Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

Plant Collector – Rosa Roseraie de l’Hay

Rosa Roseraie de 'Hay

Rosa Roseraie de 'Hay

I think this is what is called an oldie but a goodie. It has been around since 1901 when it was bred in France and is still widely offered for sale. What is more, it has an Award of Merit from the prestigious UK Royal Horticulture Society. It is relatively large growing and tolerant of mistreatment, which is just as well because I planted it in the wrong place to start with and had to move it. In the two years it took me to find it a suitable forever home (as the Living Channel terms a permanent location), it just sat in our heap of old potting mix and it didn’t turn a hair.

The rugosas are a rose group from the coastal areas of China, Japan and Korea. They are renowned for being tough, hardy, tolerant of wide range of conditions (including salt laden winds) and high health. They don’t generally suffer from pests and diseases and stay looking good, even if you never spray. We even get the bonus of late autumn colour when the heavily ribbed and crinkled leaves turn golden yellow. The flowers are deliciously fragrant.

On the down side, they must be one of the prickliest of all the rose groups and they are not a good cut flower. It is hard to find the perfect plant. Rugosas are sometimes used for hedging and they will certainly provide a fierce burglar deterrent but you have to accept their winter dormancy when there are no leaves. Roseraie de l’Hay is sometimes optimistically described as purple or even red. Colour is subjective but I would call it indubitably deep cerise or crimson. If that is not a colour that appeals, the white equivalent which shares the same attributes, is the equally lovely and reliable Blanc Double de Coubert whose flowers are a bit like scented, crumpled tissue paper.

Roseraie can be translated as rose garden. The rose is named for the famed rose garden de l’Hay near Paris.

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

Gardening is not exempt from fashion trends

We are hoping the next garden fashion may be the revival of romantic naturalism

We are hoping the next garden fashion may be the revival of romantic naturalism

I was reading an interesting review on line when I came across the following comment: “… New Zealand gardens are getting more conservative with time”. I have not gone back to the original source yet, so will not attribute the comment except to say it is apparently local to Hamilton. It certainly gave us food for discussion here.

Are our gardens getting more conservative and less adventurous? On balance, the unanimous opinion of two was: probably not. We are currently in the meshes of a deeply conservative garden fashion where mini Sissinghursts are all the rage (clipped buxus hedges and balls, white standard roses or bay trees, the odd limbed up hornbeam that claims to be pleached) but it is only a fashion. It too will pass.

What has changed, we suspect, is disposable income, the trickle down of wealth and status to the hoi polloi and the linking of garden to fickle fashion. In other words, the democratisation of gardening. In centuries past, garden fashion was dictated by the rich and powerful across the globe. From the Islamic water gardens, through the classic revival of Italy, the British landscape tradition of Capability Brown, the Arts and Crafts revival in Edwardian times – none of it had anything to do with the common people.

Now we have a whole breed of property owners, some of whom are gardeners, who want an outdoor environment which complements their lifestyle, marks their social position and brings some level of reward in pleasure or productivity. And just like everything else, the cycles have sped up. Clothing fashions change. Colours change in interior design. Why would we expect gardening to be timeless?

The gardening genre of suburban Sissinghurst

The gardening genre of suburban Sissinghurst

Some of us can remember the conifer garden of the seventies – the first instance of a mass fashion in gardening that I can recall. It wasn’t just conifers. It was the meeting of small conifers and the easy-care pebble garden that gave us a certain genre which is widely regarded with horror these days.

We were already in the plant nursery business when flowering trees and shrubs took a dive in the eighties. It was the time of the cottage garden, filled with a froth of annuals, perennials and roses. Anecdotally, we attributed it to the sharemarket crash of the time. Back in those days, you could buy three or four perennials for the price of one good tree or shrub. The price of woody plants has never recovered and these days you can pay about the same for a good perennial as you do for a woody plant which has taken at least five times longer to produce.

