Tag Archives: Nerine sarniensis hybrids

March bulbs in autumn

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Autumn can be a magical season here. It is not guaranteed but, more often than not, we get warm, sunny, calm days with cool night temperatures. And dry. Ours is not a climate noted for extended dry periods but when it does happen, it is in autumn. These are perfect conditions for the autumn bulbs.

We say of our reasonably expansive 1950s rockery that it peaks in two seasons – autumn and again in early spring. We are entering the autumn peak but it is perhaps more in quantity than range of different bulbs.

We don’t accept many groups these days, but the Pukeiti members’ visit came from a special request, even though their visit was a few weeks too early to catch what we would describe as the autumn season.

We had the Pukeiti members visit three weeks’ ago and, as I commented to them, when it comes to bulbs, what they are looking at here is over 70 years of building up the volume. Mark, like his father Felix before him, started with just the bare minimum – one if it was an expensive bulb, maybe 3 or 4 if it was cheap enough and available to buy. Otherwise it would just be gifts of interesting bulbs from other gardeners. Over the years, we have lost a fair number of bulb varieties that did not like our conditions, but those that survived and increased have often thrived.

Cyclamen hederifolium, happily naturalised and seeding around but in a non-threatening way

The rockery is a carpet of Cyclamen hederifolium, in shades of pink and white. Sometimes referred to as the ivy-leaf cyclamen, it is native to the Mediterranean area and one of the most amenable and easy to grow species. These days, we mostly let them seed down in situ and from time to time, I will lift clumps of tubers when they get too congested.  We have also had success naturalising them on bulb hillsides in meadow conditions but we need to get the summer cut on the grass done at the right time so we can see the flowers. Somewhat to Mark’s surprise, just scattering seed proved as effective as planting tubers but it does take a few years for them to get enough size to be visible.

The nerines have just their peak. We do a good line on nerines – well, a rockery filled with them really and we have managed to keep the colours separate. Most are hybrids based on Nerine sarniensis, Felix started with a few good ones, although we don’t know how he came by the Inchmery nerines from Exbury. From there, he and then Mark started trying out controlled crosses to build the range we have today. They are the absolute stars in the autumn rockery, underpinned by the carpet of cyclamen.

Belladonnas are somewhat under-rated as an autumn bulb – too vigorous in growth habit and too much foliage for the rest of the year, but they certainly put on a great show in bloom with absolutely no care or attention.

Most of the big bulbs of summer have finished, but I will eat my past words on the short flowering season of belladonnas. I have never tracked them before but seven weeks in full bloom and still going is not a short season at all, by bulb standards. We just take them for granted, really, and fail to recognise what a hard working family they are.

Moraea poystachya in blue, choosing where it prefers to live. It particularly likes cracks in concrete.

The moraea family is a large one of many different species, the most common being M. villosa and M. aristata – the spring flowering peacock iris. Some are invasive and some are not worth having, but in autumn each year, Moraea polystachya delights us with its blue iris flowers. It sets plenty of flowers down the stem, unlike many bulbs that set just one bloom per stem. It seeds down but not badly enough for us to decide it is invasive and dangerous. It is just gently spreading and generally delights us,

Having different species of colchicum means the flowering season is extended by several weeks.

Beyond that, the second species of colchicums are in full bloom now (either C. autumnale or C speciosum – one flowers earlier and one flowers now and one day, I will find out which blooms first). So too are the true autumn crocus in bloom. There are a fair swag of different species of autumn crocus (NOT including colchicums and sternbergia which are often inaccurately referred to as autumn crocus even though they have no connection to crocus at all). The one we have most success with is blue, almost certainly from the C. serotinus group, maybe salzmanii.

The controversial pure while Lilium formasanum close out the lily season in March. They are controversial because of their seeding ways and indeed are banned from commercial sale but not prohibited in the garden. They do need deadheading, though.

Other bulbs during March that came and went included Haemanthus coccineus, Brunsvigia josephinae and the controversial Lilium formasanum (syn. weedy, also banned from sale). 

Sometimes this run of settled autumn weather can last until the shortest day. After a particularly indifferent summer, we have our fingers crossed.

Autumn delight

The rockery plantings are complex and varied but that is what makes it all the more interesting to us

I am not quite gone yet; on Wednesday I start the long haul over to Barcelona and then the south of France.  In the meantime, the rockery has been bringing me much pleasure. If I ever have to downsize both house and garden, I might be tempted to turn any new, smaller garden into rockery.  Rockeries lend themselves to highly detailed, high-interest level gardening and I can see I could be quite happy pottering in a rockery – as indeed was Mark’s dad, Felix, in his later years. It is a particularly absorbing area to garden, even if there are times I regard it as the gardening equivalent of micro-surgery.

