Tag Archives: Mark and Abbie Jury

Spring panic, camellia pruning and a good ladder – a very good ladder

The Hippeastrum aulicums are coming into flower and the calanthe orchids are in full bloom.

As we hurtle into the full flush of spring, after a remarkably calm and mild winter, not only is the weather breaking up but I can feel the old sense of rising panic. The weather is entirely to be expected. Mark calls it ‘the magnolia storms’ on account of them always hitting during magnolia season – the confluence of cold fronts from the South Pole and warm fronts from Australia and the Pacific Ocean, I believe.

The sense of panic is more personal. I am the last of the generations who came through an education system where everything depended on the final examinations. There was no internal assessment. I was particularly good at exams which was just as well because I was never very diligent during the year. The arrival of spring meant I had to focus and cram in preparation, which I did. My last two years in school and then five years in tertiary education were marked by deep anxiety and stress in spring and exams generally finished towards the end. It was not my favourite season.

Some plants just get better with age and some do not. A magnolia should be amongst those that do get better and Magnolia Iolanthe fits that brief, even after 70 years.

I had barely recovered from repetitive stress dreams that dogged me well into mature adulthood when we inflicted springtime stress on ourselves in a different form. Many years of opening for the Taranaki Garden Festival meant that the advent of spring signalled the time the pressure came on to make sure every corner of the garden was up to opening standard. In a garden the size of ours, that was a big task that took planning, personal deadlines and a lot of hard work that wasn’t always fun.

The exams are a very long way in the past and we no longer open for the garden festival. Any stress these days is entirely self-inflicted but I still felt the old anxiety rising as I walked around the garden this week. The onset of spring has been so rapid this year, that I found myself worrying that if I was distracted or forgot to look for a few days, I could miss something entirely. I had to speak sternly to myself, pointing out that this is what we garden for and that I need to take the time to breathe, to look and to enjoy. I listened to my own advice and truly, the seasonal sights are a joy to experience and yes, I do have the time these days to appreciate them. Every day, another plant will open in bloom to add to the floral tapestry already on display.

I have almost finished pruning the camellias that need it and I pondered the thought that two skills which are under-rated in gardening are pruning and staking. It is awfully obvious when they are done badly and doing them well can seem to take quite a bit of time.

The undulating hedge in the Wave Garden – cut with an electric hedge trimmer.

We use a variety of pruning techniques on the camellias, depending on the situation. If we are doing a full rejuvenation, it is easy. We just cut off to a good framework and then practise patience for two years while the plant recovers and makes bushy, fresh growth. Camellia hedges are done with the electric hedge trimmer. Mark did the Wave Garden hedges and I spent probably as long going through afterwards with secateurs to tidy up wayward branches and bits that were still out of place.

Camellia Tiny Star was cut back pretty much to bare wood two years ago after getting way too tall and leggy. This is two years of regrowth.

It was the four umbrella camellias surrounding the sunken garden that have taken the most time. These are top-worked, so grafted about a metre off the ground. They are a seedling from Mark’s breeding programme that we never sold but Mark has always referred to as Pink Poppet. For years, he has kept them in shape with the hedge clippers. When I say years, I have no idea how long. Maybe fifteen or so? They had become very dense and full of debris and dead twigs. I decided they needed a good clean out and thinning.

Spot the difference? These are two down the other end of the sunken garden that have just had hours of attention and you can see in the wool bale how much has been removed.

I may not have started, had I realised how long it would take. The first one took me around four hours. I did speed up but even so the last one would have been two and a half hours and I could have spent longer and done a more thorough job. At the end of it, I had removed at least a third of the bulk and they did not look any different. But that is the whole point and the reason why it took so long. I didn’t want them to look any different, I wanted them to be able to breathe, to shed spent blooms and leaves and to get rid of the growing issue with black mould on some of the foliage. Invisible pruning. I am hoping they may last another decade.

