Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

Garden Lore

“I always think of my sins when I weed. They grow apace in the same way and are harder still to get rid of.”

Helena Rutherford Ely “A Woman’s Hardy Garden” (1903)

Sago!

Sago!

Garden Lore: Friday 10 January, 2014

Most of us above a certain age grew up with milk puddings. Semolina, sago and tapioca were the most common thickening agents. Until recently, I had vaguely assumed that they basically derived from the same source of starch and the difference was in the grade of grain. Not at all. Semolina is usually durum wheat-based. After the outside husks and wheat germ have been removed, what remains is the inner part, or middlings. This is what gets ground into flour but before that stage, basically it is semolina. It can also be obtained from rice and maize crops – the latter becomes the dish known in USA as “grits”. Modern times have seen old fashioned semolina give way to the trendier North African couscous, which is essentially very similar in makeup but sold as a quick-cooking product having been steamed and then dehydrated. Israeli couscous (which resembles tapioca or frogs’ eyes) is simply further processed to this larger form.

Sago, on the other hand, is a starch that comes from the pith in the trunks of various palms but particularly Metroxylon sagu and is largely a product from New Guinea and South East Asia. Tapioca has an entirely different origin, being from cassava (Manihot esculenta) which grows as a tuberous root and is a tropical plant which originated in South America but is now a staple food in the Pacific and Asia as well.

These days, I only have sago in the kitchen cupboard. That is because I sometimes use a recipe idea which is vintage Alison Holst. When stewing rhubarb, add sago with the diced fruit (1/4 cup to 4 cups of fruit). It takes a little longer to cook, but the result is somewhat jellied and the acidity of the rhubarb has gone. It is very palatable, even for non-rhubarb fans.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Plant Collector: Justicia carnea alba

The white candles of Justicia carnea alba

The white candles of Justicia carnea alba

Christmas candles? Reminiscent of the tufting of old fashioned candlewick bedspread? It has also the unromantic name overseas of shrimp plant, a reference to the shape of the flowers. The white justicia has been bringing me a great deal of pleasure in recent weeks. We have always had the pink and yellow forms but I thought we had lost the white until I found it looking a little ragged and squashed by surrounding plants. I moved it and it hasn’t looked back. It can be a bit of a straggler so I constructed a discreet little bamboo frame to hold the plant together.

There are over 400 different justicia species, mostly from tropical to warm temperate Central and South America (think Brazil, amongst others) but J. carnea appears to be one of the showiest and is the most common in cultivation in this country. It has a very long flowering season across the summer months. This plant is only a metre tall at this stage but left to its own devices, I expect over time it will reach the 2.5 metres of the pink and yellow ones we have.

There aren’t many plants which will flower profusely in heavy shade. Most plants need sun to bloom. So it makes an ideal larger woodland plant with one proviso. The information online says it will not take below 7 °C. I don’t think it is that sensitive. We can get colder than that here and it has never shown damage but clearly it is quite cold sensitive and is regarded as a glasshouse plant in many areas of the world.

Justicias belong to the acanthaceae family.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Garden Lore

“It takes a while to grasp that not all failures are self-imposed, the result of ignorance, carelessness or inexperience. It takes a while to grasp that a garden isn’t a testing ground for character and to stop asking, what did I do wrong? Maybe nothing.”

Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts (1981).

Japanese black trifele tomatoes

Japanese black trifele tomatoes

Heirloom and heritage seed varieties

I see Kings Seeds define “heirloom” seed varieties as being selected strains dating back to pre-1960s. Anything grown from seed will be a selected cultivar from the original species over time and may be very different from wild forms. While, by definition, heirloom varieties are open pollinated (by insects or wind), so too is the vast majority of seed we grow. I tried to work out whether there is an agreed difference between “heirloom” and “heritage” but generally the terms seem to be used loosely and interchangeably.

A number of people and organisations have been working for years to preserve our heirloom varieties in this country but none more so than the Koanga Institute and Kay Baxter in particular. Why does it matter? It is really important to keep genetic diversity in a world where commercial production is driven by other imperatives – particularly high productivity. The kiwifruit industry is a clear example of the perils of depending on a single cultivar of yellow fruit. If disease (PSA, in that case) takes it out, the impact is devastating.

Heirloom is not a synonym for high health. Some will be, some won’t and some will not perform well outside their original area. While most of us like to think it is synonymous with better flavour, that is not always true, either. It has nothing to do with being organic although many organic gardeners will favour heirloom varieties. Essentially, all “heirloom seed” means is that a particular seed strain has shown sufficient merit in some area of performance for people to keep it going for over fifty years. And long may we continue to preserve these different strains of seed.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Plant Collector: Pachystegia insignis

Pachystegia insignis - one of our loveliest native plants

Pachystegia insignis – one of our loveliest native plants

We do a good line in native daisies in this country but few, if any are lovelier than this Marlborough rock daisy. The flowers are pristine white, but even when it is not flowering season, the leaves are big, rounded and heavy textured – glossy green on the upper side and felted white on the under side. That felting is called indumentum (sometimes tomentum).

