Tag Archives: Mark and Abbie Jury

Pruning a rampant climber: step-by-step with Abbie and Mark Jury

1) This climber has gone well past the point where a light trim will suffice and allow more light in the window behind. However, we don’t want to dig it out and cutting it off at the ground is likely to kill it. This is an ornamental jasmine (not the dangerously rampant variety) and we like the fragrance.

2)The tendrils going over and under the spouting, and even worse, under the roof tiles are a warning that action needs to be taken now. Looking into the mass of vines, you can see that the downpipe is under threat and also that the plant is putting out new growth from the middle and not just on top.

3) Cut back the foliage hard. We are aiming for a curved shape around the corner of the house. It is easier to work out which vines to keep when you can see where each one is headed. You can use a chainsaw for the initial shaping and follow up with clippers and secateurs to tidy up the rough cuts.

4) Trace the path taken by the vines and remove unwanted stems in sections. If you try and pull it out in long lengths, you run the risk of damaging the growths you want to keep. We are trying to protect the house and to allow the window to be opened so we are thinning extensively. More frequent pruning would have avoided this.

5) Thin out clutter and remove all dead wood.

6) The finished product looks shorn and a shadow of its former self but should grow away strongly. In our mild and soft climate, we can do this type of cutting any time of the year but gardeners in cold, inland areas may wish to wait until late winter or early spring, timed for just before the plant will put on its first flush of new season’s growth.

7) This is the photo that we did not use in the newspaper when this feature first ran – not perhaps the best advertisement for safe practice (though Mark asserts that he was holding on tightly with the hand which is out of sight…).

Lifting & limbing – the before and after of careful pruning

1) This garden aspect is generally all right but you would not look twice at it. The large tree is a weeping cherry, Prunus subhirtella pendula. The fact that the left hand tree, a malus or flowering crabapple, has no leaves on it in high summer is a bit of a giveaway. It is dead.

2) The malus is showing fresh growth at its base but as we knew it was a grafted plant, this is just the root stock growing away.

3) Spend some time working out which branches need to be removed. You can’t glue branches back on and it is surprisingly easy to make a mistake. We are taking off the lower branches and a few higher ones which extend too far over the adjacent gardens. We used a squirt of paint to mark the branches destined for the chop.

4) Make an initial cut underneath the branch. This prevents the branch from ripping off and damaging the bark when you cut from above.

5) Cut close to the trunk or main stems. Don’t leave ugly stumps which resemble protruding coat hooks. There are different schools of thought about whether wounds need to be painted with an antibacterial paint. In this case we have coated the wounds but we don’t usually bother.

6) The dead malus has been removed entirely, even the main stump. If you can get most of the root ball out, it reduces the chance of honey fungus or armillaria getting established on the rotting roots and potentially spreading to surrounding trees. The cherry tree now has a more pleasing shape and it is possible to see beyond the tree and to notice other garden features in the same view. Successful pruning is often discreet – quite a bit of material is removed without it being obvious where it has come from.

Of pohutukawa and pineapples

The pohutukawa - often called the NZ Christmas tree

The pohutukawa - often called the NZ Christmas tree

The cold spring is still having an impact. I say this because the pohutukawa flowering is late this year, probably by at least two weeks. Hardly the New Zealand Christmas tree – more like the mid January tree, where we live at least.

Mark and I drove around looking at the pohuts (as we tend to call them) in Waitara which are well worth a visit at the moment. Waitara would be a bleak little town without these splendid trees. We felt a bit like Mark’s parents reincarnated. For years, Felix and Mimosa would make forays around the pohutukawa plantings and keep records on particularly heavy flowering specimens and good coloured ones. Mark could still recall certain trees – number six along such and such an avenue, or the one outside Mrs So and So’s place. Felix and Mimosa knew them all.

We were not so meticulous, but certainly three aspects made a big impression. The first was what a splendid tree they are for coastal areas and what a joy to behold in flower. The second aspect was a bouquet to the District Council who finally got around to limbing up and cleaning up underneath the trees which line the river. They look hugely better for it.

