Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

Big, red rhododendrons

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Rhododendron ‘Kaponga’ in Pat’s garden. We have a specimen planted somewhere in the garden but not in a prominent position because I would have to go looking for it.

I do not miss our days of retailing plants. Nursery work was simply a means to earn a living and now that we are retired from all but gardening and final selections from Mark’s plant breeding programme, we are reaping the benefits of those long hours and quite a bit of hard work. Nothing reminds me more of that than red rhododendrons.

“You should take a photograph of ‘Kaponga’, my friend Pat said last week. And indeed it did look as splendid as a full truss, red rhododendron can, when viewed from her window. I didn’t have my camera with me at the time. I am old school – I prefer to use a camera rather than my phone. So I called back in this morning and it is already just past its peak.

Rhododendron ‘Kaponga’

‘Kaponga’ is a local selection of a red R. arboreum hybrid, bred and named by the late Bernie Hollard of Hollard Gardens fame. We like arboreums in our conditions because they don’t get hammered by thrips (turning the foliage silver) or die-back so the plant stays looking well furnished and healthy without needing spraying and special attention. ‘Kaponga’ was never my favourite; I do not love the big ball trusses on rhododendrons so favoured and admired by others. The looser trusses and flower forms of the maddenii group are more to my taste. ‘Kaponga’ is not a pure red like ‘Rubicon’,  having a slight pink cast to its tone but it is an exceptional performer.

Rhododendron ‘Noyo Chief’ in our park, clearly planted in a more prominent position than ‘Kaponga’ because I know exactly where it is.
It is hard to capture reds accurately. The photo of ‘Noyo Chief’ in our park looks redder than it actually is. This photo of it in a vase is somewhat pinker than it is. The actual shade lies somewhere between the two photos.

Overseas readers will know ‘Noyo Chief’ better than our local selections and, while an excellent plant which performs well every year, it too has that slight pink cast to its full red trusses.

Coming back to selling plants, every person who sells plants will know that any plant in bloom sells on sight. Never more so than red rhododendrons with full, ball trusses. Over the  years, I realised that men bought red rhodos. Almost every time. When women bought them, it was often as a gift for their husbands. I should not have been as surprised by this gender-based colour preference – there are still men today who won’t have anything to do with pink, pastel apricot or paler lilac colours, regarding them as too ‘girly’ or feminine for real men. Maybe gardening men have broadened their tastes in the time since we dropped retail about 15 years ago? I hope so.

‘Rubicon’ was my favourite – pure red and handsome foliage but prone to thrips. It needed spraying to keep it healthy and we are not willing to use sprays in the garden just to keep plants looking good. In the end the thrip infestation got so bad that they pretty much marched away with the plant. Brilliant red rhodo but best grown in a climate with a colder winter than we get.

I am sure I must have told the story before (but not, I hope, recently) of the Tauranga landscaper who came in to buy plants for a new retirement village. He would only buy red, yellow or orange flowered plants, maybe blue – no whites, creams, pastels and certainly no pretty pinks because he, personally, didn’t like them. At the time, selling plants was more important than my view, but I really, really wanted to point out to him that his retirement village occupants were going to have a majority of women owing to the fact that women have a longer life expectancy. Besides, some men do like pretty flowers and rise above the constraints of old fashioned, masculine expectations when it comes to colour choices.

It must have scarred me because, to this day, I find it hard to rise above my disinterest in big red rhododendrons. I can still admire a good plant that performs well but they never make my heart sing or lift my spirits. Each to their own.

Pat, she of the ‘Kaponga’ plant, had a neighbour who planted a row of reds on their road boundary. I had assumed it was ‘Kaponga’ until I looked at the foliage today and it is not. It will be one of the common varieties in commercial production here these days but, since we stopped selling plants, my memory has filtered out information that no longer seems necessary to remember and confidently identifying many rhododendrons has gone with it.

And now for a big plant

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The Doryanthes palmeri last bloomed here in 2018. Only eight years have passed since then. To have it flowering again already seems to be quite a quick turnaround. Taking ten years to bloom and then dying is the norm.

By May 5, the new flower spikes were making themselves obvious.

It is a clumping perennial and each rosette only blooms once before making offsets and the one that bloomed dying off. The rosette that bloomed last time died off fairly tidily. In fac,t I recall wondering if it actually did die off at all but I am assuming it did. It is a bit hard to remember how it behaved eight years ago.  It looks as though each of the three spikes this year come from different rosettes.

Two months later, by July 1, the weight of the stems was pulling them down and the first hint of colour appeared
Three weeks later and the lowest stem is dropping further and definite colour is visible

This is not a plant for those short of space, living in a colder climate or faint of heart. Ours is now well over three metres in diameter so if you feel inclined you could calculate the area (Pi R squared, is it?) or the circumference (Pi D, I think). Or you could just take my word for it that it takes up a lot of space and you can not plant anything close in to it because those leaves act as brooms or blunt scythes in windy weather.

