- Temperatures are inexorably creeping upwards and that means an explosion of slugs and snails. Waitara gardener, Alathea Armstrong reports that she caught no fewer than twenty of them partying and feasting on her emerging delphiniums. If you choose to use slug bait, remember that one bait can kill several. Reduce the danger to birds and hedgehogs (nature’s controls) and to pets by never spreading it thickly like fertiliser. Placing a bait or maybe two under a shell or a lid will keep the bait active and out of the way. Slug bait is designed to attract the targets which is why you do not need to carpet the garden hoping they will trip over it. Keep your packet of slug bait somewhere safe too and don’t leave it on the door step. Always wash your hands after touching it.
- To avoid using toxic baits, get out with a torch for night time sport and reduce the population. Use a thick spread of cheap baking bran around special plants. Mulch with pine or rimu needles. Create a circle of sand, sawdust or egg shells around vulnerable plants. Place hollowed out citrus shells to provide a house for them (and don’t forget to do a terminator round each morning) or leave a partially buried, half empty can of beer to attract them. Stay on top of the problem from the start, which is now.
- As sasanqua camellias finish flowering, it is time to trim and shape them. If you want to have a go at some creative pruning or topiary, sasanqua camellias are a good starting point. If you make a bad mistake, fresh foliage will hide it within a fairly short space of time. If you get it right, a shaped and trimmed mature camellia can be a wonderful feature plant and act like a punctuation point in the garden.
- There is evidence that marigolds can repel some of the pesky insect infestations in the vegetable garden, although it is unlikely that one or two plants will do much. You probably need lots of them. However, they will feed good butterflies like monarchs and can be dug in as a green crop later so it is worth a try. Sow them from seed now. It is miles cheaper than paying for a nursery to produce a punnet of half a dozen plants for you. Tagetes are the recommended marigold family for this purpose though there is some evidence that calendula will work too.
- If you are wanting to plant fruit trees, don’t procrastinate. While there is plenty of time left for planting, garden centres will have their largest selection available now and if you hang about too long, sure as eggs they will sell out of the ones you want. Hawera Plum, Apricot Fitzroy and Monty’s apple are all local(ish) selections.
- In the veg garden you may like to get fennel seeds in now for an all round useful and long lived new vegetable. It is not bullet proof as a crop but its harvest is certainly useful. Dig in green crops.
July 31, 2009 In the Garden
- A few mild days mid week were the klaxon heralding spring. In New Plymouth if you look to the right as you drive along Powderham Street between the radio station and the well known liquor store, you will see the campbellii magnolias in all their glory. These are the first of the season to flower every year. Our English snowdrops are starting to pass over and the dwarf daffodils are flowering their little heads off. It is very much countdown to spring. Be prepared for some relapses to miserable, bleak weather as well.
- It is still garlic planting season but don’t leave it too much longer.
- Don’t delay on pruning grapevines because the sap will start to move soon and they weep and bleed if you prune too late. However there is no harm in taking a little longer on the roses, wisteria, clematis and hydrangeas.
- If you are enjoying eating the yellow kiwifruit and want to grow a vine, you will need to try it from your own seed. As far as we know, the fruit you buy in the shops all comes from cultivars still owned by the plant breeders [Hort Research] and not available to buy for the home gardener. There is, however, nothing to stop you from trying your own from seed although there is no guarantee you will get a top cropping one from seed. Mark has several plants which he raised and we will be planting them out in the field to see which is worth keeping. Just use seed from a good specimen of fruit you have bought.
- Continue sowing broad beans. If you don’t think you like them, try eating them at the juvenile stage and you may become a convert. They are a most useful spring bean and, as an experienced veg gardener noted, once you have harvested the beans, the remaining plant makes a wonderful green crop for digging in to the garden..
- The optimum time for feeding plants is just as they are about to go into growth which is… [wait for it….drumroll…] now – for most plants. Prune, clean up the garden beds, feed and get mulch on. The mulch is really important if you have poor soils and if you dry out easily in late spring. We still advocate blood and bone or Bioboost as garden fertiliser. Leave the plastic coated prills (Osmocote, Nutricote, Plantacote type) for container plants and don’t waste your money using them in the garden.
- If you have ugly, leggy or otherwise crusty looking rhododendron plants, now is the time to cut them hard back. For brutal pruning back to bare woody trunk and stems, don’t delay. You are going to shock the plant and you want to maximise its new growth so sacrifice this year’s flowers. Cut back hard, feed and mulch. It won’t flower next year but you should have a really attractive, renovated plant which is bushy and fresh. No guarantees – it is kill or cure with sick plants. You can cut all the foliage off on both rhodos and camellias but only at this time of the year.
