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.
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.
Our Wild North Garden – an experiment in a much looser style of gardening
Following on from yesterday’s post considering sustainability in gardens, a new book out of the UK take the issues of sustainability and reducing negative environmental impacts to a far more holistic view. I admit I have not yet read ‘Pastoral Gardens’ by Clare Foster with photographs by Andrew Montgomery. I am not sure it is in this country yet. I am working from the interview with her on Dig Delve, the site of Dan Pearson – an English garden designer whose work we greatly admire.
I am not sure that the term ‘pastoral gardens’ will ever catch on in this country. While the word ‘pastoral’ is evocative in England with its connotations of bucolic nostalgia, here it is more likely to be associated with ‘pasture’ which immediately summons up the mental image of intensive dairy farming. I prefer the term the ‘New Naturalism’ or even our shorthand of ‘wild gardening’.
Nigel Dunnet’s garden at the Barbican is included in the book but I hesitate over the inclusion of this Central London garden under the descriptor of a ‘pastoral garden’. It is a wonderful example, however, of a naturalistic-styled garden in a challenging environment.
What comes through very strongly in the interview, and presumably the book, is the embrace of gardening styles that work with Nature, that prioritise biodiversity and garden practices that enhance the natural environment. It is still gardening and still focused on aesthetics, but not at the cost of damaging the environment. The author won me with this quote:
“Another uniting factor for all these gardens is their need to be gardened. So many people think that wildlife-friendly gardens are relaxed, neglected spaces, that can be left to their own devices. This is certainly not the case with the gardens we showcase in this book. The role of the gardener is almost more important than ever in overseeing, managing and editing each planting scheme, ensuring that diversity is maintained, rather than one or two species taking over.”
We saw this deterioration happen over time in in the Missouri Meadow Garden at Wisley where a dominant aster had swamped out large parts of the meadow.The role of the gardeners had fallen well short on maintaining this area and I assume it had to do with the fact it needed to be monitored and maintained in a very different way to more traditional perennial plantings and they had yet to learn those skills.
Wildside, Keith Wiley’s garden in Devon, was a revelation to us in terms of complex biodiversity and still stands in our memory as one of the most exciting gardens we have visited. It is not in the book, though.
I think the author is dancing on a pin head when she attempts to differentiate current trends in naturalistic gardening from the earlier work by Irish gardener, William Robinson of Gravetye Manor in the 1880s and the more recent New Perennials movement. I may be doing her an injustice but I think she is saying that ‘pastoral gardens’ are basically the new naturalism but sitting on the higher moral ground of biodiversity. I see the difference as more linguistic. The term biodiversity is an amalgam of biological & diversity and was first coined in 1968 but didn’t enter common usage until the 1980s. Robinson didn’t have the same language to draw on but that doesn’t mean that his gardening in harmony with nature is any less for that. The loss of biodiversity, the impact of climate change and questioning of many current garden norms which run counter to the natural environment combine to give considerable urgency to the matter, but it is not necessarily new.
We grow good hostas without needing to lay slug bait or add fertiliser
We have never done any scientific study to determine the changes to our immediate garden environment when we consciously switched to more sustainable practices. That would, I am guessing, involve analysing small sections across the property, maybe 10cm squares, maybe metre squares, starting before we changed our practices and then at various points along the way. Counting the number of different insects, fungi, bacteria, animals, plant species and analysing the soil profile could prove the case. We rely on anecdotal evidence. We never use slug bait but our hostas are largely clean and lush which would suggest that we have a very healthy bird population which keeps the slugs and snails in check and indeed, we see a great deal of bird activity all the time here. But we have never taken a census of the bird population or done any comparisons. Observation tells us that it is a healthier environment but that is not scientific proof so I am somewhat cautious about making sweeping environmental claims for how we garden.
When we changed the management of the grass in our park to go with a Taranaki version of a meadow, we were not at all sure how others would react. It was even more the case when we opened the Wild North Garden which is several steps further on the naturalistic, wild gardening spectrum. When you open your garden to the public, you also open yourself to being judged. It was heartening to see an overwhelmingly positive response. It may be that the visitors who dismissed it as lazy or unkempt were too polite to say so but if that is the case, they didn’t question us or express their dislike. Most visitors visibly breathed out, relaxed and often responded to the casual environment with emotion rather than detached observation. These days, we don’t open any longer so we don’t feel at all sensitive to judgement of our garden but I have thought about it recently. In a country which places a high value on immaculate maintenance and overall tidiness in open gardens, why did visitors respond so positively to large areas which were anything but?
