City trees. An asset, not a liability

High density living amongst the trees in Sydney

In the week before I left for Australia, I had seen coverage about the loss of trees in Auckland. The loss of up to one third of all Auckland’s established trees, in fact. That is an astonishing number to have been removed  in the last five years. Too many New Zealanders hate trees.

It was interesting to hit Sydney and Canberrra where temperatures were rising rapidly for summer and to hold conversations with people who value trees a great deal more. I was told more than once that good tree cover in the city can lower the temperature in summer by as much as two or three degrees, making the leafy suburbs much more liveable. And the whole term “leafy suburbs” is used to describe the affluent areas. Sadly, the more down market the area, the more barren and treeless it tends to be.

I photographed this sign in Canberra but ringing in my ears were the cries I often hear in our local city of New Plymouth to fell trees where the roots are starting to lift the seal. It is a curious fact that as soon as this occurs, legions of people suddenly speak up for the welfare of the elderly who, in our local area at least, are allegedly incapable of coping with an uneven surface. Having travelled in Asia, Australia, Europe and the UK, I can assure you that a bit of lifting or cracking of seal is NOT seen as a reason for removing trees in those places.

Privacy on the third floor balcony

My second daughter gave me food for thought. She bought a third floor apartment with a good sized balcony overlooking a very busy road. In a densely populated area of Sydney, there are only about three apartments out of many (but I failed to count how many), that can see onto her balcony. It is amazingly private and that is due to the trees, both the street trees and the elongated Magnolia grandiflora ‘Little Gem’ that are on the apartment property.

The street trees are huge. It is a ficus outside her place. And yes, the roots do get into the drains. Just before she bought her apartment, there had been a major repair required on the building’s main sewer pipe. If this happened in New Zealand, the resulting cries for the removal of the offending tree would be deafening.

“Would I have bought this apartment if the trees weren’t here?” Daughter commented. “No. Not a chance. It is the trees that make the busy road and being overlooked bearable. Maybe repairing the underground pipes from time to time is a price I have to pay for living here.” That is NOT a New Zealand sentiment!

Yes trees can cause a lot of damage in storms and when the roots penetrate pipes and crack sealed areas. But never before has it been so important to keep our big trees in urban areas and cutting them down to replace them with shrubs or small, suburban trees which are never going to get much above three metres is not an adequate substitute. Trees generate the very oxygen we breathe as well as contributing to ecosystems and the environment.

Elder daughter drove me round new Canberra suburbs. With typical over-sized freestanding houses on small sections, there is no room for big trees to be planted on these private properties. That is where town planning to allow for plantings in public spaces becomes so very important. If big trees are not established on road verges and in neighbourhood parks, such subdivisions will forever be barren wastelands of concrete and brick. As well as up to three degrees hotter on scorching summer days.

The established – and higher priced – leafy suburbs of Canberra

The established, older areas of Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne all have B I G street trees and how lovely that is to see. It is time for Auckland to rise to the challenge of planting more trees rather than felling them in ever increasing numbers. Planning is critical to create sufficient space for trees to be able to reach maturity. And time for all New Zealanders to cast aside the pioneer mentality that trees merely exist for humans to fell them.

If you don’t have trees, then you don’t get to experience the opening of the first flowers on the jacaranda. In Sydney. In October. Ours at home won’t bloom until February.

I just don’t get it.

With the interest that we have in meadows, I had to stop the car and photograph what appeared to be a natural road verge meadow in a new Canberra suburb. The simple combination of a soft brown  grass and gazanias was eye-catching. The South African gazanias were gently spreading along the verge in a manner which Canberra daughter observed was bordering on weedy. Harmlessly weedy, though, in these fairly harsh, exposed conditions, as opposed to rampantly invasive.

The union of Australia and South Africa?