Behold my ladder. In an establishment with many ladders (about eight different ones), this one is mine, all mine. I bought it to use in the house. We have a higher ceiling stud than modern houses and I couldn’t reach the top cupboards from the kitchen step ladder. So it lives in the broom cupboard in the house but I also use it in the garden. It is so lightweight, I can lift it with a single finger. It is very stable with a platform for comfortable standing, rather than a narrow step at the top. There is even a handy top shelf for small tools. I can’t recommend it highly enough for anyone who needs a convenient ladder for outdoor or indoor use. Lloyd was so impressed when I let him use it indoors for a task that he said he was going to get one for his home. For New Zealand readers, I bought it at Mitre 10 Mega and it wasn’t hugely expensive – a bit over $100, from memory. It is worth every cent.

Early spring gold

A selection of the earliest flowering narcissi – we like variety

What a delight are the dainty narcissi. I see I started photographing them in in mid July so we have had a month of pleasure so far and plenty more to come. When it comes to magnolia flowers, we lean to the bigger is better way of thinking but the narcissi are different. Small and dainty, thank you.

The big daffodils flower later and we don’t have many of those. In fact, we have none of the large-bloomed, modern hybrids which are what dominate the commercial bulb catalogues. They just don’t fit our garden style. Also, because they are later flowering, they get hammered by the narcissi fly and with their long stems and heavy heads, they flop over as garden plants in heavy spring rains.

Down in the park. Those backswept petals are a feature of cyclamineus narcissi but they are by no means all as backswept as these specimens that look particularly startled.

We once went to the National Daffodil Show when, for some unknown reason, it was staged in the War Memorial Hall of our nearest small town. It was amazing but the only dwarf varieties on show took up about one square metre while the rest of the hall was packed with impressive displays of show blooms and there was a clear preference for what we sniffily refer to as ‘novelties’ but devotees would describe as ‘breeding breakthroughs’. Those split coronas (the trumpet part in the middle) that look squashed don’t do anything for me and I am unconvinced by the colour break to pastel, salmon pink. But that is a matter of personal taste and life would be dull if we all liked the same thing.

Against a tree trunk in our entrance area

Mark and his father before him gathered up all the dwarf varieties they could find at a time when there were more available than seem to be around these days. So we have a reasonable representation of named varieties like ‘Tête-à-tête’ (more commonly written as Tete a Tete, without the French accents these days), ‘Beryl’, ‘Jetfire’, bulbocodiums (hooped petticoats) in both bright yellow and lemon (Bulbocodium citrinus), ‘Thalia’ and others. But we wanted more and we wanted them sooner than we could get by lifting and dividing existing clumps, which is why both Felix and Mark started raising seed.

In the hellebore border beside the drive

It is the back story of our garden, really. We could not afford to garden on the scale we do if we had to buy in all the plants. A lot of what we have across most of the genus we grow are unnamed seedlings that have been raised on site. In most cases, those seedlings are the result of controlled crosses rather than random, self-sown seedlings. A controlled cross is selecting two good parents and taking the pollen from one to fertilise the other, marking the flower stem and watching until the seed is ripe enough to gather. It is quite a bit more faffing around than just collecting random seed that has set but it ensures a higher percentage of good progeny.

That is a Felix Jury hybrid which he named Twilight which may still be available in NZ. Naturalised on our bulb hillside in the park.

If you want to start in a smaller way, you can just gather seed but, with narcissi, you need to sow it in a seed tray, look after it and pot on the seedlings when they are large enough, growing them on – usually in small pots – until they are large enough to plant out. From seed to flowering size takes about three years which may seem a long time to some who are used to more instant results but we are patient gardeners here.

If you are wondering where to start, Peeping Tom is a very early season, larger variety that is fantastically reliable and prolific. It and Twilight in the preceding photo are the strongest growers and form the backbone of many of our larger plantings.

The classification of narcissi is a complicated business and there are many different species and groups. In our climate, we have most success with the cyclamineus types, often characterised by swept back petals. The other advantage of keeping to dwarfer varieties is that their foliage is smaller and finer so they die off more gracefully, rather than the spent foliage flopping down and smothering everything around them.

