March 7, 2008 Weekly Garden Guide

From the school of We Finally Got Around To It, it really is your last chance this summer to prune cherry trees. These are trees you don’t winter prune because you open them up to silver blight and cherry trees are short lived enough in our climate without making it worse.

  • Next task here is to follow our own advice from a few weeks ago and remove the raspberry canes that fruited this year. Next summer’s fruit is set on new canes so the old ones are superfluous now. Raspberries are a rewarding crop for the home garden if you have some sort of netted cage to grow them in (keeping out the birds) but nobody here is exactly rushing to carry out the pruning.
  • Autumn is certainly here and the heat has gone out of the sun but if you feel drawn back to planting, make sure you soak the root balls in a bucket of water until the bubbles stop rising before you plant. We are still very dry and watering a plant in will not suffice. If the potting mix around the roots has dried out, it will just repel water unless it is soaked first. You can not rush or skimp on this process without risking the plant.
  • Keep preparing ground for autumn sowing into lawns. Push hoeing or raking off each crop of fresh weeds pays dividends in the long term.
  • If you have a grape vine outdoors, do not expect any crop at all unless you have covered it with bird netting. The birds do not understand about waiting until the fruit is ripe before eating it and once they have pecked pretty well every grape in search of the perfect specimen, the wasps move in on the pecked ones.
  • With the gentle rains, diseases can get away almost overnight on vulnerable crops like tomatoes. Keep up the copper sprays with special attention after even light rain. The humidity is the problem. Potatoes may need a spray against late blight unless you are growing some of the more resistant, modern varieties. Blight will kill the top and work its way down to the tubers. It was late blight which was one of the causes of the Irish potato famines. Potatoes are the fourth largest global food crop. Our guess is that they come in behind rice, wheat and probably soy. Given that they have only been around for 400 years, their rise in global popularity is astonishing.
  • Side dress young vegetable crops with fertiliser if they need it to encourage them to continue growing strongly and keep the water up to them. Research shows that fertilising while the plant is growing by sprinkling around it can give better results than raking in all the fertiliser when you are first planting the crop. Cropping in a vegetable garden is no different to cropping in the field – unless you are alternating with green crops which you dig in and adding large quantities of good compost or other fertilisers, then constantly cropping the same area depletes the soil of goodness over time. You must keep feeding the soil.

February 29, 2008 Weekly Garden Guide

Summer bunnies amongst us may have to accept that the full heat of summer has gone for another year, making a somewhat early departure this season, but keen gardeners will be relieved that conditions are becoming kinder for planting and cultivation. Keep thinking drought mode until we get some serious rain however.

  • Start deadheading agapanthus as they finish flowering, especially if the plants are adjacent to waterways or to reserves. Most agapanthus have been ruled noxious weeds in Northland and Auckland now because of their seeding habits. Our summer roadsides and gardens would be dull without them but increased vigilance may slow any tendency to become a major problem. If you are buying them, look for sterile varieties which don’t set seed.
  • Deadheading dahlias will extend their flowering season. Dwarf marigolds can also provide late summer colour if you like them. Some of us don’t.
  • If you raise your annuals from seed (which is hugely cheaper than buying potted colour), you can be thinking about sowing seed for winter and early spring crops. They do most of their growing before winter and then slow down in cold temperatures before bursting into flower. Keep them disbudded, however, while they get established. Once they start to flower, they can rush to seed and die prematurely.
  • Start thinking about wrenching large shrubs and trees that you plan to move in autumn or winter. Plan to take as large a root ball as you can physically manage.
  • Lettuce, kale, broccoli, cauli and cabbage can all be planted from either seed or baby plants. Those with a warm spot could still get a late sowing of dwarf beans in but it is the last chance. They will develop into winter and the cold then holds them for an extended picking.

As we admired a beautifully crafted waxeye nest which had come down with a branch, Mark regretted that he had never tried to document the changing fashions in birds’ nests over the decades. This one was held together with fine threads of blue synthetic baling twine and did look very decorative. Other nests we have found over the years incorporate the soft plastic strips which we use for budding and grafting, the black plastic tape we use to tie plants to bamboo stakes and even the odd Tuflok label gets recycled to cushion eggs and babies. We wonder if the birds will ever get to build their nests entirely out of near indestructible plastics and synthetics that they pick up. It is a slightly alarming reminder of how much non bio degradable debris is lying around, even in an establishment where we try to reduce its impact.

