Tag Archives: garden maintenance

‘Doing the broms’

I have been ‘doing the broms’, as we say here. That is the once-a-year thorough workover in the Rimu Avenue. We have complex subtropical woodland planting throughout this area, but in square metreage terms, bromeliads are the dominant plant. This always brings back the memory of the rude old biddy who got into the garden for free on account of being brought here by a neighbour up the road. “I loathe bromeliads,” she declared as she stood in the middle of the Rimu Avenue. “Well you won’t like this part of the garden then,” I replied crisply, getting out of their company as fast as I could. When it comes to insults, I am like an elephant – I never forget.

More a symphony of texture and form than bright colour for much of the year
It is not entirely bereft of bright colour. The Hippeastum aulicum are glorious at this time of year and clivias in yellow, orange and red will follow

This avenue has long been one of our most admired areas. First started in the late 1950s, by Mark’s dad, Felix and then doubled in length 40 years later by Mark, it is probably unique in terms of an interesting, remarkably sustainable and low maintenance woodland garden adapted to our climate. Because it is completely frost-free, we can grow true subtropicals beneath the towering canopy of rimu trees (Dacrydium cupressinum) which are now over 150 years old. All up, it is an area somewhere over 2500 square metres, maybe even near 3000.

The Rimu Avenue is roughly 100 metres in length and variable in width

It is undemanding in terms of maintenance. During the year, we will remove dead branches and larger debris that falls from above. It is largely free of weeds, being in shade and having been gardened for so many years, although we are forever removing seedling prunus, nikau palms and wretched bangalow palms. Since we cut down the seeding bangalow (Archontophoenix cunninghamiana), the incidence of those seedlings will phase out in a few years.

We like a highly detailed garden and, while this area may be low maintenance by our standards, it remains diverse and detailed.

Once a year, I start at one end and work my way to the other end, picking over every plant. Yes, it is a big job and it takes about two weeks of intense labour but the difference is rewarding and it is not heavy work. When I say two weeks, it is probably 60 hours which represents just over an hour a week across the year to maintain a major area of garden. I admit that does not include Zachs’s time as he works along the margins or Lloyd’s time removing my mountains of debris. So maybe this annual exercise equates to an average of two hours a week, except we do it in one hit.

Lloyd must have dealt with about 20 times this volume so far. it is a prodigious amount.

When I say mountains of debris, I mean that Lloyd is removing about two packed wool bales a day of my prunings. We used to dump it in our bush across the road to rot down in its own time but this year, Lloyd has been putting it through the mulcher and then using it in compost which is more labour intensive, but we get to use the end result. You can never have too much weed-free compost.

Before
and after

It is the bromeliads that generate most of the waste. Almost every bromeliad only flowers once and then the centre dies off – although the dying process can take more than a year or even three. While this is happening, the plant puts new shoots or pups out from the base of the old crown, or adjacent to it, and it is those new growths that will flower in the future. You can leave them to their own devices and the oldest parts will eventually die, dry and become dislodged but the clumps can get very congested and messy. I go through and remove the crowns that flowered last year.

Before
and after

The strategy to removing them is to take the time to look at each variety to see where the new shoots are coming from. Some appear from inside the bottom layer of leaves so if you just cut through the base of the rosette, you are cutting off all the replacement young growths. Every variety is a bit different but that is also what keeps the task interesting. They will all be shooting from somewhere near the base if the time is right to remove the old crown.

And the last before
and after.

Even though we have been doing this for years, it never fails to amaze us just how much volume is removed and yet the remaining planting never looks bare. It just looks fresh. It is one of the more rewarding garden maintenance tasks on our gardening calendar.

Those are monstera – the fruit salad plant – climbing up the trees. A long way up.

It wasn’t just the bromeliads. Zach and I removed huge amounts of Monstera deliciosa which had become monstrous indeed. We are fine with them climbing up; they add to the tropical look. Spreading outwards was another issue and removing most of the stems from the lower two metres opens up the views through which gives the feeling of more depth and distance in the garden. As he hauled out large amounts for mulching, many with aerial roots, Zach was musing how appalled plant sellers on Trade Me would be to see the wanton destruction of plant material they could sell at exorbitant prices!

