Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

Gardening in the ruins

Not Christchurch. The Garden of Ninfa in Italy.

Poor old Christchurch cathedral is back in the news. Badly damaged in the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, its future again hangs in the balance as money for the restoration has dried up, with substantial shortfall of $89 million – at current prices but likely to rise.

In the 1880s on the left and in 2001 on the right. Photo credits Wiki Commons.

Christchurch’s Anglican cathedral is a key building in the heart of the central city square. Built in the neo-Gothic style in the years between 1864 and 1904, it immediately became an iconic image of that city.

A haunting image taken 30 minutes after the 2011 earthquake (Wiki Commons)

I have no personal opinion on the right or best option for the future of the badly damaged building. I can understand the desire for restoration from some parties. Christchurch lost so much of its history as a result of the earthquakes and this is one of its most significant, historic buildings. Its flamboyance harks back to earlier times before the stodgy utilitarianism of most modern structures.  On the other hand, I can see the point of view of the Anglican church, that their focus is on caring for the living, not preserving architectural history at huge expense financially. The post-earthquake reconstruction required throughout much of the city was incredibly expensive, stretching both government and local body resources and those financial resources have now dried up. While historic buildings are important, the reconstruction of sewage pipes, water and power takes precedence, followed by the need for new homes for the many displaced people.

I visited Christchurch in 2013 and saw some of the damage first hand, but just from a domestic, suburban point of view. The inner city remained largely closed off. The sheer scale of destruction was hard to comprehend. My well-travelled Christchurch gardening friend and I had discussions about how the cathedral could be made safe, preserved as a ruin and gardened. We had both seen similar scenarios in Europe. But we knew our idea was romantic fantasy at the time.

Ninfa, again. Built around a larger village than Torrecchia shown further down the page.
Ninfa again.

For the rest of the country, the earthquakes are already just a memory – but Christchurch is left with a ruined cathedral in the heart of the city, a constant reminder of what happened, now with no solution in sight.

Of the possible options for the cathedral, the current situation of stopping restoration mid-flight seems the worst possible one. Fully restored, the city square would have been returned to its pre-quake status. Demolition would have given the option of replacing the old cathedral with a new building in an exciting, contemporary architectural style marking the new era. Of course, it might also have led to the building of a utilitarian monstrosity of no architectural merit at all but public opinion may have had some sway on a replacement. But to be left with a ruined cathedral, shut off from the public and surrounded by the detritus of a building project sitting in limbo just seems like a continuing reminder of the destructive earthquakes with nothing positive in sight.

Torrecchia Vecchia in Italy, built around the ruins of a village
Torrecchia Vecchia again

Maybe those discussion my friend and I had back in 2013 are not so far-fetched at all. It had me delving back through my photo files for images of gardening amongst ruins. I am still a bit sad that Covid cancelled our 2020 trip when we planned to get to Lowther Castle in East Cumbria. We knew Dan Pearson, a UK designer whose work we admire greatly, had an ongoing project creating gardens around a ruin. I can’t find photos I can download without breaching copyright but it is worth clicking through this link to get a view of that project which looks both grand and romantic. I would love to have seen it in person.

Britain and Europe are littered with ruins. I have never forgotten a garden we visited, overlooking Lake Stresa in Italy. At the top of the garden were stone ruins – a Roman fort, no less. As in Ancient Roman. Christchurch cathedral doesn’t have that antiquity – but neither does Lowther Castle.

Ruins of the former grand house at Trentham near Stoke-on-Trent in the UK. It was all barricaded when we visited in 2017 but I am sure I read that there were plans to make the ruins safe and then extend the gardens into that area.

If it is still a roped-off building site in ten years time, or if hope dies of raising the funds to complete the restoration, maybe, just maybe, memorialising the site with a garden in the ruins will be an idea whose time has come in this country, too. It took 40 years to build, so I guess the 13 years it has been an unsafe, dangerous building may have a while to run yet.

The Palatine in Rome – more gently controlled serendipity than active gardening
Villa Ariadne in Tivoli, near Rome. All serendipity here on a huge site of ruins but no less charming for that.

