Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

Matrix planting – a skill worth pursuing

The auratum lilies -now dormant – called to me for some attention

Many gardeners will recognise the situation where one heads out to the garden to do something and what initially seemed to be a straightforward task escalates into one that is considerably more major. I shall dig and consolidate the lily bulbs in the avenue garden, I thought to myself. They haven’t been touched for years and are somewhat higgledy piggledy around the place. It escalated. Of course it did.

After more than 20 years…

“I am surprised they are still there, really,” said Mark. “It must be 20 years since I planted them and some of those now are seedlings from the originals.” It is probably more like 25 years since Mark planted the lower beds of the Avenue Gardens. No major work has been carried out in the time since, bar clearing up after the occasional treemageddon. We do a tidy-up from time to time and most years the lilies get staked. Nothing has been fed and not a lot new has been planted, just the occasional removal of a dead plant and plugging the gap if need be. I ended up going over almost every square centimetre of the area and becoming familiar with every plant, not just the lilies.

Remarkably low maintenance in the long term

As the days passed, my awe at the skills Mark used when planting the area grew. Matrix planting. That is what it was at the time – a highly complex planting of a whole range of different material, most of which has stood the test of time and is still there. It is the stability and the compatibility of the plants used that makes it a matrix – a form of sustainable gardening that is worth attempting to come to terms with.

When I did a net search looking for a definition of matrix planting, I found a fair number of recent references attributing it to renowned Dutch designer, Piet Oudolf. Oudolf is a giant in the contemporary international garden scene and he may have popularised matrix planting as a concept but he did not come up with it.

Orchids a-plenty in early October

As I told Mark how much I admired his skills in carrying the original planting 25 years ago in some areas, he just shrugged it off and said, “I was only copying what my father did”. Indeed, we still have areas in the garden that Felix planted from the 1950s onwards that remain stable, interesting, timeless and remarkably low maintenance today. These are mostly in shade and semi shade whereas Oudolf’s contemporary work that I have seen is predominantly in open, sunny conditions.

It is the sustainability and low maintenance with a high level of plant complexity that makes matrix planting so important. Without a high level of plantsmanship, you end up with utility, mass planting of few varieties – the hallmark of many contemporary landscape designers who have to plant clients’ gardens with reliable selections so they can not take risks. And people who pay professionals tend to like the tidiness of uniformity. Without sustainability, you have much higher maintenance requirements. This may not matter much in a small garden but if you are managing a large area with a low budget and low labour input, that stability of plant relationships is critical to keeping it all manageable while maintaining a high level of plant interest.

When I talk about a complex planting, I mean different layers and a mix of trees, shrubs, perennials both evergreen and deciduous, bulbs and a smattering of self-seeding plants. In this area, we start at the top with a layer of massive old man pines which are up to 50 metres high. At a lower level, we have rhododendrons (a few, in better lit areas), vireya rhododendrons, cordylines, brugmansia, palms, a few cycads, hydrangeas and the like). At ground level we have trilliums, Paris polyphylla, assorted varieties of bromeliads, Helleborus x sternii, argutifolius and foetidus, orchids (mostly dendrobiums, calanthes, cymbidiums and pleiones), veltheimias, hippeastrums, the aforementioned lilies and a whole lot more. I did say it was a complex planting.  Oh, and lots of clivias in red, orange and yellow. Being in the shade, we don’t get a lot of weeds but the naturally occurring vegetation needs to  be managed and thinned – assorted ferns, macropiper (kawakawa, pepper tree or, botanically, Piper excelsum), native astelias and collospermum, even seedling nikau palms and cordylines.

Lifted, divided and replanted after many years

The surplus from this one small batch amounted to 3 or 4 barrow-loads

I was amazed at how much I could remove without making it look different, just tidier. I lifted entire blocks of bromeliads and reduced them to a shadow of their former selves. After replanting this patch, I removed four laden barrows to dump but it still looks well furnished.

