Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

Plant Collector: Corylopsis pauciflora

Corylopsis pauciflora - short flowering season in our climate, but charming

Corylopsis pauciflora – short flowering season in our climate, but charming

This dainty delight is in full bloom now and a good reminder of why I like having a large garden. It is so pretty in flower for a maximum of two weeks in late winter or early spring. For the remaining fifty weeks of the year, it is an anonymous looking shrub. If you only have a small garden, you need plants that work a bit harder than that to justify their space. But for those two weeks when its light, arching branches are clothed in pale lemon witch hazel flowers (it is a member of the witch hazel family, Hamamelidaceae), it has an understated grace and charm. It is also pleasantly scented. When the flowering finishes, saw toothed leaves in dull greeny bronze will take over.

C. pauciflora is one of the more compact species, making maybe 1.5m high by 2m wide. These are hardy, deciduous shrubs from cooler parts of Asia and Japan and are best suited to open woodland areas (in other words, humus rich and semi shaded). We also have C. willmottiae ‘Spring Purple’ which has similar delicate primrose blossom but with purple new growth. It has yet to come into bloom here but it grows to twice the size so it needs a fair bit of space for its 14 days of glory. The flowering period appears to be extended in colder climates.

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

Lynda Hallinan’s year in her country garden

In my flu ridden state last week, I was so grateful to Lynda Hallinan. Her new book, Back to the Land – a Year of Country Gardening – made me laugh out loud on several occasions. She fair sparkles in this book.

Many readers will know Lynda Hallinan as former editor of the NZ Gardener magazine, now editor at large. In that role, she entirely repositioned the magazine to appeal to a younger demographic. She read the mood well and was at the vanguard of the renewed interest in growing food at home to the extent that I uncharitably took to referring to said mag as The Girls’ Vegetable Monthly. But readership figures showed that was where the interest lay and the very personal, anecdotal take on growing food was highly successful. Having met the author on a couple of occasions having had a few dealings with her, we have always known here that she is genuinely interested in a whole range of plants well beyond carrots. That is not always true of garden writers or editors, by any manner of means.

Her book is in diary form, covering from June 1, 2011 to mid May this year – a year in which she adjusted to life back in the country with baby and husband after years of inner city living as a single career woman. To coin a phrase of respect from my late father in law: “she’s a worker, I’ll give you that”. With a new baby, regular writing commissions plus some TV and radio work as well as personal appearances, she is out there gardening on a grand scale. There is a strong emphasis on edible crops but she is also developing a significant ornamental garden. She has a regular stall at Clevedon Farmers’ Market. And she cooks, preserves, pickles and makes various fresh beverages (many alcoholic). All this is managed with family support but without the whole machine of paid staff backing up behind which the likes of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of River Cottage needs to keep his show on track.

As I was reading “Back to the Land”, I started making jokes to Mark about having found New Zealand’s potential answer to Martha Stewart. She is the doyenne of lifestyle, including gardening, in USA – aside from her unfortunate brush with insider trading which resulted in a short period behind bars. Her TV gardening programmes had Mark riveted for a brief time. He was in awe of her compost mountains. Martha, of course, is an expert on everything and does everything properly. “She had better hope,” I said, “that Our Lynda never takes up dog breeding or crafts”. That was before I came to the diary entry: “When I first became interested in gardening, the crafty cottage craze was in full swing. I embroidered pillows with pictures of herbs, made my own natural hand creams and grew swags of English lavender and statice to hang from the rafters to dry.” Right. I am now wondering if I should warn Lynda to stay away from the share market which was so nearly the undoing of her older American counterpart.

So what else did I like about this book? Of course the author can write. She has been a journalist and editor for years. But it was a pleasant surprise to find that, away from the limitations of magazine writing (word count, prescriptive structure and similar external requirements), she can write even better.

There is no commercial sponsorship or intrusive product placement. When the author recommends a product or a source, (which she does freely), the reader can reasonably assume that this is genuine and independent advice. A return to old fashioned credibility, one might say. All sources are acknowledged. In a book packed with practical information but in diary format, there are indexes at the back. Two indexes even – one for recipes and one for gardening. The recipes are wide-ranging and eclectic and it is the most seamless integration of recipes and gardening text that I have seen in any publication. The gardening practices are focussed on sustainability, not quick-fix modern consumerism. Don’t expect to find raised beds filled with endless heavy grade plastic bags of potting mix here.

I haven’t even touched on the lovely photography by Sally Tagg. Some are illustrative, many are mood photos. Plant photos are captioned with names. The photos capture the spirit of what is a lifestyle book. The publisher is Penguin which means that the production values are high quality – at last they have the content to match (which can’t be said of all their recent gardening publications). The book evokes a slightly soft focus nostalgia although the content is a thoroughly modern take on old practices.

It is primarily aimed at women. My advice is that, if it appeals, go and buy a copy for yourself now (especially if you need cheering up) and then you will know if you want to buy copies as Christmas presents for others. The growing conditions described in the book are Hunua and will be very similar to much of Waikato.

