Tag Archives: Castanospermum australe

The Colour Orange

My starting point was dahlias, single and semi-double flowers

I was intending to write about dahlias this week. Not that we grow many dahlias but I see friends posting many photos of huge, specimen blooms in a range of colours and complex forms. I was going to plead the case for the simplicity of single and semi double blooms in a garden setting and argue that those big novelty blooms are perhaps better grown in a row in the cutting garden than in mixed plantings in flower beds. I like the light, airiness of the simpler forms in the garden.

We don’t know if this orange dahlia with its dark foliage is a named form or a seedling from the red ‘Bishop of Llandaff’ beside it but it is very attractive.

But then I got distracted by the colour orange because this year, my favourite dahlias are the orange ones and I have not been greatly enamoured of that colour since I was a child when I desperately wanted an orange bedspread. My dear mother always did her very best to meet our requests but we were only ever a step or two above the poverty line so it was always a case of near enough has to be good enough. She found some velvet being remaindered but it was more red than orange so she made the bedspread and assured me it was *tangerine*. It may have been tangerine-ish but it wasn’t the pure orange I had dreamed of. I remember swallowing my disappointment to express appreciation, knowing she had done the best she could.  

A selection of orange flowers from the garden with three tangerines in memory of my mother and a monarch butterfly that died of natural causes. Reader, my velvet bedspread was not the colour of these tangerines.

I turned my eyes to orange flowers in the garden and was surprised when I picked flowers from a dozen different plants. The orange – and yellow – cosmos we planted in the rockery for late summer and autumn colour are looking particularly cheerful and they started flowering within two weeks of my planting out tiny seedlings a few centimetres high. And this week, it is the heleniums that are the stars of the twin borders.

Heleniums or sneezeweeds

Every year, I forget whether these are helenium, helianthus or helianthemum and I have to google them to refresh my memory. Maybe I could call them sneezeweeds instead. That is the common name conferred upon them when, in times gone by, the dried leaves were used in snuff to encourage sneezing in order to rid the body of evil spirits. Fellow sufferers of hayfever, take heart. We just didn’t know that we were expelling the bad spirits from our bodies without having to resort to snuff. That said, I am not aware of the helenium flowers making my hay fever worse.

Castanospermum australe, black bean tree or Moreton Bay Chestnut

The Castanospermum australe is having a particularly good season. The tree is well over ten metres tall now and we usually only see the flowers from a distance right at the top. This year, we seem to have more growing beneath the foliage as well so they are only about eight metres up. Being native to the more tropical parts of Australia, it may be enjoying the milder winters and warmer summers we are now experiencing.  

A crocosmia on steroids in the rockery. It may be a similar colour to the common roadside weed but the flowers are huge by comparison and it is very slow to increase. We think it is the form named as ‘Star of David’.

When it comes to orange as a colour in the garden, a little can go a long way. It is a very strong colour in its pure shades. Mark’s advice is to include plenty of other plants from the other side of the colour wheel – so in the blue and purple shades, although green also acts as a visual foil. Personally, I am not so keen visually on a whole lot of orange combined with either red or yellow and pastel pink is problematic.

I would have said I never wear orange, but that changed as of yesterday when this orange cardigan arrived. In self defence, I tell you that it is just for summer gardening, 100% cotton, has the all-important pockets and was reduced from $100 to $25. I was just a little alarmed by the colour. I may have thought of it more as burnt orange when I ordered it but it is Very Orange. At least I will not be difficult to find in the garden. When I come to think of it, it is probably the very shade eleven-or-twelve-year-old me had envisaged for my bedspread.

My thoughts are with northerners this weekend, particularly in Auckland, Coromandel and Northland, who must feel as though they have the sword of Damocles poised above them as they await the arrival of Cyclone Gabrielle. It is one week off a year since we learned what cyclonic winds can do when we took a direct hit from Cyclone Dovi. That was bad enough and we didn’t get the torrential rain that is predicted with Gabrielle, falling on land that is already saturated and further threatening infrastructure already badly damaged by the recent extreme weather and flooding in those areas. May you stay safe. We will breathe a sigh of relief if the dire predictions do not come to pass for you in the next few days.

Scattered observations

The countdown is on. This time in seven weeks, we will have the garden open and be in the thick of the garden festival – the Centuria Taranaki Garden Festival to give its full name. We are at that stage of preparation where I am paralysed into dithering inaction and displacement behaviour in the face of how much I want to get done. I am sure others will recognise this state.