The Hairdresser's Garden

I feel a prediction coming on.

While the seventies brought us the phenomenon of the conifer garden (an era perhaps best forgotten now), the eighties can be remembered for bringing us the cottage garden with a riot of flowers and colours. The nineties saw a reaction to the ill discipline and high maintenance of the cottage garden and it was the stark and often pretentious minimalist garden (five rocks and three plants one of which had to be sansevieria or aloe bainsei) which became the height of sophisticated fashion. Few of us mourned the quick decline in popularity of the minimalist look. But the prediction from the House of Jury is that the new fashion is going to prove to be the simple formal garden.

A colleague sent me an aerial photograph of a garden without comment and I wasn’t quite sure what my reaction was meant to be. It was a large formal garden and there is no doubt at all that the seductive simplicity of the formal garden makes for very good photography because the form and design is dominant. My response was not what was sought and we had a fairly tetchy exchange of emails because I was not prepared to admire at face value. What I saw was a large area sharply defined by tightly clipped hedges built around the mandatory central axis which Mark is fond of describing as the airport runway look. I saw the substantial (but impressive) hedges sucking all the nutrient out of the surrounding ground so there were bare patches in the lawns beside them. I saw trees planted in matched formation. One grid had a substantial number of trees and I enquired what the owner had used. As far as I was concerned, if you are going to plant a large number of matched trees in a grid, it mattered hugely what tree was chosen to feature so prominently.

My colleague did not see it as I did. He took it at face value and felt I was being pedantic and picky enquiring what tree had been used. It was the overall look that mattered. And that is the nub of the simple formal garden. It is the overall look that matters. Not the detail. And certainly not the botanical interest. Best guess here is that the tree that had been used was the predictable hornbeam or English beech.

f I was doing up a property for sale, I would put in a formal garden. It has immediate appeal and does not require great gardening skill to maintain. Most of the population is not committed to intensive and detailed gardening. In fact what most people want is an attractive outdoors which is not going to take every moment of their spare time to maintain. A formal garden can deliver just that.

There is of course a great difference between a good formal garden and a very average or poor example. But the difference does not rely on gardening skills. It lies in proportions and spaces and there is no reason why an architect, mathematician or a trained artist could not achieve a very good formal garden by applying set principles. Or a hairdresser. In my experience, good hairdressers have well developed skills in fashion, colour, shape and proportion as well as being highly skilled in accurate, freeform cutting which would stand them in very good stead when it comes to clipping the plants later.

But planning a garden on graph paper by creating a central and intersecting axis and placing plants in geometric formation should not be confused with being creative and original. Frankly it has all been done before and it will be done many times again.

Once the design has been drawn (formal gardens work best from scratch on a blank canvas, in other words a bare section, preferably flat) the plant selection is a minor detail. The key is to be restrained and to keep to a very limited range. It doesn’t matter if your lollipop trees are camellias, bays, michelias or robinia Moptops, as long as they are all identical. Simplicity, shape and space are the key ingredients.

A formal garden is the quickest way I know to achieve maximum impact. Bigger is better, of course. To create a formal garden across several acres is more impressive than a tiny town section but the principles remain the same. And formal gardens are traditionally associated with wealth and class so we can annex a little of that status for ourselves in the democratising of the modern formal garden.

Arguably formal gardens are the easiest to care for as well. You don’t need gardening skills to maintain them. Many people have a cleaner for the inside of their house. Generally somebody of a similar skill level can maintain a simple formal garden outside so you can hire in help. If I was of that persuasion, I would be looking for a moonlighting hairdresser.

Yes. I think we are going to see many formal gardens appear over the next few years. Quick impact, impressive, easy to maintain and appealing in their simplicity and form. Were we staying in the wholesale plant business, I would be redirecting some of our production to meet this anticipated demand.

