Tag Archives: Mark and Abbie Jury

The evolution of a garden

One of the privileges of taking over a family garden is being able to trace it down the decades and watching how the garden grows and changes over time. In sorting out Mark’s parents’ slide images, I found snapshots in time that I had not seen before.

We can date this aerial black and white photo of the property to the early to mid 1950s. The house (marked with the red arrow) was built around 1950 to 1951 and key areas of the garden had yet to be laid out. The red rectangle is the area we refer to as ‘the park’ – then a sheep paddock of about 4 acres or 1.6 hectares on a south facing slope. Here, in the antipodes, south facing means it is on the cold side. Mark once studied the original, large format photo with a magnifying glass and declared that he could spot patches where his father had sprayed out the grass in preparation for planting.

This image is undated but is one of the earliest we have after planting started. That is a lot of top quality trees and shrubs going in. I can’t remember who told me that the planting was guided by the principles of the Rhododendron Association at the time; it may even have been Felix. The plants were not grouped but individually placed so that each one could be viewed in solitary splendour from any angle. Plants grow quickly in our mild, warm temperate climate with volcanic soils, regular rainfall and high sunshine hours.

This slide was dated 1962. That is Mark’s older brother on the horse but he was only riding through. Rhododendrons in particular are toxic to stock and so are other ornamental trees like yews. Felix maintained the area by grazing a very small group of sheep in amongst the trees and shrubs. He kept to the same sheep because they learned quickly which plants made them ill and they avoided them from then on.

The park really didn’t change a great deal over the next 30 years, until a somewhat younger Mark unleashed himself in 1995. There was always a problem with flooding in the low-lying areas and rhododendrons hate having wet feet. The evergreen azaleas are more tolerant but it was an ongoing issue. Mark’s tidy grandfather, Felix’s father, Bertrum Jury had straightened the stream to run at right angles on the property to maximise grazing areas. That was around 1900. Every time it rained heavily, the park flooded and there were no natural drainage channels left.

Mark’s efforts were major. That is our bottom road boundary. Grandfather Bertrum’s stream channel was deepened and turned into a flood channel controlled by a simple weir. Before anybody asks, yes he was Bertrum Jury, not Bertram or Bertrand. Flexible spelling is not recent.

The largest flow of water was directed back through the park, opening up the original stream bed. Mark had calculated its likely route and felt vindicated when the digger excavated tree trunks and debris that had been used to fill the old stream bed when it had been closed off.

The resulting clean-up was huge. The amount of silt and clay stacked up by the channel needed to be moved because it would set like concrete and smother the roots of trees that were already deemed precious. It was winter, probably before the days of bob-cat machines and all that gluggy mess had to removed by hand because it was too wet and the spaces too tight to get machinery in. I remember Mark coming in for months on end – dog-tired and covered in mud. He hauled barrow loads to upper slopes to build tracks – one person pushing the barrow and another on a rope pulling because they were too heavy for one person. It was a pretty grim winter activity and only dogged determination got Mark through. To this day, he swears it stuffed his back.

But look! Within just one season, by late spring the scars of the earthworks were already healing and we had flowing water where before there was soggy bog. These are still 1995.

Around this time, we bought our first fancy-pants lawnmower that cost more than our car did but was capable of mowing the varied terrain in the park and maintaining stability while manoeuvring around innumerable plants. Between that and the new weedeater or strimmer, we entered the era when we maintained the area to a standard that would have satisfied even public parks and gardens. Very, very tidy, we were, with neatly mown grass.

Mark then set about turning what had been plants standing in solitary splendour in a glorified paddock into more of a cohesive garden. He also started planting – bulbs and even perennial beds on a shady slope. The bulbs have worked well, especially the narcissi and galanthus. Mark went to some trouble to establish our native microlaena grass in some areas, as a replacement for paddock grass. Its finer foliage and gentler growth is much more compatible with dainty bulbs. 25 years on, we now have swathes of spring bulbs, rather than a few patches.

Around 2010, we started thinking there had to be a better way of managing the park. Keeping it mown and neat was not only labour intensive but we were increasingly concerned by our heavy dependence on petrol-powered motors. Enter the meadow era. We looked closely at meadows, particularly in the UK, and worked out that our situation was very different and we would have to manage it in different ways. Quite a lot of thought and discussion took place before we took the plunge.

