Tag Archives: gardening

Plant Collector: Magnolia laevifolia “Velvet and Cream”

Now renamed Magnolia laevifolia

Now renamed Magnolia laevifolia

The naming of this plant is a complicated story. It was and still is widely sold as Michelia yunnanensis. It then had a fling with the name Magnolia dianica but is now Magnolia laevifolia. There are sound reasons for the changing name but it makes it confusing. In this country, it is almost a certainty that you will find it sold under its original name of M. yunnanesis. Michelias have now been reclassified as magnolias. Though evergreen, their foliage is much finer than the tough grandiflora types we normally associate with evergreen magnolias.

“Velvet and Cream” is a particularly good flowered form first released by former Cambridge nurseryman, Peter Cave. It has larger flowers in a beautiful cup form. M. laevifolia sets seed so prolifically that every man and their dog has raised seedlings and named them – some are better than others. Grown in open conditions with full sun, plants will stay bushier and more compact but generally these plants are a little slow to get established but eventually make small trees around the 3 metre mark if not trimmed. They are generally sold as fragrant, though I have yet to find one that has more than just a hint of perfume.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Reviewing accepted garden practice

Lawncare - one of the worst culprits in environmental vandalism

Lawncare – one of the worst culprits in environmental vandalism

I caught most of an extended interview with Fiona Eadie on National Radio last Monday. She is the head gardener at Larnach’s Castle just outside Dunedin. For me, the most interesting aspect was when she commented that much of our traditional gardening practice is bad. Just bad. Hear the clanging of bells, dear gardening readers. Change is coming.

It has been interesting to see the speed at which criticism of modern dairying practice has gathered momentum. It used to be that farmers held a pretty unassailable position, immune to criticism. Not any longer – environmental practices are coming under the microscope and the sure sign of pressure is the growing defensiveness in the sector.

Expect the same thing to happen in gardening. We have been talking about garden practices here for quite a long time and gently changing our ways. A trip to the UK a few years ago was a wake-up call. In the gardening sector, there was a lot more talk and action on beneficial gardening and sound environmental practice. It comes through most of the UK gardening programmes we get here (the main reason we subscribe to Sky) and also through their garden print media. It is a snowball that is gathering size and speed.

It may not be that long before a near perfect lawn is no longer a badge of honour but a sign that you are an environmental vandal. There is a direct correlation – the better your lawn, the worse your environmental score card. You cannot achieve that perfection without major intervention in the form of very frequent mowing (twice a week, I just read someone claim), removing all clippings which means you have to apply nitrogen based fertiliser frequently (once a month, the aforementioned lawn owner said) spraying, scarifying, summer watering and generally maintaining a complete monoculture. At its most extreme, even the worms are poisoned off. After all, worm casings spoil the green velvet. In fact none of this is good practice at all. While we appreciate the restful green interlude that lawns give, we have long since abandoned anything other than mowing with a mulcher mower and a bit of judicious hand weeding. Our lawns are less than perfect but at least they are non toxic. Greater purists abandon lawns altogether but that is a step too far for us.

Roses need considerable intervention to stay lush through summer

Roses need considerable intervention to stay lush through summer

Similarly, perfect luscious looking roses without a hint of disease in high summer and autumn may become an advertisement for your bad practice rather than a sign of care. You can’t achieve that state without regular spraying and heavy supplementary feeding and watering. The healthy buxus hedge in urban areas may be frowned upon in due course now that the dreaded blight has taken such firm hold. A healthy appearance is likely to be a sign of regular chemical intervention.

Gardeners have substantially reduced the use of sprays, in part because the Government has placed so many restrictions on the availability of many that were in routine use. That happened because many are either highly dangerous or downright environmentally bad. So the gardener who told me she drenched her alpines weekly with fungicide to keep them alive in lowland conditions may soon be accused of bad practice rather than cleverness in keeping such plants alive and healthy outside their natural habitat. At least we have moved on (I hope) from the Paraquat days when that highly toxic weekiller was used interchangeably with the much safer glyphosate. Mark remembers a neighbour in our Dunedin days whose Friday routine was to spray all edges, paths and any visible weeds with Paraquat. We have been frowning at brown sprayed edges for years – not a good look in a garden and not good practice.

