Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

From foxgloves* to foxtail lilies – eremurus

Eremurus - but in Yorkshire not Tikorangi

Eremurus – but in Yorkshire not Tikorangi

We don’t have foxes in New Zealand. In that huge modification of our environment that took place with the early settlers in the 1800s, we were at least spared those. True, we could have done without the bunny rabbits, the possums, deer, goats, many common
garden slugs and snails and assorted other introductions, but foxes we did not get.

This is by way of introducing the so-called foxtail lily, which we don’t have here in the warmer north although plants are sold and no doubt perform well the further south one gardens. I imagine they are perfect in Central Otago. I photographed these in the cutting garden at Mount St John in Yorkshire last June, so in early summer. I had not seen them before and I wondered why we were not growing them. Having Mark at my side is akin to a resident technical advisor and he immediately commented that he had tried growing them (of course he had, how could I have doubted that?) but they don’t like our conditions.

The reason eremurus don’t like our conditions is that in their native habitat, stretching from north eastern Europe across western and central Asia to China, they have good drainage, especially in winter and winter chill. They also need full sun. These are areas we might describe as cold climate deserts and the other common name for eremurus is desert candles. No desert here in Tikorangi.

Eremurus are deciduous perennials in the asphodeloideae family, growing from fleshy root systems. Their growth is rapid and their season is short – again indications of a harsh climate. There are a fair number of different species which I have not unravelled (somewhere over 60 of them, according to Wiki) as well as hybrids. Some will put up flower spikes to 3 metres of more, so as a cut flower they might be better suited to the baronial hall than the domestic living room. I would hazard a guess that modern hybridists have set about breeding more compact forms, allegedly better suited to edging suburban gardens in the same manner that handsome alstromeria, eryngiums, zinnias and many other plants have been scaled down to compact little clumps. I have yet to see any that are improved by this treatment but if you have the right conditions, full-sized eremurus are a handsome delight. They also come in white and pink and any number of colour combinations between those and the oranges and yellows.

The cutting or picking garden at Mount St John in Yorkshire

The cutting or picking garden at Mount St John in Yorkshire

* The foxglove reference is to the post immediately preceding this one.

Schooling the foxgloves

White foxgloves, though at Tikorangi, not Hidcote

White foxgloves, though at Tikorangi, not Hidcote

An enduring memory of our visit to Hidcote Manor Garden in Gloucestershire was a simple planting of white foxgloves. They stood like grand white sentinels, belying their humble botanical status. A packet of white foxglove seed was top of the list on our next seed order.

Common foxgloves – and the white is just a form of the common Digitalis purpurea – are not difficult to grow. Not at all. We let some pink ones seed down through the park and in outlying garden areas. I think our widespread, dismissive attitude to foxgloves has to do with an earlier rural orientation in this country where such plants are seen as noxious weeds. But we are not farmers, so some seeding wildflowers naturalised on our property are not a problem, adding to biodiversity and providing a food source for insects.

Common Digitalis purpurea seen here with Rhododendron Caroline Allbrook

Common Digitalis purpurea seen here with Rhododendron Caroline Allbrook

???????????????????????????????The whites I wanted for my rose and perennial garden. After a few years, I am now moving them. They are too big and choke and swamp the smaller perennials I have in that area. I have found a couple of spots which they can have all to themselves. I was amused to see English gardener, Keith Wiley – for whom we have huge respect – on TV talking about growing plants in colonies but noting that some plants are so dominant that they do not want to grow in colonies. He cited foxgloves as an example. They are way too thuggish to co-exist happily with many other plants.

I could have saved myself a lot of trial and error if I had looked to the ground where the Hidcote foxgloves grew and taken note of what else did or did not grow there and how much space each huge rosette of leaves occupied. Instead, I was so enchanted by the summer display at eye level that I failed to observe further.

???????????????????????????????Carol Klein on BBC’s Gardeners’ World, once said that she sorted her foxgloves as juvenile plants – the pink ones had pink veining in the leaves and the crown whereas the white ones were all green. I am not convinced she is right though I went through a stage of culling all pink-veined seedlings. I am happy to stand corrected if somebody has been more systematic in assessing this, but I am pretty sure that I have pink-veined ones flowering white and vice versa.

What I can tell you from experience is that foxgloves have very large tops but small root systems so are easy to transplant even when quite large, as long as I reduce the foliage by anything up to 75%. They are tough. I am hoping by next year to have my white Hidcote sentinels flowering in abundance in positions where they can be glorious without smothering other plants.

Seedling variation showing a white centre to the common purple

Seedling variation showing a white centre to the common purple

Garden Lore: Another tree falls

Poor old Picea omorika

Poor old Picea omorika

Behold, a fine example of why most trees are best kept to a single leader. A short, fierce storm 10 days ago brought down part of our Picea omorika. This tree is several decades old – five or six maybe  – and is over twelve metres tall.

It reached about four metres before it forked into three trunks so it would have needed a good ladder to deal with the issue then but it is one of those jobs that nobody ever got around to doing. The first trunk was broke out a couple of years ago, having been exposed to wind after damage to a nearby tree. The second trunk has just fallen. Fortunately, while tall and dead straight, the only damage caused was to the flashing on the side of the shed roof. The third trunk is still in place but precariously swaying. It is highly likely it will snap off at some point in the future though we have ascertained the direction it will likely fall and it won’t be too problematic. The loss of the other two trunks leaves it one-sided, exposed and vulnerable.

