Tag Archives: Mark and Abbie Jury

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.

007

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.

Flowers from an early autumn Easter weekend

It is indubitably autumnal, but no sign of the leaves colouring or dropping yet as we gently drift into the cooler seasons. I shall do a survey of the plants that take us through autumn, I thought, and headed out to the garden with snips and a basket.

We love flowers – lots of flowers. Simple blooms, common varieties, oddities and curiosities, anything and most things (though not everything) across the colour spectrum. Some gardeners, presumably of more refined sensibilities, prefer to be restrained and to preach the value of form and foliage. We are happy to value form and foliage but we want the added appeal of flowery fluff softening the austerity.

Despite that slight sense of mournful decay that can characterise the autumnal garden, there was so much flying the flag for flowers that I had to group them. It is still early for the autumn bulbs. There is a whole lot more to come but the nine in bloom at least indicate that not all bulbs belong to spring. Starting with the white flower at the top of the photo, going clockwise, these are: Crinum moorei, belladonna, Colchicum autumnale, one of the autumn crocus (could be C. serotinus), Moraea polystachya which is an unsung star amongst the autumn bulbs, Cyclamen hederafolium both pink and white, the dainty little Leucojum autumnale, the earliest of the oxalis (hirta, luteola, massoniana and lobata) and the first of the nerines that will become the rockery stars over the next few weeks.
Climbers can be a little bothersome to place. Too many are strangling, invasive things, smothering their host as they scramble to the top, or, like the Rhodochiton atrosanguineus, seeding down in perpetuity. Others are such retiring little dainties that they can be difficult to keep going. Flowering for us at the moment are the bougainvillea (very much in the rampant camp) and one of the more garden-friendly jasmines at the top but we have lost track of which one it is. It has good fragrance, flowers pretty much all the time and is strong growing – bordering on rampant – but not as aggressive as the weedy jasmines. It is planted on the corner of the bedroom once inhabited by our daughter of the same name. Immediately below, the purple flower like a mini streptocarpus is on a soft vine, but its name escapes us at the moment. Well, I have never known it and Mark thinks he raised it from commercial seed but has yet to recall what it is. To the right are the lapagerias – Chilean bell flowers – with their wonderfully long blooming season and obliging habits. Sure it can take several – many, even – years to get a vine established but once there, these are rewarding plants for the shaded side of the house.
The flowering shrubs and trees are not so numerous at this time of the year. Top row left, we have Radermachera sinica (more on this below), Hydrangea Immaculata which is still at peak rather than that fading over to dusky spent flowerheads, next row down is the fragrant osmanthus (though not sure which one) and the so-called African butter knife plant or Cunonia capensis. Then comes the white flowered tibouchina which seeds down far too freely here but does compensate by flowering pretty much all the time in semi woodland conditions. Fuchsias are not a strong point for us, but the one on the left has been here forever it seems, surviving even falling over, splitting apart and drought. The one on the right is the attractive but dangerously weedy Fuchsia boliviana. Second row from the bottom is a sampling of vireya rhododendrons – have enough of these around the place and there are always some in flower, 52 weeks of the year. In the bottom row are the first of the evergreen azaleas embarking on their marathon blooming from early autumn right through to mid spring and the first camellia.
Camellia sinensis will no doubt be of interest to some. It is always the first to flower though with such insignificant blooms that they are easy to miss. This is the tea camellia, and yes, sometimes we do harvest the young leaves to make green tea. White flowered tea camellias are more common and we have a plant somewhere – in the “plant out” area, I think, waiting to get out of its pot.
I was pretty thrilled by the Radermachera sinica when Mark alerted me to it in bloom. It has a divine and heady fragrance. The trouble is that it is sub tropical to tropical so treated as a house plant in the temperate world. But it is a tree and ours is shooting skywards. Besides, we don’t do houseplants so we are yet to decide what to do with this plant besides enjoying its current flowering.
Finally there are the perennials and annuals still in full bloom. In brief in the yellow tones, we start with a damn big yellow salvia at the base and head around clockwise: kniphofia species, one of the gesneriad family whose name we have currently forgotten but which makes an excellent woodland plant, datura, dahlias, simple little autumn zinnias (none of the over-bred, bushy, compact, modern hybrid bedding plants), a handy yellow ground cover which flowers for a very long time and whose name will come back to us at some point, Hibiscus trionum and the common wildflower oenothera which is remarkably rewarding when it comes to blooming on and on.
In the pinks and whites, we start at the top with the under-sung white plumes of Actaea racemosa (syn Cimcifuga racemosa) whose fairy candles light up a woodland area, a simple dahlia seedling, the annual Amaranthus caudatus which is self sown, the lovely wind anemones, assorted daisies, streptocarpus (bit of one-upmanship here – we use these as permanent bedding plants in frost-free locations), one of the saponarias, a really old, self-maintaining strain of impatiens that has naturalised in our woodland, a self-seeded abutilon which should have been amongst the shrubs and some rather large and resilient begonias.

