Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

White frou frou, shades of green and jute twine

Ammi majus – my seed source currently growing in Mark’s vegetable garden

On our Sunday morning discussions on Radio Live Home and Garden Show, Tony Murrell and I have started an ongoing topic of colour. Last Sunday, we opened with the revered or reviled white gardens. Revered by many because, you know, Sissinghurst and sophisticated. Reviled by those who see it as a contrived and dated cliché which can be very flat, lacking vitality or oomph.

I have pretty much covered all my thoughts on white gardens in recent posts – White Gardens for the New Age and Shades of White in the World of Flower Gardens – and I do not think that I have more to add to that. Just a quick update on my own efforts on a seasonal white border to shine before the auratum lilies bloom in a riot of summer colour.

I want white frou frou

I mentioned this to Tony and he asked if I would consider renga renga lilies (Arthropodium cirratum) which are in bloom at the moment and looking very charming at our entranceway. I recoiled in horror but not because I don’t like the plant. I want frou-frou – light white froth dancing in the air. The renga rengas are too heavy, too weighted to the ground. So my plans are for the popular Orlaya grandiflora, Ammi majus (the Bishop’s flower) and even coriander and carrots which have light, white umbelliferous flowers. Maybe I will admit the pure white poppy that is flowering at the moment.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I have started planting this garden. Now it is on hold but in hand. This is a new area and the rabbit problem has been devastating. They have probably taken out half the auratum lilies as they came through the ground and it will be interesting to see how many of the bulbs survive in the ground through until next spring. Mark and the dogs are doing their best. The dogs are particularly highly motivated, having no residual qualms about Peter Rabbit in his little blue jacket. With one dog now elderly, slow and stone deaf and the other dog being a townie in his earlier years and still learning the role of rural estate dog, their enthusiasm is not matched by their success. Mark has by far the greatest hit rate – nine so far. In the meantime, the rabbits had eaten all my early efforts at planting out white umbellifers.

Maybe I will add the white poppy to my frou four mix

Also, being a new garden, there is a mass of weeds germinating so I am assiduously cultivating the area every few days. This is an easy task with my trusty and trusted Wolf-Garten mini cultivator but ongoing. Worth it, I think. Given that I want to sow the area in predominantly self-seeding annuals, if I spend this year getting the area weed free, it is going to save me an awful lot of work in the future when it comes to weeding. In the meantime, I am gathering seed to save for next year so that I will be ready to go when the area is relatively rabbit and weed-free. Gardening has taught me patience in a way in which none of my other life experiences have.

Having ‘done’ white gardens, Tony and I plan to go onto other monochromatic gardens (the blue, red or yellow border), the two-colour schemes (maybe red and white, or blue and yellow), then managing more complex colour schemes and the impacts of whites and pastels as well as the curious colour impacts of orange and yellow in a mixed border. Also the role of greens and whites in colour schemes. Are they colour neutral in garden settings? I am sure I will harp on about my intense dislike of pink and yellow as a colour combination. That will be Sunday mornings through January on Radio Live.

Not all greens are equal or natural, let alone invisible!

While on colour, I was slightly surprised at the suggestion from an esteemed gardening colleague that you could spend your down time in winter painting your garden stakes green to make them less obvious in your garden. To be honest, it had never occurred to me to do this. I mentioned it to Mark and he thought that it would be better to paint them in jungle camouflage rather than straight green.

It is so easy to get the shade of green wrong, in which case your ‘invisible’ stake suddenly becomes highly visible. A friend who trained in design once commented in passing that if you want something to recede into the background, you use black. Not shiny black, I would suggest, and maybe not pure black. Think creosote colouring – matt and dark.

In terms of unobtrusive tying, I have now gone to old fashioned jute string which is apparently still on the market though I have yet to find who is selling it. I shall go looking and stock up because it is one of those traditional products that can suddenly disappear. I have tried many tying options, including black twine (but it was synthetic), nursery tying tape (black plastic) and stockinette ties in muted hues. The jute twine is easy to use as long as you are tying loosely, so unobtrusive it is near invisible and it is a natural product. This means that when it comes to de-staking plants later in the season (I am currently staking some of the lilies), it doesn’t matter if the ties fall to the ground to gently decompose. That is my practical hint of the week. Find some jute twine. We have been horrified at the amount of plastic that has turned up in birds’ nests. Maybe they will find the jute twine instead.

