Tag Archives: Mark and Abbie Jury

Gardening with grasses

We were entranced by the Piet Oudolf borders at Wisley

Years ago I was editing garden descriptions and amongst the plethora of developing gardens or tranquil havens filled with birdsong, I came across one which claimed to have “a fascinating collection of grasses.” Fascinating seemed to be overstating the case. I think I toned down the adjective. It has taken a long time to win us over to the merits of grasses here, even though we have some lovely native varieties in New Zealand.

Big grasses need big space

I have never actually seen grasses used in a breathtakingly beautiful way in gardens in this country though I have seen some handsome amenity planting combinations. The problem lies, I think, in how we use them. For starters we tend to limit ourselves to varieties which are knee high or lower. Even worse is the habit of forcing innocent grasses into an edging role where they are destined forever to be like an untidy fringe. And yes, mondo grass (both black and green), liriope, Carex Frosted Curls and blue fescue – I’m looking at you here. Grasses by their very form are designed to grow in the round, not to be forced into a narrow row as an edger. Nor indeed do I understand the obsession with uniform edging plants on all garden beds and borders in this country but that is another matter.

It wasn’t until we went to look at summer gardens in the UK that we were won over by grasses. We had heard slightly disparaging comments about the Piet Oudolf twin borders at Wisley (the RHS flaghip gardens) – a chevron design in grasses, I think somebody told us sniffily. It wasn’t that at all. Twin parallel borders were united by rivers of colour and texture flowing from one to the other with grasses featuring along with other plantings. Not knee high grasses, these were at least waist high and integrated with other carefully chosen perennials. It was an inspirational planting.

On the same trip, I saw the most exquisite grass I have ever seen at Beth Chatto’s garden. I don’t even know if Stipa barbata is in this country but it was light, ethereal and remarkably beautiful. Since then, we’ve seen grasses featured frequently in British TV garden programmes. One of the reasons we subscribe to Sky is to get gardening shows on the Living Channel.

Early view of the Wisley Oudolf borders before the glasshouse was built (from Penelope Hobhouse's book "In Search of Paradise" - magic

The common threads to making these plantings work are:
1) Inspired combinations. Grasses are not planted with other grasses. They are integrated into mixed plantings which are carefully managed to look naturalistic in style. Grasses don’t generally suit formal plantings.
2) Forget grasses which are ankle high to knee high. Statement clumps are at least waist high and often considerably taller. This of course means they need quite a bit of space.
3) Big grasses plus big plantings result in a big effect. It rarely scales down effectively. Therein lies the problem – not that many of us have the space to garden on this sort of scale. Those of us who do have space (and it needs to be sunny, well drained space), have usually cluttered it up with mixed plantings including trees and shrubs. These exciting perennial plantings using grasses are usually only perennials, not mixed borders. The aforementioned Oudolf borders at Wisley are around 150 metres long by 11 metres wide – each. While that is on a grand and public scale, you really can’t expect to replicate it in miniature in a border which is only a metre wide and three metres long.
4) Many of these successful plantings have their origins in a garden interpretation of American prairies. It is a managed but not manicured style of gardening. It is some distance away from the classic herbaceous border and it is a long way away from the formal garden rooms genre we have adopted so enthusiastically in this country. It does not combine well with clipped hedges.

Set the grasses free. That is not original. I read it somewhere and it was a NZ writer though I can’t recall who. Stop trying to straitjacket them into contrived and managed combinations. If you have your grasses in a situation where they require grooming and regular combing, it is likely that you are straitjacketing them.

We were told that the Oudolf borders we so admired at Wisley required only a third of the labour input that the classic herbaceous borders needed. Partly that is because they don’t need staking or deadheading. They are cut down in late January (for us that translates to the end of July or late winter). I imagine by that stage they are quite scruffy so it is not a style that will appeal to tidy gardeners. But despite that scruffy stage, these prairie styled plantings contribute a great deal to the ecology of an area, feeding birds and wildlife. It is different to wildflower meadows in that it is managed plantings in varied combinations, often within a somewhat formal layout and with tight weed management. It is not random or self sown. This is not a style we seem to have picked up on this country. We are still mulling around as to whether we have the right position to try.

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

Tikorangi notes, Friday 24 February, 2012

Summer and Mark's vegetable garden is taking on its meadow garden alter ego as he grows food for the butterflies

Latest posts:

1) For us, the flowers of summer are lilies but you need to grow a range of different species to get them performing through the season.

2) Lepidozamia peroffskyana in Plant Collector this week – including how a Russian benefactor came to have an Australian plant named after him.

3) Grow your own garlic and keep vampires at bay. This piece also suggests that the conventional wisdom of planting on the shortest day and harvesting on the longest day may not always be the best advice.

4) Quite possibly the last in the short lived garden diary series done for the Weekend Gardener (unless a miracle happens and the magazine rises like a phoenix from the ashes of liquidation.

Tikorangi notes: Friday 24 February, 2012:

Summer came for three days this week. It was warm enough to entice me into the swimming pool where I looked up at the trees silhouetted against our blue, blue skies and reached for the camera as soon as I got out. I never tire of trees and skyscapes. The elderly pines make a pretty amazing sight even if the one leaning to the right is indeed leaning as much as it appears in the photograph below. One day it may lean beyond the point of balance.

Sadly there is no doubt that a full-on summer is simply not going to happen this year. Yesterday had the unmistakeable hint of autumn. Mark is bringing in grapes every day and muttering about how we had better eat the grapes before the melon harvest starts. Eighty something rock melons, he tells me there are ripening away out in his melon patch. He will have counted them. In the meantime we will not admit defeat and we will eat our way through the grapes. The only crop to rival them here is the green beans, which lack the romance.

