A step by step guide by Abbie and Mark Jury first published in the Taranaki Daily News and reproduced here with permission as a PDF.
New Outdoor Classrooms are uploaded fortnightly.
Tag Archives: Abbie Jury
Repotting container plants with Mark and Abbie Jury
A step by step guide by Abbie and Mark Jury first published in the Taranaki Daily News and reproduced here with permission as a PDF.
New Outdoor Classrooms are uploaded fortnightly.
The appropriately named buxus blight
Buxus blight, fortunately not in our garden
One of the frequently searched articles on our website is a piece I wrote a while ago on buxus blight (aka: why is my box hedging turning brown and looking as if it is dead and what can I do to resurrect it?) Given that we are a bit sniffy about box hedging here, it seems ironic that we are apparently seen as a source of information on the matter. Mind you, in deference to the level of interest and concern from others about both the short term look and the long term viability of their box hedging, I have been taking a slightly more than desultory interest in the whole matter.
You too can google it if you have some level of computer literacy and it is likely that you will come to the same conclusions from the international research and the anecdotes that I have. There are certain incontrovertible facts: it is a fungus called cylindrocladium and its rate of multiplication does not appear to be temperature related – in other words, it will multiply quickly in cold temperatures too. Most fungi thrive in warm, moist conditions but nasty buxus blight appears to be quite well adapted to cool and even dry conditions. The fungi spores are long-lived and can survive for years on dead leaves.
There are around 30 different species of buxus originating from Europe, Asia, the Americas and even North Africa. I have been told by individuals that the Asian forms from Japan and Korea (Buxus microphylla and microphylla var. koreana or Buxus sinica) don’t get it but the scientific evidence does not back this up. It is likely that the personal anecdote is based on the fact that in one particular location, this type of buxus is not showing signs of infection. That does not mean it won’t be affected in another location and the research says none are immune. The bottom line is that I wouldn’t be ripping out affected sempervirens (and suffruticosa, the very low and slow form used as an edger is still a sempervirens variation and is particularly susceptible) and replacing it with a different species of buxus, be it from Japan, Korea or anywhere else. I would be wanting to use a totally different plant family altogether.
You will know if you have buxus blight. Small dead patches are more likely to be dog urine or an accidental whiff of glyphosate. Buxus blight is simply devastating. The dead patches spread rapidly and do not show any willingness to regrow.
The first bit of bad news is that if you have buxus blight already, you will have to spray endlessly, for the rest of the buxus life, to keep the blight at bay because you won’t ever eliminate all the fungal spores. You can manage some level of control but the days when all your handy little hedge needed was clipping twice a year are over.
The second bit of bad news is that if you live in an urban area and do not yet have buxus blight, it is probably only a matter of time before you will get it because the fungal spores are easily dispersed by wind, so will gently spread throughout built up areas where there are host plants at regular intervals. You can reduce your chances of getting it but you are doing a King Canute number.
The good news is that if you live in the country and none of your neighbours have buxus blight, you may be able to keep it out because the spore don’t seem to be travelling quite as far as, say, camellia petal blight spore which have been tracked up to 5km. But quarantine your garden. Don’t bring in buxus plants or cuttings from other places unless you are 100% sure that the source is isolated and free of blight. Propagate your own additional plants at home. The international advice is that you should routinely quarantine all buxus plants brought in from other sites until you are sure they are free from blight. The problem is that quarantining plants at home is difficult. They need to be confined to a shed, glasshouse or nova house for an extended period of time and few people have the facilities to quarantine effectively which means that if by any chance the plants or cuttings you have brought in are harbouring the fungi, even if you try and keep them separate the spore will spread. Easier by far to seal your garden borders and not admit any foreign buxus. They are dead easy to propagate at home for even the most amateur gardener.