Camellia nitidissima on the left but what is the rather different one on the right?
Even the growth habit is markedly different, which is why it had never occurred to me that it may be another yellow species

I was delighted but puzzled this week to find a camellia that turned out to be one of the yellow species that I didn’t even know we had and that was flowering for the first time. It must be a good 25 years old. We have three other yellow species that bloom and they all have very similar characteristics – pretty rangy growth, small bright yellow flowers in a lantern shape and large, heavy textured leaves. I was trimming back this other plant to make space for the yellow C. nitidissima beside it that was reaching for light, thinking it must just be one of Mark’s seedlings that was very shy on setting flower buds but filling a role in a boundary screen planting. Part way through, I noticed a flower and it was yellow. I promptly felt like a vandal, cutting back the very first flowering, and I looked ruefully at the buds on the branches I had removed with what I now saw as typical flower buds of the yellow species – like little covered buttons.

Its identification is still a bit of a mystery to us. We have lost the label down the years and Mark never kept an accession book. It came from Neville Haydon at Camellia Haven and he will only have had a very limited number of the yellow species that he sold commercially all those years ago. We have C. impressinervis, C. euphlebia and two forms of C. nitidissima syn chrysantha. There is a possibility that this new one, which is quite different, may be C. indochinensis var. tunghinensis. If anybody can confirm this or has past copies of Neville’s catalogue, we would like to hear from you.

As far as I know, these yellow species are not available commercially in this country any more. They are also more interesting – thrilling, even, for plant collectors – than showy as a garden plant.  And tropical.

Camellia Hakuhan-kujaku with its willow-like leaves

While on camellias, behold the flowers of ‘Hakuhan-kujaku’, also known as the peacock camellia from Japan. It is another one that is more curious than showy, mostly because we find it shy on flowering in a plant genus that is largely grown for generous floral display. But we like it for its pendulous growth habit, its willowy foliage and its understated charm.

The attractive seedpods from Castanospermum australe or the Moreton Bay chestnut
I have to use the zoom on my camera to catch the summer flowers on the castanospermum because they are a long way up

I couldn’t resist doing a small arrangements of seed pods which are extremely decorative. These are from Castanospermum australe, also known as the Black Bean Tree or Moreton Bay Chestnut. Our climate being distinctly cooler than Moreton Bay in Queensland, we don’t get the same level of flowering that it has in its native habitat but we get enough blooms to set plenty of seed and they are as attractive as the flowers, in their own way.

A glimpse of the range of colour, size and form in Mark’s michelia seedlings

Mark’s michelia seedlings from his breeding programme are all flowering and we are monitoring them closely for any that may be good enough to add to his Fairy Magnolia series. I picked a range of flowers to entertain a northern hemisphere magnolia Facebook page that I belong to. There are many more factors than just a pretty flower when it comes to selecting a plant to release. What is interesting about these is that he started with hardy michelias that are basically all white or cream, bar one that has recessive colour genes in it. There are colourful tropical species but he has never been interested in using them because he is trying to get hardier selections for colder climates, not more tender ones. It has taken a number of generations of hybrids to get this range in colour and form and is an ongoing project. Most of them have strong scent, so that is encouraging because fragrance had disappeared from some of the earlier generations of these breeding lines.

Lloyd is trimming the totara hedge which is now about 120 years old. This is trimming or clipping and a task that Lloyd carries out with sharp precision, using measuring poles and stringlines.

This week has been all about pruning and trimming here. Were we not opening the garden soon, we might have waited a little longer until flowering was over on some of the plants but needs must. And I am reminded of the advice from friend and colleague, Glyn Church, not to leave this task too late because the birds are all starting to nest.

Zach is pruning – carefully assessing each plant and removing growth to achieve the pleached or two dimensional effect we want here. Pruning does not cut the foliage and should be largely invisible to the casual eye as soon as the plants make spring growth. Really I wanted a photo of Zach with all his ladders – I think I have seen him using up to 3 at a time – but I wasn’t going to make him move them just to get into the shot. This is a platform ladder which makes it far more comfortable to stand on for detailed pruning at height.

A reminder about the difference between trimming, clipping and pruning. Trimming uses hedge clippers or trimmers and the individual leaves end up being cut, so we keep it to smaller-leafed plants like the totara hedge or the small-leafed camellias we have used for hedging. Pruning is done with secateurs and a handsaw. It takes a lot longer and is all about shaping but it doesn’t cut and bruise the foliage so we do this with the michelias and the camellias with larger foliage. Hacking is bad pruning.

We bought a new hedgetrimmer – a battery powered Makita where the same battery and charger can be used on multiple other pieces of equipment. There was much amusement at the range mentioned in the instruction booklet. A heated jacket, maybe? Or how about a portable coffee machine? But what really took our fancy was the electric wheelbarrow. That would make getting back up from the park or the Wild North Garden with a full barrow much easier at the end of a day’s work.

