Tag Archives: Mark and Abbie Jury

Generally unenthused by green flowers and other garden observations

Mark has never been a fan of green flowers. I asked him why and he replied with utter simplicity, “because I like colour”. As I have observed before, green is colour neutral in a garden situation. Maybe Hippeastrum papilio passes muster because it has quite a bit of red in it and has some hefty flower-wow-power but his preference lies with the glowing red of H. aulicum.

I am pleased with H. papilio. We started with a single bulb and now have two good sized patches of it with a profusion of flower spikes this year – at least a dozen on the point of opening in one area alone. It is just patience, time and lifting and dividing that gets a single expensive bulb to a significant block – or an extravagant budget if you want a quicker response. We grow our hippeastrums in woodland conditions because the narcissi fly stay out in the sun so the bulbs don’t get burrowed out by narcissi fly larvae.

We have plenty of green hellebores – Helleborus ‘Sternii’, H. argutifolius and H. foetidus feature heavily in the woodland Avenue Garden – some green arisaemas and a single green orchid but generally I see Mark eyes glaze over with disinterest when green flowers are praised by others. He will go as far as white fading to green or white with streaks of green – but predominantly white, thank you.

I think I was having difficulty getting a good photo in the garden of Helleborus foetidus and, to be honest, it looks more exciting staged

Just the one green orchid but it has a certain grace and style

Yellow clivias, we have a few. Quite a few really.

Some readers may remember when the first yellow clivias became available here, retailing for up to $50 a plant, as I recall. I think about this as I pull out the self-sown seedlings and discard them as surplus to requirements. If you want to raise plants from seed, if the seed is yellow, the plant will flower yellow. Red seed gives orange or red flowered plants. Now the fashion appears to be for the new green flowered varieties, but not here, for reasons already stated. I wouldn’t mind some richer yellow ones but I have only seen one in another garden. The pale yellows can be a bit insipid en masse but really sing when combined with orange and red clivias. Pretty peach clivias would also be a nice addition and are now available but haven’t come our way yet.

The trimming of the Podocarpus parlatorei in the summer gardens

Our focus is entirely on getting the garden ready for opening. Mark is trimming the Podocarpus parlatorei to pillar shapes and he is welcome to this job. It has to be done with secateurs and loppers more than clippers to get the main shape formed. Hopefully it can be done with electric clippers in the future once the shape is defined and the plants have bushed out so it is foliage that needs to be trimmed and not woody branches. The top knots are because he wants to stretch them over to form an archway in time. There are six of them and as the chief shaper is currently incapacitated by a bad shoulder and a cracked rib, it is taking him some time. Notice the old shade cloth spread beneath to capture the mess. Lloyd does the same when he is trimming hedges. It only takes a moment to spread a drop sheet (old sheets or curtains do the same job) yet it makes the clean-up so much faster.

My goal today is to finish down in the park. It is all about tidying in that area, but selective tidying because we like a looser, more natural look in that area. Then it is back up to the top gardens for the final round with fingers crossed that we get no major storms between now and October 30.

Down in the park tidying up so I get to enjoy the wisteria, bluebells and rhododendrons

Rhododendron ‘College Pink’ is both very large and very pink

Following the pink theme, ixias in the new borders

Finally, the bird bath – well used, particularly by tui. It is the outer mill wheel from a grain mill. I used to worry that it wasn’t level until Mark pointed out that is to that small birds can also use it without fear.

Counting down to Festival – 25 days to go

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is img_7791.jpg — Admiring the scale of the Monstera delicoosa climbing a massive rimu tree

We had a film crew in this week, complete with *actors*. The garden was just a venue – the filming is for a major community funding trust but it was more fun than I expected. I was impressed by the gusto shown by the willing participants, if somewhat amused to hear one admiring the ‘snowdrops’ as he walked past a pretty clump of white Dendrobium (orchid) ‘Bardo-Rose’.

In the sunken garden they whipped out their phones because, as they declared, that is what garden visitors do nowadays and how right they are. I don’t do Instagram because it is geared to mobile phones and we lack phone reception here so I continue to use a camera, not a phone. But here we have the videographer filming the visitor photographing the other visitors photographing the blue Moraea villosa.

I was riveted by the drone and hope we may get to see the drone footage at some stage. Now I know who to get in to do some drone footage next year when the magnolias are in full bloom – a time when I am guessing we would be looking our most dramatic and colourful from above.