We have not regretted it. The mown park may have looked impressive but the meadow is full of soft-edged charm that delights us all the time. I have written before about how we manage it. We mow walking paths through and twice a year we cut the entire area of grass to the ground – in mid summer and again in mid winter. We don’t remove the grass because that would be too big a job. Nor do we have yellow rattle in this country to weaken the growth. We have grass growth all year round; it is why this is good dairy farming country. We had to adjust to a meadow with rampant grass growth. We work to keep out noxious weeds like thistles, tradescantia that washes down the stream from above and onion weed but we have learned to tolerate our buttercups and even the docks. They are part of what makes a meadow in our conditions.

The park continues to develop. The latest two areas are our gardener Zach’s efforts. The upper photo – an area we refer to as The Barricades – was a creative means to deal with waste wood after Cyclone Dovi. Rather than burning it on site, it has been carefully arranged by Zach to create an environment for more planting – mostly orchids and ferns. It will gently moulder away and return to the earth, as indeed we hope to ourselves.

The Accidental Rockery, as Zach calls it, was his solution to retaining a bank that needed some attention by one of the paths down the hill. It wasn’t planned as a new planting area but that was a bonus to moving in rocks to retain the soil. It has filled out a lot since I took this photo soon after it emerged from his efforts.

Back to earlier days, I think this image is mid 1960s and that is Mark’s mother, Mimosa, standing by the azaleas. I looked at this photo and thought, maybe we have just gone full cycle. Is that soft-edged scene with a mown path so very different to where we have ended up now, 65 years on?

From an earlier era

The marquee displays at the 1960 Chelsea Flower Show

I had told myself for decades that one of these days. I will sort through the family slides. Not so much a day, it turned out, as a couple of weeks but I am close to the end.

Both Mark’s parents and Mark himself photographed on slide film in the days before digital cameras. It was always an expensive medium to work in, probably even more so in the days when slide films had to be sent to Australia to be developed. There were boxes and boxes and boxes of slides. Forty years of them.

Labelled ‘Captain and Mrs Ingram, Benenden’. Initially I assumed this must be from Felix’s trip to the UK a decade later, Captain Ingram being none other than renowned plant collector and ornithologist Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram. The photo is more Mimosa in style and Mark says he is pretty sure his mother visited the Ingrams on her tour.

I decided early on that I would scan and keep the historic images of the garden and the property and those of identifiable family members but the close-ups of flowers could all be discarded, as could random landscapes and events that meant something at the time but are of no discernible relevance now.

My task became a lot more interesting when I came to the slides that Mark’s mother, Mimosa, took and now I worry that I may have been too ruthless in my selection of those to scan and keep and those to discard.

Mimosa in front of the Papal Basilica of St Peter in the Vatican, 1960 photograph (not a slide in this case)

Mark’s mother only left the country once that I can see. But that one occasion was a big trip – Le Grand Tour, in fact. Mark has always been a bit vague on her absence, it being ‘quite a long trip’, he thought. I was a fair way through sorting the slides before I realised what a huge experience it must have been for her. She spent about two months voyaging there and back and five months exploring the UK, Italy, France, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Astilbes in the marquee at Chelsea
Astilbes and lilies
This display of roses was somewhat less than glorious but look at the serious garden visitors behind

It included the Chelsea Flower Show where she was clearly impressed by the marquee displays which were of the very highest standard. She didn’t take many photos of the outdoor gardens. It seems that the showpiece outdoor gardens have evolved quite a bit in the last 65 years. Perhaps they are more fashion-forward these days?

It would seem that the outdoor gardens had more to do glorious floral displays than design

I wanted to date her Chelsea visit and I can now say that it was indeed 1960, as I thought. We also happen to have the menu cards from the trip over and back. We forget how recent long-distance air travel is and how extraordinary it is that we can travel all the way across the world in just over 24 hours in the air. Mimosa sailed out of Aotearoa New Zealand just before Christmas 1959, on board the SS Australia, a long-distance passenger liner operated by the Italian company, Lloyd Triestino, with an Italian crew.

The large format covers for entertainment cards and the menus changed daily, clearly designed as souvenirs – and successful souvenirs in that we still have them!
A very Italian experience

This solved one mystery. I was a little surprised by this somewhat raunchy image until Mark and another both suggested it was related to ‘crossing the line’, ergo, the equator. I found the programme for the event. One wonders what form the 10.15am Discorso di Nettuno e battesimo deo neofiti took (Neptune’s speech and the baptism of the landlubbers) but it all happened on January 12, 1960. Those relatively uninhibited young men in the photo appear to be the Italian crew. The voyage terminated on January 27 at an Italian port, having travelled via the Suez Canal.