Sydney notes: Friday 13 November, 2015

IMG_7117I spent the past week in Sydney, helping our second daughter move into her new apartment. This was a larger task than either she or I had anticipated so left little time for things horticultural. But oh the jacarandas were lovely, used widely as street trees and in front gardens in the eastern suburbs. Sydney is a great deal warmer than Tikorangi – our jacaranda will not bloom here until mid summer. IMG_7111

IMG_7141Daughter’s apartment is on the third floor. No lift. It’s not too bad – the stairs are well designed to make it easy. But I mention the third floor because that is several Magnolia Little Gems and a handsome red bougainvillea growing level with her apartment balcony. I have written about this evergreen magnolia before and have for many years suggested that its name is only ‘Little Gem’ as compared to a hypothetical Extremely Giant Gem. Three stories high so far, and these trees are not fully mature. What is more, whenever you see it photographed, it is usual to see a pristine white bloom and it certainly has a beautiful form. Alas each flower only lasts a day or two so one ends up with brown blooms – still with an attractive form – until they disintegrate, but never a tree covered in a mass of pure white. IMG_7138

IMG_7135Over the years I have seen a number of small English backyards where the only access way is via the house and thought that would be tricky. I can now say that these are eclipsed by apartments with no lift. ‘I will repot her container plants while I am here,’ I thought. Or at least the kentia palm and the tired peace lily which looked as if it was on the point of surrendering. I briefly toyed with carrying the plants down to the potting mix where there was a bit of communal garden so the mess wouldn’t matter, but decided it would be easier to carry the potting mix up and do it on the balcony. I wasn’t sure there was an outdoor tap and the rootballs needed a good soak. Logistically, it is harder than you think. Believe me. I was trying to contain the mess but even so some of the debris and the water went over the edge and I worried about alienating the lower apartment residents. The spent potting mix then had to be carried downstairs to spread. These were new challenges for me and I will look upon apartment gardeners with even greater respect. Undeterred, Daughter reclaimed her closed unit worm farm from a previous dwelling and located it discreetly at the back of the ‘landscaped’ communal area. Her kitchen scraps need to be carried downstairs anyway, so she figured she might as well keep them separate, feed the worms and use the liquid fertiliser they generate. It makes you proud to be the parent.

IMG_7132The kentia palm, I noted, is in fact three kentias (Howea forsteriana from Lord Howe Island) and there were at least five seeds sown in the original pot. That is a nursery technique to get a larger plant in a shorter space of time. Naturally I wondered about separating them but daughter needed one attractive kentia, not three smaller ones going into shock from such brutal treatment.

IMG_7128Greater love hath no mother than shopping for plastic items in Kmart but I did also get to wander through the plant section of a Bunnings store while we were doing a mission in search of home handyperson supplies. For $A26.90, you can buy a novelty houseplant of germinated “Black Bean” seeds. These are Castanospermum australe. I use the word novelty because these are not designed to grow to maturity but to be a disposable houseplant. More gratifyingly, I spotted a stand of small  plants of Mark’s new daphne, Perfume Princess.IMG_7130

There is nothing quite like finding a little bit of home in a Sydney garden centre.

Plant Collector: Castanospermum australe

A mission requiring the tall extension ladder - gathering the Castanospermum australe flowers

A mission requiring the tall extension ladder - gathering the Castanospermum australe flowers

It was just a little difficult to photograph the orange pea flowers on the castanopsermum, owing to the fact that they are at least 10 metres up the tree and beyond the limit of my camera’s zoom. Getting this photograph entailed Mark on the end of the extension ladder cutting a branch to bring down to ground level. The tree itself is probably getting closer to 20 metres now, though it has taken several decades to get there. I was slightly alarmed to see that it has the potential to reach 40 metres high in its natural habitat of east coast Australia, particularly Queensland, but I doubt that it will reach that in our cooler climate, or indeed in my lifetime.

The common names for this plant are Black Bean Tree (on account of its large black seeds held, as legumes are, in a pod) and Moreton Bay Chestnut. Indeed castanea means chestnut in Latin and that is where it gets its name from. It has always been much on my conscience that many years ago when we sold a few of these (and painfully slow they were, to get grown to saleable size), in my ignorance I assumed that the common name of Moreton Bay Chestnut meant the seeds were edible. They can be eaten – if you are Aboriginal and understand the painstaking process of rendering toxic seeds edible (a bit like karaka berries in this country). Lacking that knowledge, poisoning is more likely. As the tree takes some time to flower, I am hoping that my incorrect plant labels will long since have faded into oblivion so nobody tries eating the seeds.

The tree is evergreen and has handsome, pale green, large pinnate leaves – pinnate meaning divided like a feather. Should it outgrow its space here, apparently the timber is attractively grained like walnut.