Tag Archives: Mark and Abbie Jury

New directions with camellias

This is a longer piece than I usually post on this site but it was written for and first published by the Royal Horticultural Society (UK) annual journal of the Rhododendron, Camellia and Magnolia Group, 2022.

*C. sasanqua* ‘Crimson King’ showing the typical open, graceful form many sasanquas have as they mature

I married into a camellia family. Both Les Jury and Felix Jury were recognised in their day as making significant contributions to the camellia world with their new cultivars. Both worked with Camellia japonica and hybrids to create plants that were self-grooming (dropping spent flowers rather than having them hang onto the bush) and breeding out the tendency for stamens to turn black as blooms aged. Hugely popular in New Zealand, camellias ranked second only to roses in sales figures.

My own mother was not as keen. True, she described a young plant of Felix’s C. x williamsii ‘Rose Bouquet’ as being like growing an herbaceous paeony in a climate which did not favour the growing of any paeonies at all, but it was clear she saw it as second best. Memorably, she once declared that the trouble with camellias was that they were all red, white or pink blobs with shiny green foliage. With more experience, I now realise she was only thinking of C. japonica and hybrid camellias. I do not think she ever met the species or had anything to do with C. sasanqua.

We have a large garden with many camellias used in a variety of situations. I have never counted them but it will be in the hundreds, not the tens. When Mark started plant breeding, he followed in the footsteps of his father and his uncle and chose camellias first. They are right at home in our climate so we have camellias as feature plants, background plants, hedges both informal and clipped, windbreaks and as a backbone plant repeated throughout the garden.

The unsightly appearance of petal blight on japonicas, reticulatas and many hybrids. It looks marginally better on red blooms but a great deal worse on pale and white blooms.

The arrival of camellia petal blight – Ciborinia camelliae – was nothing short of devastating. Our massed displays of C. reticulata, C. japonica and hybrids blooming in winter and spring disappeared as petal blight took hold and now they are just a memory. Petal blight is common throughout the world. Is it only Australia that remains free from it now? It took a trip to the International Camellia Convention in southern China in 2016 for us to realise that our particular climatic conditions mean that the impact of blight here is arguably at the very worst end of the scale. We are humid and mild with regular rainfall and plenty of wind to spread the spores far and wide – ideal conditions for any fungal ailment. In the drier conditions of China, it was nowhere near as big a problem as here and talking to growers from around the world, they don’t suffer the same level of impact as we do.

In our particular location, it is bad enough for me to say that we haven’t and wouldn’t plant a C. japonica, a large flowered hybrid or a C. reticulata now. There is no point. Flowering has become sparse and all that early breeding for plants which are self-grooming does not work for these vulnerable camellias so the display is now pale brown blighted blooms or blooms in the process of being blighted with just a few lovely flowers to remind us of times past.

All is not lost, but we have done a serious re-think. Fortunately, Mark had always been interested in miniature flowered camellias with a strong personal preference for the simplicity of singles and semi doubles. They mass flower and each bloom only lasts a couple of days so they fall before blight takes hold. We also like the species and had already set out to build a collection of most that are available in this country. Some of the species bring in a wider range of growth habits and foliage than are seen in commercial camellias. In fact, some don’t even look like camellias as most people know them. We are so besotted with little C. minutiflora that we have several in the garden; what came to us as C. puniceiflora doesn’t look like a camellia at all and only aficionados would identify the pink flowered form of C. sinensis and the assorted yellow species we have as camellias.

We also have a good representation of autumn flowering varieties from the C. sasanqua group, which are not affected by the blight. In the days when the large flowered C. japonica were favoured, with a particular preference for the perfection of formal doubles like ‘Dreamboat’ and scores of others, the attitude to C. sasanqua was bit dismissive. They lack the solid petal texture and defined form in their blooms and are slower to establish, as nursery plants at least. In New Zealand, they were largely seen as utility hedging, best in white and even better if C. sasanqua ‘Setsugekka’. The white ‘Setsugekka’ hedge became a cliché.

Tastes can change. Now we appreciate the C. sasanqua cultivars for their mass display in autumn through to early winter, preferring that looser flower structure and simplicity. Added to that, as mature plants, most have a naturally graceful form that is easy to tidy up and enhance to create a feature plant even when not in bloom. Shapes are important all year round and shapes with good, healthy foliage that are also hardy, reliable and low maintenance are not to be disdained.

