Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

Tikorangi Notes: the virtues of little green apples

The latest efforts are ginger and tangelo marmalade (in apple base) and feijoa and passionfruit jam.

The latest efforts are ginger and tangelo marmalade (in apple base) and feijoa and passionfruit jam.

I have never been a great maker of jam. I used to try. Raised by a mother well versed in the traditional skills, I would put on the jam pan and make an excessively large amount of one type of jam. If the stars were in alignment, this jam would set adequately. If not, the jam pan would boil away for ages while I valiantly added additional sugar and lemon juice to try and reach setting point. At the end of it, the jam would be brownish in hue and there would be far too many jars of less than stellar jam.

My late mother-in-law was a superb jam maker and my efforts never came within cooee of matching her delicious jams. Her fruit salad jam was my all time favourite but I recall her Sultan plum and cape gooseberry jams being exceptionally good, too. I got rid of my jam pan and would buy the occasional jar at the supermarket. We are not big jam eaters, I reasoned.

But I am a born-again maker of jam due to three recent discoveries. The first was the realisation that jam tastes best when very fresh and that it is therefore logical to make smaller quantities at a time.

The second was the discovery of Chelsea jam sugar. It costs more than ordinary sugar with its added pectin but reduces the time needed to boil the jam down to as little as four minutes before the setting point is reached. This means the jam keeps its bright colour and fresh flavour, while the fruit stays nice and chunky.

Unripe windfall Granny Smiths

Unripe windfall Granny Smiths

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The third discovery was about little green apples, but in the autumn time. I had read about using green apples to make one’s own pectin but didn’t try it until this year. It works! It works a treat. Combined with jam sugar, I think I have rediscovered a (minor) passion for jam. I just wash the apples, cut them in bits and remove any bad bits, codling moth or similar before boiling them up. Once strained off, there is a liquid base which lends itself to the addition of any manner of fruit.

The latest efforts are ginger and tangelo marmalade (in apple base) and feijoa and passionfruit jam. Having frozen some apple liquid, I anticipate continuing to make mixed fruit jams which may even be said to rival those of my very late mother in law. There is much more incentive when the process of making the actual jam becomes a 10 minute job with guaranteed results.

Her last butterfly (of the season)

018It is a somewhat gloomy grey and damp day here today, brightened by a knock at the door. There stood a woman, slightly abashed. She had read a piece I wrote recently about monarch butterflies and decided that we were better placed than she was to offer a good home to her last monarch of the season. It had hatched last night and was yet to fly. This little delivery involved a drive of at least 20 minutes to get here (and presumably the same to get home again) but we are not going to discuss the carbon footprint.

What a lovely ray of vibrant colour this butterfly offers, perched on the discarded sasanqua camellia flowers I was photographing yesterday. When he is ready to fly, he will find some friends over on our butterfly hillside. I was charmed.
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Late Bloomers – the tree dahlias in autumn

Tree dahlia 'Orchid', bred by Keith Hammett

Tree dahlia ‘Orchid’, bred by Keith Hammett

The last clarion call of the autumn flowers here are the tree dahlias, wildly impractical plants to grow but I absolutely love them. There is nothing like their over the top blooms soaring skywards in late autumn.  At least we are lucky in this country that we get clear blue skies with strong light all year round. Otherwise they might be soaring up to the gloom of lower light levels of other climates.

For problem number one is that these are frost tender plants which is not surprising when you consider they originate from Central American areas like Mexico, Columbia and Guatemala. We are not actually frost free in Tikorangi. We have areas of the garden that are so protected now by overhead cover that we can grow the most tender material, but out in the open we still get sufficient frost to require placing tender plants carefully. We may only get three visible frosts each winter, but the air chill on a calm night can get low enough to wreak havoc. And because these tree dahlias don’t start flowering until May and continue into June, they can get hit late in their season.

Left to right: 'Chameleon" , 'Orchid' (both Hammett varieties), D. imperialis and an unnamed Hammett variety.

Left to right: ‘Chameleon” , ‘Orchid’ (both Hammett varieties), D. imperialis and an unnamed Hammett variety.

A hint to the second problem lies in the name – the ‘tree’ part. These are not trees. They have nothing to do with trees. They are a fully deciduous herbaceous perennial but their rapid growth in summer and autumn sees them take on tree-like proportions. It is nothing for them to be 3 metres high, sometimes 4 or even 5 metres. Being dahlias, they are plants for sunny, open positions but they also benefit from some support and shelter from wind which can knock their brittle stems over. They have the hollow stems that are typical of dahlias. Some we grow against sheds or to the side of frames already in place for runner beans and frost protection frames for the bananas and sugar cane.  Some we fence in with heavy duty bamboo cross bars – hitching rails, Mark calls them.

Below ground, they have big, chunky tubers which mean that they are difficult to grow amongst other plants and they take up quite a bit of space for their six weeks of glory.