Move over Martha Stewart. The new generation has come of age in the world of gardening and lifestyle.

Back to the Land. A Year of Country Gardening by Lynda Hallinan. Photography by Sally Tagg. (Penguin; ISBN: 978 0 143 56708 0)


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

Garden lore

I’ve noticed something about gardening. You set out to do one thing and pretty soon you’re doing something else, which leads to some other thing, and so on. By the end of the day, you look at the shovel stuck in the half-dug rose bed and wonder what on earth you’ve been doing.

Anne Raven Deep in the Green (1995)

wood ash

wood ash

Wood Ash

Wood ash is a traditional fertiliser but comes with warnings. The ash from your household fires is fine to use as long as you never burn plastics, polystyrene or tanalised timber in your fire. If you have a very efficient modern wood burner which doesn’t leave much ash, what it does leave will be heavily concentrated. Wood ash is alkaline (so acid loving plants won’t like it and if you add too much to your compost heap, it can alter the pH balance). It has good levels of phosphorus and is high in potassium but has no nitrogen. If in doubt, weigh 200 grams in a plastic bag and sprinkle that over a square metre. That will give you a rule of thumb for a light application. Near enough is good enough – it won’t matter if you up the rate. It seems a pity to waste a natural fertiliser when you can use it spread over lawns and garden, especially the vegetable garden, and get a bonus from your firewood.

Published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Dealing with maturity (in garden terms)

First published in the spring issue of “Our Gardens”, the quarterly magazine of the Garden Clubs of Australia

Sculpted kurume azaleas

Sculpted kurume azaleas

In gardening terms, I guess most people would agree we are blessed. Our climate is mild, never very hot and never very cold. We have regular rain all year round, good sunshine hours and the soils are friable and volcanic. Added to that, we are fortunate to be on a family property where the oldest trees were planted by Mark’s great grandfather in 1880. These give a wonderful mature backbone to the garden and how obliging of him to have planted an entire avenue of our majestic native rimu trees.

Notwithstanding the big trees, the majority of our plantings date back to the 1950s and having a mature garden offers its own challenges. Finding space for new plants can be problematic, even though we have reasonable acreage (we open about seven acres to the public). But the biggest challenge of having a mature garden is to stop it all melding together and becoming walls of foliage which choke out the less vigorous plants. Increasingly we find ourselves doing more lifting and limbing, shaping and clipping.

We like to use plants as focal points and features. Our garden is light on ornamentation. You won’t find anything armless, legless or white lighting up a dark corner. We prefer to place garden seats where we will sit on them, rather than using them as focal points. When sculpture is used in gardens, we think it becomes the dominant feature, forcing the garden setting and the plants into the background. We want the plants to be the stars.

There is no shortage of candidates for clipping or shaping but we do not want the Italian formality where almost every plant is manipulated. This is not about topiary so much as it is about finding the natural shapes within the plants and featuring them.

Clipping Mine No Yuki

Clipping Mine No Yuki

Maples can develop a wonderful form over time which just needs cleaning up. Loropetalums also clip and shape well. We keep our small flowered Kurume azaleas limbed up so that it is possible to look through them. The trunks naturally grow white lichen and, in season, the undulating tops of the azaleas form a carpet of colour, while we have species cyclamen planted beneath around the white trunks.

Camellias are wonderful for clipping because their growth rates are not too fast and, if you make a mistake, they will sprout again from bare wood. We have a massive plant of the white sasanqua, “Mine No Yuki”, which looks wonderful with its pristine white blooms until we have a heavy downpour to turn them to brown sludge. These days we regard any flowers as a bonus and the plant justifies its garden space because of its shape. We keep it tightly clipped into layered mounds – generally referred to as cloud pruning in a technique associated with Oriental gardens.

The finished product

The finished product

Fairy Magnolia Blush

Fairy Magnolia Blush

Michelias also lend themselves to shaping and the lollipop Fairy Magnolia Blushes at our entranceway are a more recent addition. A light pruning twice a year with secateurs keeps them to a tidy shape and we have been able to stop them getting too large.

It is all much more fun than weeding and gives us the detail and focal points we want.

Mark and Abbie Jury garden at Tikorangi, The Jury Garden in Taranaki on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand. Like his father before him, Mark is a plant breeder, probably best known in Australia for his Fairy Magnolia Blush, Camellia Volunteer, Magnolias Black Tulip and Felix Jury and his joint venture plant with his father, Cordyline Red Fountain. Abbie is a garden writer for national and regional publications. Their garden opens for the magnolia display at the start of August and remains open until the end of March.
Website: http://www.jury.co.nz
Facebook: facebook.com/thejurygarden
Twitter: @Tikorangi

Biodynamics – the homeopathy of the gardening world

A mutinous threat from Zephyr and Spike

A mutinous threat from Zephyr and Spike

Being a SNAW (that is a Sensitive New Age Woman, but of course you knew that), I am all for religious tolerance. That is, as long as nobody comes knocking on my door thinking I may need to be converted of a Saturday morning. I could perhaps do with being renovated, but not converted.