At the end of about three weeks, I decided I had done as much as I intended to. I didn’t need to add much new material at all. That is why I was in awe at Mark’s original plant selections and plantings. And while it was a larger job than I originally envisaged, if that sets it up so that it can be maintained with the lightest of intervention over the next two decades, that is a good outcome.

 

 

A forgotten resource

Auricularia polytricha, hakekakeka, or wood-ear fungus

It is a fungus, Auricularia polytricha, and it played a very important role in the European settlement of Taranaki 150 years ago. Mark was raised knowing it as ‘pigs’ ear fungus’. I shall call it wood-ear fungus if I can not commit the Maori name – hakekakeka – to immediate memory. Most of the common names appear to have an ear reference in them, though the unfortunately named ‘Jew’s ear fungus’ is a different species of auricularia. The Chinese call it mu-er.

I thought I should try cooking some if I planned to write about it but when I looked up how to use it, I found the comment:

“Auricularia polytricha is usually sold in dried form, and needs to be soaked in water before use. While almost tasteless, it is prized for its slippery but slightly crunchy texture, and its potential nutritional benefits. The slight crunchiness persists despite most cooking processes.” (1)

It didn’t sound sufficiently appealing to me. Our son has friends whose parents were new migrants from China and occasionally they used to collect it here for their father, but he has moved on from Taranaki now. 

This fungus is by no means unique to Taranaki. It grows widely through South East Asia and parts of China and it was the Chinese connection that proved to be the salvation of the early settlers. When they arrived in this area, commonly expecting rolling grass fields, they found instead the daunting sight of dense native forest. They set about clearing the land and indeed, Mark’s settler great-great grandfather was killed by a falling tree, as was often the case in those days. Hakekakeka found the environment of felled and decaying native trees and stumps particularly hospitable and grew in abundance. I am sure these early settlers, most of whom hailed from South Devon and Cornwall, had no idea what this odd fungus was so it was their good fortune that a local merchant did.

Enter Chew Chong, though this is the anglicised version of his name which was actually Chau Tseung. Like so many Chinese, he left his homeland in the mid 1800s for the goldrushes, first in Australia and then New Zealand. The hardship, contempt, extreme discrimination and prejudice these early Chinese settlers endured has only been highlighted in recent years and there is real irony to new colonisers from Britain being so harsh on new settlers from China.

But Chew Chong carved out his own space in history. Gold mining was not for him. He became a merchant and found his way to Taranaki. He was an extraordinarily successful and entrepreneurial businessman. He saw the resource in hakekakeka and brought together an abundant supply in Taranaki with a market in China. In a period of 30 years, he is credited with exporting 8400 tons of dried fungus. If you convert imperial tons, that makes it over 8.5 million kilos of it, which is beyond comprehension, really. What was more critical to the development of Taranaki, is that he paid out in cash at a time when cash was in very short supply. I do not know how the recorded pay-out sum of £309,343 converts to modern monetary values but Chew Chong is credited with keeping the new settlements in Taranaki viable, laying the economic foundations for the dairy industry. Mostly based on this fungus.

I photographed it growing on one of the lengths of branch that we use to edge a garden. The decaying branch is whiteywood, (mahoe or botanically Melicytus ramiflorus) which is one of the main hosts, along with tawa and pukatea. Mark commented that people still sold the fungus when he was a child but he has no idea who was buying it. However, it might be time for a revival given the search for alternative protein, in addition to its many other valued qualities.

“It contains carbohydrates, calcium, potassium, iron, the same percentage of protein as meat, including eight kinds of amino acids, and is low in fat. The Chinese used it to lower cholesterol, coagulate and purify blood, improve circulation and aid wellbeing, and as an antiseptic mouthwash, an aphrodisiac and an ingredient in wood glue.” (2)

Maybe a hakekakeka revival could replace the highly polluting, intrusive Methanex plants locally that turn gas into methanol which is then used, amongst other things, to manufacture builders’ glue. I would call that a win all around. And all the clichés about our province of Taranaki being built on dairy, oil and gas (‘white gold’ and ‘black gold’, the defenders of those two industries like to declare) entirely ignores the pivotal role of Chew Chong and the flabby fungus.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_ear_fungus
  2. https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/chew-chong/

Postscript: Mark is sure we should be trying it after I pointed out its claimed protein content and all round goodness. This cluster of it has turned black now. When I find a fresher batch, we may try it after all. I shall report further as to whether it is neutral to eat or an acquired taste.

