Tag Archives: Mark and Abbie Jury

In the garden this fortnight: Thursday 23 February, 2012

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

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.

Plant Collector: Tecomanthe venusta

The pink bells of Tecomanthe venusta

The pink bells of Tecomanthe venusta

We are so excited by our Tecomanthe venusta in bloom. That is because it is tropical but we are not so it doesn’t often flower for us. And I have to admit that there are only a few clusters of these pink flowers in evidence. A garden visitor once told us there was a specimen at the entry to Whangarei Gardens’ glasshouse which flowers magnificently. We have not seen it but it would figure that it is happier further north because it originates in New Guinea and is the most cold-sensitive member of the tecomanthe family, all evergreen climbers in the bignoniaceae group.

The tecomanthe family is not large and some readers will know our own T. speciosa – a tender but rampant climber which was found in the wild as a single, surviving specimen on Three Kings Islands. It needs a frost free position which rules it out for most inland locations and it needs a bit of training and management if you want to see the lovely creamy trumpet flowers. It will shoot up the highest tree available and flower only at the very top if left to its own devices, but if you train it along a horizontal support, it can be encouraged to flower along its length.

Back to T.venusta. We grow it under the cover of a deep verandah with opaque roofing. When it does decide to flower, it puts out clusters from its bare vines, which is very obliging because they are so obvious. Most plants set flowers on either new growth or last season’s growth but venusta appears to be quite happy to do it on gnarly old growth. We get a far more spectacular display in spring from the species we have as T. montana, also from New Guinea, which is grown in the same conditions but there is a delicious unpredictability to venusta.

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

Tikorangi Diary: Friday 10 February, 2012

The bonus of summer flowers on Magnolia Black Tulip

The bonus of summer flowers on Magnolia Black Tulip

Latest Posts

1) From big picture gardening to small picture detail – Abbie’s column.

2) On the case with Ulmus “Jacqueline Hillier” in Plant Collector this week. It is not a dwarf grower as we were originally led to believe by somebody or other (probably the person we sourced the original plant from in NZ).

3) Grow it Yourself – spinach this week. Silver beet for refined tastes?

4) In the garden this fortnight – the latest instalment of our garden diary as written for the Weekend Gardener where we reference seeding and spreading plant pests (yes! Campanulata cherries, bangalow palms and Daphne bholua).

Magnolia Apollo in summer

Magnolia Apollo in summer

Tikorangi Notes:

In days gone by, the Jury name used to be synonymous with camellias. These days it is magnolias and we can chart the year by repeated requests for diagnosis. In late winter and early spring, it is always: “Help. My magnolia buds look fine but then the flower opens all distorted and misshapen.” In this country, the answer is that a possum has developed a taste for the buds and chewed out the centre at an earlier stage. They can do this without it being obvious from below. The solution is to catch the critter – we favour high velocity lead, as Mark says.

In spring and summer, the question is: “Help. The leaves on my magnolia tree are opening all yellow, distorted and sick-looking on one side. What can I do?” The answer is that somebody has used a hormone spray – usually a common lawn spray – at the time when the tree is just breaking dormancy and there is nothing you can do except wait to see if the tree can recover. Oh, and be more careful next year (or ask your neighbour to) because the slightest hint of hormone spray drift at the wrong time does major damage. Don’t spray your lawn in spring if you have magnolias nearby.

Magnolia seed pod, not a sinister growth

Magnolia seed pod, not a sinister growth

This summer, we have had repeated requests for information about alleged abnormal growths and cankers which have appeared. SEED PODS, dear Reader. There is nothing sinister. The plant has set seed and you have just noticed it. Some plants set a fair amount of seed, some none at all (they are sterile) and some only set seed occasionally. And yes, you can grow them but the chances of getting something exciting and better than the parent are extremely remote. And you need space because it may take many, many years before the seedlings get to flowering size – by which time they can be large trees. When the pod eventually turns brown and dry, it starts to crack open and release the red seed. For better germination, we rot that red coating off before planting the inner black kernel.

Out of season summer flowers on magnolias are often mentioned too. There is nothing unusual about this phenomenon. I wrote about it in Magnolia Diary 14. It is in the breeding, basically. And they are bonus flowers, not a major display.

The Tikorangi weather report is better this week – some sunny, warm, summery weather at long last though the lower than average night temperatures and sunshine hours mean the water temperature in our swimming pool remains too low to entice us in. The pool is unheated and would normally be a pleasant 26 degrees celsius by now, maybe more but it is not even close. The only consolation is that the entire country is having a cooler than usual summer. It is always nice to know that one is not alone. At least the auratum lilies don’t mind and flower on beautifully.

Plant Collector: Ulmus elegantissima “Jacqueline Hillier”

Ulmus (should that be elegantissima, minor or x hollandica?) "Jacqueline Hillier"

Ulmus (should that be elegantissima, minor or x hollandica?) "Jacqueline Hillier"

It’s an elm but from there on there seems to be some debate. We received it under the species classification of elegantissima. The Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs lists it under the species name of minor with elegantissima added as a synonym. A quick net search and I see others now list it as Ulmus x hollandica which is a natural hybrid of minor and glabra. In other words, nobody knows for certain so we will stick with Hillier’s own classification.

The reason nobody knows for certain is that it was found in a garden in Birmingham in the early 1960s and it was visibly different. Most elms are renowned as handsome, large trees, though they have suffered hugely in the UK and Europe since the 1970s from a major outbreak of Dutch Elm disease which kills them. “Jacqueline Hillier” is smaller growing. In fact it came to us under the descriptor of dwarf. It has tiny, sawtooth leaves and very fine tracery of branch structure whereby the leaves are held in fan shapes. This means it is extremely attractive when it is a bare skeleton in winter. It is delightful when flushed with bright spring growth and it is lovely and lush in summer until the predations of the red spider sometimes defoliate it.

Dwarf it is not. I planted a specimen in our rockery where it set out to prove it belongs to the large shrub category. We have to keep working on it extensively every year to keep it down to about 3 metres x 3 metres. It also seeds and suckers but not in a dangerous way. Had I realised it would grow to that size, I would have planted it somewhere with more space – but I would definitely still have planted it.

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

Grow it yourself: spinach

Silver beet and spinach are close relatives. Indeed, somebody very close to me claims they taste the same when cooked, which I can’t argue against because it is so long since I have eaten the former. Texturally, I much prefer the finer, softer leaves of spinach and will happily eat those. Spinach is a winter vegetable. It will continue growing in colder temperatures but as soon as the weather warms in spring, it will bolt to seed. It is not quite as amenable as silver beet to grow and while you can leave plants in the ground and just pick as much as you need, it does not have the same cut and come again characteristics.

Well cultivated, well drained soil rich in nitrogenous fertiliser and full sun are the keys. Spinach is usually direct sown from seed and most of us now know to pick the thinnings and eat them as micro greens in salads or stir fries. The final spacing is in the 10cm range. In the right conditions, it is a quick crop because it will mature within a couple of months and you may have been eating immature leaves all that time. Some gardeners like to sow successive crops every few weeks to ensure continued supply.

There are a number of different spinach varieties, including New Zealand spinach or kokihi which is a different plant altogether (though similar taste and texture) and is our one great contribution to the global world of vegetables. While most spinach are spinacia, it is Tetragonia expansa. We recommend shunning the heirloom strawberry spinach (Chenopodium foliosum), being of the opinion that the reason it has been around for over 400 years is because it seeds so freely it is nigh on impossible to eradicate once you have it. The leaves are pleasant enough but the so-called strawberry seed heads are not.

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