Finally, on the topic of green and white, can any knowledgeable gardener confirm with authority that this is an albuca and put a species name on it? Huge bulbs, as large as any I have seen, which like to sit half out of the ground and flower spikes up to a metre and half tall. The albuca family is a large one that I am having trouble disentangling, especially as we have thought for many years that this plant was in fact an ornithogalum. I am not sure where we got that idea from.

Postscript: a helpful and knowledgeable reader tells me the plant is most likely Albuca nelsonii and from an internet comparison, that certainly appears to be the case. The largest of the albuca family. 

The bakelite Holy Family for an antipodean Christmas

I love Christmas. I love even more the lifetime of memories that come out once a year with the Christmas bric a brac stored in the Harry Potter cupboard beneath the stairs. Our little nativity scene may even pre-date Mark’s birth. It certainly pre-dates mass plastic because it is made from its precursor  – bakelite which was not much used after the 1940s. I have to admit that Joseph used to have a teeny tiny lantern that hung from his hand and I can still recall my dismay as I vacuumed it up many years ago and then failed to find it in the cleaner bag.

I enjoyed the wreath I made last Christmas in order to display the bakelite holy family. I know you can buy wreathes at shops like Spotlight but we live in the country so I improvise. In this case I retrieved a few grape vine prunings from where they had been thrown to decompose under a hedge. Because I use fresh flowers, my seasonal wreathes are but temporary affairs when compared to the tinsel numbers I see elsewhere, but their carbon footprint is minimal.

In this example, I just gathered an assortment of flowers in red, yellow and white from around the garden and wove them in to the vine circle. The cup shaped blooms in yellow and red are abutilons and the red berries are from Nandina domestica ‘Richmond’ (often referred to as the heavenly or sacred bamboo though it is neither sacred nor a bamboo). The nandina berries hang on for much of the year and it is worth having a plant if you like some for picking. The white flowers are star jasmine for fragrance (Trachelospermum jasminoides), a variation on a climbing hydrangea (Schizophragma hydrangeoides), our native Jovellana sinclairii and the green and white bells of one of the ornithogalum family. Or they may be an albuca.

Abies procera in our garden at Tikorangi

Ours is a household that tries hard to bypass plastic and other non-biodegradable options that tend to flood our lives every day but even more so at Christmas. I have always shunned the idea of a fake tree though at least the tinsel option is commonly stored away for future reuse. I also have a few ethical issues with the felling of trees to die indoors for twelve days at Christmas. Though not so much the Pinus radiata that is the common Christmas tree in New Zealand; they are quick growing and generally seen as disposable. It only takes three and a half years from seed to get your average sized tree. But the northern hemisphere uses a variety of slow growing conifers. In London one early December, I was somewhat aghast at the severed offerings in all the markets of beautiful Abies of Nordmanniana and Abies procera. Neither are rapid growers and even if they are plantation grown (mostly in Scotland and Norway to serve the London market, if my memory serves me right) it seems a bit, well, a bit like an act of consumer-driven vandalism to sever such slow-growing and potentially handsome long-term specimens merely to hold the Christmas fairy aloft in the front lounge.

These days we mostly reuse our version of the everlasting tree but the grapevines that I wove around the metal frame are due for replacement and this is a job that I need to do in winter when the vines are pruned. I have failed to get my timing right the last few winters so I am not sure what we will do this year as it really is too tatty now.

A flat pack designer tree and an Australian version of the outdoor tree

Over the years I have collected photos of various trees ranging from the ingenious to designer style for upmarket apartments. These last options usually fold flat for easy packing away after the event and there really is no place for a lifetime of memorabilia such as are contained in the family Christmas decoration box. But they are at least reusable and if you have a designer style of Christmas, maybe the designer tree is a good fit.

The tinsel adorned tree stump I photographed in Vincentia, a lesser known beach area south of Sydney. Of course it is wonderfully tacky and no substitute at all for the indoor tree that is the traditional centrepiece of the orgy of gift giving. But it made passers-by smile. It seemed a wonderfully Australian take on a time of year that we still celebrate in a southern hemisphere early summer season with traditions straight from a northern hemisphere winter.

First published in the December issue of NZ Gardener – my final column for that publication. Such are the demands of advance deadlines that I had already submitted this copy before I resigned towards the end of September over this column. 

Biennials, are they worth the effort, he asked.

Verbascum creticum, a biennial with presence in our rock garden

Each Sunday morning at 7.45am, I have a chat with Tony Murrell on Radio Live’s Home and Garden Show. We cover a wide range of gardening matters and during the week before we have a discussion by phone or email to agree an upcoming topic. As an aside, the recent release of very encouraging listener figures for this time slot has sharpened our focus somewhat. There is a scary number of folk out there who listen at that hour.

