Well lookee here. When I was submitting three new articles a week to the Waikato Times – that was in the days before syndicated features and the resulting copy that became the newspaper equivalent of elevator muzak – I used to be on constant alert for subject matter. Old habits die hard and I reached for my camera to bring you this example of what not to do, photographed on a street in Auckland’s upmarket Mount Eden.
Don’t. Just don’t do this at home. The homeowner is disposing of lawn clippings by building a small grass mountain around the street tree on the road verge outside. It is not good for the tree and may even kill it over time. Building that mound can cause a condition called ‘collar rot’ – opening up the tree to fungi that attack the bark around the base of the tree. Bark needs to breathe, not be suffocated. Grass heaps also heat up as they start to decompose and that heat is bad for the tree, potentially killing the bark. Then the grass compacts down to an anaerobic sludge which can suffocate the surface roots. All this just so the homeowner doesn’t have to put their grass clippings out in the green waste or to find ways to compost it on his or her own property? Tidiness is not everything in the world of gardening and nature.
That is how the snake entered our family. Theo admired it. He was still too little to pronounce his s’ss (or should that be esses, or maybe ‘isses?) and he always referred to it as “my ‘nake”. He had a great deal of fun with it for several years. Yes, you can harass New Zealand cats with fake snakes and even adults instinctively flinch when a snake’s head looms close. When he grew out of it, we relocated it to the Pinus ‘Beuvronensis’. I think it may be time to move it to the back shed and produce it with a flourish should our son, now in his late twenties, ever have offspring.
Yes, Schizophragma hydrangeoides looks like a climbing hydrangea but it is not the common climber which is Hydrangea petiolaris. This one comes from Japan and we prefer it to the usual form despite its difficult name. It is a close relative and a member of the same family but one step further back on the plant hierarchy from species to genus to family. Planted side by side, the schizophragma (pronounced skitsofragma or shyzofragma, whichever you prefer) is more floriferous and has significantly larger flower heads which seem to dance on the vine. This may be because its larger, winged petals (technically bracts, not petals) are held singly whereas H. petiolaris has its smaller bracts grouped in four, like a little flower all on its own. The schizophrama is self-clinging and relatively slow growing so it doesn’t take over and swamp neighbouring plants. It needs something to climb up, however. If left to ramble at ground level, it doesn’t seem to flower though it does layer its way along so you can get more plants from it by this strategy.
The pink form is even more unusual. This fact was often not appreciated in the days when we used to sell plants. I recall too many customers who were at best ABP – Anything But Pink, at worst IOBW – I Only Buy White (flowers). Such self-imposed rules can certainly limit appreciation.
The biochemist and the synthetic organic chemist were more amused than anything else. They could not see any reason why gin should be more efficacious than any other form of alcohol. But none of us really wanted to sacrifice the Christmas gin to carry out field trials. Mark recalled the routine use of kerosene for weed control on carrots in his father’s day. When we arrived home, he found me the reference in the McPherson book, “Vegetable Growing in New Zealand”. It is so old, it doesn’t even have a date on it but the publisher was Whitcombe and Tombs Limited and it is a few decades or more since I have seen that name.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 