The cyclamen are opening which promises an extended delight. The lilies are on their last legs – another torrential rain will spell the end of the auratums but within a few weeks, the autumn bulbs will be starting. That at least is some consolation for a truly disappointing summer.

Our old man pines, Pinus radiata, are large trees after 130 years

Plant Collector: Lepidozamia peroffskyana

Lepidozamia peroffskyana - an Australian cycad

Difficult name, I know, but this plant does not appear to have a common name. It is a cycad and one native to Australia at that. Some mistake it for a palm because it grows a trunk and sprouts it leaves in a palm-like habit, fountaining from the top as it matures. Those leaves can be up to 3 metres long, which is extremely large when you think about it. But it is a cycad which is an entirely different plant family to palms. This particular plant is a seedling from a mature specimen we have and I photographed it because of its spectacular cone which has split open in a wonderful spiral. This split is to release its pollen, rather than to create a perfect pattern.

Lepidozamia peroffskyana cone

Normally we remove cones to stop the plant putting its energies into trying to set seed. It is suspected that forming the cone robs the plant of too many essential micro nutrients which can lead to yellow banding disfiguring mature leaves. It looks like sunburn. Our mature plant suffered badly in the past from this yellowing but it is still a little early for us to be able to state with confidence that de-coning it solves the problem, though it is looking hopeful.

This is an east coast rainforest plant from northern New South Wales through to Gympie in Queensland (I have been to Gympie though I cannot say I recall seeing lepidozamia there). In our conditions, it will tolerate light frosts and cooler temperatures overall. The natural rainforest habitat gives an indication that it likes fertile soils rich in humus, growing in company and in ground that never dries out. I had to go searching to find out for whom this plant was named – Count Peroffsky, a Russian nobleman and benefactor of the St Petersburgh Botanic Garden where this plant was first cultivated beyond its natural habitat. First in gets dibs on the naming rights even now.

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

Grow it yourself: garlic

Freshly harvested garlic is a very different proposition to the stuff that has been hanging about for ten months and has lost most of its potency. We are not, perhaps, served well by the traditional wisdom of planting on the shortest day and harvesting on the longest day. We prefer Kay Baxter’s advice and moved to autumn planting in order to get it in growth before it has to deal with the cold, sodden soils of a wet winter. You can even successionally sow from May to August to extend the harvest season. Fresh picked green garlic is delicious.

Garlic needs to be grown in full sun, in heavily worked, fertile soils. It is a greedy feeder and good drainage is critical. If you are organised, you can prepare the beds now and sow a quick green crop. Dig that green crop in two weeks before planting the garlic. This, allied to late autumn warmth, will give them a real kick start into growth.

Always plant only the biggest and the strongest cloves from the garlic bulb and never but never plant the cheap, imported Chinese stuff (wrong hemisphere so out of season, may be carrying virus which threatens the local strains of garlic and will have been chemically treated). If you follow Kay Baxter’s advice and plant at 10cm diagonal spacings, you can get 100 plants to the square metre. We prefer a wider spacing of up to 15cm in parallel rows. Cover the cloves with a couple of centimetres of soil. Keeping the area free of weeds stops competition but also keeps the soil well cultivated, thus helping with drainage in the wet months. Some gardeners liquid feed regularly. We don’t, but we mulch with compost which is effectively a form of slow release. It is important that the crop never dries out or it will stop growing so be particularly vigilant from November onwards. Garlic can be harvested as soon as the tips start to turn brown.

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

In the garden this fortnight: Thursday 23 February, 2012

The natural look can take a surprising amount of effort and intervention

We have been making a major, combined effort to return our natural stream closer to something resembling pristine condition. I say natural stream because it is entirely natural where it enters and leaves our property but in between we manipulate it quite a bit. We have ponds, we play with the levels to create little rapids so we have the sound of water running and we have total control over what happens with flood water when we get torrential rain – achieved by a simple weir, flood channel and stopbanks. What we don’t have control of is the build up of silt and invasive water weeds.

What started as a pleasant summer activity reducing the water weeds (Cape Pondweed, oxygen weed and blanket weed are the worst), has grown to be something more major. We have hand pulled and raked most of the weed out. The clumps of streamside planting (mostly irises but also bog primulas, pontederia and a few others) are all in the process of being dramatically reduced in size. We hadn’t noticed quite how large they had grown in the years since they were first planted. The build up of silt in the water channel – up to my knees in places – is being stirred up and then flushed through to settle in the ponds. To flush it through requires holding the water back and then releasing it in one swoosh. To do it properly requires the building of a second, simple weir. Once all the silt is in the ponds, we will hire a sludge pump to clear it. Trying to stay on top of water weeds (none of which we introduced ourselves) is an ongoing task. We are thinking a bit more regular maintenance may keep the silt under control. Our access makes getting a digger in very difficult and the mess afterwards is such that we prefer to do things by hand.

The end result is that we will have a natural looking stream again. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to achieve and maintain a natural look in a garden.

Top tasks:

1) Continue reducing mossy cover and lichen on rocks and paths in the rockery. In our humid climate, we have continual moss growth and while some of it softens hard lines and adds a certain look, too much of it obliterates lines altogether and makes the place look unloved. I use a wire brush and I know I will probably have to continue doing it for the rest of my gardening life here.

2) And on the theme of having too much of something, no matter how good, I need to finish my radical thinning of the black mondo grass (ophiopogon) and the cyclamen hederafolium which seem determined to try to choke each other out. The mondo grass goes on the compost heap. The large cyclamen corms I am laying as ground cover in an area where I have given up on both Rubus pentalobus (orangeberry) and violets which both proved to be too strong growing.

A fortnightly series first written for the Weekend Gardener and reproduced here with their permission.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: