Tag Archives: Mark and Abbie Jury

Tikorangi Notes: Thursday July 29, 2011

New Zealand Woman's Weekly on magnolias - Burgundy Star, Black Tulip and Fairy Magnolia Blush in the photos

New Zealand Woman's Weekly on magnolias - Burgundy Star, Black Tulip and Fairy Magnolia Blush in the photos

I think I have only bought the NZ Woman’s Weekly twice in my life – both times because I knew gardening stories of interest to us were included. It bills itself as “NZ’s No.1 Royal Mag” and I just think I am not amongst their target demographic. But it is very popular so the colourful double page spread on magnolias this week, written by Denise Cleverley, was gratifying to see, given that it focuses quite heavily on our Jury magnolias.

Schefflera septulosa - distinctly worse for the frost

Schefflera septulosa - distinctly worse for the frost

An abnormally heavy frost this week has left us ruefully contemplating the damage. In colder climates, plants are better acclimatised to lower temperatures but here it tends to be so mild that they are not hardened off and extreme events can cause a lot of damage. How much is damage which the plants will outgrow and how much is loss by death will become clearer soon. It is not so bad in the garden where there is a lot of protection afforded by the trees but under the shade cloth in the nursery and out in the open, it is a bit of a sorry sight. Schefflera septulosa does not normally sport the brown velvet look. I think Mark ranks it as the second worst frost he has ever seen here – a ground frost of around -5.5 degrees.

Mark has been experimenting in his glasshouse with passive heating. He hopes to apply this on a larger scale in the near future (I think this means a much larger glasshouse in a new location) partly because he is determined to grow more tropical fruit including his beloved pineapples. He has moved in some largish containers of water and has built a compost heap from dung and straw in the glasshouse. Fortunately it no longer smells and it does appear it is working to raise the temperature and to prevent it losing all the heat overnight. I am just looking forward optimistically to future harvests.

The white sapote - now a winter fruit staple here

The white sapote - now a winter fruit staple here

However, we don’t need a glasshouse for the white sapote or casimiroa edulis which we can grow in a protected position outdoors and which rewards us with a very good crop of ripe fruit in mid winter. They have the texture of a ripe rock melon and taste a little like vanilla custard – delicious.

The weekly blurb on plant sales highlights Hippeastrum aulicum this week (I felt the need of something bright and cheerful on the coldest day of the year) and one of my most favourite camellias – dainty little C. minutiflora.

And on a very cheerful note, yesterday I was offered a new garden writing contract. Not with our local paper, the Taranaki Daily News, which is determined to press on without me but that is fine because the new contract offers a much better platform. Until it is signed and sealed, I won’t say with whom but it feels good to be back in the mode of thinking about regular contributions and deadlines. It will be three pieces a week which will then appear as a regular feature on our website.

Tikorangi Notes: July 18, 2010

Magnolia Black Tulip is just starting to open

Magnolia Black Tulip is just starting to open

Latest posts:

1) Clean and green in New Zealand? Not as much as we claim and, alas, not at all if you look at the common treatment of our rural road verges.

2) Digging and dividing clivias – one in the Outdoor Classroom series of step by step guides.

3) Mid winter photos – on our new Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/thejurygarden I have to admit, however, that I have not been out with the camera on the rain sodden days when we threaten to wash away and there have been rather a lot of those lately. We had a massive 237ml in June alone (or about 9½ inches for those still on imperial measurements) and we won’t be far off that in the first half of this month. Our winters can be wet. But the snowdrops don’t mind and it has only been the two hailstorms that have damaged the early magnolia blooms.

4) Nothing whatever to do with gardening (but I am guessing some readers also have other interests), I have just launched a separate website devoted to book reviews of a non gardening nature: www.runningfurs.com For some years, I have reviewed books, firstly for the Taranaki Daily News but these days for the Waikato Times. I have always had a particular interest in children’s books and in New Zealand fiction. I went back to the children’s books a few years ago because I thought we might be lucky enough to receive the gift of a grandchild at some time in our lives and our book collection could do with updating. There is no sign of any grandchildren any time soon, but I keep the best books and pass on the others. These reviews, along with a few on books for adults, did not sit with the gardening websites so I have not done anything with them before. But the advent of The Naughty Corner by Colin Thompson made me want to table these reviews for others – it is quite the funniest picture book I have read in a long time.

