Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

Flowering this week: Vireya rhododendron saxifragoides

Eight years of growth, maybe more, in good nursery conditions and R.saxifragoides reaches this size

Eight years of growth, maybe more, in good nursery conditions and R.saxifragoides reaches this size

We have a standing joke here about plants which we won’t part with unless the recipient passes both an interview and a test – saxifragoides is one of those plants. After a good eight years, maybe more, this plant is 6cm high and about 14cm across. We don’t want to waste a plant that grows so slowly on somebody who has no idea what it is or too little appreciation of what it takes for the plant to reach this stature. It is an odd little vireya species from New Guinea which makes a mounded cushion (generally a small mounded cushion) and which is far more tolerant of both cold and wet conditions than any other vireya we know. In fact it is often found growing in cold bogs in its native habitat (other rhododendrons will quickly give up the ghost and die if their roots stay wet for long) as well as in alpine grasslands. It is not as forgiving in our garden where I have managed to kill off two or three plants now. It seems easier to keep healthy in a pot.

The flowers are red and held singly (most rhododendrons have clusters or trusses). Sharp-eyed readers may pick the similarity in flower to the rather larger vireya hybrids, Jiminy Cricket, Saxon Glow and Saxon Blush. Yes, saxifragoides is a parent of these and gives the hardier characteristics and the leaf shape to its offspring. In the wild, saxifragoides will layer naturally (put down fresh roots from branches which touch the ground) and seed down. Very old clumps have been found which have even developed a woody rhizome below ground but in cultivation it is normally propagated from cutting – very small cuttings as you can perhaps imagine from the picture.

In the Garden: Friday 9 July, 2010

Our citrus trees actually do save us money

Our citrus trees actually do save us money

  • Avoid stomping around the garden or lawn where you have spring bulbs. It is a hard life already for a bulb, pushing through cold, wet soils without being stomped back into the ground. Even worse, some only put up one flowering spike and if you break that off, you are sunk for this season’s display.
  • Prune and keep pruning. I am halfway through the roses but have finished the wisterias. The hydrangeas have been started. As luculias finish flowering, it is the best time to prune and feed them because their instinct is to spring into growth. It doesn’t pay to be too brutal with luculias – they can up and die on you. Regular pinching out or cautious renovation is recommended. They are not difficult to root from cuttings in late spring or early summer if you want to start afresh.
  • Sasanqua camellias can be pruned and shaped as they finish flowering. This includes sasanqua hedges but it won’t matter if you leave it until spring.
  • With our comparatively mild winters, we can lift and divide dormant perennials such as hostas all winter and spring. In cold climates where there is no growth over winter, recommended practice is to leave it until temperatures start to warm in spring (presumably divisions can rot in completely dormant, cold and wet conditions) – hence the different advice in books and TV gardening programmes from England. However it is wise to leave grasses, reeds, rushes and similar plants until they are growing again because they can be surprisingly touchy.
  • You can at least be planting your fruit trees which are now available in abundance. Put in the sure-fire crops first and go to the riskier, more exotic options if you have space remaining. Apples, pears, plums and feijoas are extremely reliable whereas it can be hit and mostly miss with peaches, nectarines, cherries and apricots. In mild coastal areas, citrus and avocados are well worth a try – for us they are the crops that save us significant money. Only buy named cultivars of feijoas – the cheapie plants are patchy seedlings for hedging and may never even fruit.
  • Get a winter strength copper spray onto deciduous fruit trees, citrus and roses as a winter clean up. This will reduce disease and lichen.
  • I have a new definition of a gardening optimist – the person who googled “sub tropical fruits Southland”. Southland may be many things, but sub tropical is not one of them.

Tikorangi Notes: July 2, 2010

Latest posts:
1) The winter flowering gem, Cyclamen coum ssp caucasicum – well suited to our temperate sea level conditions.
2) It is a funny thing that satire can get more response than a tightly argued piece. The response to this morning’s column published in the Taranaki Daily News on the topic of total public funding for Pukeiti Rhododendron Trust has been both positive and also considerably greater than I would expect from a usual fortnightly column.
3) It may be mid winter, but that does not mean gardening stops and we give our weekly hints on tasks which can be done.