Lowest, lower, lowish and high maintenance gardening

“What do you think is the lowest maintenance form of gardening?” I asked Mark.

His response was immediate: “Plant shrubs and spray the ground beneath with RoundUp.”

He is right. All outdoor space needs some maintenance just as we routinely maintain indoors. Even if you concrete or deck most of your area, it still needs some attention. The concrete will need sweeping and probably some attention to moss growth with weeds finding purchase in any cracks or natural build-up of litter. Using pavers or cobbles requires quite a bit more attention as there are many more opportunities for weeds to get established. And lawns – or mown grass if that better describes your green sward – needs regular mowing even if you ignore all the other interventions and care that many lavish on their lawn.

Probably the most memorable wild garden I have seen but it was in harsh conditions which would restrict growth, on a big scale, created with skill and while lower in maintenance requirements, it was not free of any need for some gardening interventions.

How about wild gardens? Yes, that is a lower maintenance style of garden but it also takes a much higher level of skill to find the right balance. There is a fine line between a wild garden and an unkempt wilderness. The same goes for cottage gardening. It is a fine line and quite a bit of skill that differentiates a cottage garden from a wild garden. The wild look will not appeal to many (most?) people who just want a tidy back yard. Wild gardens are an acquired and thoughtful taste.

I don’t take many photos of Mark’s vegetable garden because it leans to the wild side but he can tell you after growing vegetables all our married life that it is anything but low maintenance.

Vegetable gardening is anything but low maintenance. Don’t believe any of the trite commentary that you can have a productive vegetable garden with very little effort. You can’t. Getting a decent crop and some continuity in supply takes a whole lot more work on an ongoing basis. What about trendy food forests?  It takes an even higher level of skill to manage a productive food forest. You actually need to know what you are doing if you want regular harvests. In less skilled hands, a food forest will soon morph into a wild garden on track to becoming a wilderness with very little food produced for humans, although the birds, insects, rats, mice and rabbits may thank you.

By our standards, our shade gardens are on the much lower maintenance side

Shade gardens tend to be lower maintenance because plant growth is much slower in areas without sun and the soil is not cultivated to the same extent. The shade and woodland areas here are the lowest maintenance areas we have and I can say that confidently with decades of experience. They are less demanding even, than the sunny meadow. But they are not no-maintenance, just lower maintenance and that is all dependent on tree cover. New Zealanders are not known for a love of trees in domestic gardens – maybe because our housing stock is not generally of high quality and we want all the solar warmth and light we can get.

No, truly, this lovely summer scene of Scadoxus katherinae really is very low maintenance in the shade

The risk with trees is greater if you get the selection wrong in the first place, or the placement wrong and then fail to carry out maintenance as required to ensure that it is a good shape and in good health. The cost of remedial work or removal of an established tree is a whole lot higher than a shrub. That is why Mark recommends keeping to shrubs if you want low maintenance.

If money is no object, you can have what you want. You can pay a good designer and then pay a skilled maintenance crew to come in and do the work but it will be an ongoing commitment. Just as houses need cleaning, attractive outdoor spaces and gardens need attention too.

This particular formal garden was not low budget but I lack photos of the DIY low budget/low maintenance option that I consider is much less demanding of both skill and maintenance.

If you are operating on a lower budget, my advice given in earlier posts stands: plant a formal garden with a very limited range of plants. It is all about the look, the photograph. In practical terms, it takes regular attention to maintain the pristine level of care a formal garden requires but there is no great skill in carrying that out. You don’t need a competent gardener to maintain that, just somebody with a penchant for tidiness.

Apartment living avoids the expectation to maintain the outdoors area

If you can’t afford to pay somebody to come in and do your outside maintenance that you don’t wish to do yourself, and you live in a city, then buy an upper floor apartment. The body corporate will take responsibility for all the shared outdoor space. If you buy an apartment that looks out over green space and trees, the view may be all you need.

Or plant shrubs and buy a sprayer and a good supply of glyphosate. Not that I am recommending this as desirable, but it is a lower maintenance option. Shun detail and shun underplanting.

