Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

Plant Collector: Magnolia Manchu Fan

Magnolia Manchu Fan

Magnolia Manchu Fan

The most spectacular flowering trees of the early spring season must surely be the magnolias. But not everybody has room for a large, spreading tree festooned with enormous blooms. Manchu Fan has long been one of our recommendations for a smaller growing white variety. It is not that the individual blooms are drop dead gorgeous and showy. They are just white goblets with a pink blush at the base but they have heavy textured petals (or tepals, as magnolia petals are more accurately described) which withstand weather damage. And there are lots and lots of them, produced on a small growing, upright, narrow tree that will fit in urban gardens.

Manchu Fan was bred by American hybridist, Todd Gresham, in the middle of last century. There are a fair number of his selections named – enough to be referred to internationally as ‘the Gresham hybrids’. Of the ones we have grown, Manchu Fan is the standout performer. After maybe 20 years, our plant is 5m high by 3m wide without any trimming or shaping. In overall performance, it is not hugely different to the better known M. denudata but, because it flowers later in the season, it escapes frost damage and the tree will remain smaller in the long term. It also has a longer flowering season.

Manchu Fan is in commercial production in this country and available on the market. For the purists, its breeding is (M. soulangeana ‘Lennei Alba’ x M. veitchii).

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

Garden lore

You buy some flowers for your table; You tend them tenderly as you’re able; You fetch them water from hither and thither – What do you get for it all? They wither.

Samuel Hoffenstein (1890-1947)

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Garden lore- dividing polyanthus

Polyanthus are cheerful little souls flowering away at this time of the year but often treated as disposable plants with a short life span. Yet they clump up quickly and are easily divided to spread wider to get a carpet or patch that obligingly flowers when few other perennials do. I planted white polyanthus last year, all single crowns with just one rosette of leaves. This week, even though they are in flower, I have been digging and splitting the ones that have already multiplied well – the clump in the photo yielded five good sized plants. When perennials are in full growth, they can recover quickly from being divided.

Lift the clump and look at the base of the leaves. It should be clear where the different rosettes of leaves have formed. Sometimes you can gently pull them apart at the base. Sometimes you need to cut through the nubbly root formation just below the top. Each clump needs as many roots as possible. Trim off the outer leaves and replant into well cultivated soil, enriched with compost if you have it. You only need to water them in if conditions are dry. The replants should romp away with fresh growth and reward you with extended flowering well into spring. If you put the plants at maybe 30cm spacings, they have room to grow and you can inter-plant with something else entirely that will flower through summer.

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

Plant Collector: Aloe ferox

Aloe ferox - very orange and loved by waxeyes at this time of year

Aloe ferox – very orange and loved by waxeyes at this time of year

The waxeyes are delighted by the flowering of this aloe and the vertical flower spikes are often populated by at least half a dozen of these cheerful souls. This is a particularly spiky aloe, coming, as many do, from the coastal areas of South Africa. As such, it prefers a dry climate, warm temperatures and sandy soils. None of these apply here, so presumably it is fairly forgiving but it will rot out without excellent drainage. It is a very heavy plant on top so what is happening below ground is important. Wikipedia tells me that each fleshy leaf can weigh up to 2kg when it is harvested. And why is it harvested? It is not just the better known Aloe vera (or ‘ello, ‘ello, ‘ello Vera as we refer to it here) that has useful attributes. A. ferox also has medicinal and cosmetic properties and is a commercial crop. With its fiercely spiky leaves, you would want to be wearing leather gloves at harvest time.

There is nothing rare about A. ferox, except in the wild where it is endangered. It is widely available in the marketplace. In optimum conditions, plants can reach 3m tall, but after many years ours still sits at half that height. We may have problems if it reaches its potential.

Aloes are a very large family of flowering succulents from the African continent. Many are winter flowering, presumably triggered by seasonal rains.

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

Garden lore

[My garden] is a confusion of kitchen and parterre, orchard and flower garden, which lie so mixt and interwoven with one another, that if a foreigner, who had seen nothing of our country, should be conveyed into my garden at his first landing, he would look upon it as a natural wilderness, and one of the uncultivated parts of our country.

Joseph Addison, The Tatler (1710)

The dreaded buxus blight - but not in our garden

The dreaded buxus blight – but not in our garden

Buxus blight
Judging by all the search engine terms I see leading people to my website (www.jury.co.nz), buxus blight is currently running rampant. In summary, if your buxus has turned brown all over, it is dead. If it has big dead patches and some green left, odds on you have buxus blight. All species of buxus get it but it is worst on the most common ones we use here – B. sempervirens and var. suffriticosa. It is a fungus – cylindrocladium – and it is a problem throughout the world where buxus is grown. Being a fungus means that it is spread by spore and these light little packages of blight can be spread by wind.

You can treat buxus blight but you can’t cure it. As soon as you stop treating it, the dead patches will start again. Untreated, you are likely to lose the lot eventually and it will look most unattractive in the process. I know of people who are keeping it at bay by using copper sprays and there will be fungicides that will knock it on the head for a while. The trouble is that the repeated use of copper sprays is not good for the environment (eventually you can get a build up that kills earthworms) and fungicides are not the nicest of sprays. It is unlikely that natural sprays using baking soda are of sufficient strength to be effective.