What really shocked me as I looked more closely was the sheer volume of litter on this road verge. I was hard pushed to get photographs without too much in them because there were cans, plastic bottles and bags, tinfoil wrapping, cardboard, cellophane and all the accoutrements of modern packaging at about 20cm spacings all through it. Many months’ worth. Apparently, no locals feel inclined to keep it clean and those who walk by either don’t see it, don’t care or think it is somebody else’s problem. Were it kept reasonably free of litter, it would be a charming naturalistic planting which contributes more than mown grass while being genuinely easy-care.

People can be so CARELESS about the environment. While in Melbourne, I went to the botanic gardens and clearly people feel it is appropriate to graffiti plants. Why would anybody think it is okay to carve names and messages into this beautiful silver agave? And in the stand of giant bamboo, I could not see any stems that had not been claimed by autographs and marks. It is a form of territory marking, like dogs, but this is not their territory to mark. I just don’t get it. I really don’t.

Tulips from Floriade (as opposed to Amsterdam)

I have just returned from ten days across the Tasman. A mother’s tour of three state capitals, I describe it. Mark and I have three children all of whom are now living in different Australian cities. So to visit them involves a tour from Sydney to Canberra to Melbourne.

While in Canberra, Elder Daughter took me to the final day of Floriade. This is a major community and tourist event for the area with an emphasis on the tulip, backed up by annuals and the Dutch iris in support roles. It is a living flower show and is open for a whole month. The ever-handy internet tells me it involves the planting of more than a million bulbs and annuals across 8000 square metres. It is free entry which is pretty remarkable. There are a whole lot of ancillary activities – performances, cultural celebrations, traders, workshops and the like but beyond buying an icecream each, we took little notice of these.

I admit I am not the world’s greatest fan of the tulip, let alone massed displays of them. They are just a little … stiff, maybe overbred for my personal taste. But I am quite happy to acknowledge that I am a minority in this opinion and that others have great fondness for the genus. Or at least for the OTT displays often created using massed bulbs of the genus. And it would take a churlish disposition to find fault with this very pretty pink and white display.

It didn’t take me long to work out that Floriade has nothing to do with gardening. It is high level, very competent horticulture. Keeping a display going for a full month requires good skills, especially given a climate which can move from a very cold winter with late frosts to temperatures that we would regard as high summer at home, all in the space of those thirty days. There are many reasons to visit, but gleaning inspiration for the home garden is not one.

However, it is a great place to see colour theory in action – how hues of similar tones create a visual carpet of colour while certain combinations will make the colour pop. I was particularly taken by the blue bed and realised how much I respond to those shades.

I liked the occasional incident of a colour rogue – a plant that is quite clearly the wrong colour. I liked even more that these rogues had not been rooted out for ‘spoiling’ the display. My late mother used to make large rugs by hand. She was not a perfectionist but would often say that any errors were following tradition – that perfection was seen as a challenge to either the gods or God, and that the traditional rug-makers always put at least one deliberate mistake into their work. I have no idea now whether this is true let alone which religion she was referencing – possibly Islam, given the geographic location of rug-makers? The rogue pink ranunculus made me smile and think of her.

I took this photo to try and convey the flat, anticlimactic nature of black (or very dark) flowers. Mark has always been offhand about black or indeed green flowers which he sees as novelty blooms sold on the strength of individual flowers when viewed close up, not on visual impact in the garden. And he is right. All these very, very dark flowers just looked lifeless and dull en masse. They are black pansies and dark to black tulips.

Elder Daughter is clearly our offspring. She was considering the disappointing waste of wrapping up the show when the beds are all stripped out and the bulbs and plants presumably become compost. She felt that if they could delay the exercise of reinstating this inner city parkland for a further six weeks or so, then they could sell tickets for $10 each and allow locals to come and dig up the bulbs to take home. She felt she would be photographing the bulbs she really liked so she could locate them when they were starting to go dormant. At least the flowers are all picked at the end of the show, to be delivered to hospitals and care homes around the area, I was told.

Again, I posted an album of additional Floriade photos to Facebook. For anyone who, like a Dutch friend of mine, still thinks tulips originated in the Netherlands, I wrote this piece earlier. Short version: they didn’t.