Our Wild North Garden will remain wild but not a wilderness

This train of thought came about because I am much absorbed by our perennial gardens – the new summer gardens, the semi-wild Iolanthe cottage garden and the Wild North Garden. We have a new part-time gardener. This is very exciting for us – a strong, young person with some skills is like a breath of fresh air in our ageing establishment. His first project is working in the Wild North Garden to get it to a standard that we think necessary before we open it to garden visitors.  Meantime, I am taking apart and completely replanting the perennials in a little-noticed shrub and perennial border that edges the sunken garden area. It was anonymous because it wasn’t working very well and I want more visual oomph.

An anonymous sort of border that I felt needed some major tarting up but only of the underplanted perennials

I came to the conclusion that the highest maintenance form of gardening that I can think of is in fact gardening with sunny perennials. It is taking a lot more work than I thought it would. Fortunately, we are of the Christopher Lloyd (he of Great Dixter) school of thought. To paraphrase him in a comment we once saw on TV, “I think you will find that the higher maintenance your garden is, the more interesting it is.” In high maintenance gardening, you notice the detail and the changes, not just the single snap-shot big picture. That is what keeps us absorbed here, even if as it keeps us busy.

Gardening with sunny perennials here has the highest maintenance requirements but we find the rewards outweigh the efforts required. Less enthusiastic gardeners may not.

I just issue the general warning that if you want a low maintenance garden, don’t go down the track of gardening with sunny perennials. At least not in our climate with its benign growing conditions and rampant growth.

Seven days from the winter solstice – Tikorangi this week

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The white form of Dahlia imperialis

The last tree dahlia of the season is in bloom. Dahlia imperialis alba plena is the towering giant of them all, way up in the sky, not blooming until well into winter so particularly vulnerable to frosts and winter gales. I took this photo yesterday to show those in other climates the intensity of winter light that we get here on sunny days. It is different to those who garden where the winter sun hangs lower in the sky. We are not tropical; I don’t want to mislead. It is almost mid-winter and can be quite chilly. However, it is a lot less depressing to the spirits when you live somewhere with this clarity of bright light, even on the shortest days of the year.

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Miscanthus ‘Morning Light’ shimmering in the late afternoon light

IMG_7040We are now well into what Piet Oudolf refers to as the ‘fifth season’ and the new Court Garden brings me much pleasure, especially in the late afternoon when the sun is dropping lower and shines through the miscanthus grasses. I have used a lot of miscanthus running through the garden in waves and the plumes shine in the light and wave gently in any breeze.

IMG_7031IMG_7039I have finally found a place where this large yellow salvia can grow with sufficient space and it is a late autumn – early winter highlight. We have never had a name on this variety so if any readers can identify it for me, I would be grateful. It stands a good two metres tall so it is a large plant to accommodate. *** Now identified as Salvia madrensis, thanks readers.

Tips and techniques for the week:

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Stipa gigantea after a major thinning exercise

  • I took a before photo of this block of Stipa gigantea in the new Court Garden but I appear to have deleted it when I was filing photos. It looked fine at the end of its first year but I knew it wouldn’t stay looking fine and it was already too congested to allow the plants to fountain out and show their natural form. Last week, I took out well over half the plants and gave them away. I did have to lift some of the remaining plants to centre them to their own space but I am much happier with it now so it was worth the effort. I haven’t grown this stipa before and hadn’t realised how much space each plant needs. I am hoping this can now be left alone for a few years at least. It has a white field daisy growing between which I have learned I can get two, maybe three successive flowerings from spring to autumn if I cut it back to the base rosette at the right time.

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    Layering up the prunings at the back, more or less out of sight

  • Out of the ‘I thought it would be a straightforward job that would only take a day and a half at the most but actually took four full days and still isn’t quite finished’ school of thought, I spent this week clearing the wilderness of boundary plantings that separate the caterpillar garden from the boundary with the neighbours’ wool shed and yards. People with big gardens will understand that you have areas which get planted and then mostly left to their own devices. It is one of those jobs you finally tackle when preparing to open the garden to the public again. Nobody will notice I have done it, but they may well have noticed had I not. Over the years, it had become largely impenetrable with self-sown camellias, layered hydrangeas, native seedlings, especially kawakawa and various mounds of vegetation where I had emptied the wheelbarrow of prunings that I didn’t want in the compost heap. It amazes me how far I can get with a sharp pruning saw. Because there was so much of it, I dragged all the debris to the back and layered it by the boundary fence. At some points, it is quite a bit higher than in this photo. It can gently rot down there, adding humus and carbon to the soil and is a lot lighter on labour than carting it all away to compost and mulch. It is a technique we are using quite extensively now and is a tidy, unobtrusive way of dealing with excessive amounts of garden waste. That said, it is a big garden technique, rather than one for small town gardens.

