Tag Archives: Mark and Abbie Jury

Garden Lore

“A little studied negligence is becoming to a garden.”

Eleanor Perenyi Green Thoughts (1981)

Neither spray damaged nor sickly - just hard to use well

Neither spray damaged nor sickly – just hard to use well

Modern heucheras

Having used Plant Collector this week to whole heartedly recommend a new plant, the same can not be said for the yellow and orange heucheras which you will also see in almost every garden centre. I have long raised my eyebrows at these and photographed some clumps on our recent garden ambles, garnering agreement from a number of other gardeners that not all heucheras are equal and some may be best avoided.

Heucheras are North American leafy perennials and have proven most amenable to the whims of the hybridists. Not all are a triumph in terms of garden performance and appearance. The lime green form looks attractive and useful but a retailer told me it is not as reliable as the others. This discouraged me because, despite considerable efforts, I have never been very successful growing the handsome deep burgundy foliaged ones. I have, however, admired them in others’ gardens where they make an attractive show.

It is just those yellow and orange autumn tones. Novelty plants, I call them. Plant them out and how do they look? Spray damaged, is Mark’s verdict. Sickly, I say. I have never seen those particular coloured heucheras used in a way that is attractive. Be cautious of novelties. I am reserving judgement on the coral shades at this stage.

Just don’t do what I saw one gardener do – buy one of each colour and plant them in a ring around the base of a deciduous tree. Not only will they suffer from root competition, it is the look of a novice gardener.

Great nursery plants - the autumn-toned heucheras look so interesting in the garden centre but I have yet to see them perform as garden plants

Great nursery plants – the autumn-toned heucheras look so interesting in the garden centre but I have yet to see them perform as garden plants

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Modern directions in perennial planting patterns

Hampstead Heath1) Confining planting to geometric blocks (Mondrian-style perhaps, for students of art), has been evident in show gardens in recent years but has now become mainstream. This is a new planting on Hampstead Heath, done by the public authorities. The sharp lines will blur over time. It is a shame about the buxus blight that is already evident. A different clipped shrub may have been a better choice.
Wisley2) Piet Oudolf’s rivers of colour in the modern borders at Wisley have been controversial since they were planted in 2000, but we think they are glorious. They also take much less labour to maintain than the traditional twin herbaceous borders. Each ribbon of colour has about four different plants in it and the colours will change through the season. You need to be able to look up or look down on this type of planting (or both). Viewed on the flat, you would not see the diagonal effect.
A river effect3) Less ambitious may be to snake a river of one perennial through clumping plantings. In this case it is an erigeron daisy but I have already done it in my own garden with irises (the blue sibirican ones and also Higo iris). A river effect alters the dynamic of big, round clumps of plants or can give some visual unity to an otherwise disorganised planting.
Tom Stuart Smith4) Big generous clumps of perennial plants, each standing in its own space, are one of the hallmarks of the New Perennials Style that has been widely adopted in modern UK and northern European gardens. This is a private garden, the work of British designer, Tom Stuart Smith. It takes a big area to carry out well. Each plant is occupying an area at least a metre across, sometimes more. Clipped shrubs act as punctuation points.
Dorset garden5) The classic cottage garden mix and match style is harder to manage than it looks if you are determined to keep both a succession of flowers and good coverage – to avoid bare patches – throughout the warmer months. This is in a Dorset garden owned by a good gardener. In lesser hands, it can become a hodge podge with bare bits and small plants of potted colour added in an effort to fill in the gaps.
Gresgarth, near Lancaster6) The classic twin herbaceous borders adapted to a more personalised, private garden (in this case Gresgarth, near Lancaster) by breaking up the expanse into shorter sections using clipped hedging in battlement style and strategic topiary. In line with modern expectations, planting is now deliberately colour-toned and separate sections allow the colour palettes to be kept apart. The effect is deliberately refined.
007 - Copy7) Grasses! Grasses! More grasses! And many meadows, let alone prairie plantings. No discussion about modern perennials is complete with referencing these major trends. These deserve attention in greater detail and are part of a bigger picture of focussing on more environmentally friendly approaches to gardening.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Farewell to the trees

To the left has been “beautified”. To the right are the 60 year old trees to be clear-felled for more such “beautification”

To the left has been “beautified”. To the right are the 60 year old trees to be clear-felled for more such “beautification”

“Imagine if trees gave off wi-fi signals, we’d be planting so many trees and we would probably save the planet too. Too bad they only produce the oxygen we breathe.” So runs the meme that swept social media recently. Truly we despair here at how hard it is to keep established trees and how ready are so many people to take the chainsaw to them.

Perhaps it is due to our recent pioneer history that we have failed to develop a reverence for big trees. That, and the fact that our houses are notoriously cold in winter and we want every bit of sun and warmth we can get.

There is no argument that large trees in suburban settings can be a problem for residents, especially as sections get ever smaller. That is why we have always advocated for trees in public areas where they have the space to reach maturity and to give grace to our environment. All power to council arborists and parks staff who are tasked with looking after such vegetative assets. For assets they are, although not in a financial sense. A tree can be chainsawed down in a morning but it may have taken a very long time for it to ever attain stature.