But, and herein lies the crunch, I have never known a keen plantsperson or gardener who would want a formal garden of this type. The plant interest is close to zero. The flexibility is zero. The place for ongoing creativity is zero. There is no room for genuine originality in design because proportions are mathematically determined. Golden means and vanishing perspectives and all that. Keen gardeners I know all like to look at little pictures as well as big pictures. They like to try out combinations and to change aspects of their garden to see if they can get it all to work better. It is likely that the minimalists of the nineties will become the formalists of the new millennium.

What will set apart the really good formal garden over time will be the marriage of design and plantsmanship. The precedent is there (as it usually is in gardening – difficult to be truly original when it has mostly all been done before). At the turn of last century, gifted English architect Edwin Lutyens designed beautiful formal gardens (as well as some truly lovely houses). He had a wonderful sense of space and proportion which has stood the test of time. But did he then furnish these spaces with a very limited range of plants in the simple formal style? No. He handed them over to that great English gardener Gertrude Jekyll who set about filling the spaces and softening the hard edges with riot of foliage and flowers. These Lutyens-Jekyll joint ventures were not low maintenance but they were lovely gardens. It was English gardening at its best and an example of what set the English ahead of their European counterparts – the French parterres notable for tightly clipped buxus and colour toned annuals or the Italian formality marked by magnificent stone work and a very limited range of plants heavily clipped to within an inch of their lives.

Good formal gardens will stand the test of time and formal gardens certainly have their place. But the flurry of DIY lookalikes are probably destined to take their place in history alongside the conifer gardens and the minimalist gardens.

February 22, 2008 Weekly Garden Guide

  • While the rains last week were very welcome, we are still in moisture deficit and we will dry out again very quickly if more rain does not eventuate soon. Keep thinking in drought mode for a while longer.
  • Do not, however, be tempted to plant in the garden using water retaining crystals. These are a huge amount of fun to play around with for children old enough to understand that they are not edible (they expand exponentially when you add water to give a jelly-like substance) but they are only for hanging baskets and containers of annuals. We are dry for a few weeks of the year only and in the remaining months these crystals will sit in your soil like wet jelly and rot out the roots of everything around them. For this reason, they are also likely to kill container grown woody plants during winter. Keep them for summer crops of potted colour in containers.
  •  Last week’s rain will have triggered spring bulbs into growth (it is a signal to them that autumn is coming) so get onto patches of daffodils, bluebells and the like that you have been meaning to lift and divide.
  • You can start preparing areas for new lawns now. Getting them weed free before you sow the seed in autumn can save a lot of work later. It is also time to deal to flat weeds in the lawn – by cutting them out or spraying if you feel you must. Few of us have lawns at this time which are a source of pride. So if you are looking at a neighbour with a pristine green sward, you can feel self righteous that at least you are not wasting water and pouring on chemical sprays to keep your lawn immaculate. Never fertilise a dry lawn. You will kill it.
  • The rains triggered a surge in weeds. Keep on top of them while they are still small.
  • Keep the copper sprays up to tomatoes.
  • You can sow peas along with spinach, beetroot, cauli, cabbage, lettuces and radishes. Dwarf beans are still fine to sow. Fresh seed gives the best germination so keeping your own seed not only saves money but also gives you a good start. Seed keeps best in paper bags and then in a sealed container in the fridge but make sure the seed is dry. A sachet of silica gel will do this.

Doing the Bulbs

I have, as we say here, been Doing the Bulbs. This used to be an event which took place at this time each year with every pot or tray being repotted on a two yearly cycle but it was a practice which somehow dropped down the priority list until it fell off the bottom and I don’t think anybody has Done the Bulbs since I last tackled them six or seven years ago. It is rather a case of survival of the fittest and some of the thugs have taken control.

Mark’s late father was very keen on bulbs and built up a good selection in the garden. In turn, Mark bought or acquired every different bulb he could lay his hands on over a period of years but he held them in the nursery while he built them up and assessed them. Many never got out of the nursery because finding the right position in the garden hasn’t happened yet so we had developed this area that we would walk past with eyes averted so we couldn’t see the weed infestation. We are talking several hundred trays and pots so it is not a little task that can be done quickly. After a week’s work, I am about half way through.