In the wild, P. insignis grows on the eastern side of Marlborough. Apparently you can see it as you drive down the state highway but the only times I have driven it in recent times, I have been behind the wheel with my eyes fixed firmly on the road. It hangs onto the rocky banks, coping with drought and salt spray. This means it is not the easiest of plants to grow in a lush garden situation. It needs perfect drainage and an open, exposed site. Even then, we find mature plants can keel over and suddenly die from time to time.

To our ongoing embarrassment, our particularly good form here was stolen by my late mother from the Dunedin Botanic Gardens. She died 12 years ago (almost to the day), but her legacy lives on here. Pachystegias are small shrubs belonging to the asteraceae family. The “insignis” seems to mean distinguished or remarkable in this context.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Toxic plants and natural remedies

Brunfelsia, or the Yesterday Today Tomorrow plant, is highly toxic to dogs but fortunately few dogs eat flowers.

Brunfelsia, or the Yesterday Today Tomorrow plant, is highly toxic to dogs but fortunately few dogs eat flowers.

My mention of the toxicity of oleander in Plant Collector last week yielded the following comment via Twitter:
“I remember seeing a photo as a kid of someone who had made a bonfire with oleander. Poor guy looked like he had been doused in acid. He inhaled some smoke and wound up in intensive care with lung damage.”

Before you rush out to dispose of your oleander – if you have one – you may like to ponder that if you are determined to rid your garden of all poisonous and therefore dangerous plants, you will have to remove all daphnes, laburnum, alocasias, rhus, karaka, brunfelsia, aroids, colchicums, tulips and a whole lot more. You will end up removing half your garden. There is a certain folly to thinking that you can make your garden safe for small children and dogs by only growing non-toxic plants. Goodness, even oak and yew can be toxic to dogs.

The plant kingdom is still the prime source for most of our pharmaceutical compounds and our poisons. Aspirin was derived from willows, morphine from poppies. When a natural compound to treat cancer was isolated in Taxus baccata, British gardeners were urged to deliver their yew clippings to depots for a few years so researchers could isolate the relevant chemical compound.

Fortunately for the plant kingdom, scientists then set about re-creating the desired plant sequence in laboratories to avoid the problems of depleting natural resources.

I am sure it was Agatha Christie who alerted her readers to the fact that laburnum seeds are highly toxic and can in fact be used to poison off one’s enemy. But there are so many other sources of poisons. Cyanide is a natural compound, found in peach and apricot kernels, cassava, even apple pips along with many other sources. Ricin, one of the deadliest natural toxins, is derived from the seed of the castor plant (Ricinus communis) – as indeed is castor oil. The castor plant is highly decorative and still found in some gardens and public plantings. It was ricin that was used to murder Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, in London back in 1978. He was poked with an umbrella spike in the street which transferred the poison capsule into the back of his thigh. It took three days for him to die.

Most of the alocasias are toxic but this one particularly so. We are cautious handling it in the garden

Most of the alocasias are toxic but this one particularly so. We are cautious handling it in the garden

All this gives lie to the feel-good myth that “if it is natural, it must be good for us”. These can be powerful substances with unexpected side effects for the unwary. The potential for enthusiastic amateurs to get it wrong is just as great today as earlier.

The world has been grappling with the thin line between safety and danger in plants for over two millennia. It was the Ancient Greek Theophrastus, back before Christ was born, who is credited with first starting to try and sort out the plant kingdom into some comprehensible form, a task that was not completed until Carl Linnaeus in the 1700s. When humankind depended entirely on wild-gathered plant material for medicine, the potential for matters to go badly wrong was enormous. The majority of the populace has some difficulty in recognising different plants, even more so if they look similar. It is highly likely that there were a fair number of people out there a-diggin’ (for roots or bulbs), a-cuttin’ (for foliage or flowers) and a-gatherin’ (seeds) who subscribed to the “near enough is good enough” school of thought, especially when collecting for payment.

The pharmaceutical industry comes in for a huge amount of bad press but at least it has standardised product removed from the vagaries of human error. My elder daughter is a synthetic organic chemist who spent her later university years working on replicating a compound of great potential that had been identified in a plant native to Thailand. I was discussing herbal remedies with her recently and her comment was that, certainly when it came to ingesting a remedy, she’d rather buy it ready-made because then there is more certainty about the accuracy of the source plants and the dosage. For of course the time of the year when plant material is gathered can have a dramatic effect on the concentrations of a desired compound, let alone growing conditions. There will be much greater margin of error when it comes to home-prepared topical applications – in other words applied directly to the skin. But I would be very cautious and want certainty when it comes to swallowing or inhaling.

We are raised in this country to fear most mushrooms and toadstools. The dangers of misidentification can be fatal when it comes to eating them. That caution is not always extended to the plant world. Natural is not a synonym for safe and healthy. If you want wild gathered food skewers, use sticks of a rosemary bush not daphne or, as mentioned last week, oleander.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.