Tag Archives: gardening

Be bold with colour. White is not always right.

My first ever video upload (two minutes of a mass of tui in a campanulata cherry tree) and notes on the magnolias in flower have just been posted on www.jury.co.nz (our garden website).

Winter colour on the mandarin tree - and food for tui

Winter colour on the mandarin tree – and food for tui

It was most refreshing this week to receive an email from a reader seeking recommendations on a suitable sasanqua camellia for a hedge. “Anything but white,” was her request. I liked her instantly. White flowered camellia hedges can indeed look pretty and fresh but have become such a cliché in this country (especially as nine out of ten white sasanqua hedges are Setsugekka). It is most unusual for someone to specify colour.

We have a curious obsession with white flowers in this country. Why is Iceberg still the biggest selling rose here? Probably followed by the white Margaret Merrill or Rose Flower Carpet White. They are good plants but are they much better than other coloured options? No, they are just white. According to the Rose Flower Carpet agents, the coloured ones are much more popular overseas and it is mostly NZ that prizes the white. My informant put this down to our mild climate here and the fact that we are never snowbound. “If you spend months of the year looking at a white landscape,” he said, “the last thing you want is a garden of white flowers.”

I think it is conservatism. For the same reason, the trend is to have a near absence of colour on interior walls of the house (usually off white because pure white can be too stark and clinical to live with). Too often we play it safe in the garden. The garden backdrop of green is, for some curious reason, perceived as colour neutral and into that we drop another neutral in the form of white flowers. Call it serene, restful, stylish and sophisticated if you wish. In the right hands and at its best, it is. In lesser hands, it can be bland and dull. But safe. You can always be confident that your garden will be perceived by some as being in good taste if you keep to white, maybe with just the occasional colour thrown in as a feature (but just one colour, mind).

Fewer try the monochromatic scheme in other colours – though it is of course bichromatic (is there such a word?) because they are all plus green. Sissinghurst has its purple border, Hidcote its red border and both are beautiful in full summer bloom, but in NZ we tend to keep to white.

You can never have too much blue in the garden - especially if it is meconopsis

You can never have too much blue in the garden – especially if it is meconopsis

My first ever colour managed garden was to be all pinks, blues and whites. It looked pretty, but flat. Mark stood looking and said, “You need a touch of yellow.” He was so right. These days that garden remains predominantly pink, blue and white but it is the lemon and cerise (the latter, a surprisingly common colour in flowers) that give it some zing. Hence my choice of the Gertrude Jekyll quote below. Pastel gardens tend to be very feminine but they can be a little too “pastelle”, bordering on bland unless you get it absolutely right.

If you are unsure, go back to the colour wheel. It is touches of the opposite colour that will provide contrast. So yellow will be highlighted by purple, red by green and blue by orange. It does work. That said, I think blue flowers and foliage fit in with everything and you can never have too much blue in a garden. There is no theory to back that one up so it is entirely my personal opinion.

Colour to brighten a gloomy day - Magnolia Vulcan

Colour to brighten a gloomy day – Magnolia Vulcan

On a wintery day, however, I don’t want pastels or unrelieved green. Give me colour. The mandarin trees are a bright spot on a gloomy day, especially when populated by tui sucking the juice from damaged fruit. Most of our early flowering magnolias are in strong colours and can lift the spirits wonderfully with their over the top displays. The early flowering campanulata cherries lean to bright candy pink and cerise colours which are certainly a startling colour combination with the bright gold narcissi in bloom. There is no subtlety in any of those but I am not going to trade them for refined white flowers instead.

There is nothing subtle about the bright yellow of early narcissus

There is nothing subtle about the bright yellow of early narcissus

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

Garden lore

It is a curious thing that people will sometimes spoil some garden project for the sake of a word. For instance, a blue garden, for beauty’s sake, may be hungering for a group of white lilies, or for something of palest yellow, but it is not allowed to have it because it is called the blue garden and there must be no flowers in it but blue flowers…. My own idea is that it should be beautiful first, and then just be as blue as may be consistent with its best possible beauty.

