Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

Agapanthus -the blue (and white) stars of our summer roadsides

Our summer roadsides would be the poorer without agapanthus

Our summer roadsides would be the poorer without agapanthus

We have a bit of a love-hate relationship with agapanthus here in Taranaki and in warmer areas of this country. But as you drive around the countryside at this time of the year, most would agree that our roadsides would be the poorer if they were gone. They resemble giant blue harebells growing, well, growing pretty well everywhere if we are honest.

Agapanthus all come from South Africa and from relatively limited areas of that country. Don’t be misled by the common international name, the Lily of the Nile. They are neither a member of the lily family, nor do they grow anywhere near the Nile. Nor does Agapanthus orientalis come from the Orient. That descriptor merely means eastern, so the natural habitat of A. orientalis (probably more correctly known as A. praecox ssp orientalis) should be on the eastern side of South Africa, assuming the original plant collections and recording was done accurately.

The name comes from Greek. Agape is love and anthos is flower but whether this means the flower of love or lovely flower is unclear.

So are they a weed? These matters are rarely as black and white as they appear. On the debit side:
• Most agapanthus set seed freely and the seed germinates readily.
• Agapanthus grow well in a wide range of situations including inhospitable clay banks and shaded areas. They form a dense cover which prevents other plants from germinating – particularly desirable native regeneration. They have the potential to colonise bush reserves, national parks and native bush.
• The common agapanthus are resistant to the world’s handiest weedkiller, glyphosate (formerly known by its original brand name: Round Up). While you can take them out with stronger brush killer sprays, most of these require you to hold a spray licence.
• Digging out well established clumps takes quite some physical strength and determination because the plants cling on for grim death and the clumps can be formidable. Because they have roots which are rhizomes, if you don’t get the whole plant out, what is left behind in the soil will re-grow.
• There is no way this plant would ever be permitted into the country now. Mind you, the same thing could be said about kiwifruit.

There is a credit side and a degree of resigned acceptance by the authorities in this country which sees agapanthus treated as a surveillance pest plant rather than the hard line decision to ban it outright.
• While it seeds freely, the seeds are not dispersed by birds at all so in most cases, the seedlings pop up close to the parent plants. The big problem comes with plants beside waterways because the water can do a very efficient job of spreading them much further.
• They are a significant plant for cut flower producers and there are dwarf and sterile forms available for home gardeners which pose no threat at all. There is a large international market and agapanthus occupy an established niche in our nursery industry. Many of the named hybrids have parentage which includes one or more of the species other than praecox and this reduces the weed problems.
• They make a significant contribution to our summer landscape as a flowering plant and will tolerate harsh, roadside conditions so are favoured for amenity plantings.
• They are evergreen, tidy and suitable for using to stabilise slip-prone areas.

Basically Biosecurity and most northern regional councils would love to ban it outright but pragmatism triumphs so the aggie lives on to flower another day. Auckland has banned the larger growing forms of A.praecox (the common form), still allowing the production and sale of dwarf forms as a compromise position. The sensible position for the home gardener who lives adjacent to native forest or to waterways, would be to remove them entirely. As a back-up position, being industrious and thorough about dead heading would reduce the problem. For the rest of us, it probably doesn’t matter and they make a huge contribution to our summer gardens and landscape.

Agapanthus Tinkerbell - no weed potential here

Agapanthus Tinkerbell - no weed potential here

By no means are all agapanthus thugs. Little Tinkerbell is common in gardens though probably more noted for its very clean white and sage green variegated foliage than its flowers. It is distinctly shy on flowering, as a rule. It also has a significantly large root system for a plant without a great deal on top but it is a useful addition in the garden border. Other named hybrids are often more amenable than thuggish and have their place in the garden setting.

This is a plant family which is a great deal more highly prized overseas than here. In harsher climates, stronger growing plants are valued for their ability to survive the conditions and most of Europe and the US have much harder conditions than we have. Toughies that stay in leaf as well as put on a lovely summer flowering display are harder to come by, especially in blue. Because they don’t tolerate extremely cold conditions, additional measures are often required to get the common agapanthus through winter.