If you have masses of box hedging or topiary in your garden that you want to try and keep, you probably have to accept that it is going to take more work. Don’t let the hedge get too dense – there appears to be a connection between the ability of the plant to shed water quickly and slowing the fungal spread. Avoid overhead irrigation. Keep thinning the plants so they are not too dense and get as much of the build up of dry leaves and sticks out of the centre as possible to allow more air movement. There is some evidence that copper sprays will at least slow down the fungal spores and copper may be kinder to the environment than most anti-fungal sprays. It may be worth trying sulphur sprays too because sulphur has anti fungal properties. An all round rose spray may be effective if you are willing to treat your buxus hedge like your hybrid tea roses.
The big problem is what you can use instead of the infinitely useful buxus. There are three stand out characteristics of buxus. Number one is that you can keep it looking tidy on two clips a year and it does not grow too fast. Number two is that if you hard prune back to bare wood, it will resprout so you don’t end up with woody legs. Number three is that it roots so easily it is a doddle for the home gardener to produce and correspondingly cheap(ish) to buy. And we could add numbers four and five– that it is long lived and a good dark green. We are of the general opinion that hedges should be green. The problem is finding a substitute which meets all the above characteristics. Lonicera and teucrium are cheap and clip well but grow so rampantly that you have to clip frequently to keep them looking sharp. Small leafed camellias and totara clip really well and resprout from bare wood but are not easy to propagate so are much dearer to buy . Some of the small leafed hebes may clip well (but some don’t so you have to get your variety right) and root easily but are not always long lived. Pittosporums grow too well and get too tall too fast and tend to be a pale green in colour, not the desired dark shading. And they have larger leaves. Corokia can get a bit bare over time. Griselinia tend to have large leaves. Taxus (yew trees) are notoriously short lived in our climate because the roots get phytopthera. The biggest gap of all is the lack of a clear replacement for the dwarf suffriticosa which is used where a low edger is desired.
There is no like for like swap for box hedging. In the end, if box hedging features large in your garden and you have to cut your losses on it because of buxus blight, you may be wiser to go back to the drawing board and look at garden plans which don’t depend on clipped and well behaved little hedges for structure. We are mulling around the role filled by buxus hedging and will return with more thoughts on this in the future.
A step-by-step guide in creative camellias with Abbie Jury
A step by step guide by Abbie and Mark Jury first published in the Taranaki Daily News and reproduced here with permission as a PDF.
New Outdoor Classrooms are uploaded fortnightly.
From meadows to motorway sidings with the classic border inbetween (part 4 English summer gardens)
Nobody does steps quite as well as Lutyens did
Note: this follows on from the earlier column: English Summer Gardens – part 3.
I wrote two weeks ago about the English summer garden being a continuum stretching from natural meadows through to plantings on the sides of motorways or NZ traffic islands. I was gently drifting my way along this journey until I reached my word limit around the classic English country garden as exemplified by Penelope Hobhouse and the late Rosemary Verey. I had to stop there because suddenly there is a great big punctuation point with the late Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter.
Great Dixter can be controversial. Mark stood in the garden and commented that it was a bit like an ongoing negotiation with nature. At its best, it is gifted and has clearly had an enormous influence on the direction taken in many New Zealand gardens. In the middle it can be somewhat serendipitous, but there are parts where there is a suspicion of the emperor’s new clothes. As a garden it sits between the meadow gardening–wildflower end of the spectrum which relies on a great deal of self seeding (and good chance) and the controlled Edwardian arts and crafts style synonymous with Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll. Christopher Lloyd experimented all his life but his legacy to modern gardening is arguably the mixed border (using shrubs and clumping perennials in tandem and brave colour combinations) and the managed meadow. In New Zealand, we seized on the mixed border as if it was our own but alas it is not often carried out with the panache of Christo Lloyd and is frequently rather dull.