What was particularly affirming was the wildly enthusiastic response to the new summer gardens where we finished the paths this week. I look at this area and I see gardens filled with plants that I hope will do a whole lot of growing before we open in a month. They looked at the whole and went ‘wow’. One of the crew declared that it reminded him of Hamilton Gardens. This was a compliment. I do not doubt that for a moment. I was just a bit taken aback because I had not thought we were emulating the themed gardens that are enormously popular public gardens in the city of Hamilton. We are a private, domestic garden. This has been achieved on a shoestring budget by three people, albeit with a lot of experience.

Sometimes I feel as though I am living with a pixie. In this case, a pixie who has been out planting trilliums in the meadow. It is of course Mark who has both raised the plants and then planted them. Last year I spotted a couple. As I tidy up the park in preparation for opening, I must have come across about 20 of them this week.

We have trilliums in the garden. Growing them in long grass is an experiment but so far it is working and they are continuing to get a little larger each year, rather than fading away.

There is a lesson in this. If you want to experiment with choice plants in a meadow, it helps to raise them yourself. You wouldn’t want to be buying a score – or more – of them to experiment with.

Oh look! How very 2020. My 1950s washing line (a single wire held up with a bamboo prop) with washable facemasks hanging like bunting and two linen tea towels that were sold as a fundraiser in aid of the Australian bushfires last summer. It is not that we are wearing masks at this time, but that our scientist daughter has crafted masks for her parents in two styles with added, optional, washable filters. I was washing them before putting them safely to one side – prepared, just in case.

For overseas readers, NZ has reachieved its status of no community transmission, with any Covid cases caught in quarantine at the border – so most of the country is free from all restrictions on movement and crowd sizes again. We have our fingers crossed that we remain free from any Covid cases in the community for the garden festival at the end of the month and hopefully well beyond. If one is going to be confined to one’s home country with no overseas travel, New Zealand seems to be one of the best places to be at this difficult time. May you all stay safe, wherever in the world you are.

Finally a few photos of the season. I struggle to get good photographs of the swathes of bluebells here. We are just past peak bluebell and they are so pretty even if the Spanish bluebells and hybrids are inclined to be so enthusiastic that they border on being problematic in some areas.

I finally got down to tie in the wisteria to the high bridge. They are quite a bit reduced in size this year as a result of the work we undertook on the bridge but still very pretty. I use black twine because, of all the ties I have tried over the years, synthetic black twine lasts the longest and is the least distracting the eye.

We flower rhododendrons more or less from August to the end of November. This is Noyo Chief. It is an undeniably handsome red, even if big reds are not my personal favourite. It is certainly a good performer on a healthy bush and what more can one ask?

Counting down to festival in the new world of Covid

Prunus Awanui in flower this week as we pass peak magnolia and go into the next phase of spring

As a nation, we are collectively holding our breath to see if we are indeed safely back to the status of zero Covid cases, except those caught and isolated in border quarantine. Just one community case in five days and counting now, this second time round. Our team of five million that saw us achieve this status the first time round has had some defections. Hopefully, the mob of doubters, conspiracists and anti-vaxxers is small, though very noisy. Obsessed only with their own *rights*, they have no concern for the safety and well-being of others and are swallowed up by their own crusade that Covid doesn’t exist, that it is no worse than the common flu, that it is a man-made virus being used by Bill Gates and his cohorts to take over the world (never mind that these positions are contradictory), that our government is lying to us, that it is somehow tied up with the 5G network and probably chem trails, that the Covid vaccine will be mandatory (it won’t) – all because they don’t want to wear masks on public transport and maintain physical distancing while we stamp out the latest flare-up. Sigh.

Mark’s Rhododendron Floral Sun never fails to lift my spirits, even more so this week in such uncertain times

It is not helped by a prolonged election campaign where some of the opposition parties are hellbent on undermining confidence in the government and community response to Covid. Let not the fact that NZ is a shining star internationally with its Covid response and that we have fewer restrictions and a safer environment than almost every other country in the world at this time get in the way of their narrative that it is a ‘shambles’, ‘incompetent’, a ‘failure’, an example of ‘gross mismanagement’ and all the rest. Some even advocate opening the borders and ‘learning to live with Covid’, though they seem to be unable to come up with international examples of countries managing to live comfortably with Covid on the loose in the community.

