Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

Gardening – more about moments in time than achieving goals

🎵If I could save time in a bottle

The first thing that I’d like to do

Is to save every day till eternity passes away 🎵

Only some photos serve as a reminder of a point in time when the delight was so strong that it sparked a response that is felt physically as much as emotionally

My (very) late mother used to remark how rapidly time passes as we age and I certainly know what she meant. But even when I was younger, I could see how our perception of time changes. When we are seven, a year is a seventh of our lifetime which seems a remarkably long time. When we are seventy – not quite yet in my case but looming ever closer – a year is but a seventieth of our time spent so far on earth. And time does indeed seem to pass at an alarming rate.

A moment in time in September 2019 that seemed perfection – Magnolia Iolanthe in bloom

I find it almost beyond comprehension that we are coming to the end of the third year of the pandemic that turned our world inside out. Three years? Already? Three years in March in this country since the then deputy prime minister issued an alarming warning to New Zealanders abroad to get home now while they still could. It sounded overly dramatic at the time but within just a few days, borders started closing and flights ceased.

Thank goodness for the garden which is our anchor and our refuge.

An April experience I remember well – helianthus, Stipa gigantea and miscanthus moving in a fairly strong breeze in the Court Garden which seemed like the successful culmination of a mental vision at the time.

It was thinking about those who want to freeze time in the garden that brought Jim Croce’s song to my mind. I must have said it before, but I will say again: gardening is a process not a product that can be frozen in time. I fully understand that it is not everybody’s cup of tea. There are many things in life that are of little interest to me. Activities like golf, going to the gym or All Blacks rugby bypass me entirely. I am not a fan of mosaics and I very rarely go to the movies. I garden almost every day. I don’t garden with a view to reaching the final goal of getting the place looking exactly how I want it and expecting it to remain like that.  If that is a personal goal, take up interior design instead, is my advice. It is easier to stage a scene and freeze it in time indoors.

For me, it is often the wilder areas of the garden that spark a response that goes beyond quiet satisfaction or contentment, going more into joyous end of the spectrum.

But there are moments in time when I look at the garden – sometimes a full scene or vista and sometimes just a close-up of a small section – and I sigh with joy. ‘Ah,’ I think, ‘that is just perfect.’ It is a physical reaction when I feel my heart is singing.

Late afternoon autumn light falling on the flowers of Miscanthus ‘Morning Light’

Those are times I would save in a bottle if I could. All I can do is to save them in my memory or sometimes capture the moment on camera to remind me later. Those moments are the gardener’s adrenaline, in a low-key sort of way. We know that the scene will change – very rapidly if it is dependent on a particular quality of light, a couple of weeks if it is dependent on recent garden maintenance, more slowly if it is a case of a composition of plants that works brilliantly for part of the season.

Gardening could be likened to a journey with no set destination but plenty to see along the way. If you are goal-oriented, you may be better to take up golf. Or mosaic-making.

May your gardening year have moments of utter magic, joy and contentment that you, too, wish you could bottle and save.

Postscript: We once, and only once, visited a garden that on the day we went was as close to perfection as we have ever seen. It was a private garden in the Cotswolds, UK, and it remains fresh in our memory years later. https://jury.co.nz/2017/07/31/a-perfect-garden/

January – the Scadoxus multiflorus ssp katherinae at the end of the Avenue Garden rarely fails to astound me.

Meri kirihimete from Aotearoa

Christmas is different in this land of ours at the further reaches of the southern hemisphere. With the summer solstice just a few days ago, our days are at their longest and all schools and many businesses have closed for the long summer break. The festivities many love over Christmas and New Year are intertwined with the feeling that now is the time to relax and recover, to enjoy the warmth of summer.

May you find peace and happiness in whatever way you choose to mark this time of the year wherever you are. Mark and I will likely be in the garden.

Seasons greetings and may you go well and stay safe.

Abbie

That is Kevin and Sharon, They are a family joke shared by our second daughter many years ago. Kevin has to wear a Santa hat on account of a slight accident with his antlers.

I was up the top of our tall platform ladder to get these photos – a view of the Court Garden which we do not usually see because it has been designed and planted to be immersive at ground level, with no long vistas.

The tussock walkway, one year on.

I see it is exactly 364 days ago that I published a piece on deciding to establish a tussock walkway. It is entirely coincidence that I return to it today.

From a different part of the garden, that is Carex buchananii at the front with the orlaya and verbena and Carex comans behind.

I have no idea if other countries talk about tussock or tussockland. Overseas readers may like to enlighten me. Maybe it is our term and other countries have prairies, steppes and grasslands? Our tussock areas are our native grasslands and I am not even sure that many New Zealanders realise that our native grasses are not only largely unique to us but also varied and interesting with many good garden candidates. Contrary to what some think, a tussock is not a specific grass, it is a term for the growth habit of a number of grasses that include our chionochloa, poa, festuca and – sometimes – carex.  