August 25
By August 25, I was having to duck to get under it.

Doryanthes palmeri is the Queensland spear lily, although any debt to the lily family is a long way back in the botanical family tree. I expect it to flower through until around Christmas. To be honest, it is a little bit inconvenient. I can still duck under it but Zach referred to the difficulty of limboing beneath it and I assume he and Lloyd are taking the long way round. The flower spikes are far too robust to push aside or stake out of the way. Based on past experience, I am confident that this massive flower spike will not break and is not likely to weigh itself down to ground level.

By September 2, the flowers had opened sufficiently to be pools of nectar and the spikes were buzzing with the sound of honey bees

We must let it do its thing. What is a minor matter of inconvenience in the face of something as impressive as these flower spikes?

September 10 and those flower spikes are getting even lower

Tulip surprise

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I *may* have mentioned my somewhat sniffy attitude to tulips before (*definitely have*…) but that does not mean that I am going to dismiss them out of hand. There are always exceptions to the rule and I came across one on our visit to the city cemetery, Te Henui, last week.

A tulip meadow!

Look at these graves of mass, mixed tulips. It is like a wildflower meadow, albeit tulip hybrids are about as far away from wildflowers as can be imagined. As of last week, this pretty sight has escaped the fate of last year’s tulips when some atrocious grave robbers regarded the display as their personal picking garden. I loved this vibrant sight on a grey day.

Oh. And just behind is Magnolia ‘Atlas’ – another Jury magnolia

Mark and I discussed these many different tulips. I quite like the little, pointed purple ones and the huge, overblown lemon affairs were reminiscent of herbaceous peonies. We agreed that it was the red and yellow bicolors that we most disliked and I wasn’t at all keen on the orange ones.

Tulipa saxatilis
Likely the very same tulips 70 years later
Tulipa sylvestris 1950s

We only grow two varieties here and both are species, originally collected from the wild (but not by us). Tulipa saxatilis from Crete I praise every year. It gently increases for us and has a softness that the stiff hybrids lack. Our little yellow one is probably Tulipa sylvestris, the wild or woodland species, native throughout Eurasia and North Africa. I was amused to find a photo of it from the mid 1950s in our rockery here. We have kept it alive but I rather doubt that we have any more of it than Mark’s parents started with 70 years ago.

Tulips have a long history and still retain popularity that shows up every year in shared photographs on line, particularly from the UK and northern Europe. Of course, I could pick out more desirable selections but it is the waste that also worries me. Even in those northern climes, they are often treated as annuals. They can limp on in our climate for a while, getting ever weaker with a dramatic decline in blooming after the first year. When growing bulbs, I want to buy once and then grow them well enough that they will return for many years to come.

The tulips at Floriade ranged from the oh so very tasteful and refined to … less so.

I have never been to see the tulips at Keukenhof near Amsterdam and it is not on my bucket list. But I then remembered Floriade in Canberra in 2017 which was an astonishing spring display. I wrote about it then but I also take this opportunity to pull out some of my photos.

Tulips will forever be known as chillips in our house. That is due to a regular presenter on a very popular TV garden show from back when we still actually had one. This particular presenter was somewhat of a fan of chillips, as he pronounced it each spring season. Let there be chillips but in meadows and mixed plantings, I say.

Some of the people at Floriade were as colourful as the flowers.
Floriade also did the mix and match meadow style seen in the cemetery but with added annuals.

August is for narcissi.

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Not to my taste

True, so are July and September. If you grow enough different ones, you can have somewhere over three months of cheerful daffies in bloom. I have timed them. We avoid the big show daffodils; as garden plants, the weight of the flower pulls the stem down. They make better cut flowers than garden plants. Nor are we into the novelty breeding of split corona (which make the flower look like a squashed nose to me) or novelty colours like pink and peach. As far as I am concerned narcissi are in shades of yellow, occasionally white, sometimes with orange centres but predominantly sunshine yellow.

We have an abundance of narcissi both in garden situations and naturalised in meadow areas. This one is Felix’s ‘Twilight”.

We have plenty. Mark and his parents before him sourced every named, smaller growing variety they could find so we have ‘Beryl’, ‘Jetfire’, ‘Peeping Tom’, ‘Thalia’, ‘Tete a Tete’, ‘Pandora’ and more, including the various species. But then Felix started dabbling with hybridising to produce his own selections (‘Twilight’ and ‘Twinkle’ were named and we released them through our nursery). Mark raised many more by controlled crosses just to get the numbers to make a show in the garden. It may have taken several decades, but we now have a splendid early spring display over a long period of time.

Hippeastrum aulicum with lemon calanthe orchids behind

Also brightening large areas are the Hippeastrum aulicum. Again, decades of gently spreading them has increased numbers so that they are our dominant woodland bulb for August. Quite simply, they are large flowered but elegant in their simplicity and with the right ratio of flower to foliage. All class, is aulicum and that cannot be said of all hippeastrums. I am not a fan of most of the hippeastrum hybrids I have seen but each to their own.

