Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

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.

Tikorangi Notes: June 18, 2010

LATEST POSTS:

1) June 18, 2010 Camellia Diplomacy to breach closed doors in China in 1970 didn’t work, but the correspondence from Rewi Alley to Mark’s parents is pretty interesting forty years later – Abbie’s column.

2) June 18, 2010 The flowers of Dombeya burgessiae make a change to the more common camellias putting on a mid-winter show.

3) June 18, 2010 In the garden this week – recommended tasks from winter pruning, cleaning up pleione bulbs to the short directions on preparing an asparagus bed. Don’t forget to plant only NZ grown garlic.

4) Our annual garden festival at the end of October is still four months off, but gardeners around the province have preparations in hand and are counting down to Festival.

Mandarins - fetching winter colour in the garden

TIKORANGI NOTES:
The winter sight of mandarins ripening in the garden here at Tikorangi never fails to delight me. My memories of my Dunedin childhood in the relatively deep south are of mandarins as a fleeting seasonal luxury to be treasured and savoured. I couldn’t believe the sight of entire trees dripping in the little orange orbs when Mark first brought me to his family home. This particular one is easy peel and productive but not the best flavour. However, it puts on a splendid visual display and combines well with the ferns, orange and yellow Lachenalia aloides beneath.

Rescuing the lawnmower from a watery slide

We are sodden here and entire days without rain are a rare treat, or so it seems after the last couple of weeks. Mowing the park yesterday, Lloyd managed to put our prized Walker mower in a slide which saw it in imminent danger of gently slipping into the stream. A chain and the tractor were called for. Roll on spring.

Correspondence from Rewi Alley and holding back the encroaching deserts in China's northwest in the early 1950s

My late mother-in-law’s archives came home recently. Very late mother-in-law, to be honest. She died about 1985 but the local museum decided recently her archives were of no interest and returned them. After the slight chagrin at being told this, we are very pleased to have them back because we found all sorts of interesting material. The detailed instructions on how to wax your camellia blooms can wait (that is for those devotees who are absolutely dying to learn the lost art of waxing camellias). One of the historical gems from the collection was the correspondence from Rewi Alley.

If you are much under the age of 50, you may have to google Rewi Alley. He is certainly one of our most interesting and colourful ex-pats having upped sticks and gone to live in China in 1927, there to stay for the rest of his long life which he dedicated to improving the lot of the Chinese peasant. He saw out civil war, acute famine, the Japanese invasion, the rise to power of Chairman Mao and communism, the Cultural Revolution and China’s isolationist policy, achieving venerated status by the time he died in the late 1980s.

Do not ask me how Mark’s mother, Mimosa Jury, ever found an address for Rewi Alley in Peking, as it was still known back then. But find one she did and that can not have been easy, given that she was writing to Alley in 1970 when the Cultural Revolution and the rabid ideology of the Gang of Four saw his position as a foreigner in a closed country more precarious than at any other time of his life. Knowing the late parents in law as I did, I would guess that Felix was trying to get access to some of the special plant material which, even then, was known to be native to China but still not introduced to the west. Mimosa was a thwarted researcher by nature so she would have taken on the task of ferreting out the information. Together, they were going to bring Camellia Diplomacy to China and open doors.

Rewi Alley’s reply is dated October 11th, 1970. His first paragraph speaks volumes about the good nature and resignation of somebody already in his seventies with strong humanitarian principles, politically left wing and taking the long view.

“Dear Mimosa and Felix Jury:
Thank you for your letter about Camellias. I do not think that it is of use trying to contact cadres of institutes now. Most are away for re-training, re-moulding, and politics, so I do not know how long this stage will take, or when such contacts as you propose will be possible again.”

He follows this with a paragraph professing to share their interest in camellias, though it is pretty clear that this is more courtesy than fact because he really doesn’t know anything about them, except for one interesting observation: “… it’s seeds are valuable for food oil. Many counties, especially in the South Kiangsi, are completely dependent on the seeds for their food oil supply. Possibly the olive would give more oil seeds per mou than Cha Shu (the camellia), but then Cha Shu grow wild all over the hills and can be helped to spread.” Best guess is that he is talking about Camellia oleifera, although you can also extract edible oils from other camellia species. This was news to me. Should the end of the world as we know it arrive, we may be self sufficient here in cooking oil between the camellias and our solitary olive tree.

But Alley’s heart lay in reafforestation long before we in the west started to worry about global warming and conservation. He writes with conviction of the pressing need to reclaim deserts, like those of Sinkiang and he enclosed a typed copy of an article about a 1950s reclamation project in the north western area of Liangchow or Wuwei. The article is not attributed but I would guess that it is one of Alley’s own (he was a prolific writer). Globally, it would be hard to find areas with more inhospitable and harsher conditions than the northwest of China. Think of the well known Gobi Desert, though it is in fact the Tengri Desert he writes about – dry, windswept and bitter cold in winter while summers are dry, windswept and hot.

I would assume that the deforestation of China, which is referred to as having taken place over centuries, happened because the population depended on timber for both building and cooking but gradually population growth led to greater demand which outstripped the ability of forests to regenerate. Once denuded of its former cover, the land loses its top soil, floods become more frequent and there is nothing to stop the desert sands from blowing in. From time to time we hear about the spreading of the deserts in Africa but in terms of land mass degraded by encroaching desert, China has the worst problem.

Reference is made to “a low bushy tree, the sand date, locally called the ‘hero of the desert’ because it grows almost everywhere”. The sand date may be hardy but it took three attempts to get it growing, involving digging holes three feet deep (a metre deep is a huge hole to dig for every tree), carting in top soil and watering regularly – all done manually in the early 1950s. Water of course had to be carried with buckets on poles, presumably quite some distance. I tried to find out what the sand date was because it didn’t sound like the date palm which grows in marginal areas of North Africa. It is more likely to be the Chinese date or Ziziphus jujuba.

Aside from the details of this early and apparently successful small effort to hold back the desert, the political context is equally fascinating. Reading between the lines, the original letter sent from Mimosa to Rewi Alley must have mentioned something to do with forestry and described it as being beyond politics. New Zealanders, in those days, tended to see politics as a separate entity altogether with little impact on daily lives (how often did we used to hear the cry that sport has nothing to do with politics?). Rewi Alley was not having a bar of that. Not for nothing had he spent his life working for change in China. He was very much a mouthpiece for the new order of Maoist communism.

“Politics teaches why and for whom a thing is done. If the people can best be served by forests which will prevent floods and drought, then we have forests allright. And national effort is spent in getting them. Which means that it must be a mass movement, and to generate a mass movement, we must have politics. Which is seen here as the task of the government – to so raise the consciousness of people that they activate their minds and hands to carry through the job in hand.”

Consider yourself told. It may be that totalitarianism is a more effective means of countering deforestation and global warming than unfettered free enterprise and market forces. And we should continue to remind ourselves that in New Zealand we have just as a poor a record of deforestation. We are just lucky we don’t have deserts moving in.