Not exactly well furnished yet but on the way

I opted for carex in this area, specifically Carex buchananii and Carex comans ‘Bronze” because I had them to hand. I will admit that they got off to a slow start because I shifted them, divided and replanted in high summer. While well watered-in, they had to endure a long, dry summer and autumn and not all of them lasted the distance. But it will not matter. They are seeding down with great gusto, on a scale I had not expected. Not only do I anticipate it being a fully clothed tussock area by this time next year, I think I will have to thin them. Most of these look to be the more upright C.buchananii at this stage but I am hoping for some of the fountaining C.comans as well.

That is a whole lot of self-seeding happening in a short space of time

The purity of vision with which I started – that of a rippling grassland of bronze tussock with no defined paths – has been watered down a little. When we broke up the two concrete paths that defined the site of the old propagation house that formerly filled most of this space, I made the call to get Lloyd to lay some crazy paved stepping stones through it and that may be a good call in terms of keeping some clear pathways, given the dense seeding of the plants.

Adding native celmisia to the Carex buchananii

Next Mark asked me, “What are you going to do to add some seasonal interest and colour?” And those words are the death knell of pure visions. I added some celmisias – our native mountain daisy – and I really like the look of those with the carex. There were some legacy plants that survived the removal of the propagation house and I feel Cordyline stricta can stay, even though it is Australian. Another tropical-looking cordyline has popped up and it may or may not be C.petiolaris. A bit of seed is blowing in and I will have to manage Verbena bonariensis  and the white nicotiana because, while a few plants are charming enough, we don’t want them everywhere and they seem to want to be everywhere. And I admit I planted a swag of dwarf narcissi. For spring interest, you understand.

An Australian interoper – the blue flowered Cordyline stricta (not Ralph)

Zach refers to this area as ‘the prairie’, albeit a very small prairie. I shall keep referring to it as the tussock walkway because the grasses at least will remain the dominant plant and they are native tussocks.

Nothing at all to do with either foxes or gloves but here we are

Gardening a cyclic affair. I see I write about foxgloves every few years at this time of the season and here we are. It is this time of the year, I get around the garden to pull out the nasty pink ones.

There are about 20 different species of foxglove and we have tried a few of the different ones, particularly in honey and soft yellow shades but really, it is only the common Digitalis purpurea which lasts the distance. The other species are much pickier and won’t naturalise for us.

It is the shade of pink, I think, that bothers me so much I won’t even tolerate them in wilder areas of the garden

What is it I dislike so much about the pink form? It really is the colour and the status of the plant as a countryside weed, though I think I would be less worried about the weed aspect if it was a prettier colour. I do, after all, grow wild fennel in the summer gardens. That murky, hard pink is just not a colour I like. I like it even less in a garden situation because I feel it lacks any refinement or charm.

Whites and pastels gently seeding in the gravel heap. They were a little more impressive earlier in the season before the rains came in the last week.

The whites and pastels are no less thug-like in their growth habits but I like the height and the flower form and I am fine with letting them seed around in a gentle sort of way. We have a patch of self-sown seedlings growing in a small gravel heap – the contents of the capillary beds back in the days when we had a nursery on site. It is quite handy having a stash of fine gravel to use in some situations and it is not doing any harm where we stockpiled it. The foxgloves are happy to grow in straight gravel.

Red ribs to the left are meant to mean pink flowers but no, this is not always the case. Green ribs to the right, however, usually indicate white flowers
I can categorically state that this plant has white flowers with a few red freckles inside, despite those clear red ribs on the foliage

It is because I keep track of that patch, that I have worked out that the advice to cull any seedlings that have red ribs to the leaves if you want to get rid of the pink ones and keep the whites and pales is not in fact accurate. It may be true that all dark pink ones have red ribbing on the foliage but it is not true the other way round – so, too, can some of the whites and pales. For a brief while, I thought that only the white foxgloves with freckles or spots inside the thimble flowers had red ribs but no, so too do some of the all whites with no freckles.

All white forms in the Iolanthe garden where their thuggish and wild ways are fine

The white foxgloves are simply a variant of the same species, Digitalis purpurea, but the dominant gene is clearly pink so if you are not vigilant on weeding out the stronger pink forms, you will end up with a dwindling number of white seedlings. You have to pull the plants out and remove them from the site as soon as the colour is obvious. If you leave them to flower, the bees which constantly work these blooms will transfer the pollen from one to another so the genes in the seed will not stay the more desirable white.

The common pink to the right is not acceptable to me; the second from the left opens white but matures to the same pink tones I dislike so must also be removed in its prime

I also pull out plants which are clearly pastel forms of the same pink parent rather than the peachy hues of some I have and I pull those plants that think they can outwit me by opening white and then changing colour to pink as the flowers mature. Were I truly dedicated to the genus, I might start selecting for different habits – more compact or with larger sized thimbles for example – but I don’t love them enough for that. I am fine with keeping to pure whites in the Iolanthe garden and pastel peach in the Court Garden.

