Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, we don’t ever do traditional white Christmases. This is on account of us being in summer and currently two days past the summer solstice. It is a very different experience here in the south of the southern hemisphere. I was surprised when I looked around over the last week by quite how many white flowers we have in bloom at this time.
I felt my all white flower lay was not really festive enough for the day before Christmas so I added just a touch of red. Meri Kirihimete, as many (but not all) of us now say in Aotearoa. May your festive season be full of love and laughs, or at least tranquillity.
I have never wanted a white garden myself, but I have looked at them and thought about them in the past. It was UK designer and gardener, Dan Pearson who made me think about the different shades of white which is a very important consideration if any readers are contemplating planting one. Not all whites are the same, not at all. And I wrote about more contemporary approaches to white gardens after our 2017 visit to Italy, France and the UK. Garden styles have evolved since Vita Sackville-West put in her famous white garden at Sissinghurst.
Meantime, please join me on a foray around parts of our summer gardens this week.
There is something very charming in the simplicity of a carpet of white daisies seemingly suspended in the air in the twin borders. Alas these ones only bloom the once and then need to be cut back to the ground level rosettes but they are showy enough for me to forgive them.
The common ox-eye daisies, however, are lighting up the Court Garden. Soon we will cut them back hard and they will be in full bloom again in six weeks.
Rhododendron sino nuttallii was still in full bloom at the start of last week. My favourite rhododendron of all, it flowers late in the season and the only drawback is that warm weather can cut its flowering season short.
Albuca nelsonii is inclined to be large, sometimes unwieldly and in need of some targeted staking, but it is very showy and handsome and the flowers are perfect for adding to Christmas bouquets.
Lychnis coronaria would be a perfect choice for a white and grey garden. We just let it seed down gently in the Wave Garden. I can’t believe I have lost the shocking pink form – I thought it was indestructible.
Alstromerias in white with a sunny yellow throat – but they are probably not white enough for white garden enthusiasts?
Spring was surprisingly late this year, considering our winter was mild, and the lateness of the season has also affected the lilies. Usually, I can pick Lilium regale for Christmas but they have yet to open. The only lily currently in bloom is this compact one in the rockery and I don’t even know what it is. Beautiful flowers, but alas it has no scent.
Finally, I know next to nothing about cacti and succulents and I have no plans to remedy that gap in my knowledge. As a group of plants, they do not inspire me enough to put the effort in but this one in the Rimu Walk delighted me this week. I don’t think I have ever seen it flower before but maybe I just haven’t looked at the right time. Flowering in subtropical woodland, it lit up the area.
Three weeks ago, I quoted Australian garden expert, Michael McCoy, saying “But what I’m forever chasing, and experience with joyous regularity, are those magical moments when conscious enjoyment turns to inexplicable enchantment.”
I lack any good photos of our visit to Hidcote but I will say this much photographed walk to what is known as ‘Heaven’s Gate’ made a whole lot more sense when we found that gate opened up to a huge vista beyond, which neither of us thought to photograph at the time.
Since then, I have been thinking about those times in my gardening life. The first time I remember it clearly is when we visited Hidcote in the UK, back in 2009. It was Mark’s and my first independent foray visiting gardens in that country. Our original aim had been to see those gardens that were more or less parallel to ours – large private gardens managed by their owners without big budgets and just the occasional bit of outside assistance. We wanted to set benchmarks for our own garden. After the first 10 days or so, we were distinctly underwhelmed by what we had seen; we switched tack and went to see some of the better-known ones. Hidcote just blew us away. It was, quite simply everything we aspired to at the time. I italicise those words because our aspirations have changed direction in the time since but on the day, we spent hours there and came out of the garden feeling like stunned mullets. I wish I had better photos but I have never forgotten the feelings of being overwhelmed with delight.
The Missouri Meadow at its very best
On that same visit, we also saw the Missouri Meadow at RHS Wisley and it too, blew us away with its magic. Sadly, we watched it decline badly on subsequent visits but that simple beauty on our first sight is a memory that has never faded. It was an entirely new take on meadow or prairie gardening that was beautiful in concept and initial execution, if not in its subsequent management.
The Quarry Garden at The Garden House in Devon
Immortalised on the top right on my wall of memories in the room we call the laundry in this country, often referred to as the utility room overseas.
We were also entranced by what is called the quarry garden at The Garden House in Devon. The work of Keith Wiley at the time, I wrote about it being like a magic carpet garden and to this day, I have a photograph of it on my laundry wall of favourite travel photos.
Magic at Wildside.