New Zealand – we done good. We are on track to eliminate this latest outbreak. The election will be over in a month. Our lives will return to the comfort of level one freedoms in this new reality that Covid has brought to our world.

‘Back in the day’, as is said, I used to write a regular piece for the local paper called ‘Countdown to Festival’ and I still look back at that series with some fond memories. It was just an assemblage of snippets from local gardeners describing their preparations for the annual garden festival and, from memory, the paper paid me the grand sum of $35 a week for it. It comprised garden hints from gardeners all around the district, some quirky anecdotes and painting small word pictures of the characters who were beavering away to get their gardens to opening standard. I think it had a quirky charm as well as some handy advice but it all stopped when I left the Taranaki Daily News and went to write for the Waikato Times instead.

The pretty path down to the park by my washing line, The white on the left is fragrant Rhododendron veitchianum, colourful azaleas in the centre and pretty Magnolia laevifolia ‘Velvet and Cream’ on the right

My mind went back to that series because we are now totally focused on getting the garden ready for opening on October30. Hopefully, we will be in level one which, in NZ, means no restrictions at all (life as usual but with no overseas tourists) but I am assuming we can still go ahead at level two, if need be. Mostly that means physical distancing and some controls on numbers, but presumably without coach tours owing to distancing not being possible on most coaches. Note to self: buy hand sanitiser – that public health symbol of Covid – and investigate registering for QR code. Even I, an occasional mobile phone-user at best, use the Covid app to scan into all shops and businesses. It is much easier than manually signing in. Frankly, it feels weird to be contemplating getting all visitors to the property to scan or sign in but this is our world now.

Lloyd can be spotted at the back of the photo with the tractor, our fancy lawnmower towing a large trolley, screeding tool, shovel, rake, barrow and plate compactor. This is not a job for the fainthearted.

The compacted ‘terrazzo’ look

With our lives becoming so much more home-based, local and smaller – holding the chaos of the world at bay – the garden has become even more important. This week, I ordered the first truckload of the top layer for the paths in our new summer gardens. Ten cubic metres or fourteen ton to start with and we will need at least as much again. It is not cheap so there was some nervousness but we are pretty excited at the effect of this crushed limestone and shell mix (I did say our world had grown smaller!). Lloyd is spreading it by barrow, shovel and rake, screeding it and then using the plate compressor to compact it as he goes. A torrential downpour was a good test. It compacts suffciently firmly that the torrent of ground water did not wash it away and the surface is so smooth that it can be swept or cleaned with the leaf blower. The rain brought the whiter fines to the surface so the finished effect looks more like the terrazzo kitchen benches of long ago. After building up to this for so long, it is positively thrilling, I tell you.

I think the uppermost two topknots on Mine No Yuki need to removed entirely but that can wait if we run out of time

Lloyd has also been clipping our shaped and cloud pruned camellias this week and will start on the hedges soon. In the meantime, Mark rather defies my work schedule but has been painstakingly giving the geriatric apple trees a major and considered prune. Next up, the two avenues of Fairy Magnolia White and the punctuation points of Podocarpus parlatorei in the new gardens are awaiting their annual trim. Mark is by far the most skilled pruner here.

Mark has done the first four geriatric apple trees but there is a whole lot more pruning waiting to be done and I am not yet seeing him show the signs of urgency I am hoping for

I am here, there and everywhere. Garden grooming is my strength. Attention to detail. At least it gets me all round the place. We have passed peak magnolia, the snowdrops have long finished and the dwarf narcissi are all but over. Now it is bluebell time, Japanese cherries, rhododendrons, evergreen azaleas and mid spring bulbs. The plants and the seasons are not disturbed by Covid.

The mid spring bulbs are starting – Moraea villosa and sparaxis

The freshly laid paths in the Court Garden look a little stark but we are confident they will mellow and soften quickly. The initial stage is preternaturally tidy.

When 1+1 equal more that 2. Magnolia parents and offspring.

I added a postscript to last week’s post about blind pruning camellias. After comments on that post, I added in chainsaw pruning tips (cutting back overgrown camellias to ground level or just above) and a word of caution about hygiene with cutting tools. You can find it at the end of the post if you are contemplating more extreme, less refined pruning.

