Tag Archives: Mark and Abbie Jury

Flood!

001 It rained yesterday. A lot. We are accustomed to heavy rain here and are blessed with very free draining soils. The dogs hate the rain and won’t go out until it is near emergency time for them. But the rain, it continued. Mark lost track of the rain gauge around 200ml during the day.
002 Down in our park is the lowest area of our property but over the years, we had eliminated flooding with a weir, flood channel and stop banks. Until yesterday. That is what we refer to as the high bridge in the very centre behind the magnolia – featured often in photographs. It is a low grade phone camera image because I was not going to risk my new camera in the torrential rain. The water is flowing right over the bridge.

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In fact the better part of park was flooded and resembled a raging torrent. It is usually such a quiet little stream that flows through. Half of it is channelled through the garden as here, and half is diverted down the separate flood channel. It all became one yesterday.

006 When we made our way out to the road, we saw why our park was flooding. This is the corner where the stream enters our property.
006 (2) And the scene to the right of the intersection which is also our place.
007 (2) But nothing must stop the petrochemical traffic (though we notice it has stopped today so the road damage must be a concern). This massive LNG tanker ploughed blindly through without checking that there was still road beneath, which was a bit of a surprise to us.
008 The ute that tried it next was not so lucky. He hit the water too fast and stalled. Fortunately help was to hand for towing him out because the water was flowing through his vehicle and the current could well have swept it away.
There is a lesson on negotiating flood waters, even in the big 4 wheel drive offroad vehicles much favoured today. We noticed a Jeep Cherokee in our carpark, but didn’t find out until later in the day that it too had stalled in the water. The occupants had to escape through a window because the water was up the doors. It was towed to the closest safe place, which was ours. We joked about claiming salvage rights over it but he arrived today to try and start it. It didn’t. Start, I mean, so it is still parked there.
003 The shocker was this car. It is just around the corner to the right, out of view to those of us on the other road. The occupants were our elderly neighbours who had to be rescued out of the car window. They were very shocked, but not otherwise injured. With hindsight, we worry how close they came to drowning and none of us on the other road would even have known they were there, a few metres out of sight.
021 This morning, the waters were receding. It is messy but we have not yet found any major damage on our place. Others have not been as lucky. It is perhaps a timely warning about the power of Nature and the increasing frequency of what are referred to as “extreme weather events. And always live in a house on a hill, not on a flood plain.
027 Where Mark and dogs are standing was half a metre under water at this time yesterday.

Gone in a morning – the loss of the Waitara riverbank pohutukawa

Gone. The view from the lookout on Manukorihi Hill.

Regular readers will know of our battle to save the pohutukawa trees that line our local river. We lost. Today the chainsaws moved in. In a couple of short hours, trees that were over sixty years old were felled to the ground.
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Clearly there was some concern about the possibility of protests. Ironically the body that was hellbent on felling these trees is also the body charged with protecting the environment – that is what we call a Tui billboard moment in New Zealand vernacular. In a case of overkill, Taranaki Regional Council marshalled their staff to patrol the entrances to the area. Why, there was even a boat patrolling the river access. They would have been very cold out there on the river for a few hours. Truly, it is mid-winter here and most of us feel a little too old to scale large trees in order to protect them, so the fear of the operation being disrupted by protest was unfounded.

But oh, how sad to see the needless desecration of handsome, well established trees. Despite their public relations spin, the Taranaki Regional Council didn’t consult widely. They preferred to talk to people who said what they wanted to hear. As the protesting voices grew, rather than taking another look at the plans and seeing whether saving the trees could be accommodated, they set about discrediting, denying and deriding the opposing voices.
053 How anybody in their right mind could think that the hostile expanse of concrete flood wall, topped with barbed wire (it is doing double duty as a security wall for the meat packing works behind) was an appropriate form of town flood protection in this day and age is beyond comprehension. It looks like a prison wall. This is the face of Waitara in 2015. We regard it as simply shameful action by Taranaki Regional Council.
042 While the chainsaws worked at one end of the row, the digger driver proved that you don’t need chainsaws at the other end – the might of the machine means you can break apart the trees. There was no sign that the men on the site felt any sorrow at the unceremonious felling.