Not many gardens have both the space and the conditions that suit such particular requirements, along with a tolerance for their scruffy off-times. But if you have and can, they are as easy to grow as your more modest dahlia but with more spectacular results.

New Zealand plant breeder, Keith Hammett, has done a lot of work with dahlias, including tree dahlias. The orange starburst variety which he named ‘Orchid’,  with its twisted petals is more compact than any of the others we grow. It only reaches about 2 metres maximum though that is 2 metres high  and 2 metres wide. We have it by a big mandarin tree whose fruit are ripening as the dahlia blooms. It is a lovely combination.

Dahlia imperialis, my personal favourite

Dahlia imperialis, my personal favourite

My favourite is the simple Dahlia imperialis species and it is the most commonly available plant. When it first comes out, it looks like a clematis from a distance. Yes the blooms are a little floppy and the petals are larger and soft, so easily damaged, but I like the somewhat pendulous form and I think the lilac pink colouring is pretty.

Dahlia imperialis Alba - soaring skywards as winter descends upon us

Dahlia imperialis Alba – soaring skywards as winter descends upon us

Being a species, there are a fair number of different selections of D. imperialis. Our late season double white is Dahlia imperialis alba plena. ‘Alba’ of course means white and ‘plena’ means full and is applied to fully double flower forms. This one towers above a shed and puts on a wonderful display with its shaggy blooms but usually gets cut back by the cold when still in bloom in early June.

While tree dahlias can be grown from tubers in the same way as their smaller dahlia cousins, they are also commonly propagated from cuttings which are easier to handle than their oversized tubers. I admit I have yet to try it – there is a limit to how many tree dahlias we can place here – but the advice is to cut the stems that flowered in autumn, making sure that you have at least two nodes per cutting. Lay it flat because the new roots form from the nodes and cover to a depth of about 10cm. Or you can take spring cuttings from fresh growth. It does not appear to be difficult. I may report back on this because we are taking cuttings this year. We have a newly available position where a large tree fell, opening up what looks to be an ideal space for a tree dahlia or maybe two.

022 - CopyFirst published in the May issue of NZ Gardener and reprinted here with their permission. 

Tramps in the garden. Trampolines, for the avoidance of doubt.

The modern safety version of the family trampoline is not going to have the life expectancy of the traditional design so grin and bear it

The modern safety version of the family trampoline is not going to have the life expectancy of the traditional design so grin and bear it

My final article when I wrote for the Waikato Times was on washing lines.  Before the axe fell upon my contributions (replaced, I was, by syndicated copy which is “generic” in  nature, shall I say?), I always intended to follow up at some stage with a piece on that other awkward feature of so many New Zealand gardens – the children’s trampoline. What to do with this cumbersome eyesore?

Honestly, I do not believe there is a great deal you can do besides grin and bear it. The attempts I have seen to camouflage trampolines (or tramps, as we call them) have been doomed to failure. The bottom line is that if you want your children to use this large and relatively expensive piece of equipment, it needs to be in prime position – full sun, flat land, alongside your main living area where all the action is happening. In the other words, right in the heart of your outdoor space where it will look irredeemably ugly but it should at least deliver the squeals of happy, active children.

Attempting to hide the trampoline in a more aesthetically pleasing manner is more likely to ensure that it won't be used much. The spiky stumps on the hard trimmed hedge to the left looked downright dangerous to me.

Attempting to hide the trampoline in a more aesthetically pleasing manner is more likely to ensure that it won’t be used much. The spiky stumps on the hard trimmed hedge to the left looked downright dangerous to me.

Try and screen it – and I have seen this done – and you immediately create shade issues and banish the children from the centre of family activity. They will not use it anywhere near as much and you may well wonder why you bother having it.

Somebody once told me that it was easy to dig a huge pit in the lawn and set the tramp level to the ground. Yeah right. In many soils the water will not drain away and you develop a festering swamp of mosquito larvae below. It is nowhere near as much fun for the children and when you get rid of the tramp, you have a great big pit that needs filling.

The disused water tank stand which made the tramp twice the fun. I see from the date that our daughter was only 6 at this time. By modern standards, we clearly allowed our children to take physical risks.

The disused water tank stand which made the tramp twice the fun. I see from the date that our daughter was only 6 at this time. By modern standards, we clearly allowed our children to take physical risks.