We give a lot more thought to our camellia plants these days. Many are invaluable for shelter and wind breaks. Flowers are a bonus. But not every camellia plant is valuable. If they are not flowering at all well, are not pleasing to the eye as a shrub and are not filling a useful purpose, we have no qualms about removing them. These plants used to at least fulfil one of those functions – that of mass flowering.

Lifting and limbing – finding the natural shape of a plant and highlighting it – *Camellia* ‘Tiny Princess’

We do a lot of what we call lifting and limbing here. In a mature garden, raising the canopy and letting light in is ongoing. What sets lifting and limbing apart from simple pruning is that it is more focused on making the most of the natural shape of the mature plant. Mark is the master of this but my skills are improving. More time is spent standing and looking, then tracing where branches go than actually cutting and there is much going up and down the ladder. It is very satisfying to find the most pleasing forms within a plant and to highlight the shape by removing extraneous growth. Added to that, it is a one-off activity that just needs a bit of occasional maintenance in future years. It is possible to remove a lot without a plant looking massacred, as long as clean cuts close to the trunk or branch are made.

Our garden is very light on ornamentation. We don’t go in for sculptures, statuary, pots or a plethora of trellises and archways, preferring to use key plants as focal points, along with natural vistas. Mark’s cloud-pruned camellias are particularly fetching. He started on Camellia sasanqua ‘Mine-no-Yuki’ which was so huge that its weeping growth was blocking a pathway. The initial shaping took him several days up and down the ladder which was hard on his knees. He must have removed well over half the jumbled plant but found the most pleasing shape beneath. We keep it clipped to flat- topped cloud shapes. It only needs trimming once a year to maintain that form and that is a simple job that takes a couple of hours with hedge clippers. ‘Mine-no-Yuki’ is not good in bloom here. We get a few days of pristine white blooms before they get weather damaged; from then on we get a display of brown and white flowers. As a clipped, evergreen shrub it makes a splendid feature all year round.

I differentiate between clipping and pruning. Pruning is done with a pruning saw and secateurs; clipping is carried out with trimmers, be they hand-held hedge clippers or motorised trimming blades. Good pruning is a higher grade skill because the aim is to get into the plant and shape it without the work being visible – ‘blind pruning’, an older colleague used to call it. Hacking is bad pruning.

Left to right: ‘Elfin Rose’, *C. puniceiflora, C. trichoclada* and *C. gauchowensis.* All are clipped once a year.

We don’t clip many plants – ours is not a garden modelled on the clipped and corseted Italian genre – but we have a few that we like to use as punctuation points in the garden. Inside our entrance, we have a small grouping of camellias that we clip tightly once a year. The shape of each has been entirely determined by following their natural growth habit and exaggerating that. So C. gauchowensis is a plump, rounded pillar, C. puniceiflora a three tier cake stand and the somewhat insignificant C. trichoclada is a flat plinth. They are backed by the cloud pruned C. x hiemalis ‘Elfin Rose’.

The problem with clipping is that it cuts every single outside leaf that then turns brown on the cut edge. This does not matter when the clipping is being done on plants with very small leaves and it is not generally a problem on the C. sasanqua cultivars which have a somewhat softer leaf. It matters a great deal if the clipping candidate has the tough, shiny, leathery leaves common to the C. japonica types. I drive past a clipped white C. japonica hedge from time to time and it simply looks awful when it has been freshly cut. I wonder if the owners went to buy the aforementioned ‘Setsugekka’ (which would have been much more successful) but the garden centre had sold out so they talked them into a white japonica instead? It was not a good choice. Keep your clippers away from C. japonica varieties is my advice; reach for secateurs instead and forget any ideas of tight-clipped shapes.

Our preferred hedging options. Left to right: *C. microphylla, ‘*Fairy Blush’and *C. transnokoensis*

We have camellia hedges ourselves but all are small leafed varieties that clip tightly to make a dense barrier over time, looking sharp-edged and smart. We also select for small single flowers that drop cleanly and break down quickly, thereby avoiding the brown sludge that large, heavy textured flowers can create when they fall. The three camellias we have used for hedging are ‘Fairy Blush’, C. transnokoenis and C. microphylla. ‘Fairy Blush’ is our first choice where we want dense hedges to around 1.5 or 1.8 metres high. It is a C. lutchuensis hybrid, the first camellia Mark ever named and the one that remains our all-time favourite with its exceptionally long flowering season. Unlike its scented parent, it is fully tolerant of sun and open conditions (C. lutchuensis is inclined to yellow in the foliage in full sun), very free flowering and, en masse, it exudes a delightful scent on warmer, sunny days.

