Garden in Style

Author: Lynda Hallinan

Publisher: Random House, $29.99

Although this book is being promoted by the publisher as a recent release, it came out in late 2004. Its full title is New Zealand Garden in Style. Get the Look You Want. The author has an ever growing profile in gardening in this country. Her career as a presenter on TV was brief and pretty lightweight (Ground Rules – you may not even remember it) but she has gone from strength to strength as the editor of New Zealand Gardener and the garden editor for House and Garden. What sets her apart is her delight in plants (she also has a pretty good knowledge), her engaging enthusiasm and her relative youthfulness.

While the format of the book is contrived – how to achieve the look, from romantic to contemporary to formal gardens (there are nine options in all) and the 10 essential plants for each style, the plant selection is not as predictable as it sounds and there is good advice underpinning it all, along with the author’s bubbly delight in gardening.

It is a book for those who are looking to design and manage their own town sections. With lots of lovely photographs by Julian Matthews, a big typeface and well organised information, it is a good example of a motivational book for novices and a great deal more likely to encourage involvement than a dry old tome.

November 16, 2007 Weekly Garden Guide

The useful rains this week mean that you can divide perennials now if you wish. Most are in full growth so will repair the stress of your splitting them up.

  • If you have a plant with a very dry rootball, watering it in after planting will not do the trick and it is more likely that the centre of the rootball will remain dry and the roots will start to die. There is no substitute for soaking the plant thoroughly in a bucket or trough before introducing it to its new home.
  • Water holding crystals which turn to jelly are fine for container plants of annuals but do not be tempted to use them with woody plants, bulbs or perennials because they will make the plant too wet in winter. If you have very dry container plants, you can sprinkle the surface with surfactant to help the plant absorb water. Surfactants are cheap to buy but even a little dishwashing detergent will suffice.
  • Deadheading annuals and perennials does extend the flowering season considerably, if you can be bothered. Roses also benefit from deadheading, as do rhododendrons.
  • Keep sowing corn, scarlet runner beans, lettuces, green beans and all the summer and early autumn veg. It really and truly is your last chance to start melons from seed but it is the optimum time for planting kumaras.
  • If you are really keen, you can start your brussel sprouts for winter though we are not the best climate for brussels which prefer colder conditions and frosty conditions. Inland gardeners may be better placed to impress their coastal cousins with their brussel sprouts.
  • Keep a copper spray on potatoes (remember the Irish potato famines…) and on tomatoes. This is best done every couple of weeks after rain if you want to maximise your harvest though you can get away with less. If leaf miners and caterpillars are attacking your brassicas (the discovery of cooked caterpillars in your broccoli is most off putting, even if your mother insists that it is merely added protein) you may need to resort to an insecticide spray. Ask at your local garden centre for the current recommended option.

November 9, 2007 Weekly Garden Guide

Now is the time to prune rhododendrons, including vireyas, which may have become leggy and woody. You can try the kill or cure approach of cutting back very hard to bare wood but only at this time of the year when the plant is in full growth. Feed and mulch the poor mutilated victim and hope it will reward you by springing into fresh growth. Do not expect flowers next year, however.

  • Deadheading rhododendrons should be taking place as they finish flowering. You want the plant to set flower buds for next year, not seed.
  • Apparently coffee grounds deter slugs and snails so you may like to try this around hostas although we have not tried it ourselves yet. Rimu leaves, sawdust, sand and crushed eggshells will certainly discourage newcomers. Do not forget cheap baker’s bran as an environmentally friendly option. It doesn’t kill them but they end up so stuffed that they are lying comatose in the morning for the birds to pick them up.
  • Pot up colourful annuals to give a summer display around outdoor living areas.
  • Get on to sowing melons right now if you want a harvest. They have a long growing season and we can be marginal in our climate.
  • Plant kumara runners.
  • Continue successional sowings of dwarf beans, corn and peas. All are much nicer fresh from the home garden than off supermarket shelves or out of the freezer.
  • Get the push hoe out. The weeds are having a party and you want to interrupt it as quickly as possible to prevent ongoing problems. Push hoeing on a sunny day means you can leave the weeds on the surface to shrivel, as long as they have not already set seed.

If you want it, you may have to produce it yourself

So twenty years of Rhododendron and Garden Festival (or Rhodo Fest as participants tend to refer to it) has been and gone. Blink your eyes and it is over for another year. We could all have done without the unrelenting rain on the last Sunday but them’s the breaks. It is certainly not the first time that the weather has not cooperated and it won’t be the last.

And another year of eager beavers searching out particular rhododendron cultivars has gone. We assume R.elliottii was not flowering at Pukeiti this year because nobody asked for it. And we could tell that BriRee was not open this year because they used to have a spectacular rhododendron whose name escapes me offhand, that many people asked for. The trouble was that nobody but the good gardeners at BriRee could do much with this particular variety so it was not readily available.

