Different light. Different colours. Canberra in mid winter.

Late afternoon by Lake Burley Griffin

One of the interesting things about travelling is the different light. Canberra in mid winter is very, very different to Tikorangi in mid winter. A special family event saw us convening in that city a couple of weeks ago.

Plenty of eucalypts

Canberra, being inland Australia, has what I recall from my days of school geography as ‘a continental climate’. In mid winter, it is cold and dry. In mid summer, it is hot and dry. Much colder, much hotter and very much drier than our verdant climate at home. And in my many visits there since our eldest daughter took up residence about 15 years ago, I have never experienced wind. In winter, this is just as well because, when daytime temperatures are often only single digit (celsius), a wind would make the cold intolerably bitter.

You can see how much colder it is by the daughter’s Crassula ovata (commonly called the jade plant or money tree). She forgot to cover it and hopes it will survive. We never have to worry about that sort of thing and it grows quite happily outdoors, all year round.

In my mind, I see Canberra as being dominated by muted golden colours. This is largely on account of it being such a dry climate. This is the entry to a major sculptural installation at the National Art Gallery. I never tire going to experience American artist, James Turrell’s Skyspace ‘Within without’ each time I visit and thought I had shared it before but it must have been just on the garden Facebook page instead.

 

It is an astonishing piece, all angles, flat planes and light and shade. Truly glorious. We had hoped to catch the last day of the Cartier jewellery exhibition in the gallery but so did everybody else and the prospect of queuing for over an hour just to get in did not seem appealing. New Zealanders are not used to queuing.

This is the entry lane to Skyspace and probably as close as you will get to a group shot of the family on this public site. It is minus me as photographer and minus the only representative of the next generation whose second birthday we had gathered to celebrate.

Public architecture and landscape in Australia is on a more lavish scale than we tend to have in New Zealand – a sign of a larger and wealthier economy. The parliamentary precinct houses many other facilities as well and goes well beyond utility provision of services to enable federal government to operate. I hadn’t see this particular water feature before.

 This is the wider context – a staircase waterfall, designed to be safe for the public while capturing light, movement and gentle sound in what is an arid environment.

What Canberra may lack in terms of plant appeal in mid winter, it makes up for with its birds. Flocks of birds, in this case a convention of king parrots on the road side in our daughter’s quiet street. Daughter tells us that the red head on the front bird is a sign that it is the only mature male amongst the 20 or 30 juveniles in that group. New Zealand birds are generally restrained in colour whereas Australia has many birds that are bold, brash and colourful.

We rarely see the muted, mystical light of a winter morn in Canberra. This may be because we have far more wind – a disturbed westerly air pattern, as Mark refers to it. This is just a suburban street scene – eucalypts, eucalypts and more gum trees. But no koalas on these ones. There are more than 700 different eucalyptus species, most of which are native to Australia. I once offered to buy the daughter a book on them so she could start to learn the different ones but she did not take up my offer.

We came home to a place where the dominant colours are green, green and more green but with plenty of highlights of pinks, reds, yellows and all the colours of late winter breaking into spring. It is very different. My next post is likely to be ‘And suddenly it’s spring’. For this week, we have left winter behind here.

A visit to Sydney Botanic Gardens

A campanulata hybrid in full bloom at Sydney Botanic Gardens. Our season has also started at Tikorangi.

On our recent visit to Australia, we made a return visit to Sydney Botanic Gardens. We are not city people so tend to seek out green spaces and gardens. We did at least get to grips with the public transport system to get around. This is greatly preferable to driving and you do not need the details of the dramas on the final Monday morning when it came to returning the rental car we had hired to drive to Canberra. Let it just be said that the internet and sat nav are decidedly less than perfect when it comes to inner city driving and we spent a truly traumatic 90 minutes trying desperately to find the rental car business which saw us taking motorway links first to the airport and then across the Harbour Bridge! Fortunately our flight was delayed several hours which was about the only blessing on an otherwise stressful morning. Public transport is a breeze by comparison and amazingly cheap in Sydney. Buy a transport card at one of the airport shops when you arrive, is my advice.