When your lawnmower is worth more – a lot more – than your car

Out with the old… 

and in with the new. I see Lloyd left it air-drying after its first wash on Friday. He likes to keep a clean machine.

We bought a new lawnmower. This may not seem particularly momentous, unless you have met Walker mowers. We have been a Walker mower establishment for maybe 30 years now and this is our third new machine. Walkers, you understand, are like the Rolls Royce of lawnmowers – with a price tag to match. As the person who pays the bills, I was less than enthusiastic about the move to this brand of lawnmower but I have come to accept that ours is a life where having a lawnmower that costs more than our car is a perfectly logical position.

Walker is an American brand, an evangelical company which fully integrates its faith with its business. We are Walker fans because these machines are much safer, more stable and manoeuvrable than most ride-on mowers. It is capable of turning in its own space and of mowing steep slopes without tipping. It also gives us the option of mulching or catching and gives a good result on the house lawns as well as coping with our rough road verges, grassy slopes and the variety of terrain across our acreage. That is why we have a fancy-pants lawnmower despite its price tag and ongoing maintenance requirements. We have never seen another mower that is capable of doing what a Walker does.

Over the years, the Walker has brought us much amusement. It comes with a certain amount of merchandising – caps, coffee mugs, pads and the like – and every few months we receive a copy of their magazine, Walker Talk. It appears that we became members of the ‘Walker Family’ when we bought the first mower. Were we in USA, we could even attend annual get-togethers of the Walker Family. We used to get a copy of the Walker calendar and we thought maybe we should submit a photo of Lloyd mowing here to see if we could get him as a Walker pin-up boy. The calendars featured photos of garden and park settings, all with somebody on a Walker mower in the foreground. Lloyd has long hair and a bushy beard so he may have looked more Amish than Bible Belt, even had we dressed him in the mandatory white, long sleeved shirt that all these Walker mower operators appear to wear in the US. We never got around to staging a photo shoot and the calendars stopped coming.

When the bank gave way beneath Mark on the machine (22 years ago)

I did find a photo – as in a print photo from pre-digital era – of Lloyd mowing the lawns on the Walker, wearing a Santa hat. But I need his permission before posting his photograph and he does not work on Sunday. He may, after all, be less than enthusiastic about having a photo of himself wearing a Santa hat sitting on the internet. I give you instead a photo of an upside down mower. Very stable, the Walker may be, but even it can not stay upright when the stream bank caves in. I think Mark was responsible for this mishap 22 years ago, cutting in too close to the bank.

What to do with the old machine? We were not going to get a good trade-in price on it so decided that we would try and sell it privately. The lawnmowing here is entirely Lloyd’s domain so he gave the old machine a final wash and clean and I listed it on two local Facebook buy and sell pages. Overall it was in good nick, well maintained but with very high hours on it so we set a price accordingly at $2900, leaving a little room to negotiate.

Well, who would have thought that an old Walker is so very desirable? They are a specialised machine with exacting maintenance requirements and there are much cheaper ride-ons for home gardeners. It had only been on line for a few minutes when the messages started pouring in. I am not exaggerating when I say that in the three hours that followed, I could have sold six of them at that price. Four were people willing to pay immediately, sight unseen, based on the photos. But we only had one to sell and it had been paid for and left the property within three hours. Yes, it is tempting to think that we set the price too low and we could have got more for it. But we set that price at what we thought it was worth and we are fine with that.

Oh look. We are valued customers.