A postscript comment from Christchurch gardener, artist and garden writer, Robyn Kilty: It’s tragic Abbie! I have been to Ninfa too, and wondered if the Italian solution would work for Christchurch! Remembering that Ninfa is a much larger area- a village – with a most picturesque stream running through it, whereas the Square in Christchurch is an urban built up area with no stream, not much history, and surrounded by hard grey concrete. There is a small grassed area nearby, which is completely out of scale, but still, a Memorial garden of some sort would be preferable to the nothingness and the ugly temporary scaffolding that is meant to prop up what is left of the ruin. This seems destined to be the fate of the centre of Christchurch ad infinitum.

The trouble is that there has been and still is, such indecision around the whole sad situation – groups for and against restoration and at the time of the earthquake, a bishop from Canada with no vision and no cultural links to Christchurch, yet representing the Anglican community who appeared to hold all the power. She was in favour of demolishing the ruin and replacing it with a beach!!

As the current work to make the ruin safe has progressed, it is uncovering more and more structural damage that is more extensive and deep-seated than originally thought, so that sadly the cost of continuing to restore the Cathedral has become prohibitive, and with costs rising all the time, it is beyond the Anglican community and now the government. Even if it had been financially achievable, the feeling is that pouring more millions of dollars into restoration would still only result in a kind of ‘fake’ cathedral, where modern construction methods and materials could never replace the 19th century original anyway.

While some type of memorial garden amongst the ruins seems to be a solution, could it ever be like Ninfa, or even Lowther Castle, as our ruins are just a sort of small, out of scale aberration in the centre of the Square in Christchurch, surrounded by concrete. Imagine orange and yellow African marigolds gracing the centre of Christchurch where a cathedral once stood. Or perhaps that would be fitting after all, as we are told that the Christchurch Cathedral was mediocre in design anyway compared to grander Cathedrals in Europe and not worthy of restoration. Oh dear – why did our Victorian city fathers build their dream of an english city with a mediocre english cathedral at it’s core – on a far flung earthquake prone swamp??

Sorry, I’ve not left this comment on your Comments page, but that doesn’t seem to work for me – probably because I don’t press the right buttons.

I would make three points in reply to Robyn:

  1. It is all in the scale. Yes the cathedral site is one building, not an entire village but that is a design and scale issue, not a concept problem.
  2. Given the track record of the cathedral in earthquakes, maybe a rethink is needed. “Earthquakes have repeatedly damaged the building (mostly the spire): in 1881, 1888, 1901, 1922, and 2010. The February 2011 Christchurch earthquake destroyed the spire and the upper portion of the tower, and severely damaged the rest of the building.” (Wikipedia)
  3. Not African marigolds! Nevair! And preferably not tulips either, but that is personal taste.

Odd crops

Hakeke at the top with white oyster mushroom below

We are timid eaters of assorted mushrooms and fungi in this country, having been raised with a healthy fear of death cap mushrooms which look so innocent and edible. Generally we have a choice of brown Portobello mushrooms or white button mushrooms at the supermarket, so I leapt at the chance to try fresh oyster mushrooms when I saw them at the local farmers’ market.

We were a bit underwhelmed, which was disappointing. More textural than tasty, one might say. I decided to taste test the remaining ones beside the flabby brown fungus that grows freely around here and which played a very significant role in the early colonisation of Taranaki, where we live.

I am not sure that I have unravelled the complicated nomenclature of this flabby brown fungus. Mark has always known it as ‘woodear fungus’ but that is wrong. I couldn’t commit the original Maori name to my memory – hakekakeka – but it seems that is now synonymous with hakeke, which I can remember easily. It belongs to the Auricularia group, and it may be correctly identified as A. cornea but that seems to be interchanged freely with A. polytricha, which it probably shouldn’t. They are not synonymous. Anyway, it is common here and safe to eat. If you want to.

Mark found me some hakeke from the garden for my flavour experiment. I sliced both that and the oyster mushrooms into thin strips and cooked them in butter with a touch of olive oil (to stop the butter from burning) and some finely diced garlic, using separate frypans.