I hope we will see a change from the rampant consumerism promoted by many garden centres sooner rather than later. Fertiliser use needs a good hard look. Frankly it is no more acceptable to routinely use chemical fertilisers in the garden than it is to saturate farmland in the quest for increased production. The very notion that the slow release bubble fertilisers, some of which are encased in a non biodegradable coating, are suitable for garden use is a shocker. They are developed for container growing (and are expensive) but I have seen garden centres promoting their use in garden situations.

My local garden centre has a major display at its entranceway of heavy duty plastic bags filled with all manner of mulches and mixes. It is one thing buying the occasional bag of seed raising mix or potting mix. It is quite another to load large numbers of these prepackaged consumable commodities onto your trailer so you can fill your new raised bed with a soil mix trucked halfway across the island and then mulch with peastraw shipped from a similar distance in the other direction.

It’s all about sustainability – making sure that our quest for beauty in our gardens does not come at the cost of degrading the environment. We have a long way to go with this debate in New Zealand but it was heartening to hear Fiona Eadie bringing a similar message. Maybe the time has come to review practices we have taken for granted and to take steps to ensure that our gardens actually enhance nature instead of wounding it.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Plant Collector: Erythronium revolutum

The transient delight of dogs tooth violets - Erythronium revolutum

The transient delight of dogs tooth violets – Erythronium revolutum

Of all the fleeting seasonal delights, the dogs tooth violets or erythroniums might take the award for ephemera. They are so pretty and dainty and they are here today and gone pretty soon after. We probably only get ten days out of them in flower and a bad bout of weather can knock the display for the year. But we still get a great deal of pleasure from them. The flowers are like nodding hats while the compact foliage is often gently mottled or marbled in green and maroon.

There are about 20 different species, all in the Liliaceae family, but some of them just won’t perform in our climate. Many prefer cooler conditions and dry summers. As far as we know, what we have are mainly seed raised E. revolutum which is native to the west coast of USA. They thrive in humus rich conditions on woodland margins where the soil stays moist and there are reasonable light levels. The corms are interesting, being long and narrow and alarmingly easy to snap in two when disturbed. They find their own depth, often burrowing down quite deep, out of harm’s way.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Garden lore

A partial quote this week, relevant to changeable spring weather, which I noted some years ago from none other than Billy Connelly: “There is no such thing as bad weather,” he boldly asserted on television. He went on to blame television weather presenters for continually referring to sunny days as “good” and rainy days as “bad”, causing depression in people who live in high rainfall areas.

“There is no such thing as bad weather. There are only the wrong clothes.”

Tikorangi The Jury Garden

The time to hard prune camellias and rhododendrons is running out so do it right now before spring advances further. That way, the plants will still be able to flush with new growth on what remains. If you leave pruning and shaping camellias too late, you end up cutting off most of next year’s flower buds. However, you do have to sacrifice this year’s rhododendron flowering if you are wanting to cut plants back hard. If you leave it until after blooming, you are more likely to kill the plant instead. Timing is of the essence. Birds are nesting so check before you murder their babies as collateral damage with your pruning efforts.

Published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Repetition – unifying a garden or downright dull?

A surfeit of renga renga lilies repeated throughout your garden is highly unlikely to unify it

A surfeit of renga renga lilies repeated throughout your garden is highly unlikely to unify it

How often have you heard the advice to repeat the same plant in your garden to achieve continuity? It has almost achieved truism status though I would argue that this is one piece of so-called garden wisdom that too few people ever question. In fact I would go so far as to suggest that you are better to cast that piece of clichéd advice out to the wilderness and ignore it.