*Camellia* ‘Fairy Blush’ as a clipped hedge.

We have never grown much buxus hedging here but when the threat of box blight loomed (mercifully, it has still not reached us and we don’t have the buxus caterpillar in New Zealand), Mark took the opportunity to rip out a couple of box hedges and replace them with C. transnokoensis. I think the blight might just have been an excuse really, because the main reason was that he thinks hedges should be more than just green walls; they should also contribute to the eco-system and plants that flower and attract bees and butterflies do more than just act as a visual divider. C. transnokoensis has excellent small foliage and tiny white blooms but its flowering season is much shorter than ‘Fairy Blush’ and it is taking longer to become dense in its growth.

When it comes to tight clipping, timing is important. We tend to clip hard in early to mid-spring, just as the new growth is being made. If it gets left later, the next season’s flower buds will have set and clipping will be at the expense of next season’s flowering. Sometimes we get to the C. sasanqua plants earlier; in our relatively mild climate, we have more latitude and can garden through winter without risk. We only clip once but we are fine with the softer, woolly look that develops as the seasons progress. If you want a sharper look, do the hard spring clip and then follow up in summer, but just with a light prune to tidy up the wayward fresh growths.

*C. microphylla* will be kept lower as an undulating wave hedge, between 30cm and 70cm high.

*Camellia microphylla* backed by *C. yuhsienensis*

C. microphylla has an even shorter season in bloom and flowers in late autumn for us but we selected it less for its white, starry blooms and more for its very compact habit and small leaves which lends it to tighter clipping where we want low, undulating hedges in the area we call the Wave Garden. It is taking some time to grow and clip into the tight growth we want, particularly because the plants Mark had raised from both cuttings and seed languished, unloved, in pots in the nursery for longer than they should have. It took us a while to plan and then plant the garden they were destined to grace. Healthier plants would have taken off faster but we can see it will work exactly as planned.

*Camellia yuhsienensis used as punctuation points, backed by Mark’s ‘Fairy Magnolia White’*

It is possible to remove a lot of plant without it looking as though it has been brutally attacked if pruning is considered and careful. This is getting *C. yuhsienensis* back to a manageable size.

Overall, we do more pruning than clipping and that is aimed at keeping some key plants from growing to their full potential. Essentially, we are trying to contain them to a certain size. We have used the lesser-known species, C yuhsienensis, as punctuation points with winter interest along the summer gardens. We love its open, starry blooms which are lightly scented and reminiscent of a michelia as well as the heavy-textured foliage which many people fail to identify as a camellia. It is not self-grooming and it is one of the few camellias I am willing to go through and brush off spent blooms which is a sign of how much it pleases me. Left to its own devices, it will reach 2.5 to 3 metres high by 2 metres wide in our conditions, getting somewhat more open as it grows. I am keeping these to around 1.6 metres high and a metre wide and that is done on a single, perfectly straightforward annual prune with secateurs and sometimes a handsaw. Each plant is reviewed individually as I work out which branches I want to take out entirely and which ones I just want to shorten. It sounds more onerous than it is in practice but my aim is always that the pruning not be visible to other people’s eyes.

A top-worked hybrid of Mark’s we named ‘Pearly Cascade’ which is unlikely to still be in cultivation. While the flower is not special, the slow, spreading growth habit kept it small and made it an ideal candidate for training to a feature plant.

A top-worked (high grafted) weeper. This came to us as ‘Nuccio’s Pink Cascade’ but that may not be an accurate name.

We have a few high-worked standard camellias, grafted a metre or so up a single, strong trunk. These are not easy to do so certainly not widely available commercially here, if at all these days. Our plants date back to when we still had a plant nursery and specialised in unusual options. The weepers are just left to weep. These are ‘Quintessence’ and one that came to us ‘Nuccio’s Pink Cascade’ but I am now doubting that name because I can’t find it on line. I scrapped all the weeping ‘Sweet Emily Kate’ specimens because the exceptionally pretty flower did not atone for the dreadful yellowed foliage.

Our other standards are slow growing hybrids from Mark’s breeding programme that are not commercially available. The natural characteristics of being both slow and dense in growth is what makes them easy to maintain. Trying it with stronger growing varieties would mean a whole lot more work fighting nature to keep the desired shape.