The verdict? Compared to the hakeke, the oyster mushroom was flavourful but it was the garlic butter that was the tastiest by a long shot. The hakeke is purely textural. The only use I could see for it in times when food is plentiful, is fried until it is crisp and then used as a garnish on, say, fried rice. I don’t think I will be adding it to our diet on a regular basis, even though we can gather it for free.

Wasabi in flower beneath the orange trees. With self-sown forget-me-nots.

We were given a small division of a wasabi plant last year. Despite the internet saying it was difficult to grow, we hit on ideal spot (fertile soil with overhead cover from a couple of orange trees) and the clump has grown. I could see some evidence of the swollen tubers that are the part that is grated to eat so I dug it up, only to find I was being a bit optimistic. It seems it is a two or three year crop in our conditions, to get big enough tubers to grate. We now have seven divisions, five replanted and two shared with others. 

You can see the tuberous parts forming which are the edible parts but I didn’t want to sacrifice too much of the plant by harvesting too early

Interestingly, I doubt that I have eaten genuine wasabi before. Outside of Japan, most of what is sold as wasabi paste is in fact horseradish, mustard and green food colouring. I did grate one little bit to try but it was too small a volume to detect subtle differences in quality and taste. It tasted wasabi-ish. I am sure that in time, freshly grated wasabi will lift my summer sushi to a new level.

Salted limes. In the past, I have done them whole but quartering them makes no difference and more fit to a jar.

In the kitchen, I am curing a jar of salted limes. I have been doing these for years to use in cooking, particularly in Middle Eastern and southern European dishes. They also add flavour when cooking grains like wheat, be it freekeh or bulgar, quinoa, rice or couscous. I dropped couscous when I realised how processed it is, but if you eat it, I can recommend adding a finely chopped salted lemon or lime to give it flavour. Limes and lemons are interchangeable when it comes to salting; I just use limes as they turn yellow because we have more and they are a better size if I am salting them whole, rather than quartered as here. The brine is so strong that they last up to a year in the fridge.

Fermented artichokes – I just looked up several recipes on line and worked out the general drift rather than keeping to one. Delicious raw in salads – and more digestible.

Salt also plays a role in fermenting foods. I have just completed a small jar of fermented Jerusalem artichokes and the reason to ferment this crop is that the process breaks down the inulin to a more easily digested form. It is the inulin that is responsible for this crop oft being referred to as  fartichokes. Fermenting means that you can eat, sweet, crispy artichokes without the unpleasant after effects. I like the taste of artichokes and they are heavy croppers for minimal to no effort but my stomach did not like them at all. Hence the fermentation. I did a big jar last year but we didn’t eat them fast enough and they don’t store as well as salted lemons. When some questionable moulds formed, I threw out the rest but I think we will get through the smaller jar.

Huhu grubs – reputed to taste a little like peanut butter

I have my limits. I know that huhu grubs, as we know them, were eaten in earlier times but I could not bring myself to gather these, even when I discovered a plentiful supply in a rotting stump. Huhu are a long horned beetle endemic to this country. We were often faced with a plate of cooked insects in the elaborate meals we were served in China and I did try a few. I think it is a cultural thing and it would take me a while to get over my gag reflex and to normalise eating insects, even while I know that they could be a valuable protein source and more environmentally sustainable than animal farming. If I am going to eat insects, I would rather start with them in a more anonymous form – cricket flour, perhaps – rather than launching straight into foraging at home and putting live, squirming bugs into a hot frying pan. I fed them to the birds.

The food we were served in China often included a plate of insects.

The legacy of Magnolia ‘Lanarth’ and modest Magnolia liliiflora ‘Nigra’

Not the best photo but I can assure you it was the best sight on its day – looking through trees to ‘Lanarth’ in the distance

As I paused to admire the glorious purple of Magnolia ‘Lanarth’ through the trees, the thought occurred to me that the vast majority of the red magnolias raised and released around the world since the mid 1980s have descended from this particular tree down by the stream in our park. Some are several generations down the line but they trace their genes back to our tree.

Our plant of Magnolia campbelllii var mollicomata ‘Lanarth’

Botanically, our Magnolia ‘Lanarth’ is the form distributed by leading UK nursery, Hilliers, back in the 1960s, Magnolia campbellii var. mollicomata ‘Lanarth’. Felix Jury imported it at considerable expense and thank goodness he did.

