegetable sheep, but that does not mean it is okay to rename it as that and completely ignore its proper name. There are a host of different plants internationally described as penwiper plants, but the main one we have here is Notothlapsi rosulatum. But don’t expect this book to tell you that because it has dumbed everything down so there is to be no botanical naming, even at the bottom of the page. The Blue Swamp Orchid – which orchid is it? Don’t expect this book to tell you that but it will tell you which tree is most likely to shout “Boo!” at you. Bah humbug. I hope New Holland’s other titles in their All About natural history series are better than this one.

(New Holland, ISBN: 978 1 86966 251 6)

Flowering this week – bluebells and blue lachenalias

Bluebells (more correctly hyacinthoides, used to be scillas and even endymion)

Bluebells (more correctly hyacinthoides, used to be scillas and even endymion)

Wordsworth waxed lyrical over his sea of golden daffodils (long finished here and hardly a sea) but it is the haze of bluebells that is pleasing us this week. The desirable bluebell is the English one, Hyacinthoides non-scripta, which is scented and less inclined to be as over enthusiastic as the larger growing Spanish one (H. hispanica). But they are reportedly struggling to keep H. non-scripta pure in the UK and odds on what we have here are various Spanglish forms of natural hybrids. Bluebells also come in pink and white although they do not then become Pinkbells or Snowbells. The other colours have some novelty value, but for large scale drifts you can’t beat the beautiful blue. In the UK where their woodland is far more open than our forest, it is hard to surpass the romantic sight of a copse of white barked birches with a blue carpet below. Here we have to naturalise on the margins where there is sufficient light but the bulbs are not competing with full on grass cover which overwhelms everything.

If you really want to sort out the origin of your bluebells, the English ones have cream anthers whereas the Spanish ones always have blue anthers. Apparently. Presumably if you have both blue anthers and cream anthers in your patch, you have Spanglish bluebells. And in case you are too embarrassed to ask what an anther it, it is the pollen bit on the end of the stamen in the centre of the flower.

Probably lachenalia orchioides var. glaucina

Probably lachenalia orchioides var. glaucina

Bluebells are easy to naturalise and have a simple charm. Blue lachenalias take considerably more effort to build up and are much fussier about position, but have a great deal more status value. We find mutabilis is the easiest of the blue lachenalias, bur orchioides var. glaucina is showier. Over the years we have collected as many different blue and lilac lachenalias as we can find but they tend to be a little promiscuous and it is likely that we now have the species mixed. We certainly have the labels mixed. The blues flower later, are more frost tender and somewhat fussier than some of easier red, orange and yellow forms (aloides, reflexa, bulbifera and the like).