When we removed the garden beds around the top of the sunken garden, we retained the eight camellias and three dwarf maples as clipped and shaped character plants.

Mark is not a lollipop or pompom man. He likes these camellias clipped to low, flattened domes – mushroom shapes he calls them, or maybe umbrellas. Again, we clip or prune just once a year and that is sufficient to keep these as statement plants.

An espaliered sasanqua camellia from another person’s garden.

I have never gone in for espalier. I am not so keen on that level of extended fiddle-faddling, myself. But I stopped to photograph a very well-established espalier done with C. x hiemalis ‘Elfin Rose’ in a garden down the road. Unfortunately, the flowering was finished for the season so you will just have to imagine how pretty it looks with the bright pink blooms and deep forest-green foliage. It has been trained on a readymade trellis fan and is kept clipped to make a dense screen which is only about 30cm deep.

In days gone by, I used to keep a small collection of trained and clipped camellias in large containers to move around to particular locations. Each one was treated differently to emphasise individual characteristics. The reason I planted them all out or gave them away was simply because I decided that, in a garden as large as ours, having large plants in pots that need regular watering, feeding, repotting and root pruning was too much work. I prefer to work on plants already growing in the ground but the container approach may work for other situations.

We used to view camellias as a low maintenance, undemanding but top performing utility plant in our garden. That changed with petal blight. Now their roles have changed. We treat each plant individually and give them a lot more attention but that is what makes gardening interesting for us. We wouldn’t be without them. It may be putting a brave face on it, but I am not sure I miss those days when they were largely big blobs of white, pink or red on shiny green foliage. Times change and we just change our gardening ways to meet the new situation.

In memory of times past when we used to have mass displays of blooms like this. We refer to this one as ‘Mimosa’s sister’, not because Mark’s mother ever had a sister but because it is a sister seedling to ‘Mimosa Jury’ that Mark’s father bred and named for her.

Rays of golden sunshine

The narcissi tell us spring is here, irrespective of what an arbitrary calendar says.

A representation of those narcissi currently flowering

We once went to the National Daffodil Show when it was held in our local town. Alas, despite trawling through my files, I can not find the photos I took to convey the nature of the show. It was beautifully staged and moderately spectacular – in a daffodil-y sort of way. It was also an interesting insight into how those who breed and show daffodils are on a different trajectory. Bigger was undeniably better, extraordinarily long stems topped with enormous flowers, split corollas galore, a lot of different colour combinations and novelty variants. These were blooms grown to be staged as cut flowers. The little dwarf and miniature types were confined to one very small and somewhat insignificant table.

Our interest in narcissi begins and ends with them as garden plants or naturalised in a meadow situation. I cut some simply for photos yesterday. Because we over-heat our house in winter, we don’t generally cut flowers to bring inside where they immediately wilt and die. And those big show daffodils don’t make good garden plants in our conditions. The heavy heads pull them over and heavy rain and spring wind knocks the blooms about too much.

Peeping Tom at the front – reliable, tough and maybe a little too enthusiastic in its rate of increase. We do seem to have rather a lot of it.

These will be named varieties from the 1950s because they are a relic of original planting done by Felix and Mimosa when they started the garden here.

We don’t have a single big King Alfred type often favoured by people wanting to planting swathes of daffodils. Amongst other things, they flower later in the season. We prefer the early flowering types because they are largely done and dusted before the narcissi fly are on the wing.

Our narcissi flower over a reasonable period of time and some are still to show any colour at all. While we probably have a respectable collection of named dwarf varieties (Tête-à-tête, Jetfire, x Odorus, Twilight, Beryl, Peeping Tom and others), many of those we grow are unnamed, controlled cyclamineus crosses that Mark and his father before him have done to increase numbers. It takes a lot of bulbs to naturalise around the garden and the plant budget here has never stretched to buying bulbs by the hundreds or even thousands needed to put on a good show. We could not afford to garden on the scale we do if we had to buy all the plants.

I have never unravelled the different narcissi groups in detail. We grow the hooped petticoats – N. bulbocodium – in lemon and the later flowering bright yellow but they are not my favourites. The bright yellow is showy but increases somewhat too readily, the lemon (citrinus) may need a bit more love than it gets here to flower well.

I would like to say Ralph is tiptoeing through the daffodils but I would be lying. His movements are more akin to thundering.