Lytocaryum weddellianum

Sydney Botanic Gardens are not huge compared to others we have visited but immaculate, focused on plants they can grow well and in a superb, inner city location by the harbour. It is a lovely place to spend a few hours. It is not a botanic garden that aims to be all things to all people with a comprehensive collection of everything that can be grown. I found on an earlier visit that they don’t appear to do deciduous magnolias. But the palm collection is superb. My knowledge of palms is perfunctory at best but Mark was terribly impressed and browsed through, looking at more mature specimens of ones he has planted here. I was slightly alarmed at the size of Lytocaryum weddellianum, often referred to as the wedding palm. I have planted a fair number of these through our rimu avenue and they are looking very charming after a few years but my mental image was of a palm that would stay somewhat smaller. Fortunately, they are not likely to grow as large as the Sydney specimen in our temperate climate.

The indoor vertical garden

I failed to photograph the new coffee shop attached to the education centre, which had a curious and not particularly convenient design. But in the education wing was the largest vertical garden I have ever seen. It was indoor, hence the shadows from the struts of the building, and the main attraction in a display about the importance of pollination in nature.

A novelty, but no less charming for that

I did, however, photograph the tri-coloured abutilons threaded through the ground display. Novelties they may be, but they were very cute. If you want to try this at home, you need three small seedlings of a similar size. Plait the flexible trunks and keep them to a single leader each. They will also need a stake. If you are in NZ, I noticed Woodleigh Nursery selling a range of eight different abutilon varieties in a range of reds, orange, purple, yellow and white so you too can try this at home. Start with small plants so that the root systems are also small and you can get the stems close together at the base.

Alcantarea imperialis

I made Mark pose beside the Alcantarea imperialis to give some sense of scale. These are widely available in NZ and much loved by northern landscapers but our efforts with them failed. We must try again because they are very showy and worth growing.

Aechmea blanchetiana

I was less convinced by the yellow Aechmea blanchetiana but this may be because I have seen bromeliads grown in more marginal conditions showing this colouring as a result of deep stress. To me they look as though they are starved though, being bromeliads, this will not be the case. They were certainly eye-catching.

Aerial roots on Ficus macrophylla

Trees feature throughout the garden. There is nothing rare about the Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla). It is an Australian native and grown widely, despite the inclination of the roots to break paving and to break drains. I just liked the fine example of aerial roots reaching to the ground.

More aerial roots on Monstera deliciosa

Similar aerial roots were evident on the Monstera deliciosa and I admit I was grateful that our somewhat rampant plants of this at home are not quite as determinedly rampant as they appear to be in a hotter climate like Sydney.

Araucaria cunninghamii

I showed the Sydney Botanic specimens of the Wollemi pine last week. I was also taken by another tree native to New South Wales, Queensland and New Guinea – the Araucaria cunninghamii or hoop pine. It must have been at least 25 metres tall and those little tufty pom poms will be its natural form. Nobody has been up an extension ladder cloud pruning it.

The stand of flowering cherries in full bloom drew the crowds and proved yet again that humans like colour and blooms, preferably in abundance. It is a locally bred hybrid, a cross between the wild cherry Prunus avium and Prunus campanulata, named ‘Yvonne Matthies’. I have no idea if it is available in NZ and, of more importance, whether it is sterile or not. I imagine with all their bats and birds in Australia, they are not so keen on potential weed cherries that are spread by birds.

I particularly appreciated the tour group with the three women who, by pure chance, toned so perfectly with the blossom. They were equally delighted and took many (many, many) photos.

Finally, the sign in each toilet cubicle spoke volumes about the sheer number of overseas visitors these gardens must attract. Toilet etiquette and requirements vary throughout the world. A Twitter friend was more worried by the fact that the roll of toilet paper is depicted round the wrong way. it should be unrolling from the top, not from underneath. That is all I will say on this matter.

A day in the life of the magnolia and te maunga

I rushed out at 7.40am on Monday because the day had dawned sunny, clear and calm and I thought the mountain should be in view. We only have one really good view from the garden and at this time of the year, Magnolia campbellii is in bloom in our park. It being just past mid winter here and the subject being a mountain, it is more often shrouded in cloud. We are inclined to get apologetic about this in Taranaki but I remember driving round the South Island with our son some years ago. We never once saw the Southern Alps and that was down the east coast and up the west coast in January. Mountains attract cloud which is all the more reason to celebrate the winter view when it is revealed.

This is 15 minutes later at 7.55am when the sun has risen. It is Mount Taranaki, more commonly referred to by locals simply as the mountain, or te maunga in Maori (or indeed, te mounga in the local dialect). Or maybe the brother of the more famous Fuji. (I still have Barbara Trapido’s ‘Brother of the More Famous Jack’ in my bookcase). It is an active volcanic cone standing in splendid isolation surrounded by a ring plain and bounded by the coast for maybe 200°  of its circumference.