But in this country, you can’t even give away common agapanthus. Which is why we were genuinely shocked by a section in “A Green Granny’s Garden”, by Fionna Hill. I reviewed this before Christmas and I have to admit I did not read it cover to cover or that review might have been a little tougher had I come across the following paragraph referencing her attendance at a Hollard Gardens’ workshop here in Taranaki:
“Workshop participants have been invited to bring seed and other plant material to share. We pulled lots of agapanthus plants from Maggie’s New Plymouth garden that day and (we thought) cheekily we’d take the opportunity to leave a wheelbarrowful. We give the barrow to some helpful children to wheel back to the meeting shed, while we speed off down the road. I think it might not have been welcome, at that time, believing them to be a pest.” (sic). The page of self justification that follows does not mitigate the action for anybody except the author, who concludes: “I shouldn’t feel so guilty about that wheelbarrowful that Maggie and I have left as a contribution – at UK rates, the barrowful was worth about 300 pounds.” I don’t think so, dear. What you did was to furtively leave your friend’s weeds for Hollards’ staff to dispose of. You should be feeling guilty and embarrassed.

In the Garden this week: January 28, 2011

• A point of clarification from last week: if you want to try water retention crystals (Saturaid, Crystal Rain or similar) on a dry lawn, you must rake them in, not just leave them scattered on top. Otherwise you will just hoover them all up with the lawnmower.

• If you read the article on the food pages of our local paper last Tuesday about pine nuts, you may be interested to know that they are easy enough to grow here. Pinus pinea, the Italian stone pine, is the most common variety though there are other species suitable for seed (pine nut) production. However, and it is a big however, as soon as it comes to harvesting the seeds and peeling off the outer coating of each seed, you will realise why they are relatively expensive in the supermarket. You are more likely to decide that they are actually extremely cheap to buy instead.

• If you needed an extra reason to get motivated to plant a winter vegetable garden, the Australian floods may be it. Vegetables are tipped for hefty price rises this year – it is all a matter of supply and demand. So start digging. If you are working on grassed areas skim off the top layer of turf and stack it to one side to rot down. Or, if you are not determined to be organic, spray with glyphosate (formerly known as Round Up) which will also kill off most of the perennial weeds (but not clover). Current evidence is that glyphosate is safe to use when applied according to directions. It has been around for many years now so there has been time to discover lingering ill effects or contraindications.

Last weekend's rain means it is safe to return to planting out herbaceous material

Last weekend's rain means it is safe to return to planting out herbaceous material

• With the heavy rain last weekend and more forecast, we have resumed planting but only of herbaceous material, not woody trees and shrubs which will get stressed when we next dry out again. Herbaceous material is quicker to establish itself and to get its roots out and it responds much faster to watering if necessary. I have been digging, dividing and replanting an enormous clump of Ligularia reniformis (the tractor seat one) – but cautiously. It is within reach of a hose just in case.

• If your potatoes are showing signs of blight (dark brown wet patches on the leaves), you have to be in really early with a fungicide spray to stop it. If the foliage is already collapsing, it is too late. Dig the potatoes immediately and you may save some of the crop. Delay and the blight will also infect the potato tubers. You have to remove all the diseased foliage and tubers to try and stop the fungus from remaining. Either burn the affected plants, put them out in the rubbish or hot compost them. Don’t just throw them in a heap or cold compost them. It is this blight (Phytophthora infestans) that caused the Irish potato famines.

• On the grounds that a few phone calls asking the same question may indicate a landslide of curiosity out amongst the readership, I found the rolling compost maker shown in Outdoor Classroom last week at Mitre 10 Mega in New Plymouth. This is not to say that other outlets do not also have it in stock – I did not look further.

Plant Collector – auratum lilies

Auratum lily Flossie - one of Felix Jury's hybrids

Auratum lily Flossie - one of Felix Jury's hybrids

I don’t cut flowers to bring indoors very often. When every window of the house looks out to a garden, it doesn’t seem necessary. But as soon as the auratum lilies start to open, I reach for the kitchen scissors and head out. They are just the perfect cut flower – one stem can have up to ten flowers (sometimes even more) and put in a tall, slender vase they not only look superb, they can spread their delicious scent through an entire room.

Auratums are known as the golden-rayed lily of Japan – how lovely does that sound? The flowers are the largest of the lily family, often more than 20cm across, and they are a mainstay of our January garden. Felix Jury adored them (probably for all the same reasons that we do) and dabbled with breeding them, naming several selections. This one is the very large flowered Flossie. The upshot is that we have a lot of auratums in the garden and generally they are quite happy with benign neglect, growing in both full sun and semi shade. They prefer soils with good drainage and plenty of humus but not too rich.