So much for clean and green….

The ugly sight of roadside spraying

The ugly sight of roadside spraying

Mark regularly despairs at the state of our rural roadsides, expostulating at the cavalier use of herbicides and the ugliness of sprayed areas which then create a blank canvas for weeds to colonise quickly. “How,” he asks, “can we pretend to be clean and green in our country when people see these road verges?”

This particular example is from down the road, more or less. We suspect it is the farmer trying to eradicate bristle grass but in fact bristle grass got established in the first place here because it is an early coloniser on sprayed areas. Alas our councils regularly get in on the act, too. In days gone by, rural roads used to have wide gravel shoulders which were graded from time to time. Now the maintenance regime is such that the road edges have been recontoured to slope sharply downwards at the side – the idea being that this moves the water off the road quickly but it also means that cars can no longer move off the road safely. And it is all to be kept free of vegetation, which is done by spraying.

We designated our road verges no-spray zones – which can be done by ringing the local council. We would rather maintain our own property frontages which we plant extensively and mow. It stops any contractors swooshing around with herbicides. The year they sprayed all our belladonna lilies was too much for us. It is not that we are opposed to sprays in principle. But Mark uses herbicide spraying to target spot weeds and generally it can be achieved in an unobtrusive, near invisible way.

The scorched earth approach to dealing with rural road verges needs to be revisited. It is bad environmental practice and it looks downright ugly – not a good advertisement at all for our country.

Tikorangi Notes: Sunday 10 July, 2011

Latest posts: Sunday 10 July, 2011

1) Prole drift (further comment on trends in NZ gardening)

2) Tikorangi Diary Friday July 8 (subtitled: what we have been up to with a smattering of garden hints which may be useful)

3) Growing garlic based on Mark’s experience. I was going to say our experience but that would be the royal we. Growing garlic and indeed all fruit and veg is entirely Mark’s domain, as writing is mine.

It is persimmons set against the winter sky this week, instead of Magnolia Vulcan

It is persimmons set against the winter sky this week, instead of Magnolia Vulcan


Tikorangi Notes: Sunday 10 July, 2011

Winter in our neck of the woods tends to be wet but comparatively mild. This year has been particularly mild with the warmest May on record and a warm June to follow. But wet. We can continue to garden in all the fine spells and because we have such free draining soils, the ground rarely gets too sodden to work. And light is our other defining feature – we keep the same astonishing clarity of light all year here. Most New Zealanders take our blue as blue skies and bright sunlight for granted and it is not until you visit countries with very low winter light levels that you realise our winter light is quite extraordinary. It is what makes the magnolias so wonderful here and despite July being our coldest month, more magnolias and michelias are opening blooms. We usually have a wonderful display of the early red magnolias towards the end of July and then flower through to mid September (longer for the michelias).

In the rainy, sodden times, I have been getting to grips with social media – as in Twitter and Facebook. This is a challenge for me (and one which entirely bypasses Mark who does not even know where the on switch to the computer is located). I enjoy the brevity and simplicity of Twitter but Facebook has been a bigger challenge. However, we reached our magic number of 30 “likes”, as one says in Facebook parlance, so we now have our own designated url: facebook.com/thejurygarden It takes a certain amount of mental energy and time to manage all these on line connections but it does appear to be the way of the present and maybe the future. Facebook seems to offer a good platform for current pretty pictures. If you feel inclined to visit our new facebook page and tick the like box, it apparently helps in establishing a profile beyond just our standard webpages.