Thirty five minutes later at 8.30am and this is as clear as we can ever see it. With bonus bird. Te maunga is somewhere between 35 and 40 km away from us, the magnolia is in our park so these shots are right at the limit of my camera zoom and my ability to get both the tree and the peak in relatively equal focus.

By 10 am, the cloud is starting to roll in on the lower slopes.

At 10.45 am I expected to lose the sight within the next few minutes.

But it was still visible at 11.50 am and looking as beautiful as I have ever seen it. I have not used any filters or enhancements on these photos.

But gone from view by mid afternoon. I liked the Facebook comment that the mountain is always shining; it is just the rain (and cloud) that gets in the way of us seeing it. The magnolia is the unusual pink form of M. campbellii known as the Quaker Mason form. Because this was put into circulation so early in this country, we tend to regard pink as the dominant colour in the campbelliis but white is far more common in the wild and therefore in cultivation internationally. I have written about this M. campbellii in earlier posts. It is always the first magnolia to bloom for us each season and is really only suited to milder climates where those early blooms will not get taken out by frosts.

While we struggle here at times with the unacceptably high impact of the fossil fuel industry (Tikorangi Gaslands, anyone?), it is scenes like the magnolia and te maunga that keep us anchored to this piece of land both physically and spiritually.

Our pink Magnolia campbellii

Not just a fossil after all – the wollemi pine.

Our gifted wollemi

We were enormously touched when friends gave us their wollemi pine to plant in our park, where it has every chance to reach maturity. They had bought one of the first NZ releases of this endangered Australian plant – at a pretty hefty price tag of several hundred dollars – but were relocating from a large country property to a smaller town section and the wollemi would have been highly threatened by future property owners or neighbours, had they planted it in suburbia. In the longer term, it has the potential to reach 40 metres in height. It was a gift of love when they brought it out to us because it was a tree that meant a great deal to them and one that we were honoured to receive.

The wollemi – botanically Wollemia nobilis – is an ancient tree, dating back to the Jurassic period of dinosaurs. Yet it was not even discovered until 1994, when observant bushwalker, David Noble, came across a plant he didn’t recognise in a relatively remote canyon in the Wollemi National Park, a mere 150 kilometres from Sydney. Until then, it had only been seen in fossil form and it was thought to have died out, maybe millions of years ago.

A multi branched wollemi at Sydney Botanic Gardens last week

It is referred to as a pine and in time it produces cones but it has been declared a single species within a genus all of its own. So nobilis is the species. One step up the botanical nomenclature tree is the genus and this plant is so unique it was a given a genus of its own which is the wollemia part of the name. Only on the third step do we start to place its relatives and they are not pine trees (which are Pinaceae); it is Araucariacea which puts it in the same family as monkey puzzle trees and our native kauri. You have to go another step up to the order of Pinales before you get the botanical intersection with pines.

To the layperson, it looks closer to the podocarps – of the Podocarpus macrophyllus type – although they are in the same Pinales order referred to above so no more closely related to the wollemi than the pines are.

The wollemi at the Australian National Arboretum is already mature enough to bear cones

I mention this because it leads me to the story of an old rogue we knew (now deceased) who never felt obliged to follow the law when it came to plant imports. He turned up here triumphantly one day, totally unasked, bearing cuttings that he declared were the wollemi – purloined from the Melbourne Botanical Gardens, from memory. I had seen one of the earliest wollemi plants in the Canberra Botanical Gardens locked in a cage which was an interesting indicator of its perceived value. Mark was sure that the stolen cuttings were in fact a podocarp and to this day, we wonder whether the Melbourne garden staff named one of the podocarps as a wollemi to fool people such as the old rogue who shall remain nameless. If so, it worked.

The Canberra wollemi again – it was home to a rather large, showy, orange beetle which we do not have in NZ, I think.