Rather more risque than the farm boys from Tikorangi that Mimosa would have known

It must all have been quite the culture shock for a middle-aged woman from Tikorangi but Mark tells me his mother prepared for it all by putting quite a lot of effort into teaching herself Italian. I am not at all sure how one would even plan a trip of that length, in pre-internet days but even more so as a woman travelling on her own with no prior experience. I doubt that she would wing it, as we have done, and she probably travelled with a great deal more luggage than we have ever taken.

The return voyage was likely less exotic, on board the R.M.S. Rangitane, owned by the New Zealand Shipping Company so it likely transited the Panama Canal which, according to my mother, was very dull compared to the Suez. She boarded the Rangitane on or about June 3, 1960 and they docked in NZ on July 6. The menu cards from this return voyage show a diet that was considerably less adventurous than on the Italian liner.

I loved this soft focus image from her visit to a seaside village in Cornwall. We stayed in a very similar fisherman’s cottage in St Mawes when we visited in 2009.

Mimosa was always interested in gardens but she mostly photographed landscapes and architecture. She had a good eye and, 65 years on, it was her people photographs that I found most delightful.  

A random shot, I assume, of Cornish locals, possibly inspired by the blue and red clothing composition. As Mark commented, these photos are all the more remarkable for the fact that with old cameras, the settings all had to be manually adjusted so she would have had to take a light reading with her light meter and then adjust for distance and focus as well. Photography was less spontaneous back then.

When the rainy weather sets in again, I will turn my attention to ordering the garden scenes that I have scanned in. It is interesting to see the earliest plantings and constructions and the various stages they have gone through in close to 75 years. It makes us realise yet again that a garden can never be frozen in time. Gardening is a dynamic response to a changing environment, in the longer term at least. Curated examples may appear here in due course.

From her visit to the Netherlands…. Clogs- dear. They are all wearing clogs.
Nothing to do with Mimosa’s grand tour, but this was probably my favourite of her images. It was labelled ‘Lou and Simon Urenui Domain Gala January ’67’
Or how about “Mr Ashton and his dog raising funds at the Wai-iti Life Saving Carnival”? The expression on the dog’s face is wonderful, if you are viewing on a large screen, as are the men wearing suits and ties at a beach carnival.

Mānawatia a Matariki

Happy Māori New Year

We refer to this seedling as Hazel’s magnolia

Usually I mark the time of the winter solstice and Matariki – the Māori New Year – with a photograph of the first blooms of the season on our pink Magnolia campbellii, set against our maunga (Mount Taranaki), with or without snow. The snow came in sufficient quantity last week for the low altitude ski field to open for a day or two. This week, that snow has melted away, all but a smidgeon on the peak. Such is the situation with a mountain set right on the coast.

This year, I am marking it with a seedling from Mark’s breeding programme that we refer to as ‘Hazel’s magnolia’. Several years ago, when Mark was asked to do the casket flowers for an old friend’s mother, he constructed his arrangement with the flowers of this magnolia. Her name was Hazel. In a world hurtling at breakneck speed towards one disaster after another, marked by cruelty and inhumanity, the memory of Hazel seems especially poignant. Hazel was a gem in life – one of the kindest people you could ever meet, gentle, welcoming and with natural grace.

Remembering Hazel

It gives us considerable pleasure to remember Hazel each year with this magnolia. It is a one-off plant; we won’t officially name it or release it. It flowers too early in the season for commercial release and is not sufficiently distinctive to make the cut of the very few we name but that in no way diminishes our pleasure in the blooming each year around Matariki and the winter solstice.

It seems a vain hope that the start of a new year in Aotearoa will bring optimism, hope and a return to kinder, more compassionate times. Hazel’s magnolia is a reminder for us that these qualities are possible at an individual, personal level. May you have your own personal markers of hope for the year to come and the future beyond.

How many Nerine bowdenii did you say?

There is nothing too special about Nerine bowdenii. It is the last of the autumn season to flower for us. We have a particularly attractive patch which is a delight every year, planted on the edge of the main lawn, just beneath Camellia sasanqua ‘Elfin Rose’ which is more or less the same shade of sugar pink.

Camellia ‘Elfin Rose’ and Nerine bowdenii beside the drive

There were three large pots of N. bowdenii sitting on an area of mat left over from our nursery days which I thought I would gather up because I had a space to plant them in an area of the Iolanthe garden which I am working over. “There are more in the propagation house,” said Mark. Good, I thought. I have just the spot where they can star in autumn and be anonymous and unobtrusive for the rest of the year.