A marked contrast between the house gardens and the looser management in the park and the wild garden
Our Wild North Garden again
I think it is likely the contrast in our garden. We always maintain the house gardens – the area of close to two acres on the flat around the house which includes the summer gardens, the rockery, the Rimu Walk and the Avenue Gardens – to a weed-free, tidy state with areas that are quite sharply defined. The switch to the loose style of the park and the Wild North is very different and it is that contrast that makes it appear by design, not laissez faire management.
A Dan Pearson designed garden in the Cotswolds that we were lucky to visit. Formalised blocks of meadow beneath apple trees on the edge of of an otherwise tightly maintained garden.
There is a lesson there that can be applied to those gardening on a smaller scale. The juxtaposition of some formality and form with more naturalistic, wilder plantings can pull it all together. It is what Dan Pearson does really well, if you scroll through to the photos of the garden he designed and planted at Little Dartmouth Farm. You can start small. We have experimented with letting our front lawn grow and flower over summer but giving it form by mowing a double width around the edge and paths on our main walking tracks across the lawn. It is not an option if your priority is an immaculate monoculture of a lawn that resembles a green velvet sward but we long ago abandoned that approach as a crime against nature.
I would suggest that if you are starting this particular journey and struggling to reconcile it with the traditional values of tidiness and visibly tight maintenance, you may find it easier if you keep the gardens closest to the house in a controlled, tidy state but start loosening that iron grip as you move further away. It creates a transition that seems to make sense to the logical parts of our brains.
It is fine to start small; it is recognising the need to change many of the ways we garden that is the very first step. Clare Foster’s book promises to show just how successful it can be to take a much more expansive view and to integrate concerns about sustainability, biodiversity and the longer term environment alongside placing a high value on aesthetics.
When I have written about working with Nature rather than gardening by controlling Nature, about gardens that sit within the landscape rather than on the land, about gardens that are immersive and not just pictorial, I think they are just variations on the topic that Clare Foster has grouped under her term of pastoral gardens. It is the same ground that I traversed with Australian gardener, Michael McCoy and it comes through repeatedly in his social media posts.
No matter the words and terms we use, I think we are all singing from the same song sheet and it is reassuring to find that the directions we have chosen in our little corner of Tikorangi are part of a wider international trend of questioning how we garden, what we value and how we can garden more positively to support an environment that gets more degraded and threatened every day.
Soft-edged romanticism at Wildside in an area on the margins of more intensively gardened areas
For New Zealand readers: I went to order the book on line but blenched when it was going to cost as much for postage as the book. I can cope with £55 for the book but £54.95 for postage was an additional cost I will need to ponder further.
A friend was telling me about a major garden that he had visited recently and his disappointment that it was, as we say, noticeably ‘going back’. He then offered the reason that “of course, they are trying to garden sustainably,” as if to excuse the out-of-control weed issues.
No. No. No. That is not sustainable gardening. That is stopping using glyphosate in regular garden management but not replacing with extensive hand weeding, mulching and making sure no weeds ever get large enough to seed down.
This is from a block of English allotments, many of which are highly productive but score low on aesthetics. Different goals apply in ornamental gardens. Also, too many synthetics and plastic to ever be described as sustainable.
A sustainable approach has more traction in the home vegetable garden where good soil management and the production of healthy vegetables are prioritised – often a mixture of organics, permaculture, biodynamics and other approaches that used to be extremely fringe but are now more mainstream. What doesn’t usually come into that type of gardening is aesthetics. Laying cardboard and old woollen carpet is fine in a utilitarian environment of food production but not generally acceptable in an ornamental garden setting.
Cardboard is a lot better than laying synthetic weedmat and bequeathing non biodegradable materials to the land for centuries to come, but it is not exactly pleasing to the eye.