Lloyd is very happy with his new Walker mower. Mark and I are happy that Lloyd is happy, though we hope this machine may see us out. And then we received this little hamper by courier from the salesman. Apparently, Walker mower owners are more craft beer drinkers than wine drinkers. Mark was most delighted by the two little bags of potato crisps which says something about the lack of such taste treats in our household. I could calculate how many bags of potato chips we could have bought for the price of the mower but then they would no longer be a treat. Mark instead calculated what sort of luxury vehicle we could be driving for the price of our three, brand new Walker mowers.

Rabbit onslaught

I lack live rabbit photos but ours was a Peter Rabbit household on account of our second born being a huge fan

The rabbits have come to Tikorangi. Not just our garden but the whole area, Cute though Peter, Mopsy and Flopsy may be in Beatrix Potter books, this is one animal the early settlers introduced that this country did not need. That is equally true of rats, possums, mice, stoats, goats, wild pigs and deer but it is the rabbits that I am thinking about today. I guess we should be grateful that we didn’t get moles, squirrels or snakes in that early drive to Englify New Zealand. And would we really have appreciated beavers if they had been introduced?

Every morning, I do a patrol of my new gardens to kick over the rabbit scrapes and to check what the family that appear to live somewhere under the boundary hedge have been eating now. The swimming-pool-deck family like to eat the liriope, but that doesn’t worry me. They do not touch mondo grass so if I really wanted that coarse grass look, I could just replace the lirope with mondo.

I have a block around 4 square metres of this campanula but it did not look like this last spring. In fact it never got past being chewed rosettes of foliage trimmed to the ground.

The hedge family are more problematic. I have put cages made from wire hoops over the perovskia when it looked as though they might eat all the plants to the ground. Their love of campanulas is more problematic. I can garden without the ground-hugging campanula with its mounds of blue flowers. I would prefer to be able to garden with it in that area, but it is not a key plant. The other three I use, I want to keep and I shall be seriously annoyed if they persist with their onslaught. Those areas are too large to cage so I am trying the blood and bone deterrent.

The austroderia and Chionocloa flavicans look even more similar in the juvenile stage when both are heavily chewed by rabbits. Now dusted in blood and bone as deterrent. 

Meantime, Chionochloa rubra is unscathed

In the newly planted grass garden, it appears that native Chionochloa flavicans (often described as dwarf toe toe) is irresistible. Every plant is under siege from the rabbits. So too do they appreciate the proper toe toe – austroderia. It is going to take vigilance and determination to get these plants sufficiently established to withstand the attack. However, they leave C. flavicans relative, Chionochloa rubra alone. I guess wiry red tussock is not as yummy.

I may yet to have cut my losses, move the desirable campanulas to safer areas of the garden, cage the austoderia and find a replacement for C. flavicans but I am not quite at that point yet. In the meantime, I can be found outside after each rain with my bucket of blood and bone and a measuring spoon, sprinkling the lightest layer over the vulnerable plants. It works but it does require vigilance.

Dudley and Spike are line up waiting for breakfast – homekill possum

Rabbits are not easy to eliminate. Mark does a nightly possum round with the dogs and keeps the possum population under control with high velocity lead, as he describes it (shooting, in common parlance). The dogs find this part of their daily routine positively thrilling and hover around in anticipation for a good hour or two before this evening ritual. He maintains some level of rat control all the time. With a stream, bush and a macadamia orchard next door, rats are a part of country life. When the population is small, he uses cage traps but when it explodes, as it has this season, he resorts to bait stations. He is amazed at the amount of bait that has been eaten in recent months. It is really important to secure the baits, as a pest control officer once told me, because if they are loose, the rats will just remove them and store them up against possible future famine.

But rabbits…. They are hard to shoot in heavily planted areas like a garden, being skittery animals who run rather than freeze when they sense danger. They are not a suitable candidate for trapping and they are hard to poison. Despite our dogs being fox terriers, they only catch the occasional one, usually a baby.