In the end, the decision really is whether you are willing to spray your buxus from here to eternity. Be grateful if you do not have the blight.

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

Tropical gardens re-created in Asian hotel-style

The distinctive spindle palm or Hyophorbe verschaffeltii at Kota Bharu airport

The distinctive spindle palm or Hyophorbe verschaffeltii at Kota Bharu airport

I mentioned I had been to the tropics. It was Malaysia and included the magical Perhentian Islands which were pretty much a perfect tropical hideaway. Waving palm trees, golden sand, warm sea with coral reefs just off the beach, no roads, so no vehicles, not even motor bikes. All transportation was done by small boat and wheelbarrows. What they did have was a sewage system and a daily rubbish collection (by boat) which is always reassuring.

The wheelbarrow as the main transporter of freight

The wheelbarrow as the main transporter of freight

Did I come home with a yen to re-create my holiday experience by building a tropical garden? Well, no. See, there is something missing here. The temperatures in the tropics are consistently in the 30s. Soggy, cold tropicalia in winter does not seem so evocative of warm holidays, in my opinion.

Many others do not share my reservations, however, and the tropical garden has become increasingly de rigueur, particularly in Auckland but also in points further south where the folly is magnified by even cooler temperatures.

It occurred to me that we may have evolved our own tropical gardening style in this country. It is perhaps best described as “cool climate Balinese-hotel-style” or, if you have been to Bali, even more specifically as “Ubud hotel-style”. I have never seen that garden genre beyond a hotel environment in the tropics and it does not reflect the wider environment.

In Malaysia, the closest I saw to domestic gardening was more akin to a food forest. The focus was on production, not aesthetics, so tended to feature a mango or two, coconut palms, plenty of bananas and maybe a breadfruit. Ornamental gardening is more likely to be limited to a bonsai bougainvillea in a pot.

Nor does the forest resemble a tropical garden as we understand it and our domestic, cooler climate version cannot be seen as an interpretation of that. Besides, we lack the monkeys (big, long-tailed ones ripping the beachside abutilons apart when I saw them).

Fake trees in Kuala Terengganu

Fake trees in Kuala Terengganu

Plantings for beautification are clearly the domain of the public sector and commercial entities (hotels, in particular). Growing conditions are pretty forgiving in the tropics. They can often cut things off and stick them in the ground with no special preparation and a reasonable expectation that they will grow. I saw Cordyline terminalis treated in this very fashion, growing in pure sand. So it was a puzzle to me as to why the riverside in Kuala Terengganu was furnished with fake trees. Fake trees designed to look like Norfolk Island pines and oak trees colouring up for autumn, in fact. Bizarre. Yet the street trees included the much favoured and very fragrant Michelia alba which is devilishly difficult to propagate in this country.

Blocking off a street in Kota Bharu

Blocking off a street in Kota Bharu

As in so many Asian countries, it is possible to beautify cities with planters, often ceramic. Indeed, I saw a row used to temporarily block off access on a road in Kota Bharu. Anyone want to take bets on how long these would last in any New Zealand city? It is just one of those unspoken reminders of the vandalism and theft we live with. No council is ever going to contemplate using something as easily destroyed, let alone putting little clipped topiaries into them.

The two dimensional traveller's palm is in fact not a palm at all (Ravenala madagascariensis,)

The two dimensional traveller’s palm is in fact not a palm at all (Ravenala madagascariensis,)

Palms are planted everywhere and the public plantings go well beyond the ubiquitous coconut palms and the utility monoculture of the palm oil plantations. The beautiful bismarckias and curious two dimensional traveller’s palms (which is not a palm but actually related to strelitzia) are certainly stand-out plants.

Frangipani - usually seen as a hotel garden plant

Frangipani – usually seen as a hotel garden plant

Underplanting? The only places I saw underplantings were on roadside verges and in hotel gardens. These are commonly the tropical crinums and ornamental gingers. The gorgeous frangipanis which we associate strongly with the tropics are mostly in hotels. Of course these are Central American plants, not Asian. Mind you, so too is the bougainvillea and it has done pretty well in establishing itself as a first choice plant in warmer areas across the globe.

All of this made me realise that the many “tropical gardens” in tropiNZ are eclectic mixes of plants from around the world put together in the classic layered style, but tidy. We won’t accept the wild abandon of tropical growth, the droop of scruffy banana leaves, the debris and litter of the forest floor. No, this is warm climate plants put together with a little tasteful Asian ornament or two, straitjacketed into suburbia.

In fact the model is those immaculately groomed gardens you find throughout Asia in better quality hotels. Presumably for many such garden owners, the evocation of happy, holiday memories centres primarily on their hotel and the hotel pool. It does not have a whole lot to do with the wider environmental or actual gardening in the tropics. As I said, Ubud hotel-style, but without the warm temperatures.

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