Magnolia liliiflora Nigra – red but otherwise unremarkable
and the shrubby tree of M liliiflora Nigra at about 60 years of age. It flowers later in the season so we think must have been the mother of the red hybrids, not the pollen donor.

To be fair, it wasn’t just ‘Lanarth’ that launched the platform for new generations of red magnolias. The plant of Magnolia liliiflora ‘Nigra’ in the garden border behind our house was the other parent, almost certainly the seed-setter. In the heady world of magnolias, liliiflora is not a showstopper. Our plant is more sturdy shrub than tree, the blooms are not large, typical liliiflora form which is not showy and the flower colour has none of the rich glow that magnolias can have. But it is red both inside and outside on the petals. Mark tells me we are reputed to have a particularly good form of liliiflora ‘Nigra’ in this country in terms of its solid red bloom without the inner petal being white.

Breeders and enthusiasts around the world had been trying to create good red magnolias before, like the optimistically named ‘Chyverton Red’,  ‘Pickard’s Ruby’ and ‘Pickard’s Garnet’. We have one example here but I only have one tiny photo of it and I have just found out that the name we have on it is wrong. I will have to take more notice of it when it flowers this year and try and work out what it is, only out of curiosity because it is not remarkable.  

Felix looked at his plant of ‘Lanarth’ and wondered if he could get a good-sized, red campbellii-type flower. He had already done his other breeding to reach ‘Iolanthe’, ‘Milky Way’, ‘Athene’ and the other four Felix Jury cultivars. And so he created ‘Vulcan’, a breakthrough in its day. ‘Lanarth’ contributed the flower size and form, solid colour inside and out but also the translucence, tree form and scent. M. liliiflora ‘Nigra’ contributed solid colour, smaller tree stature and, importantly, red.

Magnolia ‘Vulcan’ this morning

We first released ‘Vulcan’ in 1989, in that wonderfully under-stated way of that era. I don’t think we sent any plant material overseas at the time but bits of it soon winged their way around the world and the rest, as they say, is history. ‘Vulcan’ is not without its flaws. It flowers too early for frosty areas (as does ‘Lanarth’); it only achieves its density and purity of colour in warmer climates and even then tends to fade out to murky purple as the season progresses. But for its time, it was a breakthrough. It was the only plant we ever released that we could track its flowering from north to south of the country by the telephone calls we received. Even today, 35 years on, it is a showstopper at its best. I had two young tradeswomen painters in a couple of weeks ago and one of them asked me about the ‘black magnolia’ as she spotted the first buds opening, declaring she had never seen anything like it before.

Our mailorder catalogue from 1989

Felix didn’t go any further with breeding magnolias after ‘Vulcan’ but encouraged Mark in turn. And it was Mark who created the next generation which included ‘Black Tulip’ and ‘Felix Jury’.  Other NZ breeders followed suit – notably Vance Hooper and Ian Baldick.

It seems that ‘Black Tulip’ and Felix Jury’ have become two of the more significant breeder parents around the world. I see many, many red seedlings on international magnolia pages and they are clearly descended from those early red hybrids here.

Magnolia ‘Vulcan’

Felix named one red magnolia, Mark has named and released three but there is a fourth in the pipeline. We are hoping it will be ready for release internationally next year or maybe 2026. We describe it as a ‘Vulcan’ upgrade. It flowers a little later and has an exceptionally long blooming season and is a different hue of red, without a tendency to the purple undertones inherited from ‘Lanarth’. Solid colour and cup and saucer form which is our preference – it stands out here as good and we have high hopes for it across a range of climates. I won’t share photos until we have a release date.

Magnolia campbelli var mollicomata ‘Lanarth’

The new selection also traces its origin to the lovely ‘Lanarth’ in our park. That ‘Lanarth’ originated from a seed collection by plant hunter, George Forrest, in 1924 in southeastern China, near the Burmese border. Only three seed germinated back in the UK and this one was the best, named for the garden where it was raised in Cornwall. Those are quite long odds for what turned out to be such a significant plant.