If I lived in a drier climate, I might expend the same random energy on lupins – another plant that hovers on the margins between being a delightful garden plant, wildflower or even noxious weed. But lupins don’t like our high rainfall, high humidity conditions so I must make do with foxgloves.

Mix and match

Our native red tussock (Chionochloa rubra) with the Eurepean ox-eye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare)

We visit Australia fairly frequently on account of all three of our children living there these days and their native birds never fail to astonish me. Big, brash, vibrant, colourful and varied, they have an astonishing range of exotic birds.  Aotearoa New Zealand also has a huge range of native birds but ours are far more restrained. Our iconic kiwi is, after all, all brown, lives on the ground and only comes out at night so is rarely seen in the wild. Most of our birds are in muted colours and need the light or a closer view to catch the iridescence in the feathers or the charming fluffy chests. But our birds sing sweetly whereas those brash Aussie birds squawk raucously.

Our tui at the top – and I admit it can look plain black with just a white fluffy pompom at its throat without the light coming at the right angle; just one flock of Australia’s showy parrots below

So too, are our native plants of a more restrained persuasion in the showy, flowering stakes. Many of our natives have very small flowers while those of a bolder persuasion can have very short flowering seasons. A kowhai (Sophora commonly tetraptera) is spectacular but only for a week or 10 days if we are lucky. Similarly, our iconic pohutukawa (Metrosideros excelsa) is but brief in its Christmas raiment. We have very few native bulbs and we lack the range of flowering native perennials that many countries have.

Not a native forest at all but our Rimu Walk which we often describe as sub-tropical woodland and where exotic bromeliads are a dominant planting. But the big trees are rimu (Dacrydium cupressinum) and you can see both tree ferns and Dracophyllum latifolium – all native and it is our indigenous vegetation which forms the backbone and much of the canopy for the exotic imports below.

Our native forests are commonly referred to as ‘bush’ in this country but really, it is better to think of those remnants of original vegetation as neither bush nor forest but more as cool-climate jungle. At least it is jungle without snakes or other threatening wild life. The risks in our native bush are more to do with getting lost, falling over concealed cliffs or making very slow progress through dense growth in areas where deer, possums, pigs and goats (all introduced animals) have been kept under control.

Our native Chionochloa flavicans (sometimes referred to as ‘miniature toetoe’) in the foreground backed by Stipa gigantea and more ox-eye daisies because they are most rewarding in the flowering stakes if cut back regularly.

What we DO have in this country is a large range of very distinctive and unique plants – trees, shrubs and grasses – which are remarkable in their foliage, form and structure in the garden. Many are highly prized overseas – including our tree ferns, flaxes, grasses, cordylines and hebes.

I like foxgloves which have a wide natural spread in Europe, North Africa and western Asia but I don’t like them in the common deep pink shades. What I like even more is how our Chionochloa rubra combines with seasonal flowers. As the season progresses, the giant inula, single dahlias and helianthus will take over from the foxgloves and verbascums.

We have always opted for a mid-line in gardening terms – using native plants but in conjunction with exotics. A few purists may go native only with the pinnacle of moral rectitude being eco-sourced plants from the local environment, while at the other end of the scale are those who eschew natives as ‘boring’.

The showy Verbascum creticum – from Crete – with phormiums which are commonly referred to ‘coloured flaxes’ here

I was looking at the combinations of flowers and foliage that pleased me in the Court Garden and it is that mix of native and exotic. Of the structural plants I chose, nine are native and seven are exotic but all the pretty filler flowers that lift the scene are exotic. That was not by deliberate design although I did lean towards native grasses where I had a choice. I think it shows how effective some of our native plants are as bold, structural statements and how we make up for what we lack in showy flowers with some top-notch grasses.

Left to right, we have my favourite Chionochloa rubra, Astelia chathamica (both natives), Elegia Capenis from South Africa and Miscanthus ‘Morning Light from eastern Asia.

There is plenty of material to work with. Gardens do not generally replicate the natural environment but I find incorporating a range of our native plants satisfying in a faintly patriotic way. It is of course the access to a wider range of our unique native flora that makes NZ gardens different to those around the world. And when all is said and done, flowers are seasonal and ephemeral whereas form, substance and structure is with us all year round. Because our native plants are evergreen, they are ideal for filling that role.

My constant companion is Ralph, who is sniffing out rabbit trails here, so I end up with rather a lot of photos of his rear end disappearing under foliage. In this photo is Chionochloa rubra with our toetoe (Austroderia fulvida) behind. These native grasses make splendid garden plants where there is sufficient space.