Today we talked about gardening in the very dry conditions that much of the country is currently experienced, which was my suggestion. Tony’s suggestion of ‘biennial plants – are they worth the effort?’ was put off until next Sunday. But since he suggested it, I have been thinking of biennials which I had never considered as a plant group before.

Ranunculus cortusifolius in biennial for us

Yes! Biennials are worth their place in the garden. I am struggling to imagine our garden without the biennials. Mind you, we don’t put any effort at all into most of them. They are plants that we let seed down, pulling out those which are in the wrong place and letting the other volunteers remain to continue their life cycle.

Annuals are plants that complete their lifecycle in under a year from germination to setting seed and dying. Biennials have a two year life cycle. Most of them will establish themselves in the first year but not bloom until the second. Because of that year spent establishing themselves, many of them can be quite large growers – thugs, even, as Mark calls them. To let these types of biennials seed down, you do need quite a bit of space.

Common they may be, thuggish even, but foxgloves have presence

Some of our key plants are biennial. I am thinking of the large flowered, yellow Verbascum creticum, the biggest geranium of them all, G. madarense, Angelica gigas and … foxgloves. Foxgloves really do fit the thug category but we are fond of them, even the common pinky purple one that is regarded as a weed in this country. We have been working to get the white ones naturalised around the place. “Are you going for the Hidcote look,” Mark asked, for that is the first place where I saw extensive and eyecatching use of pure white foxgloves. I also like the pastel shades, especially pastel apricots, so I have been summarily despatching the deeper pink forms anywhere near the pale ones to stop the bees from cross pollinating the colours, lest they all return to the dominant dark pink over time.

Sadly, most of these meconopsis have died out in this border now

Not all biennials are self-sustaining and strong growing. The highly desirable meconopsis, Himalayan blue poppies, which are extremely difficult in our climate, tend to be biennial – even those that are touted as perennials in more favourable climes. And it has never seeded down for us. To keep it going here, we have to gather seed and raise it in trays to plant out once it is growing. Ranunculus cortusifolius is also biennial in our conditions but it seeds down and keeps going as long as it has its own area where it can be left to do this.

Parsley is biennial, fennel usually so, and what would life be like with parsley in the garden? Once you have it, you just have to make sure that you leave at least one plant a year to seed down in order to keep a permanent supply.

Biennials, like annuals, only represent effort if you are having to raise them from seed or buy them to plant out each year. If you allow them to seed down and find their own niches in the garden, they can be very rewarding, requiring minimal effort. Wanting such plants to seed down is yet another argument for not being too quick to get out the glyphosate and control any germinating plants by spraying them out as soon as they appear, on the assumption that they must be weeds.

Speaking of verbascums, can any UK readers enlighten me on what happened to the blue as blue verbascum named ‘Blue Lagoon’ that debuted at Chelsea in 2012? We have never seen any mention of it since, let alone seen it incorporated into any of the gardens we have visited so wonder if it was a fizzer in the end.

Blue meconopsis take a lot of effort to keep going here. But for this sort of display, the effort is worth it

 

The ongoing saga of Stachys Bella Grigio

From one plant to six, soon maybe sixty and garden domination

I wrote about Stachys Bella Grigio in January. A new release in this country, I had bought one plant to try and it certainly thrived. The trouble was that it was not so much the grey of grigio as a startling, silver white. In our mellow style of gardening, it shrieked for attention and looked completely out of place in the rose garden. When I found my eye drawn to its glaring presence every time I looked at that area, I dug it up. Not being of a profligate nature – and there was nothing wrong with the plant, just my placement of it – I potted it up and kept it in the nursery until I could find it a better home. I also thought it likely that it would be one of those whizzy bang plants that we call an Upanddieonyou. In other words, of short life expectancy and prone to fail.

When a visiting landscaper friend looked at my new patch of Bella Grigio, he asked whether I had bought multiple plants. I laughed. Old habits die hard and we are still economical gardeners. I had just bought the one. But after a mere six months in the pot waiting to be replanted, it had multiplied to the point where I now had seven good-sized clumps. Since planting it out a couple of months ago, it has romped away to the point where by the end of the season, should I want them, I could have seventy plants. Not an Upanddieonyou at all, it turns out.