Gertrude Jekyll Colour in the Flower Garden (1908)

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Dealing to moss

The easiest way I know to kill moss growing in the wrong places is to lightly sprinkle soda ash. This is in fact powdered washing soda (sodium carbonate or Na2CO3 for the scientifically inclined) and you can buy it from bulk bins. Cold Water Surf is often recommended and does work. I am guessing Cold Water Surf contains a relatively high proportion of soda ash as a water softener because it works much better than the budget washing powder I tried. Having found what the active ingredient is, I now prefer to use straight soda ash without the unnecessary extras. It is non toxic and occurs naturally so, as far as I know, is not going to harm the environment. It kills moss overnight though you then have to wire brush the dead moss off hard surfaces or rake it out of lawns. Experiment lightly – it doesn’t take a lot to be effective.

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

Plant Collector: Camellia Sweet Jane

Sweet little Sweet Jane

Sweet little Sweet Jane

How pretty Camellia Sweet Jane looks at the moment. The flowers are darker pink on the outer petals fading to the faintest blush in the centre with a hint of golden stamens. It is a full flower, described in the camellia world as a peony form and it only measures about 5cm across so it is classified as a miniature. Yes it gets petal blight, but there is such a generous bud set that it still manages a good display over time. It came to this country in the 1990s from Australian breeder Ray Garnett. Readers who know their camellias may be surprised to learn that one of its parents is C. transnokoensis.

In that nineties rage for miniature camellia flowers, many people assumed that the bushes would also stay obligingly small. Few do. Our Sweet Jane, unclipped, is now about 3.5 metres tall and that is true for many of those small flowered varieties like Cinnamon Cindy and Gay Baby. But they do at least have correspondingly small leaves and are easy to clip if you want them kept lower. Camellias only need clipping once a year after flowering, or twice if you are after a tighter form.

We used to grow Sweet Emily Kate commercially. It came from the same breeder and its flower is arguably prettier (and pleasantly scented). Now that we are no longer selling it, I will admit it was a wonderful nursery plant and could look good if well cared for as a container plant but I’ve never seen it looking good planted out in the garden and left to its own devices. Sweet Jane is a much superior plant.

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

Tikorangi Notes: Friday 10 August, 2012

Lanarth again - at its best against our blue skies

Lanarth again – at its best against our blue skies

Aloe aloe aloe

Aloe aloe aloe

I was caught slightly on the hop this week when somebody rang from the Wairarapa, planning a garden visit. I suggested another week would be better for the magnolia display and he asked what else was in flower. I burbled on, mentioning the big-leafed rhododendrons, michelias and camellias. I could also have reeled off the campanulata cherries, swathes of early flowering narcissi, vireya rhododendrons, hellebores, early clivias, azaleas, the last of the snowdrops, early lachenalias, calanthe and cymbidium orchids, Cyclamen coum, bromeliads, even some of the aloes. Mark keeps reminding me that in harsher climates, gardens don’t have flowers all year round. We take it for granted here and while August is technically winter, the spring flowering has started in earnest now. It is unstoppable. Mind, the magnolias did not appreciate the hail storm two days ago. I went out looking for a good photograph and the first Vulcan blooms all looked as if somebody had ripped all the edges of the petals. Give it another few days, and many replacement blooms will have opened. It is a magic time of year here and the birds are in agreement too.

Cymbidium orchids in the woodland

Cymbidium orchids in the woodland

All the early narcissi are in flower

All the early narcissi are in flower

Plant Collector: Acer Senkaki or A. 'Sango-kaku'

Acer Senkaki, as it is commonly referred to in NZ

Acer Senkaki, as it is commonly referred to in NZ

These vibrant red branches belong to what is commonly known as Acer Senkaki, or the coral-bark maple. I will go with Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society’s note that in fact, the correct name is Acer palmatum var. dissectum ‘Sango-kaku’. I wonder if Senkaki is the anglicising of Sango-kaku? The RHS gave it their prestigious Award of Garden Merit.

This is one of the Japanese maples with finely cut leaves (which explains the dissectum bit of the name), in five lobes or fingers (hence palmatum). The leaves are pale green tones throughout most of the season, colouring to gold in autumn. However, mostly one grows it for the glorious winter bark. It is a tree, albeit a smallish one. Over time it will get maybe five metres high by three metres wide.

I photographed this specimen in a country garden, Puketarata, where it stands as a splendid feature all on its own on a hillside, so it is able to viewed in its entirety. It really lit up a bleak winter Sunday afternoon.

Most maples need to be out of the blast of winds because their foliage is soft and relatively fragile. If the roots dry out over summer, the plant shows stress by burnt edges to its leaves. So positions which are well sheltered and moist all year round without getting waterlogged will give the best results. Grown well, the Japanese maples are lush and lacy in appearance and give superb autumn colour.

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