Today’s post is heavy on photos. Magnolia photos to celebrate the season. I haven’t sat down before and collated images to show the parents of our named cultivars, lined up alongside their progeny. When Felix started crossing magnolias back in the early 1960s, he wanted to see if he could get the cup and saucer flower form of M. campbellii, that would flower from a younger age, on plants that would stay smaller and with more colours.

Magnolia Mark Jury with a larger, more robust flower and longer flowering season than either of its parents.

He didn’t start with many options. There were not many different magnolias available in NZ at the time – nothing like today’s range – but he had a unique tool in his kit. That was the magnolia he named for his youngest son, Mark Jury.

Magnolia sargentiana robusta on the left, ‘Lanarth’ on the right, the parents of ‘Mark Jury’

More Mark

‘Mark Jury’ came to him from Hillier Nurseries as a seedling of ‘Lanarth’ (M.campbellii var mollicomata ‘Lanarth’, to be precise), costing 18 shillings which was quite a lot back in the 1950s. When it flowered, it was not ‘Lanarth’. Discussions with Hilliers – slow discussions by hand-written letters as was the way back then – determined that it was most likely to be a cross between ‘Lanarth’ and M. sargentiana robusta. It proved to be an important breeder parent for him.

Magnolia ‘Lennei’ alba crossed onto ‘Mark Jury’ was one of his first efforts. (For the technically minded, ‘Lennei’ is more correctly M. X soulangeana ‘Lennei’, itself a cross of M.denudata and M.liliiflora).

It resulted in the beautiful ‘Athene’

‘Lotus’

and ‘Milky Way’.

Swapping to the pink form of ‘Lennei’ crossed on to ‘Mark Jury’, he raised and named

Atlas

and Iolanthe. This particular cultivar is one of the enduring stars in Felix’s collection.

The picture on his use of M.liliiflora is not as clear. He had the dark form of M. liliiflora ‘Nigra’, a paler pink form of the same species and, it seems, a liliiflora hybrid in the garden and over time, he grew somewhat hazy in his recollections of which plant in the garden he used for which cross. One or other form of M liliiflora crossed with ‘Lanarth’ gave two notable results.

The first was ‘Apollo’.

The second was the colour breakthrough in ‘Vulcan’ that paved the way for a multitude of magnolias into the future, getting to the red tones.

Again, an unspecified form of M.liliifora but crossed this time on his old favourite ‘Mark Jury’ resulted in one named cultivar of note.

Magnolia ‘Serene’.

When Mark moved in to the next generation, starting by using Felix’s hybrids, it was his cross between ‘Atlas’ and ‘Vulcan’ that closed the circle his father started.

Magnolia ‘Felix Jury’ was what Felix had been wanting to see if he could reach and he lived long enough to see it happen. It does of course have ‘Mark Jury’ in its parentage through ‘Atlas’. To be honest, the flowers do not always look this red. I took this photo last week and we admit that it is ‘Felix’ at its most sublime.

Mark has had one notable success with his yellow crosses – ‘Yellow Bird’ with ‘Iolanthe’. ‘Yellow Bird’ is not evergreen – it just flowers at the same time as its new leaves appear in our climate and its flowers are small but a good colour. He was pleased to get a smaller growing tree that flowers on bare wood and that has been named ‘Honey Tulip.

‘Honey Tulip’ is a good stepping stone. Mark’s dream is to get the equivalent of ‘Iolanthe’ – a large cup and saucer bloom in pure yellow. Whether he has enough years left to achieve this is as yet unknown. It may fall to the next generation of hybridists to realise that vision.

Festival a-go-go

It is official. We are reopening our garden for the ten days of Taranaki Garden Festival – and only for those ten days from October 30 to November 8. In fact, we are garden number one in the programme. We attended the launch on Thursday evening and there were asparagus rolls. I only mention this because the asparagus roll shares a special position of nostalgia in NZ catering history on a par with Maggi onion dip and slightly less controversial than the Otago and Southland cheese roll. But I digress.

Some of us braved a cold winter evening for the launch

but there were refreshments, including retro asparagus rolls to the top right

In honour of this occasion, I have spent quite a bit of time updating the garden information on this site. It took me more hours than I anticipated, that I would be grateful if you could check it out and make me feel that the time spent was worthwhile. Click on The Garden tab at the top of this page.

