April 9 In the Garden this Week

April 9, 2009 In the Garden

· As predicted, the autumn rains started just prior to Easter but before you relax, have a little delve down in your garden or lawn and see how far the water has penetrated. That said, it should be safe enough to sow new lawns this weekend and to over sow bare patches in existing lawns. If the worst comes to the worst and we get very dry again, you can give the new areas a water but it isn’t likely to be necessary.
· The autumn rains will bring an explosion of freshly germinating weeds. Be vigilant on these varmints. With leaf drop just starting, using fallen leaves as mulch will suppress weed germination and there is a surprising amount of goodness as well as useful humus in rotting leaf litter. Frankly it is no longer acceptable on this planet to burn fallen leaves. Compost them or disperse them through the garden.
· Hellebores (winter roses) will be coming into growth soon. Cutting all the old foliage off means you can see the charmingly understated nodding flowers of helleborus orientalis. Heavy aphid infestations in the spent flowers in spring are a good reason to deadhead these plants (so too is their habit of seeding promiscuously), but we have also found quite heavy aphid occupation on the old foliage this year, which is another reason to cut it off and cart it all away to the compost heap. If the foliage is clean, you can leave it lying as a mulch. If you don’t remove the old foliage, the flowers tend to hide beneath the big leaves. If you leave it any longer, you have to trim around each plant taking care to avoid the new shoots but done this early, you can slash and hack your way through with little precision. Some have even been alleged to use the motor mower (but not here). Hellebores are excellent bedding plants for open woodland conditions but orientalis does not like being lifted and divided (will sulk, sometimes for years) so if you want to build up numbers, do it from seedlings.
· In the vegetable garden, make the autumn clean up round a priority for Easter. Most gardens will have mildew and bug infested crops well past their best now. Don’t leave these to rot where they are. If you make hot compost, bury the diseased crops in the middle of the heap, or feed them to your worm farm. Good hygiene and tidy habits can reduce pest and disease infestations in the future.
· Peas prefer the cooler weather so you can be sowing them now. Inland gardeners may be wanting to sow their first crop of broad beans. While the yield on peas for the home gardener can be disappointingly meagre and the frozen product is actually very good and cheap, the opposite applies to broad beans which can crop extremely well and are infinitely better than the bought product.
· Get any bare areas of the veg garden sown down with a green crop as soon as possible. Oats, lupin, vetch, phaecelia, mustard or even plain rye grass are all options.
· If it rains incessantly over Easter, take heed of John Lubbock, aka Lord Avebury, who wrote: There is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

Cyclamen hederifolium

Cyclamen with black mondo grass

Cyclamen with black mondo grass

How can you not fall in love with the exquisite gems of the species cyclamen? C.hederifolium is the first of the season to flower, opening up its dainty pink or white butterflies in late summer and continuing all through autumn, at which time it also puts out its decorative, heart-shaped, mottled dark green and silver leaves which will stay fresh until spring.

Technically, cyclamen are tubers though most gardeners will call their circular, flattish heart a bulb. The origins in Southern Europe through to Turkey and even North Africa give a clue to conditions – tolerant of both heat and cold, fine in poor stony conditions but not keen at all on wet conditions. Despite our high rainfall climate, we find they thrive in our elevated rockery and even tucked on the side of our gravel driveway.

If you can’t find them for sale, cadge fresh seed later in the season from somebody who has them. The distinctly overblown cyclamen widely sold as suitable gifts for mothers, aunts and invalids are grotesque parodies of the charming species from which they have descended.

April 3, 2009 In the garden this week

· It is countdown to the autumn rains. These will arrive soon; we are just not sure which day but some time around Easter would be a safe bet. As soon as the rains come, it is a sign that you can be out with the grass seed to sow new lawns or to over sow bare patches in existing lawns. In preparation for this, get out again with the push hoe once again to level any weeds on the site.