Lachenalia aloides tricolor and freesias

The rockery is hitting its spring peak with lachenalias, freesias, Tulipa saxatilis, Wurmbea stricta (formerly Onixotis triquetra), grape hyacinth (muscari), the first of the season’s moraeas (peacock iris) and more. I would note that the pretty lilac tulip from Crete is much hardier than I thought it was and I have probably been giving incorrect information on this for many years. I see photos of it from UK gardens come through social media. The schizostylus continue to bloom intermittently. We never seem to get a mass flowering from it here, as per photos I see on line, but both the red and pink flower randomly throughout the year for us. Amazingly, the large snowflake Leucojum vernum ‘Gravetye Giant’ is now into its fourth month of flowering and that is not to be sneezed at. Cyclamen coum is finishing for the season while dainty little Cyclamen repandum is opening.

I don’t like many of the stiff, so-called Dutch tulip hybrids, but I love this species, T. saxatilis

The first of the bluebells are already open. And that is the end of a year in bulbs. I started with September last year which, when I reviewed it, could equally apply to August really but bulbs are not limited to calendar months. May and June were the quietest months but it is possible to have fresh bulbs flowering every month of the year in our climate.

Wurmbea and narcissi with our native carex. I find bulbs combine well with some of smaller growing grasses.

I have an elderly gardening friend who once told me she wouldn’t grow bulbs because she hates the messy foliage that hangs on most of them after flowering. I was a bit gobsmacked but I wasn’t going to argue it with her. I tend to discard bulbs where the foliage to flower ratio is too high, but I would not want to be without the freshness and energy of seasonal bulbs.  I can forgive them their messy time.

Narcissus ‘Beryl’, one of my favourites
Narcissus ‘Tete a Tete’ and common blue muscari

Found it!

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The title and cover photo on the lower book does not do it justice at all – see the next photo. I would bet the publisher chose the cover photo, not the author.

When we moved into our home, it still contained Mark’s parents’ belongings. I knew I had seen a book which clearly inspired the garden here but it has taken me years to find it again. It wasn’t until I took apart all the bookshelves to dust each book individually and to try and get a more helpful categorisation by subject that it turned up again.

When Mark’s parents built their dream house here around 1950, neither had travelled overseas. The house draws largely on English style but with bigger windows. They started on the garden as soon as the house was built and I realised when we moved into the house that we could work out which books inspired these passionate gardeners across the world.

The Picture Book of Gardens by A.G.L. Hellyer is comprises full page photographs in black and white. The gardens are very much what I describe as English manor house style – spacious, but not grand historic gardens, beautifully tended and exceptionally flowery and pretty. The inscription inside the cover had me puzzled. Along with the date of publication, it placed this book as 1956, by which point the garden here was well on the way to being designed and executed. It is likely this book was more an affirmation that they were on track.

I think it was the earlier book, The Modern Garden by G. C. Taylor, B.Sc., that helped them refine their visions. First published in 1936, Felix and Mimosa’s copy was the fourth revision dated 1949 and is clearly extremely well thumbed. There I found the inspiration for our sunken garden.

Our sunken garden as it was last week. It is starker than it used to be but the growing conditions have changed dramatically as the huge rimu trees have explanded their root systems through the whole area. We could not keep the borders looking lush and flowery with all the root competition binding the soil and soaking up all the water.
The sunken garden in Mimosa’s day. Probably 1960s.
Our sunken garden is much deeper than is commonly seen – and oft mistaken as a former swimming pool. But I think it bears a debt to this photograph, albeit scaled down to a much smaller space.
Maybe with a touch of this if you look at Mimosa’s rose garden.

When the title says ‘The Modern Garden’, it clearly means modern in terms of post WW1 and the demise of enormous estate gardens that didn’t survive all the young gardeners heading off as canon fodder to the war. So, we are talking modern in terms of Vita Sackville-West of Sissinghurst, Gertrude Jekyll, Lawrence Johnston and other great English garden leaders of the era between the world wars.

I have no idea who G. C. Taylor, B.Sc. was but this remains a very practical book. The more than 350 photographs may be smallish and in black and white but they are thoughtfully recorded and well composed with captions full of helpful advice. The author might have been slightly surprised had he known that he guided, from afar, a garden with a clear debt to his 1940 advice and inspiration that has lasted down seven decades. It is quite simply, one of the best gardening books I have seen.

This is from 1961, about 10 years after Felix and Mimosa built the house. It is understandable that they were looking at English books for gardening inspiration. The had already built in a style that would not be out of place in either of the aforementioned gardening books.

There is very little in gardening that is new. Innovation lies more in reinterpreting the old than in coming up with a brilliant, original idea on one’s own. It has all been done before somewhere, sometime. Much of the advice in this book, especially when it comes to design, balance, and execution is still relevant today.

Both of Mark’s parents embraced the pretty, flowery look
Mimosa labelled this photograph ‘My little driveway’.