Similarly, when the personal faiths of others start to intrude on me, especially by claiming to occupy the higher moral ground, I get a little twitchy and few are worse at this than homeopaths, lunar planters and biodynamics converts.

Adding to my twitchiness, Spike and Zephyr, our surviving pets, are seeking legal advice. They are threatening to take out an injunction to prevent us exhuming their former colleagues for preparation 505. That is the one where a skull of a domesticated animal is stuffed with oak chips and immersed in fresh water for three months. Spike and Zephs are appalled at the thought that we may be wanting to stuff skulls with oak chips. Not only do they want to protect their former colleagues, but they are not offering to make the ultimate sacrifice, proffering up their own skulls to test the efficacy of this soil conditioner. They have been known to harumph and suggest that in this country, we should surely be stuffing bird skulls with totara chips seeing as we lack both native mammals and oak trees. And don’t be thinking any old oak tree will do. It has to be Quercus robur which is of course native to Rudolf Steiner’s homeland of Austria.

Preparation 502 is giving me much anxiety. That is the one where you stuff the bladder of a red deer with achillea flowers and bury it for months on end. There is a definite shortage of fresh deer bladders (or even frozen ones) here and local supermarkets don’t seem to stock them. I notice there is a stag where I buy my free range eggs and I pondered asking the owner how she would feel about donating its internal organ to improve our soils. But I am not sure that it is a red deer (it appears to make a difference to compound 502) and as she was hand feeding the stag when I called in one day, I feared she may not react well to my request. I think we may do better with preparation 503 (that is chamomile blossoms stuffed into the small intestines of cattle and overwintered in the ground – must remember to mark where I bury it). And preparation 506 looks manageable – dandelions stuffed in the peritoneum (sounds nasty) of cattle and similarly overwintered.

Prep 501 has powdered quartz stored in the horn of a cow (minus the cow) and buried over summer (note: summer burial, not winter, for this one). In autumn you dig it up and mix it with water at a dilution rate of one tablespoon of quartz powder to 250 litres of water (starting to sound dangerously homeopathic…). But before you spray it, you have to stir the solution for an hour and the method and direction of stirring is prescribed. You can not stint on the stirring because some see the vortex created by methodical stirring as acting like a funnel to imbue the solution with cosmic energy, making it more efficacious. Quartz is largely insoluble in water and spraying a chemically inert substance in microscopic traces over a wide area is of no discernible value whatever but let not these facts get in the way of passionate belief.

The best known prep 500 (a cow horn stuffed with the excrement of a lactating cow and buried over winter in the ground) receives similar treatment to 501 and is diluted to the same extent. Preps 502 to 508 are added to the compost heap at a rate, give or take, of around a teaspoon per cubic metre. Faith goes a long way. Apparently.

Rudolf Steiner was a philosopher and it is most unlikely that he ever got his hands in the soil. Put succinctly, Steiner came from a strong background of esoteric theosophy and when he split from the European theosophical mainstream at the turn of last century, he evolved his own world view which he styled anthroposophy. And that might be described simplistically as an attempt to synthesize mysticism and science. Lost? Don’t worry. I don’t think it matters. I would guess that Steiner, a man who spent his life thinking and in philosophical discourse, likely saw his theories on agriculture and care for the soils as merely part of a much larger universal whole. He might be slightly stunned were he around today to see how this particular side shoot to his core philosophies has taken on a life of its own as biodynamics.

Biodynamics seems to have taken a greatly simplified interpretation of Steiner’s elaborate world view and repackaged it as pseudo science to give it a credibility which it lacks. You really are back in the realms of mysticism without the science once you are into focusing cosmic rays to harness the spiritual energy of the universe. Cows’ horns and deer antlers are apparently particularly good receptors acting as a cross between a satellite dish and a storage battery for cosmic energy and cosmic wisdom. Yet, if you set aside the biodynamic preparations, the other underpinning principles of modern biodynamics are sound organics. You can not fault practices such as:
* Stocking with several different animal species to vary grazing patterns and reduce pasture borne parasites.
* Widening the range of pasture species.
* Planting trees for multiple purposes.
* Crop rotation designs to enhance soil fertility and control weeds and plant pests which include the use of green manures.
* Recycling of organic wastes, where possible, by large scale composting.
* Changing from chemical pest control to prevention strategies based on good plant and animal nutrition and careful cultivar selection.

There is nothing flaky in any of that. There is nothing spiritual either. It is just good, sustainable practice applicable to all aspects of gardening and agriculture.

I respect the right of bioydynamic converts to believe in cosmic energies and a holistic interpretation of their position in the universe. But I do wish they wouldn’t try and package it as science and, like lunar planting and homeopathy, such practices have gained a level of mainstream acceptance which is not founded on any scientific credibility at all. It can make it hard to disentangle what is sound environmental practice from what is religion.