The harbingers of spring - galanthus

TIKORANGI NOTES
The first of the snowdrops, Galanthus elwesii, are now open and the daintier Galanthus S. Arnott are not far behind. These winter joys may be fleeting, but it is hard to find a simpler or lovelier winter picture. That said, we never get snow here. Never. While daytime temperatures in winter can drop down to single digits (as low as 8 degrees Celsius on a bitter cold day), they are interspersed with glorious days like today – bright sun, blue as blue sky and temps around C16. That is not bad for a temperate climate in the depths of winter, especially as it wasn’t preceded by a frost. That is why we garden for the full twelve months of the year here.

A letter from a ratepayer

Mr David McLeod, Chair
Taranaki Regional Council,
Stratford

Dear David,
I was terribly thrilled to read your press release about having secured the future of Pukeiti. That is so exciting.

I see that you personally rank the importance of Pukeiti right up there alongside our maunga, our mountain, Taranaki. Now I don’t want to be accused of raining on your parade, but you don’t think that maybe you were getting a little carried away with the hype of the situation? That perhaps you have overstated the importance just a trifle? I admit I don’t know you (you don’t mind me addressing you as David, do you? It is just that as you are quite good at spending my money, I feel as if I have some sort of relationship with you). Maybe you do in fact wake each fine morning and look out at both Mount Taranaki and Pukeiti and feel a sense of identity. Maybe when your travelling children are asked where they are from, they identify themselves as coming from Taranaki, the home of Pukeiti Rhododendron Trust. Maybe you have enjoyed such frequent visits to Pukeiti all your life that you feel a deeply personal sense of ownership and belonging. Alas, much of your electorate has already voted with their feet and decided that in fact Pukeiti is not such a part of their very identity – that is the whole nub of the problem. Visitor numbers simply haven’t been high enough to support the dream – a dream that belonged to somebody else. But I don’t want to be negative. I am assuming that you and your councillors did a breakdown on visitor numbers to work out how many were local and how many were tourists? And as you are so hellbent on making it free for everybody, I guess that your public consultation showed that ratepayers are glad to pay so that tourist attractions have free entry for visitors from out of the region.

I mention this, David, because in your press release you approved the takeover of Pukeiti “in the wake of positive feedback during public consultation…” That is absolutely wonderful, no doubt about it. I wouldn’t for one minute want to be accused of pouring cold water on your plans. It may be that your networks in the gardening, plants and garden tourism scene are hugely better than mine. That would explain why nobody I have met in the last six months has been consulted. My networks must be terrible. I am talking to the wrong people. No matter, you have apparently found the right people to talk to. Mark says he would really like to hear the names of all three of them.

But lest you think I am moaning, really, David, my reason for writing is to offer you some help. Your press release says that ” …work will begin soon on plans to develop and enhance the property and its plant collection. This will be similar to the planning processes which resulted in the very successful redevelopment and refurbishment of the Council’s existing heritage properties, Tupare and Hollard Gardens. We are looking forward to involving the Trust, PKW and a range of people in this exercise.” That sounds absolutely splendid, very consultative. It is just that I am pretty sure that this has all been done already, quite recently in fact, and I still have the discussion papers in my archives. Actually it is not that long ago – 2005 in fact and I can date it exactly because it all happened when Mark and I were flicking off to look at magnolias in northern Italy. I think along with all the discussion papers from Big Names like Boffa Miscall, Berl and others, somewhere, just somewhere, I even have a letter from your CEO, Basil, telling me how much ratepayer money had been spent on these plans. These sums (measuring into the multi hundreds of thousands of dollars but I would need to find the letter to confirm exact figures) included plans for Hollards and Tupare as well, but the ratepayer has already paid for big plans to take Pukeiti in to a new era of popularity.

Sure, it has to be admitted that some of those plans may have been just a tad grandiose. I think they even included a new home for the wandering gondola, along with a little shopping arcade, of sorts. A tourism hub, even. And fabulous (and I mean fabulous) visitor numbers.

But a little bird told me, and I wouldn’t want to be quoted on this because I haven’t had the information officially and it may be completely wrong, that after Regional Council paid for all those plans five long years ago, the Pukeiti Trust Board commissioned another review and set of development plans immediately after. I think what I was told was that the annual grant of $50 000 of ratepayer money, allocated by Regional Council, was further reinvested in this new set of plans to save Pukeiti. I just recall some discussions at the time because some of us felt that maybe they could have been spending that windfall of 50 grand on another gardener instead of yet more development plans. I am just guessing, maybe putting two and two together and making five, that that was why Pukeiti went ahead and appointed a new CEO with a highly relevant record in managing Speedway. I recently found a newspaper clipping where that new CEO declared that within six months of him starting in his new position, Pukeiti would be re-branded as a functions and events centre. Funny thing that. Six months came and went and it doesn’t seem that long after, the new CEO also went. Made redundant in preparation for Regional Council taking over, do we think?