For the devotees of white

Meadow, meadow. Three meadow styles.

It was like an Impressionist painting but in real life – a pictorial meadow at Trentham

It is compulsory that every garden in Britain have a meadow. Well, not quite law, perhaps, but certainly lore. We have watched the rise and rise of the meadow on our trips over the past decade. The trend is also evident in many European and North American gardens though it is not a style we have embraced in New Zealand yet. For years, I thought it would not work in our fertile and lush growing conditions. It has taken several visits looking at northern gardens to better understand meadow gardening.

In this country, we do not appear to have progressed past the point where we see ‘meadows’ as dense sowings of annual flowers loosely described as ‘wildflowers’. That is plants like the red corn poppies, cornflowers and cosmos, though they are certainly not wildflowers of New Zealand. But there are different approaches to establishing a meadow.

A perennial meadow, the work of  Professor Nigel Dunnett at Trentham Gardens near Stoke on Trent

If you want to see flowery meads at their prettiest, type in ‘Pictorial Meadows’ on Google or Facebook and prepare to be blown away by the beauty. This is the commercial arm of the work that has been done though the landscape department of the University of Sheffield, spearheaded by Professors Nigel Dunnett and James Hitchmough. It is a whole subsection of the naturalistic gardening movement that is so dominant in Britain and elsewhere today, to the extent that it is now referred to as the ‘Sheffield School’. It has layers of complexity and sophistication that take it way beyond the scattering of a few random seed mixes, predicated instead on sustainable eco systems with a whole swag or research going into their seed selection.

We were delighted by the perennial meadows which were the work of Dunnett at Trentham Gardens near Stoke on Trent, just as we were entranced by the Hitchmough Missouri Meadow at Wisley in its early days. This is wildflower gardening taken to new heights altogether. Their annual meadows are glorious but it is the long term meadows that are environmentally significant. The maturing plantings around Olympic Park in London are an example of those.

Molinia meadow at Bury Court with pink Trifolium incarnatum (Italian clover)

At the other end of the scale are tightly managed meadow gardens. The pre-eminent Dutch designer, Piet Oudolf does some these creations. Beautifully refined meadows of shimmering molinia grass with restrained use of flowering plants. Interestingly, the owner of one of these Oudolf meadows, John Coke of Bury Court, told me that it was the highest maintenance area of his garden, to keep it looking that good. There is a lesson in there somewhere but it looked charmingly simple.

A natural orchard meadow in a private garden in the Cotswolds, designed by leading UK landscaper, Dan Pearson

Maximum brownie points are earned by those folk who encourage natural meadows in their garden. In other words, they stop regular mowing of the grass or cultivating the area and let plants naturalise.  The Royal Horticultural Society does this in large areas now. We particularly noted it at RHS Rosemoor but also in private gardens, often in an orchard area. Over time, there will be an increase in plant diversity in these meadows that evolve with minimal management. It is also the style of meadow that New Zealanders will find most problematic. For we are more likely to judge it as weedy, with rank, overgrown grass.

The problem is that the wildflowers in a natural meadow – be they daisies, dandelions, buttercup or clover in the initial stages – are deemed weeds here whereas they are genuine wild flowers in their home environments. We tend to apply different standards to long grass and wild areas than we apply to gardened areas and ‘proper lawn’, where imported plants are absolutely fine.

Natural meadows have been encouraged in areas which appeared to have been previously mown grass at Rosemoor

What all these meadows have in common is a concern with bio-diversity and ecologically friendly gardening, providing habitat for all manner of living organisms, insects and animals, while looking attractive at the same time. All these meadows are alive with insect life – buzzing with bees and attracting many butterflies along with a wide range of other insects.  The RHS has taken a lead in educating people on the environmental benefits of meadows. Generally, plants as close to their natural form as possible are used (so species rather than overbred hybrids).