Historically Lutyens and Jekyll pre-dated Christo Lloyd and in fact Lutyens redesigned Great Dixter for the Lloyd parents. But on my continuum, they are more to the ordered and managed side. We travelled in part to see their legacy. Famous examples are Sissinghurst and Hestercomb but we also visited lesser known gardens. The spirit of the Lutyens-Jekyll style was formal landscaping by Lutyens in the Arts and Crafts mode (confined and defined spaces of the garden room type), softened by sweeping plantings designed by Jekyll. If you imagine beautiful stone work, clipped hedging, masses of blue delphiniums, extravagant fluffy pink peonies, pink and white roses and drifts of underplanting such as lambs’ ears (stachys), you will be on the right wavelength. It is very pretty although the borders and beds could be a bit on the narrow and busy side and it can get a little formulaic when you see a number of such gardens in a row. I suspect that it may be a little dated now. Certainly the very narrow borders worried me and I would want to rip them out. Keep the trademark Lutyens rounded stone steps, though. Nobody does steps like Lutyens.
Fortunately it was towards the end of our trip that we ended up at Wisley because there we saw a range of garden styles which gave us the framework to make sense of what we had seen.
Gifted and unusual colour combinations at Hyde Hall
Cue in the classic long border. Yes Great Dixter has one but Wisley sets the standard. Hyde Hall has a shorter long border divided into colour segments. Lots of gardens have the long border. At its Wisley splendour, it is two parallel borders with a wide grassy path between and we are talking a hundred and thirty metres long, each, and (here is the rub for many home gardeners) six metres wide. Beth Chatto’s garden is a whole series of freeform borders which curve and flow but are still following the principles of the long border. Such borders are often planted on terrain contoured to give extra height at the back. Because they froth out at the front (alchemilla mollis is a great favourite to achieve this effect and seems to be regarded as colour neutral), there is often a boundary of wide pavers defining the edge. This stops the frothing from killing the grass. Generally plants are layered from tallest at the back to lowest at the front and the crux of this type of planting is combinations of plant foliage and flower throughout the season. There is no mass planting. Many plants will need staking and deadheading and it is all extremely labour intensive. You need plenty of space for this type of voluptuous display.
For us, this is the zenith of summer gardening. On the days we visited, we ranked Beth Chatto top of the list for plant combinations and quality management of this intensive style of gardening, Hyde Hall top in genuinely original colour and flower combinations and Wisley all round top in the total package of scale, design, plant combinations and management.
But, Wisley does not stop at the long borders. Dutch designer Piet Oudolf has moved herbaceous planting on a few steps and, in front of the spectacular new glasshouse, Tom Stuart-Smith has taken it further. There is an element of modern pragmatism and indeed we were told that the new borders only require a third of the input of the traditional long borders and that is a huge difference. The Oudolf borders have attracted both praise and criticism. They are a great deal more controlled. The plant palette is restricted and most of the plants chosen do not require staking (or, I think, regular dead heading) and they are pretty much of a standard height. But it is not mass planting and the skill of striking plant combinations remains to the fore. Oudolf has worked with parallel borders again but used different plant combos in rivers flowing across, more or less in diagonal lines when viewed from above. Each river is comprised of three or four different types of plants.
Tom Stuart Smith has further refined the Oudolf technique, bringing it together with the sweeps of colour first espoused by Gertrude Jekyll and the prairie meadow concept currently in vogue to give grand sweeps of herbaceous plantings for the larger canvas. Much of the detail and complexity of the long borders has now gone, as has the need for intensive maintenance. But plantsmanship and design lifts it well above utility mass planting and while it may not appeal for smaller scale domestic gardens, it is a modern and more practical approach for public plantings.
So how do we end up at the traffic islands filled with tussock or the motorway sidings of utility clumpy plants? Take the simpler blocks of colour planting done by Tom Stuart-Smith. Eliminate any plants that are pink flowered (not fashionable), anything that is deciduous (need foliage 12 months of the year), anything that is grown more for its flowers than its foliage, anything that requires more than a very occasional clean up. You are left with reliable, utility, evergreen clumping perennials which in recent years have become the repertoire of many landscapers for mass plantings – the liriopes, mondo grass, ligularia type of plant. Now reduce the range further. Take out any plants which are less than 30cm high, any plants which require good soil conditions or shelter, any plants which look sufficiently desirable to be stolen, and any plants which are not available dirt cheap and preferably from a native plant supplier or prison nursery. You are left with mostly tough grassy type plants which on their own are as dull as ditchwater. It is the end of the road.