I don’t often go into the propagation house; it is basically Mark and Zach’s territory. So when I went to gather up the bowdeniis to plant, it came as a shock. Reader, there are seven trays of them with an average of fifteen pots per tray and many of those pots had multiplied up to be about five per pot. That is a lot of bowdenii.

More surprising to me was the variation within them and it dawned on me that these were not straight species bowdenii,  but Mark’s hybrids. Over twenty years ago, it had entirely escaped my notice that he was faffing around hybridising bowdenii. It is way easier to grow as garden plant and to keep flowering consistently than the more desirable N. sarniensis types and he was trying to see if he could combine that robust nature with the variations in colour and size of sarniensis.

Not many flowers left as it is the end of the season but you get the drift

It was the deep colours that surprised me. The species can show variation but is commonly sugar pink. Indubitably sugar pink. Mark’s seedlings ranged from almost white, through pale pinks and bicolours to very deep pinks verging on red to some knocking on the door of the smoky shades that Felix was working on with his sarniensis hybrids.

Clearly, I will have to expand the area I was giving over to bowdenii in the Iolanthe garden and it is going to be a great deal more interesting than just a seasonal wave of sugar pink. I am looking forward to next year. In the meantime, my challenge is integrating hundreds of bowdenii hybrids into a garden that is perennial-cottage in style without turning it into what looks like a nursery trial bed. It may be more river than stream or wave.

Planting them in their new home beside the raspberry coop. I expect a good show next year.

In recalling the history of those nerines this morning, Mark tells me he was inspired to start experimenting with bowdenii crosses when Auckland plantsman and nurseryman, Terry Hatch, showed him an impressive hybrid he had high hopes for. “But,” he added, “they are still eclipsed by the nerines created by Monty Hollows in Palmerston North”. I remember over 50 years ago, when we were both students at Massey University, that Mark took me out to see Monty Hollows’ astounding chrysanthemums but I never saw his nerines.

I had to look up Monty Hollows. Brother of more famous Fred Hollows, he died in 2019, aged 91, and is largely remembered as a giant in the local cycling scene. A man of many talents and enterprises, horticulture also featured and he exported nerines to Asia. Monty, others may remember you for your energy, enterprise and loyalty to cycling but Mark has never forgotten your achievements with nerines where you set a very high bar.

The story behind those Scadoxus katherinae

Every year I photograph our swathe of Scadoxus katherinae, more accurately Scadoxus multiflorus ssp katherinae. It is a remarkable display, especially to those who know plants and those who have one treasured plant that they nurse along in a pot.

Mark told me the story behind it this week. His father, Felix, had a few plants of it, but not many. He will have started with one single specimen. Back in the days, Jack Goodwin was director of Parks and Reserves in New Plymouth and Jack had a different selection of katherinae that he had picked out which he was very pleased with. It had a bigger flower and a shorter, sturdier stem. He gave one to Felix but Felix was less impressed by it.  

Mark was in his earlier days of dabbling with plant breeding – a man with a paintbrush. He crossed Jack’s form with Felix’s form. Because he was crossing one clone of the species with another clone of the same species, the progeny remain the species, not hybrids. Clonal crossing doesn’t create hybrids – hybrids are a mix of different species – but it can result in increased vigour.

The rest, as they say, is history. Mark planted the seedlings at the end of the Avenue Garden where they have thrived down the decades. It is a rare example of a plant that naturalises without becoming a weed. They have just gently increased their range around the perimeter. The seeds are fairly heavy and fleshy so they are not spread by wind and presumably the birds don’t like them so they get to fall on the ground by the parent plant. I used to relocate the germinating seedlings from the paths back into the garden but now we just pull them out. We have enough.

We refer to katherinae as a bulb from South Africa but botanically, it is a bulbous perennial or a rhizomatous perennial. The bulb part is just a swollen lower stem. They are evergreen but they replace all their foliage every year so there is a period in late winter to early spring when the old foliage drops down and looks sad just as the new shoots are emerging. They are a plant for shaded woodland and will thrive in fairly tough, dry conditions with no attention at all – as seen here. However, they are not a plant for cold climates. The internet says zone 10, although we usually refer to ourselves as more zone 9 than 10. If your temperature drops below zero celsius in winter, you are in trouble.

We don’t often boast but this is a sight we doubt you will see anywhere else, except maybe in the wild.