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    On track to be an undulating, curvy hedge like a moving caterpillar

  • I have started a major clipping round on the hedges in what we call the Caterpillar Garden. The hedge is Camellia microphylla, already nearing the end of its flowering season. The plants were pretty neglected -raised from seed and cuttings many years ago and then left to kick around the old nursery until we were ready to use them. We planted them two years ago and the hedges, laid out in the shape of the basket fungus, are still a bit patchy. Mark’s plan is to clip these hedges into mounded, free-form shapes like an undulating caterpillar in the style we associate strongly with UK designer, Tom Stuart Smith. I am doing the first clip this season and have told Mark it is his job to come through and do the final clip of the top to get the mounding shapes he wants.

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    The straight-edged, hard clipped approach

    Most of our clipped hedges here are very straight sided with the top meeting at right angles. Lloyd does them with a string line to keep the lines straight and the hedges a uniform width. He has a good eye for these things. But after spending a fair number of hours clipping and shaping the caterpillar hedge, I can tell you that it is a great deal easier and more pleasurable to work with a more organic shape and form than that military regimentation of the sharper-edged hedges. Informality is much more forgiving than formality.

Does ‘Hit the Deck’ work?

‘Just spray it on, brush it off and rinse.’

I was so discouraged by the state of swimming pool decking that I succumbed to advertising and bought some “Hit the Deck”. I can’t remember how much I paid for it but it wasn’t cheap. But the deck, the deck. We laid it maybe 18 years ago and in the time since, it has been water blasted (jet washed) once. That didn’t do the grooved non-slip surface any good. It is low grade, plantation grown, quick turnover Pinus radiata that we use in this country, tanalised to extend its life span but still a soft wood which will rough up badly with water blasting. Hence the “Hit the Deck” to deal to the blackened and slippery surface before we start swimming this summer.

My test area

Did it work? Yes, but it wasn’t as easy as it looked in the advertisements. If you look closely at the TV advert, they are using it on flat timber, not the grooved product that is widely sold for non-slip decking. It would not just brush off with the stiff broom they sell for this purpose. I did a small test area and found that to get it off, I had to get on my hands and knees with a stiff scrubbing brush. It is not possible to get a powerful enough scrubbing motion at the end of a long handled broom. It is a reasonably large deck and I didn’t fancy doing the whole area on my hands and knees so I handed the job over to Our Lloyd and suggested he try a very light cleaning with the water blaster, so as not to rough up the surface more but to get enough pressure to spray off the mix and the accumulated mosses, moulds and lichens. That worked and it was both faster and not as back-breaking but it still isn’t an easy job that you can knock out in an hour.

The deck looks hugely improved. Not perfect but the decking is getting on in years. So yes, the product does work.

Somewhat belatedly, I looked at what the Hit the Deck contains. I had turned a blind eye to this when I was more worried by the slippery decking. I can report that it is sodium percarbonate. And that, Reader, is a mixture of washing soda and hydrogen peroxide. You can check its chemical properties on Wikipedia which notes: “The product is used in some eco-friendly bleaches and other cleaning products…”. So it is relatively harmless and I guess you could mix your own if you wished and I am sure that it is likely to cheaper because there are no advertising and branding costs to be factored in.

I have written about the moss-killing properties of washing soda or soda ash before. It does work, I can vouch for that.