Mid August is a very pretty time for us. The early magnolias are magnificent and the dainty narcissi scattered all around the place are such a good contrast in scale, colour and detail. We have figured we can never have too many little narcissi and are continuing to spread them further afield from cultivated areas, to extending the bulb meadows and tucked in wherever we think they can grow undisturbed that they may emerge and delight during their weeks to shine their golden light in early spring.

I laughed at myself when I found this photo of Jetfire from nine years ago. I was clearly having a flight of fantasy as I photographed flowers set against our stainless steel splashback, lit by the spotlights on the rangehood.

The Magnoliafication

The Magnoliafication – we made it up. A bit like The Rapture, perhaps, but with its roots firmly in the soil, showier and more socialist in concept so not, in fact, like The Rapture at all. It was the process by which we distributed our surplus nursery stock free of charge in our local town of Waitara.

Every plant nursery ends up with surplus stock, seconds and rejects. We had less than many nurseries, being smaller and focused on producing high-end products. But we still had them – lines we had over-produced and plants that did not make the quality grade and it seemed such a waste to burn or compost them. We had the occasional sale but when you are targeting the upper end of the market, sales are something of a betrayal of loyal customers who have already bought a plant at full price. We preferred to give the plants away.

Magnolia Vulcan as a street tree, but not planted by the Council

In the early days, Mark gave a lot of surplus magnolias and rhododendrons to local farmers in the hopes of beautifying the countryside and we still see some of those around the area. We also see properties which have since changed hands and new owners have come in and chainsawed out established trees with no awareness of what they are removing, but such is life. A few experiences made us feel we were being taken somewhat for granted so we stopped giving them to farmers. Instead, we had an arrangement with a charity shop on the main street of Waitara that they would collect plants when we had them and put them out on their front pavement for people to collect free. It worked well. Everything was taken and some of it at least would be planted.

There were a lot of Vulcans in flower around the town

A lot of what went down for collection were magnolias – some with inadequate root systems which would have needed nursing to recover, or misshapen plants which should have grown well, if a slightly odd shape. And a lot of those reject magnolias were ‘Felix Jury’ which took us a while to learn how to grow straight and tall. We also had a contract grower producing an export crop of the magnolias for us and his standards were not as high as ours so too many were unable to be exported. They went down to our magnolia distribution system outside the charity shop.

At the time, Mark quipped about the magnoliafication of Waitara.

Waitara has a lot of magnolias all coming into bloom. By no means did they all come from us, either as purchases or as freebies. When the powerhouse nursery, Duncan and Davies, was in full production on the other side of Waitara, it was a significant employer of locals as seasonal labour and it was also renowned for its huge end-of-season sales. There were also a number of other nurseries around, also producing magnolias and employing locals and some of the trees will have come from those sources.

The irony is that magnolias are generally seen as a high-end, prestige plant and Waitara can be described in many ways but elite is not one of them. Its post-colonial history has made it the poor relative in the district, at the low end of every socio-economic indicator. But it can sure grow magnolias well and I think it likely has more magnolias per capita than similar small towns.

I only drove around about 8 or 10 short streets this week, photographing magnolias from the roadside. I belong to a Facebook page which is mainly comprised of mad, keen magnoliaphiles in the more northerly parts of Europe. Most of the photographs they post are close-ups of blooms on small plants, often growing in challenging climatic conditions. I thought they would be interested to see them used more widely as a mainstream ornamental plant, planted by non-gardeners and gardeners alike. They were indeed surprised to see them in this context.

Given how many reject Magnolia ‘Felix’ we sent down, I was delighted when I found five planted in two gardens a couple of doors apart which were the right age and size to be from those. One had two trees planted side by side and the other house had three planted close together on their side boundary. I don’t know that they were our free ones, but given the high price tag on the premium product from both us and local garden centres we supplied, it seems unlikely that non-gardeners would go out and buy two or three at the same time.