English Summer Gardens – Part 3
We went to England to look at summer gardens which are all about flowers, particularly perennials and annuals. We didn’t expect to see so many meadow gardens and nor did we have the perspective of the summer garden as a continuum.
At one end, we saw natural wildflower fields, grazed by sheep and not managed as gardens at all. There are two key aspects to understanding British meadows. One is that many of our weeds in this country are in fact wildflowers in their home environment. So what might be seen as a rank, unloved and weedy infestation of dandelions, stinging nettle, daisies, convolvulus and blackberry is an entirely appropriate and acceptable meadow garden in its natural setting. Add in other elements such as cowslips and wild orchids (dactylorhizas and anacamptis pyramidalus) and you have something altogether delightful. The second aspect is that wild flowers thrive in a climate that is cold enough to stop all growth in winter and dry enough to stunt most growth in summer. These are hardly typical Taranaki conditions.
Inch along the continuum and you discover managed meadow gardens which were integral to most of the large gardens we visited. The late Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter was an influential figure in popularising and enriching the meadow garden genre by encouraging a wider range of wild flowers to naturalise. The general rule of thumb for managing meadow gardens is to cut the meadow down in August (the equivalent of February or March in our hemisphere) and to leave it lying for about three weeks. This allows the seed to distribute. The hay is then raked off the meadow in order to keep the fertility low. If the soil is too rich, the growth becomes rampant and grasses will dominate. The existence of a parasitic annual referred to as Yellow Rattle (Rhinanthus major) helps to keep the grasses weakened.
Meadow gardens appeal to the romantic and naturalistic instinct cherished by the English. It is not seen at all as scruffy or unkempt and it is fine to have a designated meadow area as your main point of entry to the garden. The naturalism is often combined effectively with that most prim and proper of all gardening techniques – topiary. Great Dixter does it – the large clipped yew shapes created by Lloyd Senior now stand in the midst of an informal meadow. At Helmingham Hall in East Anglia, an undulating wave of pathway is cut through meadow grasses which surround large clipped yew domes.
I don’t see many New Zealand gardeners managing this meadow genre. Our soil fertility is too high, our grasses grow too strongly and will choke out most competition, our torrential rains will flatten meadows even in summer and if the rain doesn’t do it first, then winds will. Our nitrogen levels are too high. And we tend to be a bit anally retentive and suburban, dedicated to manicured lawns and edges, let alone to glyphosate, to tolerate the casual live and let live philosophy of the meadow.
Take another step along the continuum and there is the completely contrived and totally enchanting field of flowers (without grasses). We saw this done at East Ruston Old Vicarage Garden where the field of yellow daisies had hints of blue cornflowers and red soldier poppies and it was so perfect that it took our breath away. If you start with bare earth, in the first season there are no competing grasses or weeds so all that is seen are the desired annuals. By the second season, competing plants mean that you are closer to the managed meadow situation.
Contrived but charming field of flowers at East Ruston Old Vicarage
We are now moving into a style of gardening which has a debt to the North American prairies and the prairie meadow style reaches a pinnacle at Wisley Gardens where Professor James Hitchmough from the University of Sheffield is responsible for one of the most delightful meadow gardens of perennial flowers that you will ever see. Apparently the inspiration was Missouri meadows but the execution of the vision was achieved with gardening skills. The brief included a requirement that this garden be easily managed by Wisley staff so it went in to an area which had been cleared of weeds and grasses and probably also cleared of much of its topsoil. A rope mesh mat was laid, allowing the plants to stay anchored and a carefully chosen palette of about ten plants from seed mixed with sawdust was sown to create a sea of perennial flowers. There wasn’t a lot of foliage evident and the plants were tough performers which thrived in hard, dry conditions. It was magic. It was also in its second season already and there was no evidence of weed or grass contamination although it must be said this is managed with some ongoing minor intervention.
The Missouri meadow garden at Wisley
Move along the continuum further and you get to the classic cottage garden style which the English made their own. Cottage gardening is an indulgence of self seeded annuals and perennials, usually combined with roses, along with other shrubs and climbers such as clematis. The effect is a riot of colour and flowers with nothing so contrived as colour toned borders or stage managed plant combinations. Plants should look as if they are growing naturally where the seed falls and hard landscaping takes a back seat in this informal, romantic look. Readers who know the Armstrong’s garden in Waitara will have seen a rare local example of this gardening genre. If you have yet to visit, go and see it this Rhododendron Festival. Alathea Armstrong has it peaking to perfection for that week and it is very pretty, albeit labour intensive.