We were so impressed by the quarry garden that we searched out Keith Wiley’s own garden on our next visit and that is a joyous triumph of vision, energy and plantsmanship. It was so inspiring it drew us back a second time on our next trip and it did not disappoint us on the second viewing which was just as engrossing as the first. We planned a third visit but Covid got in the way and, given that we rarely go back to gardens we have seen before on our brief overseas trips which are packed with garden visits, that tells you how special we regard his garden to be.
La Plume
The soaring veronicastrums and thalictrum behind a unique hedge of waves at Le Jardin Plume in Normandy were pretty darned memorable, even as my own efforts to grow veronicastrum here continue to flounder and my thalictrum do not soar.
Wildflowers at Villa Adriana
and at the Palatine in Rome. Likely more of naturalistic planting than actual self-sown wildflowers. I didn’t look closely enough at the time.
We have seen a fair number of Italian gardens on three separate trips but the moments of magic have been from incidental delights of wildflowers growing beyond the over-groomed austerity of many major gardens in that county.
Outdoor dining at Winterhome
Back in Aotearoa New Zealand, those moments of transcendent delight have been a little harder to isolate in my memory. Winterhome is a garden near Kaikoura that is usually represented by a view of the long pool that left me unmoved (I really don’t like the square pots along its length) but there were plenty of other parts that I loved, none more so than the casual outdoor dining area immediately in front of the house looking out to the ocean beyond and below.
On that same 2008 trip to Marlborough, my first encounter with a fully naturalistic garden right on the wild coastline was a revelation. I remember wondering if it could be described as a garden; now I have no hesitation at all in saying yes, yes, yes – albeit one without flowers or any pretensions to prettiness. I can’t remember the name of the man who created it and built the inground house but I think he was a well-known Blenheim architect.
Bluebell time at Te Popo Garden back when it was still owned by our friends, Bruce and Lorri Ellis, was a special time, even if many of us have learned that bluebells can be determined thugs. A sea of blue is a visual delight. Even more magical, but in the days before I carried a camera, was seeing English bluebells in flower beneath deciduous woodland near Castle Douglas in Scotland.
My heart sang when I walked amongst our own meadow and streamside Higo irises back in 2015 and it continues to make me happy at this time every year.
And yes, our own garden gives me moments when pleasure transforms into joy, times when I feel my cup floweth over with happiness.
Helianthus and grasses blowing in the wind in our Court Garden in late summer.
Readers may notice that my photos do not feature heavily defined and structured gardens with pristine maintenance. It is clear that, even before we realised it ourselves, both Mark and I have been drawn to a more naturalistic, softer-edge style of garden. The more I reflected on my memories of special experiences and searched out photo confirmations of those memories from my thousands of images on file, the clearer it became where our hearts lie. This is not to say that I can not enjoy or appreciate more structured, manicured gardens. It is just that that, to hark back to Michael McCoy’s comment, my ‘conscious enjoymen’t does not turn to ‘inexplicable enchantment’. Put more simply, they do no make my heart sing.
Didn’t even Marie Kondo decide that having children was a greater joy than having a well-ordered home?
Finally, nothing to do with gardens or plants, an image of a special moment of magic in fading light in the hillside village of Sermoneta in Italy. I may have taken this photo in June 2017 but I have used it on Christmas cards in the time since. In a country where Christmas comes in summer, it feels apt and it remains a special moment when time, place and light all came together in a magical moment, quite possibly aided by a few wines with dinner at the time.
The lower angle of the winter sun striking the plumes of miscanthus flowers in our Wild North Garden
A field of flowers in its first summer at The Old Vicarage in Norfolk, UK
Occasionally, a plant turns up in the garden that is a mystery. So it is with this gladiolus. It is flowering for a second season in the Court Garden. I know I didn’t plant it – at least, not knowingly. I would never have put gladioli in that garden, or so I tell myself. There is nothing around it that it could have snuck in as corms in the root ball. Neither Mark nor I can remember seeing it flower elsewhere in the garden but it must have been in the rockery because it has also turned up in the Wild North Garden after I gave Zach a random collection of surplus bulbs to try naturalising.
Out of place here but I can find a spot where it will fit in better
It is a mystery and may remain that way. I will have to move it. When it flowered last year, it was beside a dark blue salvia that has since gone into serious decline and the combination was striking. I looked at it and wondered if it was too striking or just unexpected in that context. This year, it is more jarring than striking because the colour palette of the Court Garden is otherwise soft and muted. I will move it after flowering. It will fit more harmoniously into the borders.