While others may find that buxus balls and refined plantings soothe their souls and give order to their lives, we like vibrancy to gladden our hearts. Besides, with flowers we get butterflies, bees and birds to enrich the scene further and we take delight in gardening to sustain a lively eco-system. That said, I gathered these flowers across a few acres, not from a few square metres in a back garden. I might feel differently with a more limited area. In the current situation, I can satisfy any need for more restrained style indoors.

Postscript: Many of these plants have more detailed articles from earlier writing. Rather than clutter up the post with multiple links, if you want to know more about most, type the plant name in the search engine box on the right of the screen.

Keeping our monarchs at home

Joe Pye weed is a handy source of nectar for the monarch butterflies. We have always known Joe Pye as a eupatorium but it has now been renamed Eutrochium purpureum

March is the month when we become aware that the days are shortening and night temperatures cooling but autumn? Not yet, at least not in North Taranaki where we drift ever so slowly from season to season. But every year, the same pressure comes on – the plight of the monarch butterflies.March is the start of the critical period. We have monarchs on the wing twelve months of the year in our garden. To a large extent, that is because we take active steps to guard the late season caterpillars. These are the ones that will chrysalis and hatch out as conditions for them grow more difficult. Given the short life span of a monarch butterfly – usually only a month, the internet tells me – it is these late season candidates which will winter over and guarantee continuance through next summer.

In North America monarchs migrate vast distances to over-winter in the mountains of Mexico but our monarchs are not as determined and will stay at home. Occasionally we find a tree where many are clustered together and it is truly a small wonder in our world to see them stretching and flexing their wings in what little warmth there is on a sunny winter’s morning. More often, we will see raggedy specimens bravely feeding from seasonal plants. The so-called Edgeworthia papyrifera (yellow daphne) can be an astounding sight in August. The key to keeping our monarchs close to home is year-round food supplies, which means plenty of flowers with visible stamens and pollen which are a fair indicator of available nectar.

Swan plants are the food source for monarch caterpillars

No doubt many readers are currently suffering the seasonal anxiety of stripped swan plants and a surfeit of caterpillars at all stages of development. The caterpillars are very selective about food sources. Basically they need swan plants. We always knew these as Asclepias fruticosa but I see they have now been reclassified as Gomphocarpus fruticosus for the common one and G. physocarpus for the giant swan plant and I can’t commit either of those names to my memory. You can – and we have in the past – get medium and large caterpillars to chrysalis-size on slices of pumpkin but you have to confine them because they will head off looking for their preferred food source given the opportunity. Is there anything as brave as the sight of a procession of monarch caterpillars heading away in search of more food?

Nowadays we try and reserve plants for late season caterpillars, covering them with netting and taking steps to rid them of the nasty yellow aphid that can decimate the plants. There is a specific aphid spray that does not harm the caterpillars when infestations are really bad. Both Yates and Tui have organic products that target mites, whitefly and aphids. Later in the season, Mark will start his chrysalis rescue programme, carefully tying them with cotton to suspend them safely because they can rarely hatch successfully if lying on the ground.

We are working to establish the admirals in the garden, seen here feeding from Lycoris aurea last autumn

We are finally getting patches of stinging nettle established. The only reason for this is to encourage the admirals, both red and yellow, to move into our garden. It is not our large native tree nettle – Urtica ferox – but one of the dwarf ones which has turned up which we are allowing to stay. Unlike the monarchs, which are self-introduced to this country and were first recorded around 1840, our brand of red admirals are truly indigenous and not found anywhere else in the world. Because their host plant is not as obliging and hospitable as the monarch’s swan plant, they need all the help we can give them. That said, there was a news item that came through at the start of this year reporting that the US Fish and Wildlife Service is taking steps to protect the monarch butterfly under the Endangered Species Act. Loss of habitat and modern farming methods have caused a massive drop in the monarch population and there are fears that, without intervention, they may die out.

Some utilitarians may ask what useful contribution butterflies make to human life. It is true that there their direct contribution does not equal that of bees. But as gardeners, most of us set out to cultivate transient and ephemeral blooms for no other reason than that they are beautiful and bring delight. Butterflies are beauties of the insect world and their continued presence is a good indicator of a healthy ecosystem.

New Zealand has an active Monarch Butterfly Trust with a comprehensive website. While the obliging monarch is their main focus, they cover the whole range of butterflies found in New Zealand (which is not large by international standards) and they touch on the moths (which are considerably more numerous here but less appealing to most people). You will find answers to many specific problems on that site. While the obliging monarch is their main focus, the site has information on a whole range of butterflies found in New Zealand, which is not large by international standards, and they touch on the moths, which are considerably more numerous here…but perhaps less appealing to most people.

First published in March issue of New Zealand Gardener magazine and reprinted here with their permission.

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