But cottage gardens are not low maintenance and in due course they morphed into the short-lived fashion of minimalism – large rocks, ground cover scleranthus and three vertical plants, one of which should be a sanseveria or yucca. That was a fashion driven by a new breed of landscaper who knew about design and space but not plants.

Somewhere along this timeline, natives became the vogue and we saw a fair number of Idealistic Young Things who would only buy a plant if it was a native.

Then we had the tropical garden – lots of palms, clivias, vibrant vireya rhododendrons and that burgundy aeonium with the unpronounceable name (Aeonium “Zwartkop” and I don’t think I ever spelled it correctly in years gone by). The trouble is that most of us do not live in tropical climes and those tropical gardens didn’t take winters too well.

The Auckland bromeliad garden has survived a little longer and is still de rigueur in some circles – for all the world the conifer garden of the new millennium. The overseas trend of prairie or meadow gardens has largely bypassed us in this country. It is damn difficult to do a prairie garden unless you live in prairie conditions with dry, hot summers and dry, cold winters.

Enter the edible garden and the Bright Young Things who would only buy native plants in the past decided they would only buy a plant now if it was edible. Raised beds, nasty mulches of used woollen carpet, no dig gardening, watered down organics – aiming for self sufficiency in food has never been easier, or so it is widely claimed. I know I am not alone when I say many of us have tired of vegetables dominating the gardening media. There are not many aesthetics when it comes to vegetables which are utility things at best.

Gardeners who weren’t into growing vegetables followed a parallel path with their recreations of suburban Sissinghurst, sometimes adorned by a pretty potager if they wanted to adopt both fashions. Even the gals at the New Zealand Gardener appear to think that vegetables have passed their peak and they are onto new branding with Grandma’s flowers – from dahlias to rhododendrons if recent pieces I have read are any guide.

The hope here is for the next fashion trend to be sustainable gardening and to see a revival of romantic naturalism replacing suburban Sissinghurst. Gardens don’t freeze in time any more than their owners do but by definition, few people are trend setters and most people are followers of fashion.

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

A New Zealand Guide to Growing Year Round by Dennis Greville

Same author-photographer, similar content but different publisher to last week’s book “Salads Year-Round”. This one is more encyclopaedic in range but certainly not in detail (there is not even an index at the back of the book which seems a major oversight), the writing is a little more personal and the photos are a little smaller and more illustrative rather than sumptuous. But it is another of the style of edible garden book we have come to expect in this country – encapsulated in the bold claim on the front cover: “self sufficient in no time”. Yes folks, you too can be self sufficient in fruit and veg with next to no experience and very little effort – it is all so easy peasy. Just buy these books that NZ publishers keep churning out for you. A low grade, lightweight cover, allied to the lack of index, means that this one was clearly never destined for longevity on the gardening bookshelf.

A New Zealand Guide to Growing Year Round by Dennis Greville (Hyndman Publishing; ISBN: 1877382 68X) reviewed by Abbie Jury.

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

100 Gardens by Jamie Durie.

Jamie Durie is the pin-up boy of Australian landscaping who has also made inroads into the USA. But this is not a book about gardening. It is a book about designed outdoor living spaces which have a few plants included. Sumptuous set design, frequently for the rich, beautiful and probably famous, not a how-to manual. It is an ideas and inspiration book largely comprised of full page or double page photographs of 100 different outdoor spaces he has designed around the world. The man is a human dynamo and versatile – which is to say the spaces look different, avoiding a “signature style” which can make them all look very same-y. There is minimal text but the sumptuous photography tells the story. I admit I spotted a few gabions, there are coloured feature walls and I must warn readers that he is clearly the undisputed King of the Scatter Cushion. Let that not discourage you from a good ideas book if you are seeking inspiration, particularly where space is tight and you want outdoor living areas which show panache. Just be aware that it is dry climate living done with a hefty budget.

100 Gardens by Jamie Durie (Allen and Unwin; ISBN 978 1 74237 890 9) reviewed by Abbie Jury.
First published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.

What is in a name? Quite a bit, sometimes.