The bulbs are large – fist-sized even – and we tried to get around all the plants last winter to dig and divide them. They haven’t had any attention for many, many years but when the clumps get too congested, the tops tend to fall over if they are not staked. The freshly divided patches are mostly standing up like little soldiers without any assistance. Some of the taller ones can get over 2m high and they need some support though often I will intertwine them through neighbouring plants.

You can sometimes find lily bulbs for sale in garden centres in winter. Make sure you avoid any dry, shrivelled specimens – they do not like to be dried out completely even when dormant. You may be lucky and find some auratums but they are not widely offered on the NZ market despite their spectacular summer display.

In the Garden: January 21, 2011

Dry bulbs can still be planted

Dry bulbs can still be planted

• Saturaid or Crystal Rain can look like a good idea at this time of the year. These products generally resemble rock salt crystals when dry but absorb large quantities of water, expanding and changing to chopped jelly in appearance. Use them for hanging baskets, potted annuals or short term potted vegetables. Don’t make the mistake of using them in the garden. While they look appealing at this dry time of the year, with our high rainfall, for ten months of the year they will hold water and ensure that our free draining soils become water logged. Once you have them in the soil, they will stay for years. Longer term container plants don’t want to be kept waterlogged in winter either. So restrict their use.

• However, I am told that these water retention crystals can be very good on lawns which dry out badly over summer and turn brown. I have yet to try this myself but I will in a couple of small problem areas. Carol at my local garden centre says that scattered lightly on the lawn, they have proven very effective and there is good logic to that but be sparing in the quantity used.

• Summer prune cherry trees.

• We have pretty much stopped planting any ornamentals here now until we get significant amounts of rain. If you insist on continuing to plant, you must water well before, during and after the planting process and continuing to water over the next weeks. With water restrictions being imposed in much of our area, it is better to delay all but vegetable planting.

• You can plant dry bulbs and leave them for nature to take its course though garden centres will not generally get any of the new season’s bulbs in stock until the start of February.

• If you grow your own vegetables from seed, you should be getting onto sowing winter vegetables – brassicas, parsnip, carrots, winter spinach and lettuce, leeks and celery. If you are going to buy plants, you have plenty of time. However, starting from seed will save money and give you extra to share.

• This does not apply to Brussel sprouts which must be planted immediately, using young plants, if you are to get a crop through. They have a longer growing season and need to be big, strong plants by winter. This is assuming you eat these gourmet baby cabbages, as we do.

• The food pages of our local paper had a piece tea this week. You may be interested to know that you can grow the tea camellia easily here, as long as you do not get very heavy frosts. What is more, it is sometimes available to buy. Look for Camellia sinensis. Mark brewed the best tea from ours when he bruised the leaves and left them to ferment slightly for 24 hours – apparently closer to Oolong tea. Our home grown product has not replaced our favoured Earl Grey but it is not a bad substitute for those in search of self sufficiency or those who love the freshest of green tea.

The New Zealand Garden – is there such a thing?

The D.I.Y. Lutyens-style sunken garden

The D.I.Y. Lutyens-style sunken garden

We have been talking about the New Zealand garden. This conversation has been given new impetus by the lack of any analysis of the nature of the New Zealand garden in the lavish new book on the topic by Kristin Lammerting, which is essentially a parade of gardens that she liked, including her own, (or maybe gardens that had been recommended to her) written up in glowing terms with fabulous photographs but zilch insight into the context. We will probably continue discussing this until we die, it being a topic of never-ending interest because it is a reflection of who we are in this long, thin country of the southerly latitudes. In the main, we are a nation of gardeners. Most residential properties and indeed commercial businesses make some attempt, however meagre, to beautify their frontages. Some do better than others but there is a shared value in beautifying our immediate environment.

So I offer up the following thoughts on defining our place in the world of international gardening, with the rider that this is by no means a definitive list.

· Size. We do big gardens here. Even our small, urban gardens are actually quite large by international standards. Our traditional quarter acre section is huge as an allocation of space for an individual family. Our major private gardens are usually several acres. Space is not a luxury confined to the wealthy in this country. It is perfectly realistic for the average home gardener to own a substantial patch of dirt.