I now plan to drive more extensively around the back streets of Waitara, playing ‘spot the magnolia’.

Finally, a wry observation about human nature. Friday was free plant day at the op shop, when we had plants to send down. One Thursday afternoon, two women drove in here in a modern car. They hadn’t come to buy plants, they had come hoping to get first dibs on picking over the free plants ready to go down to Waitara the next day. At the time we had a lovely, local man called Danny working here. He intercepted them and I hope they felt some shame at his incredulous response as he told them that was not how it worked. The nerve of some people.

This sight will not be seen again until July next year

Waitara has a splendid tree of the pink Magnolia campbellii which is one of my seasonal markers for the start of the magnolia season. It has finished flowering already but here is a photo I prepared earlier, which some of you may recognise. The tree did not come from us; it is likely it was a Duncan and Davies plant.

A travesty, I say. A travesty of pruning on this magnolia on the main street but I wanted to give the poor specimen an award for bravery in flowering on.

In praise of the humble tamarillo

A seedling tamarillo that appeared in the Wild North Garden

The unsung hero of our winter salads is tamarillo. We eat salads most days all year round and finding mixed contents in the depths of winter can be problematic. Mark is Chief Salad Maker here and he is a good forager. Perish the thought that we buy salad ingredients, especially out of season salad ingredients like tomatoes and cucumber. Winter salad staples include random foraged greens (from chickweed to amaranth leaves to juvenile beet foliage), avocado, bean sprouts, finely diced onions, citrus and… tamarillo.

Tamarillo*** are what the oldies amongst us may remember as tree tomatoes, a South American fruit renamed by in this country by a fruit marketing board, just as we renamed kiwifruit from China. Botanically, it is Solanum betaceum and the solanum tells you it is in the same family as tomatoes and potatoes, which means it is frost tender. This is not a plant for everybody, but for those who can grow one, it is worth it, fruiting as it does through the depths of winter.

If you buy one to plant, it should fruit for you within two years. Ours are self-sown seedlings so we really are foraging.

Stewing skinned tamarillos to make jelly

In my childhood, I think I was probably served them as dessert, stewed with a fairly large amount of added sugar. As a young adult, I encountered my mother-in-law’s winter salad standby of finely sliced onion, sliced raw tamarillo and a sprinkling of brown sugar. We have done away with the sugar now for salads. When we gather a surplus, I blanch them to remove the skins and then stew them before sieving them to remove the pips, adding gelatine and a small amount of sugar to turn them into a fresh fruit jelly. The usual way of eating them is to blanch them by pouring boiling water over to remove the skin and stem, slicing them and sprinkling them with sugar. I prefer them jellied to have with my breakfast muesli. They are very much a feature of our winter diet – both savoury and sweet.

The red form is way better known than the orange or yellow but we lean to a preference for the orange.

We are currently eating from two of three volunteer plants. In the depths of the Wild North Garden is a seedling that was presumably spread by a bird pooing on the wing. It is a red one, which is by far the most common form. On the wilder margins of the summer gardens, we have another two plants, one of which is an orange form which is milder and slightly sweeter to taste. Mark prefers to use the orange one for his dinner salad assemblages.

Red, orange and what we think is the result of the potato pysillid.

The third plant is a red which cropped brilliantly for a couple of years. Last year it surprised us with just as many fruit but they were tiny and this year they have remained tiny. We were puzzled why but now think it may have been affected by the dreaded potato psyllid which is a recent pest in this country that is cutting a swathe through commercial solanum crops.

Tamarillos are not long-lived plants but they are easy to root from cutting or raise from seed if you don’t want to buy one from the garden centre. We never spray or prune ours. They are not the world’s most exciting or delicious fruit but we have found them to be one of the most useful – trouble-free and adaptable at a time of the year when options are limited by winter.