We have been talking about sustainable gardening here for years and it comes down to two main principles for us. One is eliminating – or at least hugely reducing – garden practices and habits that we know are bad for the environment. The second is gardening in a way we can manage as we age but which maintains the garden in a state that continues to bring us pleasure. We are certainly ageing here, but we have no plans to sell up and move somewhere smaller so that second point is equally important to us, but may not apply to others.
If you do a search on sustainable gardening, there are plenty of resources on line, like this one from Missouri Botanic Gardens, which give handy hints on things great and small that you can do to make your garden practice more environmentally friendly. You do not need me to produce another check list. Small steps are a good start.
Changing a large, predominantly ornamental garden to more sustainable management needs more than small steps. It takes a whole different approach and looking through different eyes. Alas, it sometimes starts with ceasing use of all toxic sprays and that is a giant step, not a small one. We are old enough to be of the glyphosate generation. When it was introduced and then generic, cheaper options became available, it was a game-changer both in gardening and in agriculture. Mark recalls the talk at the time that Round Up (the original glyphosate) was the equivalent of a labour unit. One man – and they were usually men – with a knapsack sprayer could deal to weeds astonishingly quickly. Many large gardens in this country were established and are still maintained with weed sprays. Ours was no exception. Mark would fill the sprayer and start a weed round from one end of the garden to the other on a regular basis.
The Rimu Walk is the lowest maintenance area of our garden and one of the most highly detailed. The combination of shade and years of vigilant weeding means that weed growth is minimal. Problem plants have long since been removed and the complex plantings are compatible with each other and form a stable matrix which requires very little attention.
Over time, that practice has become questionable and is now increasingly regarded as unacceptable. I remember a point in time when Mark decided it was not at all okay to be seen by members of the public with the knapsack sprayer on his back. He would discreetly disappear when people arrived. When we closed the nursery, we moved away from the routine use of sprays. We removed plants that needed spraying to stay healthy; we stopped using fungicides, went for canola oil-based insecticides when we needed them and stopped the routine use of glyphosate in garden management.
We don’t describe our garden as organic because it is not. There are times when we will resort to sprays to deal with particularly invasive weeds (onion weed, tradescantia and the like) or to knock back weed growth in areas of the property we don’t garden but it is never routine and it is not often. We don’t spray or fertilise our lawns and haven’t for at least 15 years but we have changed how we manage them. Our general use of commercially produced fertiliser is rare and targeted to single plants. There is no nitrogen run-off from our place.
In full sun, we control weed growth in the Court Garden by a thick mulch of wood chip, vigilant hand weeding and deadheading some of the plants which need it before they seed down too much. Started in freshly dug ground, this garden has never been fertilised nor shown any need for it. If we are planting something new, it will usually get some compost on its roots. Where appropriate, we will often return thinnings and prunings to the mulch as we go so the soil will continue to be enriched with fresh humus on top.
There are commercial products now that claim to deliver the same results as the spurned sprays but all that is doing is continuing the same gardening practices, usually with less effective tools. Think of it like the attempts to reproduce the traditional food diet but with vegan substitutes – tofurkey (tofu turkey) and fake chicken made from pea protein come to mind. I tried the pea *chicken* once and it was perfectly pleasant but it wasn’t the same as chicken and, when I looked at the packet, the food miles were huge – I think I remember it coming from the north of the UK – and it was a highly processed product. I didn’t buy it again. Just as a good vegan diet is not as simple as swapping out animal products for something that emulates that product, so too does swapping out a toxic spray for an *organic* product fail to get to grips with real issues of sustainability.
Nor indeed should sustainability be confused with low maintenance. They are different concepts.
Once you have taken the first baby steps towards gardening more sustainably, it takes a change of thinking and management to make the next, more significant steps. It is not what we garden with that is the issue; it is how we garden and what personal values we bring to our gardens.
Before glyphosate, there was the multi-use Planet Junior which can be used to till the top layer of soil and leave the hoed weeds in the sun to die off. This is an old photo but we still have the Planet Junior and it has handy applications in some situations.
Part one of two. Sustainability and gardening for biodiversity to follow…. Probably tomorrow.
Pleached Fairy Magnolia Whites in a row shaped to a flat plane. We have two such rows.