Over the years, Mark has removed the really special bulbs to his covered house so what I am dealing with are the survivors of benign neglect.

When bulbs are mentioned, most people tend to think of daffodils, tulips (which prefer areas with cold winters), anemones and ranunculus (those shrivelled up little brown packages of promise you buy are technically tubers), maybe dahlia tubers, freesias, snowdrops and a few others. Taranaki gardeners have adopted rhodohypoxis (or roxypoxies as one garden visitor called them) as our own emblem because they obligingly flower year in year out in the week of our Rhododendron Festival. But bulbs go well beyond go well beyond these common types.

Technically bulbs, tubers, corms and rhizomes are all geophytes which are characterised by their fleshy underground structure where nutrients and moisture are stored making it possible for the plant to survive periods of drought or cold. The greatest threat to bulbs in our climate is that they can be too wet and rot out, especially those which have a dormant period (not every bulb goes dormant). In their native habitats, growth periods coincide with optimal growing conditions which, in the case of the large majority of our successful garden bulbs from South Africa, mean that they are triggered by autumn rains. Of course here we don’t just have autumn rain. We have winter rains, spring rain and, thank goodness this week, summer rain, so we can struggle with bulbs which require long dry periods. So good drainage, better drainage and excellent drainage are the three most critical elements to growing them in the garden.

The advantage of holding the bulbs in the nursery has also been to sort out which are invasive. Our worst weed in the rockery came in as a garden bulb – a geissorhiza with a pretty blue flower in spring which then seeded everywhere and put off multiple, tiny off shoots all of which seem to survive and to reproduce. It is a menace. The most common menace bulb which many gardeners suffer from is one of the oxalis family but over the past week I have uncovered others. Not all lapeirousia or moraeas are worth cherishing. Some just look dangerous. And while we are quite happy to naturalise some bulbs in our garden, those which are attempting to naturalise themselves with no assistance from us at all are inviting an encounter with Round Up. They are not all precious.

Doing a quick flick around the garden, I see there are a number of summer bulbs in flower. It is peak time for the completely OTT auratum lilies (of Japanese origin) which are a mainstay of our summer garden. The scadoxus katherinae (from South Africa and Zimbabwe) are in full flower, as are the glorious gloriosas from the same part of the world. The pretty cyclamen hederafolium from Southern Europe and Turkey have started. The zephyranthes, sometimes referred to as rain lilies, hailing from the Americas are putting up intermittent neat little copper coloured flowers alongside our driveway. It is a veritable United Nations flowering and the beauty of an extensive bulb collection is that you can pretty well guarantee that there will be some with fresh flowers for every month of the year. They add a wonderful seasonal interest and detail to a garden.

So back to sorting out our packages of promise here, many of which will remain a mystery until they grow because while some bulbs at least survived a prolonged period of neglect, the same can not be said for their accompanying labels. Those which the birds did not scatter have tended to fade beyond deciphering stage. By the by, writing on plastic labels with a soft pencil is preferable to felt pen – pencil lasts much longer (a trick we have learned over the years in the nursery). While I can recognise a fritillaria bulb from a scilla or a lachenalia, when we started with a collection of around 15 different frits, even more lachenalias and goodness knows how many different scillas it has become more problematic. It may take a season or two to re-establish the identities.

Postscripts to my last column. Mark was absolutely delighted to lay his hands on a Planet Junior from a reader and has been carefully oiling the handle and wondering where he might find some of the additional attachments which were originally available as extras. In case you are wondering what a Planet Junior is, think of it as the manual pre-cursor to the rotary hoe.

And the Monarch Trust secretary in Northland was delighted to read my last column on the topic. She has been sending information through, along with two packets of seed for red and yellow flowered forms of swan plant (we do have a blue flowered form here too). I think she has recruited Mark to join the band of taggers (those who put tiny stickers on monarch butterflies which are wintering over). If you want to contact the Trust, they have a wonderful email address: members@monarch.org.nz (nothing to do with the Royal Family). She tells me monarchs arrived here naturally around 1840 so they are technically native to our country. I did not know that.