Tikorangi Diary: Friday 8 July, 2011

Footprint in the frost

Footprint in the frost

Today feels like the first blast of real winter. As it is now the second week of July, I guess we can hardly complain. Spring starts here in August. A visible frost earlier in the week had me out with the camera which is an indicator that they are not common events here. As Lloyd and I tramped across the lawn and I photographed the footprints, I did briefly ponder the advice not to walk on frosted grass. Sure enough, the footprints had turned black the next day.

The bananas are partially tucked up for winter, just in time

The bananas are partially tucked up for winter, just in time

Fortunately, Mark had covered his bananas a few days earlier. This is one fruit which we have to nurse through the winter, though we did scoff a little at the advice in the local paper last week to cover your citrus in frost cloth. We have never worried about the citrus and it has never been a problem.

Lloyd does build a nice stone pillar when required

Lloyd does build a nice stone pillar when required

Lloyd finally finished the repairs to one of the stone walls – he does build a nice stone pillar when needed, does our Lloyd. This one was started from scratch. Since then, poor man, he has been out lifting the last of the open ground magnolia crops. We still have to sell some plants here to pay for the garden so the call of the nursery has taken him away from the garden. So too for Mark, who has been spent most of his time putting in cuttings (mostly michelias from his breeding programme as he conducts propagation trials). It is getting close to the end of the cuttings season now, though we only put in a shadow of what we used to when the nursery was in full production.

Mark is out and about most evenings after dark with the dogs in search of troublesome possums who may be developing a taste for magnolia buds. Every year without fail, we get asked about magnolia trees which are opening badly deformed flowers. In our experience, the culprit is always a possum, and usually only one. Magnolias are not possum magnets as the oranges or fresh growth on roses are, but one single minded critter can take out most of the buds on a single tree over a matter of nights. Because they chew down into the centre of the bud, the damage is not obvious until the tree tries to open the flower. Mark usually does autopsies on the possums he shoots (which is to say, he analyses the contents of their stomachs to see what they have been feeding on) and upon occasion he will find one chock-a-block with magnolia buds.

Besides doing a little fiddly-faddly potting of plants to sell during our annual garden festival at the end of October (a very important time for us), I have abandoned my efforts on the rose garden (I just don’t enjoy working in that area and I have not worked out yet what is wrong with it). I will have to return to it to finish, but it has been much more fun to work in an under-used area of the woodland. I have been planting drifts of bulbs – big bulbs like Scadoxus puniceus (given that we can sell each big bulb for about $25 because it is rare here, it felt wonderfully indulgent to plant a drift of about 30 of them), Scadoxus katherinae, Haemanthus albifloss and Haemanthus conccineus. I find bulbs much more rewarding than those wretched roses and I can live with their scruffy foliage when they start to go dormant – though H. albifloss is evergreen and the others have quite short dormancy periods. I am only just getting to grips with the fact that large clumps of bulbs need more regular lifting and dividing to stop them from falling apart when in full growth. We did the auratum lilies this time last year and most of them held themselves up in summer, without needing staking. Every three to four years seems to be about right for these types of large bulbs.

For a change from grubbing in the dirt, I have been pruning rhododendrons. These are a backbone plant in our garden and winter is the ideal time for hard pruning. They do look better when dead wood and wayward branches have been removed. A few get subjected to a really hard prune back to bare stems though this sacrifices this year’s floral display for a better long term outcome.

I was going to dig some of the huge clumps of yellow clivias today, replant the largest sections and pot some of the smaller divisions for sale but it was too cold for me to want to garden. It can wait. Clivias are tough, forgiving plants and the timing of lifting and dividing is not critical at all. In fact, they won’t turn a hair, as long as they are treated properly, no matter when it is done. It shouldn’t stay this cold for long. I even caught myself with the camera, starting a photo shoot on how to divide clivias for an Outdoor Classroom – old habits die hard.

The magnolias are coming into flower. At this stage, just M. campbelli and Vulcan but the buds are swelling fast and starting to show glimpses of colour on many others. It makes this time of year one of the most exciting for us.

Magnolia Vulcan is coming in to flower

Magnolia Vulcan is coming in to flower