No, it was Lemon Lodge that was at its peak flowering this year around the province and therefore much sought after. Lemon Lodge was selected and named by Pukeiti and it has big trusses of sublime lemon coloured flowers. The problem with Lemon Lodge is that it prefers a cooler climate and certainly will never be happy in Auckland or Whangarei. Even for us, with a warmer climate than Pukeiti, Lemon Lodge looks superb for its two weeks in full flower and pretty tatty for the rest of the year. It also has a fairly poor success rate from cuttings so is not easy to propagate.

Curiously, we were also asked for Lems Cameo several times this year so there must be at least one garden left with a good flowering specimen. Lems Cameo was the must-have plant of the late eighties and early nineties. It has a gorgeous flower in a colour range not really available in anything else of similar shape – big frilly flowers in apricot cream and pink. The trouble with Lems Cameo was that it was very difficult to propagate – had to be grafted and even then with poor success rate – and that it really wanted to live in a cold climate like Taupo or maybe Tekapo. Over the years most of the plants around this province have died, even the large specimen in our park which held on longer than most.

The big, fragrant pure white trumpets of the nuttalliis and nuttallii hybrids were also much admired and these are plants which are not readily available commercially, either. They rarely appear in garden centres because they don’t set flower buds on two and three year old plants and they don’t give much in the way of cutting material so they are not a starter for mass production.

The problem is that there are few, precious few, specialist rhododendron growers left in the country so we are seeing the range get smaller and smaller. The interesting species have all but disappeared from production. Varieties which require grafting or are difficult to propagate and grow in the nursery have also pretty well disappeared. Similarly, azalea mollis do not fit modern methods of mass production and are hard to find. The longstanding specialist nursery, Crosshills in Kimbolton is still flying the flag in the rhododendron world and probably the only source left for a number of cultivars. As far as I know, they still do mailorder too so are worth seeking out if you are after something special.

Mark is of the view that we may see a return to home propagation skills in the face of a declining plant range. For the past three decades, gardeners have expected to be able to source just about any plant they want, as long as it is in the country. Some are still of the view that the advent of the internet should make sourcing even easier but the bottom line is that you can only source a plant if it is actually being produced. With a contracting range, gardeners may have to return to learning how to propagate at home if they are to be able to grow the special plants they covet.

Sadly, dear Reader, there are easier plants to produce at home than most rhododendrons. The vireya rhododendron group are simple and many will root without special facilities. Similarly, evergreen azaleas are pretty easy. But the deciduous azaleas and the classic rhodos require more skill and better facilities. For the home gardener who lacks a hot bed with bottom heat and protection, layering is possibly the easiest method. Layering is simple, as long as you have a long enough branch. It involves pegging a branch to the ground (you can use a wire hoop or even a stone or brick) and being patient for two years or more, in the hope that where the stem is in contact with the ground, it will put out roots (like a sucker). When it has formed roots, you cut the branch from its parent and dig it up and move it. There is no substitute for patience here and you don’t always get the best shaped plant.

We may be seeing a return to the times of Bernie Hollard where you gave your layers away in exchange for other people’s special layers. Layering, of course, only works for plants which grow well on their own roots so it is not suitable for most grafted plants. Plants are often grafted because they don’t grow well on their own roots so grafting is a means of giving them a transplant of other root systems.

There is no hocus pocus to grafting or to propagation at home. It used to widely practiced by gardeners of previous generations and even Mark set up a little outdoor hotbox unit for cuttings in our first home, long before he went into a career in horticulture. If you anticipate wanting special plants, you might usefully employ your time looking through old books to see how it used to be done. It is not an expensive operation but it does require an outdoor power source and some heating cable. Now the internet might be the place where you can find step by step guides to home propagation, including grafting.

The alternative is that you will only ever get to admire many of the special plants seen in our region’s gardens in the last weeks.

November 2, 2007 Weekly Garden Guide

While we have had next to no time in our own garden this week, it is alarming how fast we can start drying out after a week of warm, sunny weather. Get mulch onto garden beds, preferably after a good dousing of rain. Keep an eye on container plants too. Daily watering is now required.

  • If you calculate that your early flowering narcissus have had 65 days of growth (in other words they were coming through the ground by the end of August), they can be trimmed or mown now. Cutting off the leaves and laying mulch deters the dreaded narcissi fly which is starting to hatch. These nasties lay their eggs in the crown and the larvae hatch and eat out the bulbs. Mark has seen his first of the season.
  • If you have been tempted into buying plants this week, make sure you soak them well in a bucket of water until air bubbles stop rising before you plant them. It is late in the season for planting trees and shrubs so if your conditions are harsher (ground which is not well cultivated or friable, very exposed or coastal), you may be better heeling the plants in to well cultivated conditions such as a vegetable garden for planting out next autumn.
  • Aphids have found many of the hellebores. Deadheading will reduce the aphid infestation in your garden.
  • Continue the Labour Weekend plantings in the vegetable garden. If you have early strawberries, it is time to look at laying netting over them. As soon as there is a hint of red, the birds will spot them and they are not likely to wait until they are ripe enough for you to eat.
  • It is now full steam ahead on main crop potatoes, zucchini, pumpkin, squash, corn and even kumara in warmer areas. Plant everything now. It has been a cold spring so we are running a little later than usual but it would be really bad luck to get a frost now.