Dame Edna type hybrids – a legacy from my very late mother in law. I like the pure yellow because of the clarity of colour and the rather muddy apricot looks fine in a cottage-style planting
I assumed it was a legacy from Mark’s mother (who died in the mid 1980s so we are going back a long way, now). Somebody gave her a collection of different gladioli hybrids that she planted in the rockery, not so much because she liked them as because they were a gift of colour. I am not a fan of those big, vulgar gladdies – too Dame Edna Everage-ish for my taste – and the foliage succumbs to rust in our climate so they don’t stay looking good and their scale is wrong for our rockery. Over the years, I discarded most of them although I did find another spot for a pure yellow one that does not displease me. A few others have gone into the mix and match of the Iolanthe Garden.
G. dalenii or not?
“I think it might be a species,” said Mark. That makes more sense because if it is a species, there is every chance he bought it at some point. If he had ever kept an accessions book, we would be able to check but he never has so we can’t. I reached for Terry Hatch’s book “Bulbs for New Zealand Gardeners” which is somewhat out of date now but still a useful record of many of the more obscure bulbs that were available in this country at the time when Mark was buying and acquiring plants to extend the collection. From Terry’s book, I found a few names to look at further on the internet and I am wondering if it is Gladiolus dalenii syn natalensis, or,if not a species, then maybe a first generation hybrid. Maybe some reader has more expertise in this area than I have?
Gladiolus papilio or the butterfly gladiolus
What I did learn from the internet is that there are at least 255 different gladiolus species and those species can be highly variable. I was curious as to the main breeder species that have been used to get those Dame Edna hybrids and the two main ones, it turns out, are the rather odd little G. papilio (otherwise known as the butterfly gladiolus) which we have in abundance and the aforementioned G. dalenii syn natalensis. So that was interesting.
Gladiolus x papilio ‘Ruby’, thank you.
What I was delighted to be given as the red form of G. papilio named ‘Ruby’ or ‘Ruby Red’ turns out to be a hybrid, too. Technically, it should be named as G. X papilio ‘Ruby’. The X is shorthand for a hybrid although my somewhat superficial search didn’t find what it is crossed with. It is very good.
Gladiolous tristis
It is only the OTT hybrids I am so dismissive about. We grow a few of the species and I would happily add more. I wouldn’t be without the night-scented G. tristis that is a graceful and charming addition to the in spring and we seem to have a number of different forms of the variable Painted Lady gladiolus, otherwise known as G. carneus. If you want to see more of the charming species, the Pacific Bulb Society has a gallery of dainty delights. Many of them won’t be in Aotearoa New Zealand and few that are will be commercially available. Gladiolus species are somewhat of a niche interest.
We generally prefer to lift, limb and encourage the natural form of a plant like this mature Camellia ‘Tiny Princess’ but it isn’t always possible.
We carry out a lot of pruning in our garden but not a whole lot of drastic, hard pruning to reduce a plant to juvenility. Generally, we like to celebrate maturity in plants and to shape or clip to bring out their natural form if required. But sometimes there are plants that are beyond that and drastic action is needed because they have lost what ornamental merit they had.
I was delighted to find some perfect blooms on a specimen of Camellia ‘Mimosa Jury’ on a former nursery stock plant this season but it is many years since the original plant in the garden has looked like this.
So it is with some of the original camellias bred by Felix Jury, some of which are now household names. We regard the original plants as having some intrinsic value simply because they are the very first one but there comes a time when they can lack any aesthetic merit, especially these days when camellia petal blight has robbed them even of pretty flowers. In particular, ‘Mimosa Jury’, ‘Waterlily’ and ‘Softly’ had reached for the sky and left nothing but bare legs and messy, blighted blooms and aborted buds visible at ground level.
What remains of Camellia ‘Softly’ after a brutal prune but we expect it to recover. It must have been at least six metres tall last week.
That is Zach, to the left of the blue circle, taking down ‘Mimosa Jury’ which was taller than the one still standing behind. In front is the mountain of material taken off already.
A word of warning: we have a fairly long season when we can do this sort of extreme pruning – late winter through spring is best, so August to October. We can get away with going into November this year because spring has been a little late and we get regular rain. It really is too late and risky for people in climates who are staring down the barrel of a long, dry, hot summer which may start very soon. Your plant may just sigh and die rather than springing into fresh growth.
This specimen of Camellia ‘Tiny Star’ had become leggy and way too tall to appreciate the dainty blooms. It was cut back very hard indeed two years ago so has just put on its third season of fresh growth and should be as pretty as a picture in flower next spring.