I love the look of Narcissus poeticus but it doesn’t love us so the best we can manage is the poeticus hybrid ‘Beryl’. We have some from the triandrus, jonquilla and tazetta groups but the reason why our collection is heavily dominated by cyclamineus types is because they are the best performers in our conditions. The ones with swept back petals are a particular delight for me.

Managed meadow! Planting on the slope gives and even better view from the path below.

It isn’t necessary to have big King Alfred types for meadow situations. I think our smaller dwarf ones are just as showy but we plant in clumps and drifts rather than scattered single bulbs and they flower before all the spring grass growth that would drown them. We need to get the timing right for mowing or strimming the meadow grass before the foliage comes through but otherwise, they are self-maintaining. And what a joy they are at this time of the year as the snowdrops of winter fade.

The bad news is that most daffodils sold commercially in this country are of the later flowering King Alfred type – big strong growers with big heads. The smaller growing ones are sometimes available in garden centres but you may have to search to find much of a range, or start raising your own from seed.

These are the largest varieties we grow. The manky first one of the left may be Narcissus pseudonarcissus double, then Silver Chimes, I don’t know what the next one is, the centre one with white petals may be the Narcissus pseudonarcissus (the wild daffodil), then Peeping Tom and Narcissus x Odorus.

Mid-sized dwarf varieties including Twilight, Twinkle, Jetfire and unnamed seedlings

And the littlies with bulbocodiums to the left

Counting down to Festival 2022.

The programme for this year’s garden festival was launched this week. It is huge. Not only are there 43 gardens around the province open for the main attraction, now named the Centuria Taranaki Garden Festival, but there are a whole lot of related garden-themed events. And wait there is more. Running alongside that are the 30 gardens opening for the Sustainable Backyards Trail and in addition to that, the Taranaki Arts Trail is also affiliated and there are 79 artists who are opening their studios at this time.

It is going to be a busy 10 days from Friday, October 28 to Sunday, November 10. The full programme is available on line here or you can request or pick up a paper copy.

Naturally, it is our little corner of the programme that interests us most. It is the only time of the year we open our garden to the public these days. Fortunately, given the scale of the programme this year, we are very easy to find, being right at the front as garden number one. The numbering starts from the north and we are lucky to be the northernmost garden.

Jennifer Duval-Smith

I am not offering workshops this year, just a few scheduled garden tours. But we are delighted to have Jennifer Duval-Smith joining us as artist in residence this year. Jennifer is an Auckland botanical artist and she is offering workshops here on Nature Journaling. How to explain Nature Journaling? The full details on her workshops are here but my description of it would be that it is more immediate and therefore probably more rewarding for the beginner than the esoteric rigour required for botanical art. It is certainly less technical and more about combining observation skills with the confidence to capture the delight quickly in colour and form on paper.

Jennifer is offering four workshops on different topics:

* Meadow and Wildflowers of the Wild North Garden

* Flowers and Plants of the Woodlands

* Rhododendron – the Grandeur and the Glory

* Flowers of the Early Summer Garden

Jennifer’s own website is here for more information about her approach and her own work. Bookings need to be made through the festival website and with numbers limited to eight per workshop, it may be advisable not to procrastinate too long if you are interested.

On an entirely different topic, we are equally delighted to be the venue for a Music in the Garden event on our main lawn on the first Sunday of festival. La Mer is a four-piece group playing music which is a blend of gypsy swing and French Café-style jazz. I can’t post video on this site but for a sample of the music, click through to my Facebook page. It is perfect garden music and we have our fingers crossed for a fine afternoon with people lounging – physically distanced as is the way these days – across our front lawn enjoying the ambience and sound.

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Alas, this event is weather dependent. We can’t move indoors for this one. I will be terribly disappointed if the weather gods fail to cooperate. There is no need to book for this event and there is no additional charge other than entry to the garden.

We have a large main lawn. I mention this for the Covid-cautious. Social distancing should not be a problem. Goodness knows what the state of Covid will be in three months’ time but we fall very much into the Covid-cautious camp here and we will be doing everything we can to keep ourselves and our visitors safe.

The front lawn in autumn – plenty of space for the Covid-cautious

We are now at the point of the year where everything here is geared towards opening for the festival. I will admit there are times when we have doubts about continuing to open but it is a terrific event for our province and very affirming to have visitors who enjoy the fruits of our labour.