What would Cambridge be like without its street trees like these on Taylor Street (Photo: Michael Jeans)

What would Cambridge be like without its street trees like these on Taylor Street (Photo: Michael Jeans)

Leave it to the populace – the ignorati – and we would have nothing taller than 3 metres and older than 20 years in urban settings. Can you imagine the main streets of Cambridge without the trees? I do not know the history of those trees but it is a fair bet that there have been efforts by some people over time to take the chainsaw to them. Thank goodness those tasked with the civic environment have stood firm for, without those trees, Cambridge would just be like any other unmemorable small town in New Zealand.

There is no doubt that trees can make a mess. It is called the cycle of nature. Do they make a bigger mess than humans? Would we rather live in paved, concrete wastelands to avoid the leaf drop, the seed dispersal, the spent flowers, birds’ nests and occasional fallen branches?

Imagine the lake scene at Te Ko Utu in Cambridge Domain without big trees (Photo: Michael Jeans)

Imagine the lake scene at Te Ko Utu in Cambridge Domain without big trees (Photo: Michael Jeans)

I write from the heart. We are truly distressed because it appears that we have lost a local battle to save the row of handsome pohutukawa that line the Waitara riverbank. They are sixty years old, just achieving the beauty and stature of established trees, but they are to be clear felled.

“Those trees are past their use-by date.” Ah, no. Pohutukawa have no use-by date. They are a very long-lived tree. “We don’t want them getting too big.” “They are messy.” The fact that they are in a position where they do not shade any buildings and their natural fall of litter does not affect any private property is irrelevant to these folk. “They are not native to this area.” That argument is specious. Not only is the natural occurrence of pohutukawa a mere 10km north of here, but these same folk will think nothing of replacing them with a golden robinia or flowering cherry.

In a battle of jurisdiction between local authorities, where power has been vested in an engineer, the good burghers of our local community board have reportedly been out asking people: “Do you want to keep the trees or do you want the area beautified?” That is a Tui billboard moment.

There is no way to reason with people who see no merit in trees. There’s none so blind as those who will not see and minds have been made up. To such people, trees are completely expendable and of no beauty. They will be long dead before any replacement plants can reach maturity and in the interim there will be decades of a windswept, bare riverbank. It will have an expensive boardwalk and some seats painted sky blue, however, for beauty and history lie only in man-made objects. We could weep.

This is not a story unique to our area. It is repeated often up and down the country in some form or other. Trees need human protection if they are to hold the chainsaw massacre brigade at bay.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

POSTSCRIPT
I see back at the start of 2007, I wrote about these trees in the Taranaki Daily News, saying: “Waitara would be a bleak little town without these splendid trees.”

These trees were planted to hide the ugly sight of the old freezing works. Unfortunately the trees are to be removed but the arse-end of the freezing works will remain. This is, apparently, “beautifying the area”.
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Garden Lore

“Did you ever meet a gardener, who, however fair his ground, was absolutely content and pleased?…Is there not always a tree to be felled or a bed to be turfed?…Is there not ever some grand mistake to be remedied next summer?”

The Rev Samuel Hole (1819-1904)

Magnolia Sweetheart (AGM)

Magnolia Sweetheart (AGM)

It was a nice surprise this week to discover that Britain’s Royal Horticulture Society has conferred an Award of Garden Merit (commonly called an AGM but not to be confused with annual general meetings) on our Magnolia Felix Jury. This is assessed on how it performs in UK conditions so it is not particularly relevant to NZ. Two of our flagship magnolias – Vulcan and Iolanthe – perform consistently well here but don’t like the cooler, greyer conditions over there. But any international recognition is gratifying.

Mark named the plant for his father, Felix, because it was what the latter had been aiming for in his magnolia breeding and it was only possible for Mark to achieve it by building on the work his father had already done. There are only four other NZ deciduous magnolias which carry an AGM. Athene and Milky Way are earlier hybrids from Felix Jury. Starwars was bred by the late Os Blumhardt in Whangarei and is still widely sold. We have seen it flowering in both Northern Italy and the UK and it looked better there than it does here, in our opinion. And finally, Sweetheart was raised by Peter Cave (formerly Cave’s Tree Nursery near Cambridge) and remains one of the prettiest small to medium-sized pink flowered magnolias that we know.

Magnolia Felix Jury (AGM)

Magnolia Felix Jury (AGM)

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Garden Lore Friday 25 April, 2014

“It is something of an urban myth that a worm will be perfectly happy if you cut it in half. It may continue to wriggle for a while (so would you after you had been shot or stabbed) but it will die not long afterwards. Only if you nip off just a little of its tail end does it have the capacity to repair itself.”

The Curious Gardener’s Almanac by Niall Edworthy (2006)

048Garden Lore

Today’s Lore is brought to you from an intensely irritated husband here who despairs at the ongoing affectation of referring to “worm wees” and “worm poos”. We are not juveniles struggling with potty training though I guess we should perhaps be grateful that we have not yet descended so low as to talk about worm “number ones” and “number twos”. Worms do not urinate and defecate in the same way as humans. Perish the thought, we would not want to put our hands in the soil. What worms produce is correctly referred to as vermicasts or worm casts. They pass the soil and decaying vegetation through their gut and in so doing aerate the soil, create better drainage and make the nutrients more accessible to living plants. The resulting vermicasts are rich in accessible potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen. Can we cast out the baby talk now that we grown up gardeners? Please.

Sydney daughter lives in a local authority zone that, in return for attendance at a free half day course, supplies free of charge to inner city residents either a worm farm or a compost bin. The choice is dependent on what best suits the individual’s circumstances. It seems an innovative initiative to tackle the huge problem of urban household green waste. I have not heard of local authorities following suit in this country.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.