The story of the discovery is interesting, as is the botany of this ancient plant (and its adaptability and very survival). But also the control of propagation, marketing and sales is remarkable. Getting it into wide circulation is one method of ensuring its continued survival. Intensive searching has led to the identification of fewer than 100 adult plants in a very limited natural habitat which makes it extremely vulnerable in the wild. Its original location remains a tightly guarded secret to protect the remaining trees. With the spread of kauri dieback (Phytophthora agathidicida) in this country where a main disease vector is human footwear, this seems a wise move. I have no idea who controlled the propagation (a lot of it is through tissue culture), distribution and marketing of the wollemi pine but it has been interesting to view from afar. There was a heavy emphasis from the start on “telling the story”, as is oft said, and the pricing has always been high which conferred considerable status on this unique plant. Especially considering it is not instantly appealing as a small plant and it is going to make a forest giant. It was the first new plant species that we were aware of being imported into New Zealand when our borders all but closed down to new plant imports. The fee for risk assessment at the time was around $65 000 and, from memory, it was a Christchurch institution that came up with that money to get it into the country legally. No individual or plant nursery is likely to come up with that sum for a single plant.

We will watch our precious plant grow over our lifetime. The well-established specimens in both the National Arboretum in Canberra and Sydney Botanic Gardens both promise that it will mature into an interesting character plant to match its interesting back story.

This is the Sydney wollemi again, viewed from the other side. I didn’t even register the bedding plants because I was looking at the sculpture.

It is clearly a sculpture with its own history, although I personally have no knowledge of the work of Andrew Fleischmann.

I was completely unconvinced that the addition of the camellias enhanced the sculpture, I am afraid. With bedding plants below, it smacked more of the descent of what I call “naffdom” rendering it merely sentimental. Or naff.

As a postscript, a reader has just sent me the following photo of her wollemi which she was thrilled to be given as a birthday present. This one is growing in the Dartmoor area of south east England. Just as the metasequoia was rapidly dispersed throughout the world after its rediscovery by plant hunters in China in the 1940s (we have an early one from that collection in our park), so too is the wollemi becoming a significant tree around the world.  

In search of more unusual plants

Back in the heady gardening days of the 1980s and 1990s, there were many specialist nurseries carrying a very wide range of unusual plants, mostly selling by mail-order. I described Peter Cave of Cave’s Tree Nursery, Glyn Church of Woodleigh Nursery and Mark Jury as being like the three musketeers but Mark reminded me of Chris and Linda Ryan at Top Trees and the late Os Blumhardt who led the way. Times changed. I think Top Trees may have closed first, followed by Peter, Glyn sold his business and Mark and I were the last of that quartet to stop selling plants, I think.

Since then, it has become extremely difficult to source many of the less common plants that were available and plant sales have become increasingly concentrated in the big box stores who carry quicker turnover stock in a hugely limited range.

You could have knocked us over with a feather when Peter Cave called in yesterday and said he has set up again, producing less common plants by mail-order (limited to New Zealand customers only). Except it is not mail-order any more, it is internet sales. (How funny to be old enough now to remember the days of real mail and the exciting advent of the fax machine!) This should be exciting news for those who often contact us looking for plants that have not been in commercial production in recent years. Now you can check out Peter and Anetta’s website for plants that you won’t find down at the chain stores. Peter has set up again under the name of Peter Cave Nursery.

I quote from Peter’s site:

When I started, importing plants was reasonable and cheap.  Expecting things to change I imported many plants and lots of seed, especially from Asian countries.  I also collected by travelling to China, Korea, Japan and especially Vietnam.   

The Biosecurity Amendment Act of 2003 completely changed that.  Importing a new species now required a $65,000 risk assessment! Slight changes since have meant that in the last 13 years about 5 new plants have come into NZ.  Fines are horrendous so don’t try to smuggle!  Our job is to locate earlier imports and grow these so we have ‘new’ plants.

I was surprised that recent plant imports numbered as high as five. I only knew of the Wollemi Pine. Peter being one of the real plantsmen of our generation, you can be confident that he knows his material well.

Woodleigh Nursery, formerly Glyn Church’s business, is now owned by Janica and Quinn Amoor. While a large range of hydrangeas remains part of their core business, Janica has been steadily expanding the range of other plants as well. Theirs is another online catalogue worth watching closely if you want different plant material that is not widely available from mainstream retailers. Just by way of example, we have just received Camellia irrawadiensis and Isoplexis canariensis from Janica – these are not plants you would expect to find at Mitre 10 or Bunnings.

This is in the nature of a public service announcement. I have no vested interest in recommending either nursery but isn’t it great that there are specialist growers who can offer you plants that you won’t find in everybody else’s garden? I had thought those days had gone.

Peter Cave is not offering magnolias on his new list but credit where credit is due. In the past, it is he who raised Magnolia Sweetheart to grace our gardens.