· Autumn is the better planting time for trees and shrubs than the more usual spring schedule, but you need to wait for the rain to penetrate the soil first and this will take a couple of days of steady precipitation. At this time of the year, you may well be planting last season’s stock and there is nothing wrong with this as long as you handle it properly. Plunge the whole plant, pot and all, into a bucket of water and weight it down. Leave it for several minutes at the very least, and longer if bubbles are still rising. If the plant is very rootbound, cut the pot or bag off and look at the roots. If they are coiled round and round, you need to make about three or four vertical cuts down the sides. If they are folded in like a parcel at the bottom, cut these back. We don’t recommend trying to tease out fine roots, or indeed any roots. You are more likely to cause damage. If the root system looks too small for the top, prune the top. Plant into well cultivated soil with plenty of compost, water and mulch. Plant once and plant well is the rule of thumb here.

· There is still a good month of warm growing weather in April, a little longer for those who live in mild, coastal areas so there is time to get winter vegetables into the garden. But don’t delay or you will get a disappointingly patchy harvest later. If you are a beginner, you are likely to have more success now with leafy greens and brassicas because it is late for slower growing root crops.

· Non gardeners may like to try sowing micro greens or mesclun into trays. You can be cutting salad greens in a matter of a few weeks. You need trays with drainage holes (we are still recycling polystyrene mushroom trays) and about 12cm of depth. Our preference is to use a layer of soil, then the main layer of compost with about 2cm of potting mix on top of the seeds. Or you may find buying seed raising mix is easier. Once planted, keep the trays in full sun, give them a light water each day and keep them up off the ground to escape slugs and snails, let alone cats who may think it is kitty litter. The barbecue table can be a good spot for the trays or a sunroom or conservatory.

· If you are saving your own vegetable or flower seed, save seed from the very best plants only. In the veg garden, this may mean sacrificing the best specimens of crops like carrots and beans so that they can set seed. Others, like tomatoes, melons and capsicums, can be gathered in the kitchen as you prepare the food. Spread the seed to dry on a piece of paper and store in old envelopes. It is only a matter of months before you will be sowing them.

· If your flower borders are looking a little worse for the wear, take heart from Sara Stein: “I appreciate the misunderstanding I have had with Nature over my perennial border. I think it is a flower garden; she thinks it is a meadow lacking grass, and tries to correct the error.”

Grow It Cook It

Grow It Cook It, by Sally Cameron, photography by Charlie Smith (Penguin, ISBN 978 0 14 301096 8)

There is no doubt that the author is keen on her home garden and her background is as a food writer and stylist both in the UK and now back in New Zealand. But this enthusiasm is not a sure-fire guarantee of success. Trying to cover all bases and be all things to all people (there are also sections entitled Cook’s Notes and Child’s Play) was perhaps a little ambitious.

There are listings for 30 different fruits, vegetables and herbs in a somewhat random selection. Each chapter starts with a page or so of information on how to grow the subject but this cultural information is patchy. Growing lemongrass was fine but the entry on feijoas was not. And if one is going to advocate eating geranium flowers, I think there needs to be a discussion on the difference between geraniums and pelagoniums. The author’s gardening experience seems to be primarily based in Auckland suburbia and while this may be adequate for dispensing some simple advice, really she is trying to punch above her weight in the area of gardening.

Ms Cameron is far more comfortable with the recipes and cooking side of things. There are 355 recipes so the book is more than generous. The food is a jaunt through the flavours of the world but at a user-friendly family kitchen level. Rosemary Shortbread, Broad Bean and Lemon Risotto, Fresh Orange Terrine – all tasty and reasonably simple. I would wish for more consistency in the use of measures by volume – the recipes lean to listing ingredients by weight even for such items as sultanas or flour when a cup measure is much easier to use and overall the measuring techniques are inconsistent. But the greatest flaw in this book is that the recipes are grouped in chapters determined by the vegetable, herb or fruit tree that is the starting point, even though it may be a minor ingredient only. So there is no logical sequence to the recipes, although it does at least have a decent index.

Overall, it is better on the food than on the gardening and you can find more comprehensive and user friendly gardening information from many other, more experienced sources. It has a nice enough presentation without getting too excited about it, soft cover and opens flat.

The Oracle of Jury

Mark was very taken by a succinct description of what makes a good garden – “I look for plenty of plant interest and good design to lead me through.” He was watching the County Organiser assessing for Britain’s Yellow Book scheme at the time, screened on Sky television. The quality of the gardens applying for assessment can be very patchy but the calibre of the County Organisers who manage the gardens for their region is usually high.