While we may only have named and released four red magnolias from the Garden of Jury, with one more to come, we have many, many magnolias on the property that come from the same breeding lines. This lovely one that won’t be selected for release is another seedling from the batch that gave both ‘Black Tulip’ and ‘Felix Jury’.

Ideas and observations – part two of two.

Palm trees are iconic in the south of France. There are only two native palm trees but imports are now the backbone of the landscape. Alas, the red palm beetle (Rhynchophorus ferrugineus) is likely to change that. It only arrived in France in 2006 but is so rampant that it is cutting a swathe through the trees and killing them. Many have been removed.

Dead palms in Perpignan which is across the other side of France but I saw plenty in the Riviera, too.

Apparently, it is possible to spray for it but as soon as the spraying stops, it returns and spraying tall palm trees must require a cherry picker and some heavy-duty insecticides. A horticulturist told me that the only hope for the future is finding selections that are resistant to the palm beetle. We may rail against our border controls here and in Australia but oh my goodness, this is another destructive pest that we don’t want hitching a ride here. What will the Côte d’Azur be like without its palm trees if the beetle is left unchecked?

Vetiver grass products

I have only ever seen vetiver grass used in this country once and I admit I was surprised our biosecurity even let it in, given that it can put its roots down to four metres deep in the first year alone. It seems that its abundant production of leaf blades can be turned to good use and there is not much danger of running out of raw material. I saw these on a market stall at the cherry festival in Céret, near the French border with Spain. They were very charming but comparatively expensive. You don’t have to have vetiver grass to make something similar. It occurred to me that, were I still of the craft-y persuasion, some of our native grasses with leaves that have some substance – Chionochloa rubra and Carex buchananii come to mind – would likely work just as well. I had a friend who was keen to try weaving with pine needles and I sent her some of the exceptionally long needles that fall from our Pinus montezumae. But she never sent a photo of the finished product so it may not have been as successful as she hoped.

The cherries may not have been up to much but how charming is the little town of Céret?

Sadly, I have to report that the cherries at the cherry festival were a disappointment. After an unusually wet spring, they were watery, splitting and lacking sweetness, bearing no resemblance to the fleshy Black Dawson cherries I pay an arm and a leg for in season here, but there were plenty of them and the French do street festivals very well. They do love a brass band – or four or five of them on street corners in this case.

The graceful design of split steps
And a smaller version, also from the Ephrussi de Rotshschild garden
We could have done more with these casual steps, had we thought of it at the time.

In the Ephrussi de Rothschild garden, the Baroness who created it clearly liked split steps. There were at least three, maybe more. If you do a net search for split stairs, also known as bifurcated stairs, you will see many examples in internal situations, mostly from USA and in modern, opulent homes. I have seen them used externally on grand old villas in Italy and always thought them particularly graceful. Executed in stone – or even concrete – they are a feature in themselves which would not be appropriate in our more informal garden. It is the form I like and there is no reason why they could not be constructed in a more naturalistic style. I am rather regretting that we never even considered something more ambitious for steps in our garden. You need gradient but also space and I am pondering where we might adapt some steps to try an informal version.

Synthetic screening in Nice
Presumably a cheap and nasty domestic version, already threadbare and dropping synthetic fibres onto the ground below.

The French do many things well but these ghastly synthetic fences and screens are not one of them. No, no. Just no. They are really awful, both visually and environmentally. People lacking all aesthetic sense seem to think that the blue tones of synthetic green will ‘tone with the environment’, on account of being green. I see the same thinking down at the new roundabout finally completed where our country road joins the state highway. I get that the landowner who lost the corner of their property wanted windbreak but did it have to be so very high, built like Fort Knox but in tanalised timber and then wrapped in synthetic green netting? Black would have blended with the environment much better. Still ugly, but utilitarian ugly, not an assault on the visual senses.

No, that green netting does not blend in visually, in New Zealand as here, or in France.
Stopped by rush hour traffic by a decidedly extraordinary commercial building

Also related to assaults on visual senses, these two commercial buildings in and near Nice were impossible to miss. I am sure they are as controversial for locals as for visitors.

I had to photograph this second one from a moving coach so you may miss the fact that the head looks mighty like it was modelled on King Charles. The similarity was unmissable. I am surprised it hasn’t  sparked a fresh outbreak of the Hundred Years War of old.