Found! Low maintenance gardening (of a sort)

The magnolia and te maunga

Magnolia campbellii, the Quaker Mason form

For me, the start of a new gardening year is marked by the opening of the first magnolia bloom. It is a very personal measure of time. This year, it happened this very week. Magnolia campbellii has opened her first blooms on the tree in our park. So I start a new season series of The Magnolia and Te Maunga – ‘te maunga’ being ‘the mountain’ in Maori. Our magnificent Mount Taranaki is commonly referred to simply as ‘the mountain’ by locals because it stands alone and is part of the very being of anyone who was born or now lives within sight of its presence. It is, by the way, an active volcano. With other volcanoes erupting in the world, Mark was moved to comment last week that we do at least live far enough away to get some warning if we ever need to evacuate. I have ascertained that the distance between our magnolia and the peak is 36km as the crow flies, so it is at the limits of my camera zoom.

Beneath the mighty rimu trees

Earlier in the year, we rashly agreed to open the garden for the annual conference of the NZ Camellia Society. I say rashly, only because the August date is coming closer. We closed our garden to the public coming up to five years ago now. While we maintain it to a standard that we are happy with, opening it to others requires a higher standard of presentation. I am beginning to feel the pressure. This week, I started working my way along the garden we call the rimu avenue. It is an area about 100 metres long and up to 25 metres wide, so large enough to accommodate a fair number of townhouses, were it in a major city. Fortunately, we are in the country, so instead of townhouses we have a backbone of 14 majestic rimu trees, now nearing 150 years old. Rimu are a native podocarp, botanically Dacrydium cupressinum. Mark’s great grandfather planted them back in the 1870s and photos show that they have doubled in size in Mark’s lifetime.

Beneath these rimu, we have what is probably the most complex planting of anywhere in our garden. Oddly, it occurred to me this week that it is the least demanding in terms of regular maintenance. This is not related to the complexity of the planting; it is to do with the fact that it is all in dry shade and also to the plant selection over time. In the last five years, we have gone through it and pulled out fallen branches and a bit of occasional debris but it has not had the loving attention to detail that I am currently giving it.

Over time, this area has become a largely self-maintaining matrix planting, an ecosystem in its own right.  There is a little bit of seeding down, but not too much. The *volunteer plants* that arrive are largely ferns, nikau palms, native collospermum and other astelias. The most common weeds are the occasional germinating Prunus campanulata and the cursed bangalow palms. Most weeds need more light. That in itself is worth knowing. If you hate weeding, go for shade gardening.

Piling the debris onto the meandering paths

All I am doing to jazz it up is going through and removing much of the fallen rimu leaf litter and debris which builds up over time, taking out the spent heads of bromeliads, thinning clumps where necessary, a bit of cutting back of shrubby begonias, zygocactus, thinning the thuggish Monstera deliciosa and Philodendron bipinnatifidum and general tidying up. It looks a great deal better for it.

For those who are wondering what plants we have growing in the rimu avenue, I will tell you that when we first went into the enormous subtropical glasshouse at Kew Gardens in London, we felt right at home. There seemed to be a large number of plants growing under glass that we grow under the rimu, an area that is completely frost free. We have a whole range of shade palms, schefflera, vireya rhododendrons, dendrobium orchids, many clivias red, orange and yellow, species hippeastrum bulbs, Crinum moorei, bromeliads galore, ferns and a whole lot more. Everything is interplanted so it is complex and layered full, interesting year-round, as well as low maintenance.  Mark’s father first starting planting this area in the late 1950s so it has only taken 60 years of active management to reach this state of gardening nirvana.

Laying cut lengths beneath

and spreading the mulched leafy waste – yellow because it was mostly berberis

While I am working ‘up the top’, as we say, Mark and Lloyd have been down in the park doing a tidy up of fallen branches and dead shrubs and trees. Chainsaw and mulcher work, mostly. For those who read these posts looking for handy hints, I photographed their techniques for dealing with the waste on site. While they may have removed the bigger pieces for firewood, the smaller lengths of branch and trunk are chainsawed into short lengths and laid beneath large shrubs or trees. Line the lengths up in the same direction and they look neater and more purposeful than being tossed higgledy piggledy. The leafage and finer material has been mulched on site and raked out over a bed of dormant herbaceous planting. These are not techniques for formal or tightly groomed gardens but we find it an acceptable process in informal and more naturalistic areas. And we like the philosophy of keeping the cycle of growth, death and then decay nourishing further fresh growth in the same location.