The orange seedling starts out red but turns orange as the fruit ripens and ages to yellow

*** The name tamarillo is specific to Aotearoa New Zealand. This fruit is grown in mild to subtropical areas around the world and has many different common names, depending on which country they are in.

“You’ve got mail”

Two interactions this week brought me unexpected pleasure.

The first was an email from Michael in Portland and I was so touched by his words I asked his permission to share it here. I post it without comment except to say that the ‘Dark Tulip’ Magnolia he refers to is of course our Magnolia ‘Black Tulip’.

Hello!

This is a bit of story, but I want to express how grateful I am for your Dark Tulip Magnolia.

I grew up in Mississippi, which is in the southern part of the United States and southern magnolia is the state flower. When I was about five years old my father took me to a garden center where we bought a small southern magnolia. He told me that was “my” tree. I loved that tree and it became a symbol of my childhood and my relationship with my dad. I’m in my late 30’s now and I live in Oregon, which is +2,000 miles from Mississippi. I rarely go back to Mississippi, but when I do I always drive by that house to sit at look at that giant magnolia from my car. My dad died unexpectedly almost two years ago and magnolias are still very much connected to him in my mind.

I’ve always wanted a magnolia of my own, but I’ve been living in apartments my entire adult life. This winter, I finally moved into a house with a (small) yard. I knew I wanted to plant a magnolia even if I had to grow it in a pot (for now). I went to a nursery here in Portland and the moment I saw your Dark Tulip Magnolia, my heart jumped! The blossoms stopped me in my tracks. The flowers immediately sent me back to so many childhood memories, to memories of my father planting our tree. But yet this magnolia is… an evolution of something… the unbelievably deep and soul moving burgundy is stunning! It’s hard to express, but your Dark Tulip Magnolia has become a symbol of growth after loss, of moving forward, of change. It’s deeply poignant to me.

I purchased my first tree of my adult life: your Dark Tulip Magnolia. I have it in a very large container, which I know is not ideal, but it is the best I can do for a few years. I am determined to learn everything I can and do my best to help it thrive. This living art you’ve created has played a role in healing my heart and in my life story. It is the most beautiful tree I have ever seen.

I know the Dark Tulip Magnolia has been around for years, but it is new to me and I’ve been reading everything I can find about how to keep it healthy. I want you to know that your work has created profound meaning in my life. I am so grateful for the years of work you’ve put into creating such beautiful trees.

Thank you for the beauty you’ve contributed to the world and to my life.

Michael

Magnolia Black Tulip – the first magnolia of Mark’s breeding that he named and released

It is always rewarding when people derive pleasure from plants bred here by Mark and Felix before him. When one touches somebody in a deep emotional, almost spiritual way, that is next level altogether.

The rare delight of a hand written postcard

The second treat this week was when the mailbox delivered up the rare specimen of a handwritten postcard. In a week when NZ Post announced the demise of posties, to be replaced by courier drivers, a handwritten card seemed especially poignant. It was a letter of appreciation from a reader of this site. The bit that made me laugh out loud was: “But I really had to say a big thankyou for ‘sad beige’!!!! So funny (and sad!)”

I read that bit out loud to Zach as he came into work that morning and he snorted in delight. It was he who gifted me ‘sad beige’ as in here , here, and here.

Appreciative comments from readers are always treasured but readers who share my sense of humour are gold.

Back in the days when people still bought and read newspapers, I used to get more feedback on the garden pages I wrote from 1997 through to 2015. I just looked up those dates and I am stunned I kept it up for 18 years. Mark used to call the incoming mail my ‘fan mail’. I kept the special ones and I shall add the postcard and the email to that file. I am a bit sorry I can’t store the phone calls I used to receive from elderly gents wanting to discuss growing potatoes. This was in the days of landlines and phone books, you understand, a time when there were quite a few elderly gentlemen wanting to discuss potatoes. Never having grown a potato in my life, I would hand those calls over to Mark who was far better equipped on the topic. They were oddly charming, in a niche sort of way.

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