The basket fungus was the inspiration for this new stretch of garden

I think it will be fine visually in the new garden area. As part of our garden developments in the old nursery area, Mark has created a planting of the small-leafed, small-flowered Camellia microphylla, using the geometry of the basket fungus. The hungry and unkempt camellias were moved in this winter just past and need to get well established before he starts shaping and clipping them next winter into what he envisages as an undulating green caterpillar in basket fungus formation. The design has created central, enclosed spaces where he wants plants that will rise above the caterpillar hedges – I have planted the first one in the white rugosa rose, Blanc double de Coubert with an tall echinops. Another will, in due course, be home to the blue veronicastrum, another is to be blue hydrangeas with pale foxgloves and so on. The colour scheme is whites, blues, purple and lilac hues. The outer bays are more numerous and it is in one of these that I have planted the thriving stachys. In a sunny, open spot in what is a more contemporary area of the garden, it no longer looks startlingly out of place. It can stay after all.

 

 

For the love of umbellifers

I am having a love affair with umbelliferous plants. Poppies, daisies and umbellifers. It is the simplicity of form, I think, that appeals to me. And my favourite of these are the umbellifers for their ability to seemingly dance lightly in the space above other weightier plants.

There is a scarily technical, botanical description of what umbelliferous plants are on Wikipedia.  They are mostly herbs – annuals, biennials or perennial, often aromatic. Typically, they have long stems often with very light, feathery foliage (though not always) and the flower heads are held above in flattish or gently mounded formation of a collection of lacy umbels. The flowers are much valued for their contribution to the garden eco-system because they attract beneficial insects. Many set seed very freely and will provide a source of food for seed-eating birds in autumn and winter.

Orlaya with blue cynoglossum at the New Plymouth cemetery

Carrots are umbellifers, as are parsley, coriander, fennel and angelica, amongst many others. The common ornamental ones include the pretty Orlaya grandiflora in flower here now (it cuts well, I have just found, and combines prettily with pastel roses in a vase) and Ammi majus.

I first started noticing the use of umbellifers in English gardens back in 2009 and predicted then that they would become a fashion flower. I can report that they have maintained their popularity in England but have yet to become a hot ticket item in New Zealand, except for the orlaya and ammi.

As seen at RHS Wisley – my lily border does not have a water feature

My new long border of auratum lilies is destined to become my nod to a garden of white umbellifers. At this stage, I am still hoeing off germinating weeds to get it as weed-free as possible before I introduce plants which I expect to seed down season after season. I will use the pretty and wayward Orlaya grandiflora with coriander for the lower growing layer, Ammi majus and maybe  carrot for the middle height and I am still debating about the tallest layer.  Will angelica be too strong a grower, I wonder? The edible angelica. I don’t want plants that will choke out the auratum lilies that are the main stars of the border.

What is referred to as ‘cow parsley’ (botanically Anthriscus sylvestris) is a common wildflower in the UK, often seen on roadsides. So too is Queen Anne’s Lace or Daucus carota, commonly referred to as wild carrot (the version we grow to eat is a form of the same thing – D. carota ssp sativus). The one to fear that comes with frankly alarming warnings is the giant hogweed – Heracleum mantegazzianum. It is a common garden escape in the UK and is apparently in New Zealand though I can’t say I have ever seen it here. The problem lies in the sap which can harm the skin by making it extremely sensitive to sunlight, causing blistering, for long periods after contact – stretching out to years, even. Don’t be tempted by giant hogweed.

Pimpinella major ‘Rosea’ at Beth Chatto’s garden where I thought to photograph the plant label as well as the pretty, airy, dancing pink flower heads

Not all umbellifers are white. Despite it being a roadside weed where we live, I have planted some wild fennel in my new summer borders. I love the way it is so tall and graceful, silhouetted against the summer sky.

Purple flowers from purple carrots at Parham House

We were very taken by the purple carrot flowers we saw in the cutting gardens at Parham House. So taken with it that I looked it up. The heritage purple carrots that have been reintroduced to the seed range (carrots did not start off orange) are the ones that produce the purple flowers.

Angelica gigas – as popular with wasps as bees

Angelica gigas is another purple flowered umbellifer, in this case a biennial which bees adore.

I have just planted a single plant of the yellow achillea, photographed here at Parham House

I had thought, based on flower form and habit, that achilleas were members of the umbellifer family. Botanically, they are not (as far as I can see) but in practical terms, they fulfil a similar garden role. Now that I have a hot, sunny, newly cultivated area, I am trying again with coloured achillea. I find them charming but they are not plants to co-exist in borders where they get overshadowed or lose all day sun.

Common fennel can look wonderful against the summer and autumn skies