I don’t know where it originated, though I would hazard a guess it was from within the landscape sector. Now it is just repeated mindlessly as a golden rule.

The first time I was aware of a plant being repeated through a garden was with Dahlia Bonne Esperance. It is a baby dahlia with pink daisy flowers and increases readily (lights should be flashing here for you, dear Reader) and it featured throughout this person’s garden. Far from giving continuity, in fact it looked like a cheap, gaudy dot plant (as in dotted around everywhere). Therein lies the problem. When the advice is dispensed so glibly that you should repeat a plant to give continuity, there never seems to be any corresponding advice as to what types of plant are most effective. And in the absence of such advice, too many gardeners fall upon an option that is cheap to start with and easy to increase.

Acanthus mollis or bears' breeches - too close to weed status to be a desirable repeat planting

Acanthus mollis or bears’ breeches – too close to weed status to be a desirable repeat planting

I am sorry to say that many plantings of renga renga lilies are not going to enhance and unify your garden. The same goes for mondo grass, liriope, catmint (nepeta), the dreaded aluminium plant (lamium), common hostas which bulk up readily, Acanthus mollis, or Ligularia ‘Britt-Marie Crawford’. They are just going to look boring and repetitive when used again and again throughout.

Truly, you can have too much, even of a good thing. I have seen gardens which suffer from the ABC syndrome (another bloody clivia), or the oh no, TMBBH trait (too many big blue hostas). You need a deft hand and very good eye to make it work well.

There may be a difference between large and small gardens here. It is a long time since I have had a small garden but I can see that restricting the plant palette and using a repeating motif could help mitigate the bitsy effect so many gardens suffer from. But if you are determined to repeat a plant, try and make it a choice one. Trilliums are good. Paris, too. Though there is a possibility that the originator of the recommendation was thinking more in terms of pencil cypress or topiary yew – a woody plant rather than a perennial. I am fairly sure he or she was not thinking of Dahlia Bonne Esperance or renga rengas.

In a large garden, hmmm. As far as I am concerned, a large garden succeeds better when it has distinct changes of mood and style. To repeat a plant or plants throughout renders it too much the same and that is when large gardens become rambling, indistinct, and not very memorable. Unless you want to be remembered as, “Oh, that was the garden with all the orange clivias/acanthus mollis/buxus hedging/catmint/day lilies.” (Strike out those which do not apply.) We prefer to aim for different groups of plants in different areas, rather than mixing and matching throughout or streaming one particular plant through the lot.

That said, there are exceptions. We are steadily drifting English snowdrops throughout (on the grounds that you can’t have too many fleeting seasonal wonders and they are satisfyingly compatible with most situations – and transient, not year round). Mark has observed before that it is rhododendrons that form a backbone of continuity to our garden. But it is not just the one rhododendron that we have repeated. While we favour the nuttalliis (the rhodo equivalent of trilliums, one could say), we have multiple different varieties used in different combinations throughout. I don’t think that is what is meant by repeating a plant for continuity.

If I have failed to convince you that the interest in a garden lies in different plant combinations, interesting plants and variety, then I would at least make a plea for considering seedling variation. Mark and I looked at a planting in a garden – a hillside of red rhododendrons all the same. They will be showy in flower and look unified in conformity when not in bloom. They are also, to our eyes, dull, utility and public sector amenity planting (and it was a public garden too). What sets a private garden apart is the opportunity and scope to detail such a planting. Had it been done in seedling raised rhododendrons (collected from the same parent plant), there would have been the overall unity but subtle variation to add interest. The same goes for a range of plants – from pohutukawa to hostas. Raising them from seed takes time but gives interest and detail which is lacking when you order in a mass of one plant only.

But then we never have been fans of mass planting and massed display. The devil may be in the detail but so is the gardening interest.

If you are determined to unify through repeat planting, at least pick something with bragging rights - desirable dark red trilliums, perhaps

If you are determined to unify through repeat planting, at least pick something with bragging rights – desirable dark red trilliums, perhaps

First published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.