· Despite our inclination towards large gardens, we usually do all our own gardening. Hired help is not common. Skilled and qualified hired help is positively rare. Overseas visitors are frequently astounded at how much New Zealanders routinely achieve in large gardens without assistance.

· It must be something in our egalitarian heritage which has many New Zealanders taking the ideas of the large, historic gardens – especially in Britain though sometimes from wider Europe – and attempting to re-create something similar here. We seem to be oblivious to the fact that the vast majority of the great gardens of Europe and Britain were established and maintained by the wealthy and the powerful who could afford to pay gardeners to actually do the work. So we go for high maintenance gardening styles (clipped hedges, a touch of topiary, sweeping lawns, mixed borders, buxus enclosures around statuary) – all the trappings of the gentry and the nobility which our forbears were so keen to leave behind.

· Grand designs, maybe, but on a very low budget so the D.I.Y. ethos rules supreme. In many circles, getting somebody else to design your garden for you or others to maintain it is somewhat frowned upon – a sign that you are not a true gardener. If you have wealth, you shouldn’t be flaunting it. Because very few of our gardens have a lot of money behind them, we tend to be very light on permanent structures and surfaces. It is a bit like our attitude to housing. We would not expect our wooden bungalows to be around in 300 years and the same goes for our gardens. So we don’t use a lot of stone or brickwork, leaning more to the rather short term pongas, timber (sometimes tanalised) and the utility concrete block or paver. We tend to favour grass over cobbled surfaces, keeping sealed areas for driveways and a path immediately around the house.

· What we lack in hard landscaping, we make up for in plants. Plants are cheap in this country, ridiculously cheap by international standards. Our equable climate means they grow quickly and gardening is pretty easy. We love a wide range of them, especially something new or different. We love them even more if we can multiply them ourselves and get some for nothing. So we use plants for structure, as well as soft furnishings – plants are often used instead of walls, fences and edgings. This passion for plants is quite possibly part of the British settler heritage. Most of the world’s great plant hunters (including Joseph Banks) hailed from there and even today, a curiosity for plants and a desire to stretch the boundaries of what one can grow is a characteristic of gardeners in that country. It is just easier here – we have better soils, a more obliging climate and cheaper plants.

· We did not, however, inherit a love for big trees. No danger of us taking up the champion trees scheme (where the largest specimens are identified, measured, monitored and even revered). We are more likely to chainsaw them down. Maybe it is a gut response to the somewhat intimidating nature of our native forests. I think it more likely that our houses are often cold in winter and our climate is not quite as hot as we would like so we just don’t want shade. Landscape views are common but highly prized, certainly above trees. We garden more with shrubs than trees.

· The frequent lack of a strong design element defined by permanent structure, a heavy dependence on plants for form and a dislike of big trees, all allied to a mobile population who move house frequently, means that our gardens tend to be quite ephemeral. They grow quickly. It only takes 10 years to create a very pretty tree and shrub garden here. Many gardeners regard trees of 15 to 20 years of age as mature. Never go back is the mantra of gardeners who have moved house. Odds on, the new owners will have ripped out your garden and replaced it. We don’t expect our gardens to survive past us, and very few do.

· Native plants. All our native plants in this country are evergreen and some are strongly sculptural (the cabbage tree, pohutukawa, nikau, tree ferns, even the pachystegia and tussocks). We have a huge array of indigenous flora which we generally take for granted but the integration of many of these plants into the ornamental garden is another defining feature.

· In our easy climate, most of the country gardens all year round. We don’t put our gardens to bed for winter while we retire indoors. We have flowers and foliage all the time so we don’t need to depend on hard landscaping to give winter form.

· Our reverence for immaculate lawns and the priority placed on kerb appeal are values taken more from American suburbia than Europe.

We are still magpies here – we borrow ideas from here and from there and try them out. Our settler history is still very recent. When we moved in to Mark’s parents’ house, we found the books which they used to give them ideas when planning the garden that we now own and the end result was a typically large country garden strongly modelled on the English landscape traditions, right down to the D.I.Y. Lutyens-style sunken garden pond. In the sixty years since, the form remains English but the range of plants and the way we use them are very different. It is likely that the sheer lushness of plant growth in this country will continue to define our gardening style far more than any slavish copying or reinterpretation of overseas genres.