Tag Archives: Dombeya burgessiae

Tikorangi Notes: June 18, 2010

LATEST POSTS:

1) June 18, 2010 Camellia Diplomacy to breach closed doors in China in 1970 didn’t work, but the correspondence from Rewi Alley to Mark’s parents is pretty interesting forty years later – Abbie’s column.

2) June 18, 2010 The flowers of Dombeya burgessiae make a change to the more common camellias putting on a mid-winter show.

3) June 18, 2010 In the garden this week – recommended tasks from winter pruning, cleaning up pleione bulbs to the short directions on preparing an asparagus bed. Don’t forget to plant only NZ grown garlic.

4) Our annual garden festival at the end of October is still four months off, but gardeners around the province have preparations in hand and are counting down to Festival.

Mandarins - fetching winter colour in the garden

TIKORANGI NOTES:
The winter sight of mandarins ripening in the garden here at Tikorangi never fails to delight me. My memories of my Dunedin childhood in the relatively deep south are of mandarins as a fleeting seasonal luxury to be treasured and savoured. I couldn’t believe the sight of entire trees dripping in the little orange orbs when Mark first brought me to his family home. This particular one is easy peel and productive but not the best flavour. However, it puts on a splendid visual display and combines well with the ferns, orange and yellow Lachenalia aloides beneath.

Rescuing the lawnmower from a watery slide

We are sodden here and entire days without rain are a rare treat, or so it seems after the last couple of weeks. Mowing the park yesterday, Lloyd managed to put our prized Walker mower in a slide which saw it in imminent danger of gently slipping into the stream. A chain and the tractor were called for. Roll on spring.

Flowering this week: Dombeya burgessiae

Dombeya burgessiae is more autumn flowering in its homelands but here it is blooming in mid winter

Dombeya burgessiae is more autumn flowering in its homelands but here it is blooming in mid winter

In the mid winter world of June, it is a little difficult to find flowering shrubs in the garden which are not camellias. Mind you, some parts of the gardening world don’t expect any foliage, let alone flowers, in their gardens in winter so we mustn’t complain. But our dombeya is looking very fetching this week. It has full heads of soft pink bells, each with a deep pink starburst in the centre and pure white stamens along with lovely velvety foliage. Apparently the common name for D. burgessiae is the pink wild pear but as we have never seen any fruit or seed pod that resembles a pear, wild or otherwise, this is a slight mystery to us. There are quite few different dombeyas, mostly from Madagascar, but not that many different ones in cultivation. Burgessiae occurs naturally in the Natal area up through Tanzania and is a plant for forest margins, much favoured as a food crop by black rhinos but we have been unable to test this claim in our garden with rhinos, black, white or any other colour.

The origin gives a clue: this genus is generally used to hotter, drier conditions and not suited to frost. We grow our pink dombeya in reasonably open conditions on a warm hillside but the hedge behind gives it some protection. Where frosts are heavier than a few degrees, it would need to be a conservatory plant. While not common in this country, the dombeya is easy enough to strike from cutting for the keen home gardener if you can find somebody with a plant.