So besotted with Peter Rabbit was our second-born that I bought her the Wedgewood teaset

In desperation, I bought some rabbit bait. We are not poison fans here at all and avoid it when we can. We lost our dear little Wilfred dog to secondary poisoning from cholecalciferol (the active ingredient in an over the counter possum poison to which there is no antidote) used by somebody else. Zephyr the sheltie (now deceased from other causes) had to be taken to the vet for a Vitamin K injection when he got into rat bait. So Mark was cautious about the rabbit bait, even laid carefully, following the instructions. It has to be accessible to the rabbits which means it is also accessible to the dogs. He headed out first thing the next morning to gather up the baits so the dogs wouldn’t get them and as he scooped them up, Dudley dog was in like a flash eating one. It put Mark off using poison because we could so easily lose another dog to slow and irreversible poisoning.

We may just have to learn to live with the rabbits, especially as other neighbours in the district are complaining about the rabbit population. When there appeared to be a dip in the population last year, we found ourselves hoping that a feral cat or stoat had moved into the area and that is a real compromise of principles.

How much easier life would be in NZ had it only been colonised with domestic and farm animals. It is really unusual to live in a country with absolutely zero native animals of the furred or hairy variety. When it comes to mammals, we only have two, very small, native bats that almost nobody has seen. In the short space of time since the arrival of all the introduced animals, we are nowhere near achieving any balance within nature to keep numbers in check.

When I looked, we still seem to have quite a lot of Beatrix Potter memorabilia, waiting to be reclaimed by our second-born.

A celebration of bright light and the start of a new year of gardening

Our maunga – Mount Taranaki – on the day before the winter equinox

I have said before that the first flowers on Magnolia campbellii herald the start of a new gardening year for us. But I had not thought before of the bigger picture. On the day before the winter equinox last week, I went out on a clear day to catch the image of our maunga, our mountain, from the path down to our park. It wasn’t until I saw it on my big computer screen that I spotted the bird in the branches. I assumed it was a kereru judging by the size and shape and so did Mark when I showed him. When I zoomed close in on my screen, it is just a thrush.

The first blooms on Magnolia campbellii herald the start of a new garden year – for us, at least.

This week, the first flowers opened. And I made a connection between the first flowers, the winter solstice and Matariki. The last is a traditional Maori celebration now gaining popularity in the wider population. Sometimes referred to as the Maori New Year, its timing is determined by the rise of a cluster of small stars known to Maori as Matariki but commonly called the Pleiades in astronomical circles. The exact date of the appearance of this star cluster varies from year to year, but it is usually soon after the winter solstice. And it occurred to me that the calendar which we all follow where New Year is accepted to be January 1 is, of course, a northern hemisphere creation so everything seasonal is reversed. It makes perfect sense that the first flowers on M. campbellii signal the start of our new year in the garden.

Reaching high into the mid-winter sky, Dahlia imperialis Alba and a bougainvillea shoot

And what a week it has been. Cool nights (which means between about 3° and 8° Celsius where we are), followed by sunny, calm days with a temperature of 14° to 15°. We cannot complain about that in mid-winter, even though we know winter storms will return over the next six weeks before temperatures start rising in August.

The shaggy spires of Jacobinia chrysostephana syn. Justicia aurea in the early morning light

As usual, in this part of the world, we keep that clarity of bright light all year round. Not for us a watery winter sun held low in the sky and lowered light levels of winter gloom. No, we have bright sunshine and clear blue skies on good days where the only difference is the air temperature. And it is not so bad to winter-over in conditions where, even as I type with warm gloves (blood circulation to the arthritic fingers is not what it once was) in my office with the heater on, I know that after my 10am coffee, it will be warm enough outside to head outside and start on today’s project. And still we have a garden full of flowers.

Luculia Fragrant Cloud in full bloom

Luculia Fragrant Cloud with its sweet almond fragrance

Mark’s Daphne Perfume Princess – we have rather a lot of these scattered through the garden

Vireya rhododendrons planted in sheltered positions throughout the top garden flower intermittently through the year but are perhaps most appreciated in mid winter