You can cut back to ground level with camellias and they will grow again but you get a thicket of young shoots and no form to the plant. We prefer to cut off to anywhere between a metre up to three metres, depending on the situation, so that the plant will look established again quickly. If we can, we will leave a few wispy branches that still have leaves on them, even if we trim them off later when the new growths have appeared. In this case, ‘Softly’ is back to bare wood while ‘Mimosa’ has a few thin branches with leaves. We shape the remaining trunks and branches, often reducing them to a strong central leader and maybe five or seven branches from that leader.
When I say reestablish ‘quickly’, I mean two years. The plants will push out new shoots this season and bush out again next growing season but they won’t flower and look lush until they have that second growing season behind them so into the third flush of new growth. Patience is a virtue in gardening.
As is our usual practice, we deal with the waste by retrieving what is suitable for firewood and putting the leafy and twiggy remains through the chipper to use as mulch.
The bare branches of an established plant of ‘Velvet and Cream’ – an extreme example of getting a decent shaped plant out of it after we failed to train it adequately from the start.
You can do this style of extreme pruning on michelias, too and we have reduced a M. laevifolia ‘Velvet and Cream’ to a leafless frame this week as well but you do need to start with a strong growing, healthy specimen. If it is not growing vigorously, it is may die. If you are wondering about hard pruning a michelia (botanically magnolias these days), there are more before and after photos over time here from an earlier effort on another specimen.
Work has stopped until the babies fledge and fly. Then, sadly, it is farewell to Picea albertiana ‘Conica’.
Some plants are beyond rescue. Work has stopped, temporarily, on the Picea albertiana ‘Conica’ in the rockery. It was once a fine specimen of admirable size and form. It was also kept in good health because Mark sprayed it for red spider once a year. As it grew larger, it became harder to spray and Mark – He Who Used To Do All The Spraying here – became increasingly reluctant to routinely spray to keep plants healthy. We decided that good environmental practice was more important than keeping inappropriate plants alive in the garden. In the years since he stopped spraying, the red spiders have pretty much taken over and the tree has gone into serious decline, as well as developing a pronounced lean. Time for it to go.
Cutting down has stopped because what remains houses a bird’s nest with babies. It may just be a common old blackbird but we are not willing to knowingly kill a family simply because we want to finish a task. Completion can wait a little longer until the branches are no longer occupied.
Talking of birds, Mama Thrush is bringing Zach and me delight although Ralph the dog is not so appreciative. She built her nest in the grapevine that grows beneath the verandah on the front of our shed which happens to be our main seating area when Lloyd and Zach are here at work. Her early anxieties appear to have faded and she has become accustomed to humans below. We can co-exist.
Mama Thrush’s nest outlined in blue – sheltered from the weather but taking a few chances on the humans nearby.
I have been a little quiet here for the past few weeks. In part this is because life can get in the way and indeed, some fairly large chunks of my time have been consumed by matters unrelated to gardening. And sometimes I think I have nothing worth saying that I have not said before. But I am back again.
I dropped in yesterday to Te Henui cemetery yesterday, not to pay respects to the dead but to revel in the flowers. It was a while since I had last visited. On a day with bright sunlight and a strong, blustery wind, it was distinctly less than ideal conditions for photographs but the graveyard never disappoints.
The catalyst to visit came in part from being sent a newsletter written by Michael McCoy who had visited it in the pouring rain a week earlier. McCoy is not a name that is well known in this country and when he came here the following day, I wished I had googled him before he arrived because he certainly has a much higher profile elsewhere – particularly in Australia – and an impressive résumé to match. Garden designer, writer of books, TV writer and host and leader of masterclass tours, he has covered his ground internationally and in an extended conversation with him, we found so much common ground that I was both inspired and affirmed.
Alas, his newsletter to subscribers (like my Canberra daughter who forwarded it to me) does not appear to be posted to his main website (https://thegardenist.com.au/) and I can’t find it on line to add the link so I can not share it in full. Suffice to say, his joy in the experience of visiting the cemetery made me proud to be a local and to have a loose connection to some of the volunteers who turn this place of death and often long-forgotten memories into a place that celebrates life with colour and light. His concluding sentences are:
“But what I’m forever chasing, and experience with joyous regularity, are those magical moments when conscious enjoyment turns to inexplicable enchantment.
I never imagined it could happen in a cemetery. In the pouring rain.”
Just those lines have started me thinking about those magical moments I have experienced in other people’s gardens in this country, in other parts of the world and, indeed, in our own garden. There is a good thought to carry me through the day. But in the meantime, I will leave you with some (mostly) joyous moments from amongst the tombstones. I still think of this graveyard as the grown-ups version of miniature gardens and sand saucers that so many of us made in our childhoods and that adds to its charm.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 