We had a very large tramp for our children, large enough to accommodate three smallish people and their rioting and tumbling father. It was large enough, even, for two teenagers. True, it required a stool to climb up to it and it was of the traditional design shunned today as unsafe. It lacked both a mesh cage and covers for its springs. What is more, we discovered by chance that when located by an adjacent platform, the fun increased exponentially. The disused stand for the water tanks was the first platform. When we dismantled this, we built a custom platform from which the kids could jump up and down. It gave both a rest area and a launch pad. More cautious parents may shudder, but in the decade or more that we had the trampoline, there were no serious injuries and I can’t recall minor ones either. The tramp received a huge amount of use. It was a problem when it came to tipping on its side to mow the lawn. It took up a lot of space. When the kids stopped using it (our youngest was well into his teens), it was with great relief that I sold it. Should grandchildren enter our lives, I will not be getting a tramp for them at our place. Their parents can endure it at their own home.

Essentially, children’s play equipment is incompatible with the beautiful designer garden look. I have never seen them combined well. I am philosophical. Once the children have grown, there is plenty of time to achieve the designer look. And the modern safety design of the trampoline makes it more the plaything of younger children so the useful life span of it is halved.

As a postscript, if you have a swimming pool and think that relocating the tramp to that play area seems sensible, it is illegal in this country. Not only must swimming pools be fenced to code, no additional activity such as the barbecue, washing line or children’s play area is permitted inside that fence.

A friend has responded through Facebook with two links to creative ideas on reusing your old trampoline. The first is for hanging beds which look really stylish but will take a great deal of effort. These would never have worked for our super-sized rectangular trampoline but there is a whole section of the internet on repurposing trampoline parts, including some interesting constructions for keeping chickens. In case you wish to. If my memory serves me right, we bought our trampoline for $250 and sold it again, maybe 12 years later, for $180. That is the easier option.

Oh, and should you live in a tornado prone area, trampolines have a large wind sale area and become airborne. While hardly the equivalent of USA’s tornado alley, we can get small twisters here and I have seen a trampoline suspended maybe 10 metres up a pine tree. I have no idea how the owners ever got it back down.

Human design vs nature’s ways

I have been waiting for an opportunity to use this photo - see the final paragraph below

I have been waiting for an opportunity to use this photo – see the final paragraph below


“… he relays a story … about living with the American landscape architect Dan Kiley on the shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont in the late 1950s, and of the Kiley’s eight children, ‘living wild like an independent tribe’. Kiley once got his children to help him with tree placement for a project by giving each one a rubber or metal stamp with a different tree on it, then telling them them to bang their stamps down wherever they chose across a large sheet of paper until told to stop. The different tree types were mixed and dispersed in a way that avoided any of the tired symmetries of classical, beaux-arts garden planning: Kiley was ‘looking for actions that didn’t look contrived’.”

Allan Smith, What I learned from Momo: or, When is a house a stand of trees? (reprinted in Tell You What: Great New Zealand Nonfiction 2015).

It was a light-bulb moment for me when I read that paragraph this week. Not because it was an attempt to get away from the rigidity of classical symmetry, but because I am guessing that Kiley realised how very difficult it is for people to recreate genuinely random sequences in gardening.

I first became aware of this when I asked one of our nursery staff to plant out the surplus black mondo grass as a carpet beneath an orange tree. She felt the need to create a pattern, to plant in an arc. I sighed and replanted it myself, putting this down to her inexperience.

Years later, I visited a gardening friend to whom I had given a large surplus of hosta divisions and in her informal woodland, she had instinctively planted in straight rows alongside the path. So it is not inexperience that leads many, if not most, to plant in an orderly fashion, even in informal settings. I think it is more visceral than that – a human instinct to impose order on wild and random nature.

I was recently asked for ideas to under plant a tightly defined, quite formal planting of fruit. As the owners had mentioned they had a beehive on order, I suggested bee and butterfly food – a mix of lower growing annuals and perennials with simple, single flowers. My mental image was of a froth of artfully casual bloom which would teem with insect life, contrasting with the formal structure and permanent plants. As soon as the owner mentioned going to buy punnets of annuals, I knew. I just knew that when I return, I will see a mix of plants spaced at regular intervals and in patterns. Rows perhaps, or worse – alternating two varieties along a row. No artful casualness is likely. The Victorian bedding plant genre and the French parterres still have a lot to answer for when it comes to suburban-style planting in the new millenium.

The advice when planting bulbs in a carpet or meadow situation is to scatter them by hand and then plant where they land. This should give genuinely irregular spacings, mimicking nature, and avoid the serried rows of commercial production (think tulip fields, for an example of the latter). It is more problematic to do this with anything but bulbs – hence the Kiley approach. I would hazard a guess that if Kiley sent his workers out to plant the trees in a random fashion, they would instinctively revert to a grid or phalanx.

Not unrelated, perhaps, is the compulsion so many gardeners have to use edging plants. How curious that this imposition of human will and order on random and wayward nature is such an instinctive response for many.

About the photo at the top: I think it was a temporary floral art exhibit. Even that cannot be said to redeem it in any manner.

I lack many photos of bedding plant schemes, hence this one from Wisley.

I lack many photos of bedding plant schemes, hence this one from Wisley.