Some trees have the shrubby habit of branching from the base and putting up multiple leaders. Magnolias Leonard Messell and Apollo are examples of this. Trying to keep these to a single leader is fighting nature. But most trees grow up on a single leader for maximum strength. In terms of long-lived garden specimens, they are stronger structurally and look better if the trunks are not allowed to fork low down. It is a great deal easier to do this when the plants are young than to clean up at the other end of several decades of growth.

The folly of allowing trees to develop multi leaders

The folly of allowing trees to develop multi leaders

Garden lore: The Agapanthus Conundrum

???????????????????????????????Overseas gardeners find our attitude to agapanthus perplexing. These plants are much more prized elsewhere, whereas we largely consign them to roadsides. It is much rarer to see them used as garden plants in New Zealand, even though there are some very good named cultivars which are sterile, so don’t set seed. Their future is sometimes under threat as they are seen by some to be noxious weeds. And they are very difficult to get rid of if you no longer want them.

But I think our summer roadsides would be dull without them. While they set prodigious amounts of seed, these do not appear to spread far and certainly the birds are not expanding the range. But such is the concern, that we try and get round to removing the spent flower heads and we feel obliged to stop them from encroaching on the neighbours’ boundaries.

???????????????????????????????This leaves the problem of what do with the seed heads. While we make a hot compost mix, it is not always hot enough to destroy viable seed. In the past, I have been guilty of putting seed and noxious weeds out for rubbish collection but we now think that sending even very limited amounts of green waste to landfill is not justifiable.

This year Mark has set up large barrels into which unwanted seeds and bulbs are put to soak in water until they rot down. It would give a valuable liquid fertiliser but liquid feed has not been part of our routine so it is more likely to all end up in the compost heap eventually. Allow at least a month for the rotting process to take place.

If you want to get rid of clumps of agapanthus, most people will have to get digging. The most common weedkiller, glyphosate (Round Up) is largely ineffective. To spray, you have to resort to heavier duty, controlled brush killers like Grazon and few people have access to these. It may be the difficulty of eradicating existing plants that puts most people off the plant, more than their seeding ways.
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Despatches from Heroic Garden Festival 3: Gaudi-esque meets Hollywood glam

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????I find garden ornamentation a source of slightly masochistic fascination. We prefer very little ornamentation in our own garden and even then lean to the natural look. Back when we were university students – way back when – we used to entertain friends and visitors with gnome garden tours as viewable from the streets of both Palmerston North and Dunedin. Caversham was a particularly happy hunting ground. But brightly painted little concrete things in my own garden? I think not.

I have been gently pondering the notion of the crossover from heavily ornamented gardens to folk art and it was with this in mind that I made a point of searching out a particular garden in the Heroic Garden Festival last weekend. It promised a “Gaudi-inspired” house with a garden that “exudes Hollywood glam with a hint of the unexpected”.
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It wasn’t folk art. Not at all. Nor was it particularly heavily ornamented, at least not compared to some others. It had panache – not necessarily easy to achieve in a garden with a kidney-shaped pool, an Astroturf lawn and a lot of solid colour. It did evoke the spirit of Hollywood glam in suburban Auckland but with a wry sense of poking fun at itself.

???????????????????????????????The plantings were fine, but nothing particularly out of the ordinary. The Heroic Garden Festival, for those who don’t know, has its roots in the Auckland gay scene. Gay men, as far as I can see. I have yet to fathom why gay men are such a powerful force in gardening whereas gay women have not made their mark in the same way. There appears to be a secret rule book that says that gay men in Auckland should create tropical gardens (the Ubud hotel-style, I have described it in the past) dominated by bromeliads, palms, cycads, the tractor seat ligularia (L. reniformis), bromeliads, maybe a banana palm. Oh, and have I mentioned bromeliads? After you have been to several gardens, the plantings start to meld in the mind and achieve a certain state of uniformity.

It is how the whole package fits together that stays in the mind – the design, the extension of indoor living to the garden outside, the style and ambience and the attention to detail.???????????????????????????????
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This Castor Bay garden had its own unique style. The tone was set by a white gnome in a glass dome giving you the finger as you arrived. I laughed. The first tulip lamp I encountered was bright orange and I am sure the vulgar orange celosias in the nearby bed were entirely deliberate. Further round was a bright pink lamp set against a terracotta wall. There were some brave calls made, contrasting with more restrained accents.
???????????????????????????????I don’t know much at all about Gaudi and Catalan modernism is beyond my ken. Certainly there was a northern Spanish arts and crafts ambience to the house which was charming. The borrowed view to the sea was also a clever device which did not appear as if it could be built out.

It is always refreshing to look at gardens which bear no resemblance at all to one’s own. Some folk say they go garden visiting to glean ideas for their own place. I like being challenged and entertained whether or not it has any application to my own garden. This whole garden made me smile. All credit to the owners, Aaron Hill and Troy Little.
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