I will take Rhododendron nuttallii any time

I will take Rhododendron nuttallii any time

I was looking at a newly released NZ gardening book and happened upon praise for a fruit described as a Chilean guava. For decades, the term Chilean guava, sometimes strawberry guava, has been widely known in this country to refer to a South American fruit called Psidium littorale. It is a biggish, evergreen shrub which produces fruit about the size of a large marble or a gobstopper in red or yellow with rather large pips. It is at least the same genus as the tropical guava – the pink fruit that most of us know in tins from South Africa.

Enter Myrtus ugni (or Ugni molinae to be more correct), usually called the New Zealand cranberry (to which it is entirely unrelated). In Australia, it is known as the Tazzieberry but internationally it is often referred to as the Chilean guava. In recent times there has been a growing tendency in the nursery and retail trade (and now in publishing) to adopt the international common name and to refer to the New Zealand cranberry (aka Myrtus ugni) as the Chilean guava. No matter that there is a pre-exisiting fruiting bush widely known as that. In the aforementioned book, the only reason I knew the author was writing about Myrtus ugni and not Psidium littorale was by the picture. That is because the header was: “Chilean guava” with no botanical name given at all. Sometimes writers and publishers can dumb stuff down so far that they almost guarantee failure.

Two entirely different plants, both commonly called the Chilean guava

Two entirely different plants, both commonly called the Chilean guava

Common names can be helpful in gardening where proper names are often in Latin and hard to remember, but they are only helpful when there is shared understanding about the plant being so labelled. There is no excuse for not putting the proper name in smaller type beneath the common name in books, or indeed for failing to give alternative common names that are in wide usage.

What novice gardeners need is not the complete dumbing down of information to a jazzy but relatively useless level. They need skilled interpretation so that the wealth of information is sorted for them and they are gently encouraged to lift both their knowledge and skills level. Part of that is learning about plant names and plant families.
Why does it matter whether you understand these things? Think of cooking. You can make a perfectly acceptable cheese sauce using any old cheddar but to lift your cooking to a higher level, it is usually necessary to understand the different types of cheeses and just when Parmesan is going to give a better result than Mozzarella or even Pecorino.

You can enjoy your garden and fill it with seeds and cuttings without knowing the names of any of them, let alone where they come from or to which plant family they belong. You may even be perfectly happy growing one Chilean guava while thinking it is the other Chilean guava you have. But it becomes a great deal more interesting when you know more. And the more you know, the more likely your outcomes will be successful and the better your garden will be.

It was an eighteenth century Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, who reorganized the structure of living things, including plants, into the order or sequence (called taxonomy) that we still adhere to today. You can get by quite satisfactorily just understanding the end points of species and genus.

The species is specific to one plant, though there can be some variation within a species – think of brothers and sisters. So if you take the gorgeous Rhododendron nuttallii (and it is so gorgeous, I will take it any time), the nuttallii is the species. There are differences between various forms of nuttalliis but botanically they all very close. The rhododendron part of the name is the genera and there are many different species within that genera – in fact all the different rhododendron, vireya and azalea species. They are like the cousins, second cousins and third cousins plus assorted relatives.

Plant names are in two parts: first the genus and then the species. Hence Rhododendron nuttallii. Even the humble common garden bean has a two part name – Phaesolus vulgaris for most green beans and Phaesolus coccineus for runner beans. Runner beans are a different species to green beans but take it a step up and they are the same genus. The naming of plants in this form is one of Linnaeus’ most enduring legacies. Prior to that, the naming of plants was entirely random and told you nothing at all about the botany of the plant (which is a bit of a problem when it involves medicinal herbs). It was also a source of considerable confusion and duplication.

Linnaeus’s system of classifying plant species through names (called binomial – two names) has stood the test of time over nearly 300 years. But apparently in this country, it is too difficult for us to grasp. If the trends of the past decade are anything to go by, we must return to the pre-Linnaeus era because we are only capable of managing common names, no matter that it can cause confusion. It is apparently asking too much that the botanical name be run alongside the common name.

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