But take another step along and you come to what I call the managed cottage garden look which I associate with English gardeners such as Rosemary Verey and Penelope Hobhouse. The romantic naturalism is now combined with hard landscaping, form and formality. It is much more controlled, as can be seen in the Hobhouse Country Garden at Wisley. Colour toning becomes a major factor. Deadheading becomes intensive in order to prolong the display. Planning for successional flowering from spring to autumn is important. Constant management means spent plants are cut back and holes are plugged by bringing in fresh potted colour from out the back somewhere. Weed management becomes more critical. Many of the plants need staking. We talked to Lady Xa Tollemarche at Helmingham Hall about her borders and she manages to keep them at a peak for several months. The English do this classic garden style so well but it is not for the home gardener who sees spending every spare minute in the garden as a form of slavery. Easy care and low maintenance, I think not.
The classic Hobhouse country garden at Wisley
We are, dear Reader, only half way along the continuum. How silly of me to think I could summarise all we saw and talked about in 1200 words. We need to pause in the middle before moving on next instalment through the mixed border a la Christopher Lloyd, the sweeps of herbaceous colour softening formal landscaping in the style made famous by the Lutyens-Jekyll partnership, moving through the classic and intensive long borders to the recent work of Piet Oudolf and Tom Stuart Smith and onwards to the modern minimalism of mass planting. There is still quite some distance to go and any number of points where thinking gardeners can hop off the continuum, comfortable that they have found the point that best suits their situation.
In the garden this week July 24, 2009
• Spring is just around the corner. The first of our campanulata cherries has opened its flowers so we expect the rest of the tuis to return post haste. Be careful using glyphosate around areas of bulbs. The emerging daffodils do not like it at all.
• Do not delay on the winter pruning because time will run out sooner rather than later. Roses, wisterias and hydrangeas all need an annual prune along with raspberries, grapes and kiwifruit in the orchard. Dwarf deciduous fruit trees or espaliered specimens such as apples and pears need a winter trim to keep them in good shape but if you have granddaddy old big trees, it must be admitted that few people prune these and most will continue to fruit. Our colleague Glyn Church advocates finishing all pruning before the birds start nest building for spring.
• For the record, we are continuing to harvest and eat avocados from our two Hass trees, as we have since January but the rate is slowing. The late summer corn cobs are pretty well at their end and are now somewhat lacking in flavor and really only good for soups and fritters. Brussel sprouts, Chinese greens, brassicas and parsley provide most of our daily greens though we should also have been picking leeks. We are still eating apples, kiwifruit and potatoes out of the store cupboard and should have had our own pumpkin. The orange trees provide plenty of fruit on an ongoing basis. All I need to buy from the supermarket are the missing leeks, carrots and bananas.
• Give some winter attention to lawns even if you have joined the movement to shun spraying and fertilizing. Flat weeds are easy to remove by hand. Fill in hollows and dips. Use the garden fork to lift and aerate sodden or compacted areas and oversow bare patches.
• The rule of thumb in the vegetable garden is that you dig in green crops at least six weeks in advance of replanting. The rate of breakdown is slow in current cold conditions. So it you are preparing areas for planting early summer veg in September, you should be starting to dig in any crops.
• While some vegetable gardeners are meticulous about crop rotation in prescribed sequences, sound practical experience over centuries backs up the idea that at the very least, you should rotate different types of crops to avoid building up pests and diseases. There are gross feeders such as tomatoes and corn, legumes such as peas and beans, green leafy crops which includes lettuce and brassicas and root crops (parsnip, carrots, onions). Don’t fertilise your root crops this year (and definitely shun animal manure for them) but plant them in an area which you fertilised well last year. So they go where your corn or tomatoes were. Mix and match the other crops to avoid replanting a crop or a close relative in the same patch it was in last season. Crop rotation does not come any simpler than that.
Lachenalia bulbifera
Naturalised beneath a pine tree - the rogue flower is a form of aloides
One country’s wild flowers can be another country’s treasures, or indeed weeds in some cases. Fortunately South Africa’s lachenalias fall into the treasure category. We have a collection of different lachenalias which will flower in sequence from now until mid spring. One group of South African visitors was surprised to see the extent to which we use them as garden plants and commented that we appeared to have a better collection than ever seen at home. But as there are over 100 different lachenalia species in the wild plus a confusion of natural hybrids, our collection is only modest. The most common lachenalia is the garish (or cheerful) orange and yellow aloides. This red one is a form of bulbifera and, being reasonably strong growing and not fussy, it has naturalised well at the base of an old pine tree in a paddock. The really highly prized lachenalias are the blue toned ones but they are much fussier (ain’t that just the way?) and generally more frost tender. We keep the more touchy varieties in the rockery while using the easier ones to naturalise for winter interest. All lachenalias grow from bulbs which will increase naturally in good drainage. If you gather seed, sow it while very fresh for best results.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 