A meadow garden is simulating the wild but modifying it to a garden setting. It has some history in English gardening and was espoused by the late Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter. Fertility is kept low to reduce competition from overly vigorous grasses and it is usual to incorporate yellow rattle, a parasitic plant that weakens the roots of grasses. In autumn, the meadow is mown and left to lie for about ten days, allowing the seed to fall. The area is then raked to keep fertility low and left to come again in spring. There is minimal cultivation, no spraying and extremely low intervention.

Our meadow at home is progressing. In autumn, the long grass was cut with our sickle-bar mower and we had some debate about whether we could just leave the long grass in situ. But there was so much that it resembled hay and, in the end, we raked most of it up once it had dried. It may take effort at the time, but not mowing the area every few weeks certainly reduces the carbon footprint and allows greater diversity in that environment. And we love the look.

Postscript:

This is the article that led to my resignation from The New Zealand Gardener magazine – irreconcilable differences when it came to photo selection. The article will not, therefore, be published in the November issue. 

Trentham Gardens again

The unexpected romance of an olive grove

Stand back. For I have found the most impossibly romantic olive grove. It is at Villa Adriana near Tivoli, which is relatively close to Rome. Adriana is the expanse of ruins that are somewhat quaintly described as Hadrian’s Villa. At about a square kilometre in area, it would be a mistake to think of it as Hadrian’s country retreat. It is more akin to an estate that was likely on the scale of a town. It is an enormous site where there is still much archaeological excavation to take place. On the day we visited, the temperature was in the mid thirties, the place was nearly deserted and there was not a breath of wind.

Unless you are a scholar, there are only so many ancient Roman ruins that enthral and only so many times one can ooh and aah over the wildflowers growing amongst the tumbled stones before shade and a cool beer start calling. But then we came across the olive grove.

I use olive oil; I eat olives; I can even enjoy dipping a tasty bread finger into a bowl of high quality, single origin fresh olive oil. But I have not been convinced about the romance of the olive grove before. The vast olive plantations of Spain I had seen were industrial production.

I was once told by somebody overstepping all personal boundaries that I lacked any romance in my soul. This was because I had described the mass vineyards of sauvignon blanc in Marlborough as being industrial horticulture. When my critic looked at them, I am pretty sure he saw the quaint little family vineyards of Italy whereas I saw hectares of tanalised timber and corporate investment. That searing dismissal of my finer feelings came back to mind as Mark and I wandered the Adriana olive grove. I just wanted to photograph every tree. Here was romance and antiquity in its original form.

I have no idea if it is still managed as a commercial operation but the lack of olive stones beneath would suggest that the crop is gathered. These were venerable trees clinging tenaciously to life down the centuries. I did a quick net search and found that at least some of the Adriana trees have been given monumental status.

“A monumental olive trees has an aesthetic destination, since production efficiency is undermined due to the elevated costs to maintain them. Often, producers will use these secular trees as emblems of an olive oil produced from younger plants of the same variety. “These plants are icons of a territory, a heritage, a tradition, a culture,”

As I read that quote, I think it must have been translated from Italian but it captures the flavour. It continues:

“An interesting fact about dating monumental olive trees is the difficulty in calculating the age because the inner part of the origin area tends to disappear due to diseases over the centuries. The wood keeps growing laterally but is internally hollow, often making it impossible to calculate the exact age, leaving scientists to estimate using available data.”

From the Olive Oil Times. 

The age of some of these Adriana olives has, apparently, been calculated at around 660 years. So they don’t date back to Hadrian, just to the fourteenth century. And the hollow centres are a typical feature.

Seen in 2014 at RHS Wisley

At least the monumental status may protect these trees from the ignominy of being dug up and shipped over to Britain for sale with a huge price tag. Instant maturity for English gardeners wanting to pretend that they are living in Italy at £1700 for a relatively young plant of a mere 70 years.

Lacking the rose tinted glasses of the former colleague who thought the vineyards of Marlborough were “romantic”, it is going to take a lot to convince me that the recent olive plantations of New Zealand are anything but utility until those trees are nearing a century of age at least.