Behold our pleached rows of Fairy Magnolia White! I am delighted. A goal has been achieved. It has taken 10 years and that was starting with big plants. In retrospect, I admit that it seems quite a long time but such is the way of gardening. It has looked fine and established for maybe 6 or 7 of those intervening years but finally, we have it how it was envisaged.
Pleached street trees in Vernon
Pleaching is creating a hedge on stilts where the foliage is knitted together to form a length that is more or less flat on two sides but uninterrupted in its length. I photographed pleached street trees in Vernon, the small French town closest to Giverny back in 2014 but I think it was Mark who drew my attention to them because he already had the plan of pleached rows defining our summer gardens, on which we had started the groundworks back at home.
Lloyd on our baby tractor, moving in trees one at a time back in 2014
The start of the summer gardens, when we were all a decade younger. You can see the peg in the ground – they were working to string lines to get the spacings even and straight.
So it was Mark’s vision and his and Lloyd’s hard work that saw large plants going into the new ground in the spring of 2014 and autumn of 2015. We already had the plants growing in a field on our property across the road. They were our original stock plants from when we first released Fairy Magnolia White and they were trained to a strong central leader or trunk. It was no mean feat digging them and getting them across the road and planted but Mark and Lloyd were 10 years younger then. As an aside of useful advice, as soon as they were planted, Mark removed about a third of the foliage, which seemed brutal at the time but was all about reducing the stress on the plants after transplanting.
This is what it looked like a month ago when Fairy Magnolia White was in bloom
In the years since, they have been trimmed once a year – as flowering finishes – to get them to the form we want but it was when our gardener, Zach, joined us that it all started to come together. This must be the third or maybe fourth year that Zach has trimmed them and he has it just right now. As garden tasks go, it is not a massive job – I think it only took him just over two days – and the heaviest part is managing the ladders, which are large. But it is a skilled, precise job. It is all secateur and handsaw work – not hedge clippers.
Squared off to be narrow in width, as viewed from one end of a row
It will look sharper when the hedge of Camellia Fairy Blush beneath also gets its big trim this week and the gap between that hedge and the pleached michelias above is fully defined. I was impatient to record my delight with the clearly defined, more-or-less two dimensional appearance (height and length but little width).
We have three archways of Podocarpus parlatorei. This front one still needs to thicken in the middle but it is getting there.
Credit to Zach, too, for creating the archways of Podocarpus parlatorei in the same garden. Mark had always planned either arches or gables – to echo the gables on the house. Realistically, had it been left to us, I am guessing we would probably have taken the easier route and just trimmed to tight columns but Zach has trained them over to be arches and they have almost filled out to final thickness. They are tied in, in case you are wondering how he did it. The key is getting it tied in when the new growth is soft enough to bend. When it has hardened, it will break. The podocarps are trimmed annually but he has kept the arch tied and trimmed every few months. Again, getting the ladder into place is the most onerous part of this task. Mark, Lloyd and I are all getting a bit old to be carting the largest ladders and working at height. This is just yet another reason why I appreciate younger generations.
Time, too, has seen our clivia plantings go from strength to strength and they are certainly starring this spring. You can have too many clivias in a garden; the orange and red ones are very strident. I am not a fan of mass plantings of clivia but we have integrated them amongst other plants in shady areas and they glow. Ours are almost all seedlings raised here from controlled crosses. This means that Mark has taken the pollen from ones he thinks are good and used the pollen on other selected specimens, marked the pollinated flowers and gathered the ripened seed to sow in nursery conditions. It is quite a bit of faffing about but increases the likelihood of getting superior seedlings rather than leaving it all to Nature. We now have so many that we just weed out seedlings and thinnings.
Mixed colours and mixed plantings are our style, not blocks of single coloured clivias
The reason why clivias are usually expensive to buy is that they are slow growing. It takes much longer than most common perennials to get them large enough to set flowers and sell in garden centres – years more, in fact.
Gardening really is about the longer game but it is particularly rewarding when you see visions realised and areas that get better as plants mature.
* The heading is a reference that it is likely only New Zealanders will understand. Cheese. Yes cheese. A reference to a long running advertisment for a brand of tasty cheese.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 