The printed programme is now out and the information is all on line here. You can request a free festival programme. If you plan to attend, it is worth getting a hard copy of the programme for the map. You can not rely on mobile phone reception throughout Taranaki and I say this as somebody who lives in one of the black spots.

There will be no plant sales. We left all that behind us years ago, much to our relief. Expect a terse response if you ask us.

However, there will be garden tours at no additional charge (Friday 30 October, Wednesday 4 November and Friday 6 November at 11am). Taking large groups around gardens is often described as an exercise in herding kittens. Mark professes himself to be in awe of my ability to head off around the garden with a large number of people and then emerge an hour later with almost the same number. I hasten to assure readers that I do not achieve this by publicly shaming any who wish to drop off the end. As far as I know, they stay voluntarily.

Mark and I are also offering two workshops. There is an additional charge for these and you must pre-book because numbers are strictly limited. You will have Mark’s and my undivided attention along with morning tea. I shall bake cakes for these occasions and the chances of proper coffee rather than instant are high.

New Directions with Sunny Perennials

For over a decade, we have been looking closely at modern trends in perennial gardening, particularly in England. Variously called the Dutch New Wave, New Perennials and the New Naturalism, we have analysed and experimented with these ideas in the very different conditions of coastal Taranaki, culminating in the planting of an acre of new summer gardens.

Join us for morning tea and a talk on key points we have distilled from visiting over 90 gardens in England, France and Italy, tracking the work of six key contemporary designers and how we have applied this in their own garden.

Numbers strictly limited. Bookings essential. $25 includes garden entry fee.

Monday 2 November 10.15am Book here.

(I have never kept a list of all the gardens we have visited but I did a quick tally of those in England, France and Italy and I really-o truly-o did get past 90. That is not an exaggeration.)

Meadow Theory 101

While charmed by what are often called ‘wildflower meadows’, we knew that they would soon become a weedy mess in our conditions so set about looking at different meadow styles, the underlying theories and management techniques that apply in our conditions with verdant year-round growth. We have now established bulb hillsides, changed the formerly mown park into an actively managed meadow and, most recently, adapted a neglected area of the garden to a perennial meadow.

Join us for morning tea as we share what they have learned and the fine balance needed in managing a sustainable meadow with environmental benefits while avoiding an out of control, weedy wilderness.

Numbers strictly limited. Bookings essential. $25 includes garden entry fee.

Sunday 1 November 10.15am Book here.

Our sunken garden

There are 40 gardens open with related events but there is a whole lot more to the festival this year. There is also the Sustainable Backyards Trail with its focus on food production and creative approaches to sustainability and self-sufficiency. And the Taranaki Arts Trail which had to be postponed from earlier in the year because of Covid restrictions – 85 artists around the province opening their studios to visitors. Both of these trails are included in the garden festival programme.

Then there is Feast Festival Taranaki – Garden to Plate – for those who like to feed the inner person on good food, mostly in the evenings. That is local restaurants using local produce to create special menus and related events. I am not sure that their website is up and running yet but you can capture the flavour, so to speak, on their Facebook page. Finally, starting on November 5, a new theatre-based festival will start. Called RESET 2020, it is a re-set after Covid forced the cancellation of other planned events and overseas performers. The programme, featuring NZ performers, will be announced in a few weeks.

As I explained all this to Mark, he described it as a ten out of ten on the befuddlement scale and that comment alone illustrates why I am still married to this man. Suffice to say, you can visit our garden and there is plenty more to entertain you in the wider area.

With the big upsurge in domestic tourism at this time, it may pay to make plans early if you are visiting from outside the region. Postscript for overseas readers: sorry, this is all of no relevance to you. Even if you wanted to, you can not come. Flights to NZ remain few and far between and you have to be a NZ citizen or permanent resident to get in (bar a few essential workers). Even then, all incoming passengers have to go into government quarantine for 14 days and it seems to be the luck of the draw as to whether you get confined in a five star hotel or one that is more modest. But we are now free of Covid, bar the quarantine cases at the border, and have been for over ten weeks. Life here is back to normal – no masks, no PPE, no physical distancing required, no restrictions bar those at the border. This situation has been hard-won and there aren’t many New Zealanders willing to risk the alternatives as we look at the grim situations around the world. It seems there is a long way to go in this pandemic yet. May those of you overseas stay safe and well.

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