In a world dominated by the ongoing impact of Covid, the garden festival this year shines like a bright light of cheer in a relatively safe environment and there is a lot to be said for that.

A little bit of Tikorangi on Corrie

Sometimes life can throw up little surprises. I saw a clip from Coronation Street come down my social media, a tribute to the victims of the 2017 bombing at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. Gail Platt and Eileen Grimshaw were laying flowers at a bench commemorating Martyn and other victims. Martyn Hett, a real life victim of the bombing and a great Corrie fan reportedly had a tattoo of Deidre Barlow. It is a poignant moment on that long running television soap opera.

Yellow Wave! In poll position centre foreground

What caught my attention was the plant of Phormium ‘Yellow Wave’ in prime position in the scene. Ha! A little bit of Tikorangi on Corrie! ‘Yellow Wave’ is one of the earliest of Felix Jury’s plant breeding efforts and arguably the most widely grown internationally, although not so often attributed to the breeder. All one minute 21 seconds of the clip can be found on Facebook here and on YouTube here.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, we know the phormiums as flax in English or harakeke in Maori. They grow widely throughout the country but ‘Yellow Wave’ was one of the very first compact. variegated cultivars to be released on the market. It wasn’t released by Felix. He was never a nurseryman and he never received a single cent for the plant. This was back in the late 1960s or early 1970s before there was any provision to claim plant variety rights or a plant patent over a new cultivar. We have always quipped that such is its international popularity, had he received just one cent per plant sold, he would have been a rich man. It received an Award of Garden Merit from the UK Royal Horticultural Society.

I made Mark pose beside Phormuium Yellow Wave at RHS Rosemoor in the UK in 2017

In this country, the flaxes tend to get a spotting on the foliage that rather detracts from their looks but they keep very clean foliage in other climates. Maybe this is why we prefer the newer dark burgundy and black phormium cultivars as garden plants? Also, we do not have a love affair with variegated plants.

I have used some of the newer burgundy to black phormiums in the new Court Garden

Felix went on to breed with astelias and cordylines in preference to the phormiums and Cordyline ‘Red Fountain’ continues to be very successful internationally. It is likely that in total numbers produced, sold and grown, ‘Yellow Wave’ eclipses that and we have often seen it growing overseas. I just did not expect to see it on Coronation Street.

Bye bye bangalow

The Archontophoenix cunninghamiana, commonly known as Bangalow Palms, are no more. We have been talking about cutting them down for several years and we have finally done it. The first we felled in the recent clean-up after Cyclone Dovi. It was in an area with a huge mess to be dealt with already and it seemed the right time to get rid of it. Zach dropped the second one this week.

This is just the very top of a pretty tall bangalow

I say we had two but really, we had two very tall specimens – and eleventy thousand seedlings. They were handsome enough with a tropical jungle look and posed no problems until they started setting seed. And boy do they set seed.

The bangalows had very straight trunks with an attractive enough top knot but they were outstripping even the extension ladder. We have better options we can grow.

For the first few years, Mark would get out the extension ladder and cut the seed off. But they kept growing taller to somewhere around 12 or 15 metres and we kept growing older; this approach was not exactly sustainable. We decided they were expendable. I am sick of weeding out all the bangalow seedlings.

We see them here, we see them there. We see those pesky seedlings everywhere.

It will take a few years to eliminate the last of the seeds

Archontophoenix cunninghamiana is an Australian palm from northern New South Wales. By my definition, native plants in their natural environment, or even just in their homeland, are not weeds. Seedlings can be surplus to requirements. I never describe our native nikau palm or even pongas (tree ferns) as weeds even though we have an abundance of them that we regularly thin out. They belong here.

Just a few leftovers from the massive seed set from the last season.

Introduced plants are different. I see Brazil has a major problem with the bangalow outcompeting some of their native species and I think we are on a similar track in this country. Because it is so widely grown and sold commercially, that horse has probably bolted already. However, this does not stop us from taking responsibility for our own plants and stopping them from spreading. They will colonise much faster than our nikau palm (Rhopalostylis sapida).

Weed though it is, those flower racemes are pretty

I have seen more than enough of their seedheads over the years – huge amounts of red berries that are attractive to our native fruit-eating birds, particularly kereru, so spread widely by them. I can not say I had ever noticed their flowers before because they are so high up. Zach reverently carried over their flowers to show me. I say reverently because, weed or not, the flowers are exquisite in form and colour. Nature can be beautiful in so many different ways.

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