David, I don’t want to be a moaner but it just may be that there are plenty of recent reports already available to be drawn on, without having to start again. We don’t want to be accused of re-inventing the wheel, do we? Or to make ourselves vulnerable to an accusation of pouring more rate-payer money down the wishing well. Maybe somebody could pick up the phone and have a chat to the immediate past CEO to find out what did and didn’t work?

You don’t think, do you, that maybe it could be argued that it is a teensy weensy little bit precious to say that the cost of Regional Council picking up the tab for Pukeiti will have “minimal impact on average regional rates — over a full year, less than half the cost of the $14 entry fee Pukeiti has been charging up until now” (your words, not mine). That might be true had all ratepayers demonstrated that they wanted to visit Pukeiti at least once a year. A veritable bargain in fact. Such a shame they didn’t. Had they shown this burning desire to visit, Pukeiti would not be in the pickle it is. Instead they would have been run off their feet, even more so on their gold coin donation days when the financially impoverished would have flocked there. In fact, if you take the cost of running the place and divide it by the number of visitors, it just may be that you will find the cost of attracting every single visitor is somewhere nearer $70 per person. Even if you double the attendance in a short space of time, it is still around $35 of ratepayer money to give every visitor free entrance.

Lest you think I am being grumpy, David, I am already on public record as saying that for us personally, Regional Council making sure that Pukeiti survives is, on balance, a good move. We know what Pukeiti’s standing has been internationally, which is more than many of your ratepayers who just have to take your word for it. We also know which key individuals worked tirelessly to earn Pukeiti that credibility. In fact we know quite a bit about the history of Pukeiti. We just hope that you and your fellow councillors have a pretty good grip on it all too After all, you wouldn’t want history to record that you were the people who were all too ready to spend other people’s money trying to realise a lost dream. The Pukeiti dream of Douglas Cook and the founders has long gone. Now you have a large garden in a cold and damp out-of-the-way position, served by a really bad road, branded with a plant which used to be incredibly popular and of high status but few people want any longer.

Do let me know if you need the reports I mentioned.
Kind regards,
Abbie

Today’s column is but the latest in a series over recent years. Earlier columns on this topic include:
1) A tale of Pukeiti Rhododendron Trust and ratepayer funding Published March this year.
2) Taranaki Regional Gardens Part 1 – first published late 2004
3) Taranaki Regional Gardens Part 2 – first published, apparently January 2005 – the best piece of writing for those who can’t be bothered wading through the lot.
4) And Taranaki Regional Gardens Part 3 – which rather tells about the treatment of an unsolicited submission. When in doubt, levy accusations of self interest.

Outdoor Classroom – Winter pruning Hydrangea macrophylla

The common hydrangeas grown here belong to the macrophylla family. These give us most of the traditional mop-tops along with the flat heads of many lace-cap varieties. Less common hydrangea species (the ones with oak leaves, cone flower heads, evergreens and the like) often have different pruning requirements.

1) It is not essential to prune hydrangeas. They will still flower if not pruned but you will usually get many small flowers on a bush which grows ever larger. Pruning takes place to keep the bush smaller and tidier and to encourage bigger blooms.

2) Most hydrangea stems will have a series of buds in pairs visible down their length. The fat buds are flower buds. The thin, small buds are leaf buds. Ideally you want pairs of fat buds, because that will be two flower heads but sometimes you find one fat bud paired with a small leaf bud. You will only get one flower from that spike.

3) Using secateurs, prune back to the lowest pair of fat buds. If that is still much taller than you want, trim back to the lowest single fat bud.

4) After you have reduced the height of each stem, look at the clump and take out any really old, thick, woody stems and any spindly weak ones. You can also take out stems which are headed sideways and those with no flower buds if you want to keep your bush more compact.

5) Because most hydrangeas flower on last year’s growth, if you cut too low down and without taking any account of the difference between leaf buds and flower buds, you will have cut all this summer’s flowers off. You can cut off near to ground level if you want to rejuvenate an old plant and it will shoot again but you will have to wait 18 months for flowers. We have pruned for flowers on this plant.