The Waitara riverbanks are also home to the oldest yellow pohutakawa on the mainland

The Waitara riverbanks are also home to the oldest yellow pohutakawa on the mainland


The third aspect was the variation in colour. As landscape trees, not all pohutukawa are born equal. Their flowers may look lovely en masse, close up. But from a distance, rather a lot of them are distinctly brown in tonings. The stand out trees were those with rich red flowers, or those which had an orange tone to them. The orange lifts the colour considerably when viewed from further away. Funnily enough, the dark flowered forms tend to be later flowering.

The moral of this particular story is that if you are going to buy pohutukawa plants, it is worthwhile seeking out either named clones or plants from an identified seed source of good colour. One might as well start with better selections. If you plan on gathering your own seed, identify a good specimen now and return around mid May to collect the seed. Growing selected seed increases your chances of keeping good colour, although there will be variation. Partly as a result of Felix and Mimosa’s study of the Waitara pohutukawa, Duncan and Davies put out a good range of named selections. “Rata Maid” and “Scarlet Pimpernel” are still growing in Waitara. Up north, Graham Platt also selected good forms along with Jack Hobbs, including one called “Brilliance”.

Pohutukawa are tough trees and while they can get wide, they don’t get particularly tall. They can withstand most assaults except for frost when young and vicious attacks with injected weedkiller. If you cut a tree back hard to ground level, it will sprout again. And they will take heavy pruning. Cutting away all the growth from the base exposes their interesting trunk and branch structure and allows views through the tree. They don’t have to be dense, impenetrable visual barriers. They can be a flowering canopy with an interesting structure beneath. And the prunings are brilliant firewood.

We happened to be in Patea over the weekend and their pohutakuwa were also a real feature in the town. Many of them appeared to be of about the same age and are therefore likely to be from the same seed batch so they are not quite as varied as the Waitara plantings. Alas both these small towns suffer from the same problem of overhead power lines. If these were underground, the trees could grow without the heavy mutilation of top pruning some get subjected to on frequent occasions. That pruning does not do much for the appearance of the trees. Bottom pruning is good. Top pruning can be butchery.

On another topic, we had an amusing discussion with London daughter home for a holiday. In her travels around this country visiting friends, she had got into a conversation with somebody about an exciting new red pineapple which is being widely marketed. She just about fell off her chair when we told her that it was none other than the pineapple which grows beside our garage and which has been growing there for about 40 years or more since her grandfather imported it. Or so we understand. A northern nurseryman had visited and bought a plant from us. Sure that he had uncovered treasure which we didn’t appreciate, he put it into tissue culture to multiply it quickly and has been marketing it nationally as an exciting new release which is “cold tolerant, extremely hardy and easy to grow.”

Have we got news for him. It might be easy in Northland (and pineapples are just bromeliads so they are pretty easy in the right conditions) but hardy it ain’t (unless compared with the tropical pineapple) and it sure won’t be that rewarding in less than ideal conditions. I imagine he will get many letters from areas south of the Bombay Hills querying his claims. I can’t think that it will be a great success growing in Christchurch or Invercargill, for example, or indeed anywhere inland. In our books, cold tolerant and extremely hardy means it will grow in Tekapo and Turangi. If you have bought one of these pineapples, it will need the hottest position you can find in full sun. We find its fruit producing capacity is pretty hit and miss and it is an ornamental curiosity rather than the taste treat of the decade.

Pineapples are gross feeders. Our elderly plant is a pretty large clump. It needs thinning, which, because it is spiky and intimidating, does not happen often. You need leather gloves to handle it. The season that Mark thinned the clump and fed it well, it responded beautifully by putting on a splendid crop of fruit which are decidedly ornamental, but in our conditions they tend to rot before ripening properly. As Mark is big fresh pineapple fan, we still buy them from the supermarket.