It is not that long ago that garden design ruled supreme and plants were mere soft furnishings. In fact the designers held such prestige that they felt completely justified in advocating mass plantings of a single variety as The Only Way to good design and completely dismissing gardens which preferred variation in the form of many different plants, often planted in groups of one. Patchy, spotty, formless, some would sniff. There was little expectation that designers and landscapers would know their plants. Indeed even architects could confidently wade into the area of garden design, bringing their knowledge of space, proportion, building materials and good design but knowing next to nothing at best (and often less) about plants.

Prior to the landscapers and designers seizing the prestigious higher ground in gardening, we had quite a lengthy era when the gardens of the common populace (which takes in most of New Zealand) were all about plants and very little about design. The zenith of garden design here was captured in what is now referred to as Kiwi Hosepipe Style. That, of course, is where the gardener laid out the garden hose to get a natural looking curve or a more radical series of undulating curves which gave the lines to follow with the spade. Many readers will still have gardens firmly anchored in that tradition. In those earlier days, garden prestige lay far more in being able to proudly display rare or unusual plants, a value we took on from Victorian England where plant hunters were revered for their efforts in delivering up ever more novelties for collectors at home.

The simplest explanation is that it is only in recent times that many property owners have had sufficient money to pay others to realise some outdoor dining and entertaining visions on their behalf. When there was a great deal less disposable income, the DIY ethic was deeply ingrained. The hard landscaping required by most good design was way beyond the budget of all but the wealthiest and there was little done in most gardens. But the home gardener certainly compensated with a detailed knowledge and practical experience with plants which would shame many modern gardeners.

So what is really interesting about the County Organiser’s comment, with which I started, is that it married the two aspects of plant interest and good design as being necessary in a garden of any quality. Not only that, but good design is not treated as an end in itself but as a tool to facilitate movement through the garden space.

There are precedents for this marriage of design and plants and one of the most illustrious comes in the form of two significant Britons around the start of the twentieth century. Edwin Lutyens was an architect who also turned his hand to garden design. His houses were truly beautiful, as was his mastery of windows and light. So too were his garden designs a gifted use of space and proportion, very formal and completely dominated by plenty of magnificent stonework and bricks in walls, terraces, steps, water features and all the rest. He also gave us the Lutyens outdoor seat which is now probably mass produced in Asia but at its best is a classic and well proportioned piece of furniture.

But, and it is a huge but, having designed a magnificent formal space, he did not then fill it with clipped topiary and only five different plants laid out like soldiers on a parade ground. No, he handed the space over to his colleague, the revered gardener Gertrude Jekyll who then set about filling all the spaces and softening the hard lines with a riot of flowers and colour through the seasons. Jekyll is famous for her work on herbaceous borders with big drifts of colour and texture put together with the eye of an artist, but she was also a plantswoman using a wide range of plant material to enliven and blur the hard edges of the otherwise somewhat sterile formal design.

The Lutyens Kekyll partnership would not have come cheaply. No DIY going on there. But 100 years on, we have seen the preserve of the fine garden extend well down the social and financial ladder so that it is no longer the preserve of the wealthy upper classes. The democratisation of gardening, we might call it. Firstly through the most fundamental skills of learning how to grow and show plants to advantage, secondly through learning to value the aesthetic of good design and ways to manage this on a much smaller budget and hopefully now into the era when we successfully bring together both the plant interest and good design in the domestic garden.

So should anybody ever advise you to simplify the plantings in your garden, you may wish to smile serenely and consider, according to the Oracle of Jury, that advice is just so last century. If your advisor knew more, they may well say that your plant combinations are not good enough – that is the way you put all your many and varied plants together in the garden. Or they may mean that the design and flow within your garden is not good enough to carry the collection of plants you have amassed. But it is a cop-out or a non-gardener’s solution to say that all will be rectified by drastically reducing the number of varieties of plants you grow. Really good gardens are a blending of many interesting plants grown in good combinations and held together by excellent design. It is all a bit like love and marriage and the horse and carriage.