Outside of tourist areas, much of France closes on Sundays. We wandered through the near-deserted city square in Perpignan where all the outdoor furniture remained outdoors, albeit loosely tied to make it clear they were not free for the taking. Just as I marveled at the use of ceramic pots with topiaries planted in them to block off a road (instead of traffic cones?) in Malaysia, this level of trust in human decency and good behaviour made me ponder where we have gone wrong in this country.

Pinus montezumae may be suitable for weaving into craft-y baskets.

Blue sky winters

The bright pink Prunus campanulata are controversial in this country because of their seeding ways but this enormous specimen is sterile and doesn’t set seed. The greatest danger is being hit by low flying birds as scores of tui move around the garden.

We are very sensitive about criticism of the climate in our neck of the woods. It is true that other places warm up more quickly in spring, some of us would like another degree or two of heat in summer and spring can be wet and windy. For many years we would cringe as garden and nursery visitors from further north or east would come in, hopping out of their heated cars and shivering, saying how cold and miserable it was here and asking if it was always like this.  Or worse, asking “How can you grow such tender material in your cold climate?” One person clearly pushed Mark too far because I heard him reply with a dead pan face that we get out at night with little woolly jumpers and blankets to cover them up.

First blooms opening on Magnolia Vulcan, one of our early flagship Jury magnolias

We may not have higher temperatures in summer but we have high sunshine hours and high light levels and that makes a big difference in winter. Of course, it can get cold and we have winter storms as cold fronts move over bringing wind, rain and gloomy skies. But in between, we can get bright blue skies and sunshine for days on end. Right now, in what we deem midwinter and our bleakest month, we still get 10 hours of daylight.

Rhododendron protistum var. giganteum ‘Pukeiti – one of the big leafed varieties that flower early. We also have subtropical vireya rhododendrons in bloom.

This train of thought was started by reading a blog post by Christchurch gardening colleague and friend, Robyn Kilty. Headed ‘It’s winter drear, my dear’, it vividly conveys her experience of mid winter, where low light levels and grey skies suck the colour out of both garden and landscape.

Blue skies a-plenty. With a white magnolia – likely kobus, flowering in a garden down the road.

I have not been to Christchurch in midwinter so I have no opinion on their winter conditions. For overseas readers, we are in the middle of the west coast of the North Island. Christchurch is in the middle of the east coast of the South Island. Clearly our winter experiences are totally different and that is what happens when you live in a country of long thin islands that run north to south, surrounded by vast oceans with no major land masses nearby. There are big variations in climate.

Luculia ‘Fragrant Cloud’ flowers on, undeterred by winter.

Nobody is going to suffer from seasonal affective disorder here in Taranaki. We are at latitude 39° south. If you match that to the 39th parallel north, we correspond to places like Ibiza, Sardinia and a line through California. Not that this means in any way that our climates are similar but it does mean our winter daylight hours are greater, as is the height the sun rises in the winter sky.

Camellias in bloom – this is Camellia yuhsienensis (syn C. grijsii var grijsii)

We garden all year round. If it is wet and windy or bleak, I will stay inside. I wait until the mornings have warmed up a bit before heading out, retiring indoors when it starts to cool off at 4.30pm. But most days, we are out and about for most of the day. I have a penchant for photographing flowers against blue skies but I don’t colour enhance my photos so what I show is colour as my camera captures it.

Loads of narcissi in bloom. We mostly grow the early flowering dwarf varieties because they are over before the nasty narcissi fly is on the wing.
Everybody grows narcissi but not everybody grows orchids in the garden. These are calanthes opening and most of our cymbidiums are already in flower.

Our winters are still filled with colour and flowers. As the snowdrops pass over – their season is but brief in our mild conditions – so much else is coming into flower that I feel that slight sense of panic that I may miss something altogether if I don’t get right around the garden every few days. At least we no longer suffer from anxious pressure at the need to get many tasks done before the garden visiting season starts – on account of us no longer opening the garden, you understand.

There are many worse places to spend winter than here in North Taranaki.

Magnolia campbellii var campbellii in our park. The snow line on Mount Taranaki is high this year, indicating a milder winter than some other years.