Once were trees. The new view from our town bridge

With ever increasing population in urban areas, we had thought that the role of protecting mature and handsome trees fell increasingly upon our local bodies, particularly in public spaces. These trees had the potential to live for many hundreds of years without causing any harm or inconvenience to residents while enhancing the centre of Waitara. No more.

Will this pretty scene downstream be allowed to remain?

Earlier plans were to fell ALL the riverbank trees. There is fear that this might yet happen. I found this pretty scene just down the river a little further. I wonder if it, too, will suffer the same treatment in the next year or two because the engineer who designed the flood protection doesn’t think there is any place for trees on river banks.

There is no place like home

Fortunately, I do not live in the town itself so I could come home to our own place with its many, very large trees to soothe my heavy heart. These at least are beyond the reach of the chainsaw-happy regional council.

Tikorangi Notes: June 11, 2015 From Nerine bowdenii to homeopathic gins

Nerine bowdenii on May 11

And a month later on June 11

Without a camera, I may never have tracked the flowering time of Nerine bowdenii. It is a species and we have valued it for being the last of the season to flower without being too excited by it. But a MONTH at least in full bloom through autumnal storms and wind – that is an astoundingly long time for a bulb that only puts up one flower head, as opposed to successional flowering down the stem. We are now thinking we will use it more widely beneath deciduous trees where we had been relying on belladonnas. The latter flowers early in autumn when the leaves are still on the trees and the blooms don’t last anywhere near as long. Fortunately, N. bowdenii multiplies up extremely well and is probably the easiest of the nerines we grow.

The Kurume azaleas, underplanted with Cyclamen hederafolium

I have been cleaning out the azaleas. Oh how easily those words trip off the tongue but I tell you, doing the first of two blocks is probably 20 or 30 hours work. It must be a sign of the leisured pace of my life at the moment that I can spend that amount of time on one task. Years ago, we limbed up these tiny leaved Kurumes to make the most of their interesting form and to enable us to look through them. Sculpting them, we call it. It is more common to clip and mound them, keeping them much lower to the ground. These ones are planted on the margins of our enormous rimu trees and they catch a fair amount of litter falling from above. They also shoot from the base and we try and rub off those new shoots before they get large. But once every five or ten years, a major clean out of the dead wood and the canopy makes a major difference. It just takes time. A lot of time. I am reminded of something we once heard Christopher Lloyd say (it must have been on the telly because I can’t find it in print): “People are always looking for low maintenance and easy care gardens. Personally I am of the view that if you love what you are doing, higher maintenance is more interesting.”

I lack a photo of passionfruit at the purple stage of ripening

But at least I have red tamarillos on file

On the home harvest front, we are now experimenting with homemade juices. Not using the mechanised juicing machine that we inherited from our daughter when she left to live overseas. She assured us it made good carrot juice but we have not had a surplus of carrots yet. Mostly I use it for grape juice or melon juice. It takes a prodigious quantity of fruit for a pretty small liquid yield but then so do the fresh squeezed orange juices we often make – 5 or sometimes 6 fruit per glass. No, it was the surplus of passionfruit and upcoming tamarillos that were worrying me and I didn’t want a juicing system that ground up the seeds. Mark scooped a bucket of passionfruit out. The quantity immediately reduced to medium sized basin. I added some water and brought it to the boil with a little sweetener because the fruit was rather too tart. Do not laugh. It was only because I had agave nectar in the cupboard (bought when I was test cooking a recipe book sent for review) that I used it as a sugar substitute. I simmered the fruit for a short while before straining it off. The original bucket of fruit yielded just a litre of juice. Liquid gold. We will savour it, diluting it 50% with soda water in lieu of our weekday homeopathic gins.

What, you may ask, is a homeopathic gin? Here, it is lime and soda served in a nice glass which holds the memory of gin. When we decided, in a burst of wholesome living, to manage alcohol consumption by not drinking from Monday to Thursday, we realised that it was in part the ritual of sitting down together with a drink before dinner that we enjoyed. Hence the homeopathic gins. The logical extension of wholesome living seems to be the shunning of synthetic lime juice in plastic bottles, replacing it with our own fruit juices. Virtue expires on Friday evenings, I admit.

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Blame the quail

Mark has been busy in his vegetable gardens. He has now resorted to covering all the brassicas and leafy greens as well as all seedlings, in order to protect the crops from birds. He blames the cute resident quail for attacking the Brussel sprouts but there are plenty of candidates. It may just be that the quail, being predominantly ground birds, are the most visible. The strawberries are planted for spring and the garlic is already above ground.

Lovely in bloom, huge, but what is it?

Finally, if any reader can give us the name of this enormous perennial, we would be most appreciative. It is of similar stature to a tree dahlia – about 4m x 4m – so taking up a lot of space. Currently it is smothered in white daisies and has survived a frost but cold weather can cut it to ground. It is very late in the season for what is presumably an autumn flowering perennial. We will enjoy while we can, but we would like somebody to remind us of its name.

Postscript: That didn’t take long. A reader has identified this as Montanoa bipinnatifida which I see is commonly known as the Mexican tree daisy, a member of the asteraceae family. No wonder we were struggling to come up with a name – I don’t think either of us have ever heard it before. And it is not a perennial but a shrub. It must be that ours gets cut back so often by the winter chill that it resembles a huge perennial rather than a shrub.

When near enough is not far enough

012 It being autumn, ‘tis the season of sasanqua camellias here. Ever since camellia petal blight arrived to wreak havoc on the later flowering japonicas, we have been a great deal more appreciative of the sasanquas. What they lack in flower form, they make up in performance.

Gay Border on the left, Navajo to the right

On a grey and somewhat bleak day, I thought to entertain myself with photographing the flowers but became sidetracked onto comparisons. When we had our nursery in full production, Mark would regularly make calls as to which cultivars we would propagate and sell. Would it be Navajo or Gay Border? We chose Navajo. It is not just the flowers that are the deciding factor. The habit of growth, foliage, size, performance and ease of propagation and production were also considered although the decisions were often a little ad hoc. When it came to Sparkling Burgundy and Elfin Rose, we chose the latter because its foliage looked better.

Sparkling Burgundy left, Elfin Rose right

We felt that it is not helpful to a customer to look at a range of plants with very subtle differences. “The man on the galloping horse” test, Mark calls it – the differences should be obvious, not just subtle variations. As far as we were concerned, we were professionals and customers had a right to expect us to do some filtering in selections and to pick good performers.

When it comes to naming his own cultivars from his breeding programme, Mark is hugely more rigorous and restrained. A new release has to be significantly different, distinctive or a major improvement. He has only named four of his own deciduous magnolias so far and that is out of many, many hundreds – maybe into the thousands – of seedlings he has raised. This restraint is somewhat unusual in the world of plant breeding.

Honey Tulip top left with other named cultivars. Might we have seen this as a breakthrough in flower form?

When we released Magnolia Honey Tulip, we received an email from an overseas self-appointed expert acknowledging that Mark was extremely – excessively, some may say – restrained about the new selections that he named and released but he should not have released a yellow magnolia. The world has enough yellow magnolias already, he loftily told us. Right-o then. We knew what he meant – there are many yellow magnolias named which all look very similar, but apparently it had not occurred to him that Mark, with his self-imposed restraint, may actually have managed to breed one that was a breakthrough and very different. We did not reply.

Anybody can raise seedlings of Black Tulip but are they then all worth naming? We think not.

A plant breeder, by our definition, does more than just raise open pollinated seed. Not so the gentleman who visited us (again from overseas). He loved Mark’s Magnolia Black Tulip which sets seed. So he raised a whole batch of seed and spawned a whole lot of similar looking flowers which he then named and insisted on showing Mark all the photographs. None looked to be distinctive, a breakthrough or an improvement. They were just subtly different, as seedlings usually are. That sort of willy-nilly approach is not helpful to the plant and gardening world but we see it often.

That is why we have never coveted a National Collection – of anything really. The UK is very big on national collections. The parent website states:

“Plant Heritage’s (NCCPG’s) mission is to conserve, grow, propagate, document and make available the amazing resource of cultivated plants that exists in the UK….

Our main conservation vehicle is the Plant Heritage National Plant Collection® scheme where individuals or organisations undertake to document, develop and preserve a comprehensive collection of one group of plants in trust for the future.”

Camellia brevistyla left, microphylla right. They look mighty similar to us.

It is one thing to collect species – that is important for biodiversity and many are endangered in the wild. Mind you, we remain unconvinced that Camellias brevistyla and microphylla are actually different species. It looks more like seedling variation to us.

“For I have seen the national rhubarb collection”

Also the compilation and maintenance of a wide genetic pool is important when it comes to crops like fruit and veg. “For I have seen the National Rhubarb Collection”, I tweeted when we visited Wisley. It seemed such a random and esoteric plant to collect, which is not meant in any way to deride its worth. And it was certainly a beautifully maintained collection.

But a National Collection that takes in many named hybrids? We have seen too many inferior and indistinct hybrids named to ever want to start a collection of any plant genus. We would rather have plants that are selected on individual merit in our garden.

Plant collecting is like stamp collecting, Mark explained. The search for a particular named cultivar may be challenging, rewarded by the thrill of acquisition. Whether the plant was actually worth acquiring – whether it warranted naming in the first place – becomes irrelevant.

Postscript: we don’t like to dwell too much on the travesty of our Cordyline Red Fountain and the ring-in Cordyline Burgundy though this was not, we think, motivated by misplaced breeder pride but by much baser motives indeed.

More harvest than festival

After picking flowers, I couldn’t resist laying out some samples of the autumn harvest. I didn’t get too obsessive. There is much that I forgot to include – a good potato crop, sweet corn, another year’s supply of dried beans (not sure we have finished the 2013 bean harvest yet) and I forgot entirely about the show-off avocados which we have in such abundance that we are giving them away by the supermarket bag full.

What I can tell you, as we personally move more to a diet dominated by plant-based protein rather than one heavy on animal protein, is that anyone who says that you can be relatively self sufficient in food on a few metre square raised beds and an hour or two of work a week hasn’t actually done it themselves! With a lifetime of experience, it takes Mark a great deal of time and space to generate a wide range of food that we want to eat. Most of it is organic and we are also interested in the whole issue of nutrient density – more on this another time.

We are swapping surplus tomatoes and melons with a friend for eggs and pumpkin and appreciative friends also reciprocate with jars of preserves made from our surplus produce. It is a satisfyingly simple way of life that we followed in our twenties in our hippie days and we are enjoying rediscovering decades down the track.
The melons – both rock and water – take some effort here. Mark starts them early under a cloche in almost pure compost. The cold, wet spring meant that stone crops were sparse this year but the abundant melon crop is an indication of a good summer.

The yellow fruit by the melons are chaenomeles (japonica apples). I have boiled some down and strained off the liquid to use later for some conserve or jelly. The green fruit, for non New Zealanders – is the feijoa, a South American fruit we have almost made our own here. The oranges are one of our staple fruit here – we can harvest all year round, especially from the Lue Gim Gong tree.

Sadly, while we can grow sapotes, macadamia nuts and other marginal crops, mango and papaya are never going to grow here. We do still buy some extra fruit and vegetables.

I have even made Cape gooseberry jam again this year.

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