There was quite a bit of excavation and construction that went into our rockery, especially given it was a blank canvas and largely flat to start with.

Ours is a raised rockery with different levels so it has detail in its design, not just in its plantings. Mark’s mother always used the plural ‘we’ when she talked about building the rockery, but we think it more likely that she designed it and then supervised Felix in its construction, which included some excavation to achieve different levels. Every original garden structure here was done by hand or, on occasion maybe, using horse power. Felix did not have a tractor or access to any of the machinery we can call on these days.

As our rockery measures some 20 metres by 10 metres, it is not small and it is certainly not low maintenance. Because it is largely raised beds and pockets of soil for separate plantings, it dries out and heats up in summer. Our frequent heavy rains drain quickly but that also leaches a lot of the nutrients out of the soil in the process. Bulbs generally need excellent drainage and many thrive in poor soil so they are quite happy in this environment. We try to get around with a thin layer of compost every spring and when I excavate a pocket to sort out its contents, I will add compost when I replant. But the soil overall is pretty impoverished and generally lifeless in the summer heat. There are almost no earthworms in summer but they seem to return as temperatures cool.

Rockeries are traditionally a re-creation of rocky mountain slopes to grow alpines. We can’t grow alpines here where our conditions and climate are anything but alpine. Our rockery basically consists of elderly dwarf conifers of considerable character and a few cycads giving all year round structure, offering some shadier areas beneath for bulbs of many descriptions. Smaller bulbs and many species rather than bigger hybrids which look out of scale, with one notable exception.

Nerine sarniensis hybrids

That exception is the Nerine sarniensis hybrids, most of which were bred and selected here although we have a few of the early Exbury ones and some of the species nerines. They are sensational at this time of the year. Along with Cyclamen hederafolium and the ornamental oxalis, they keep the autumn rockery full of blooms and colour.

Not all oxalis are equal. Some are much more floriferous and better behaved than others. This is O, luteola and it makes an excellent garden plant,

Last year, Zach reassembled the oxalis collection. Years ago, I planted them all out because I didn’t want to be repotting them every year and he set about retrieving some of each. We had only lost one or two inbetween times and he now has over 30 varieties in pots – most from the garden and a few extras he has picked up from local markets.

It is hard to fault Oxalis purpurea alba with its long flowering season, mass blooming and non-invasive ways.

A much maligned genus, the oxalis shine at this time of the year. We are only a few months off the short snowdrop season and the start of the dwarf narcissi and lachenalias. There is always something of interest going on in the rockery and it is constantly changing as different bulbs and plants take their time to shine. Always, Mark and I remember Christopher Lloyd saying in conversation on a TV programme, “I think you will find high maintenance is a great deal more interesting.” We could not agree more.

Notably nerines

Nerine sarniensis hybrids in the rockery

It is nerine season and they certainly put on a great display. I don’t love them in spring when the foliage is slow to die off and looks scruffy as all the spring bulbs light up the rockery, but, come April, all is forgiven.

I need to put a tie on the two pink ones which have inveigled their way amongst the orange-red so I can move them. While we are fine with the adjacent blocks of clashing colour, they look better to my eye if they are adjacent, not mixed together.

Most of our nerines are sarniensis hybrids which give the range of colours and full heads of flowers. Often referred to as ‘Guensey lilies’, their connection to Guernsey is solely due to the cut flower trade because they are native to the Cape area of South Africa.

One of Mark’s unnamed hybrids that matures to purple, planted amongst our native carex grasses. It is a very good head of flowers with long stems but the stems really need to be a little more sturdy to hold the big head upright.

The sarniensis hybrids need really good drainage, open conditions and sun. Because they are in leaf in winter, they aren’t suitable for areas that get heavy frosts. These are bulbs that want to grow where their bulbs can bake in the sun so the rule of thumb is to plant them to a depth of no more than half the bulb with the other half and the long neck above the soil. They are also happiest in a crowd and can form a clump above the soil. I will divide the clumps when they get too congested and I discard the many small bulbs before replanting the larger ones close together.

Smoky shades
Undeniably vibrant shades. I find the highlighter pink particularly so.

We have a few of the early Exbury hybrids and the rest are all the result of Mark’s dad, Felix, hybridising to get a wider range of colours, along with some by Mark in days gone by. Felix particularly liked the smoky shades and they have a subtle charm of their own, as do the ones that mature to blue-purple shades. That said, the vibrant orange, clear red and highlighter pink ones are unashamedly bold and make a loud statement of their own.

The sarniensis hybrids are not that easy to find for sale. Local readers might like to hop in their car right now and head out to the Inglewood Sunday car boot sale because I saw somebody selling a really good selection of different colours in bloom there last Sunday. It is likely they will be there again today and maybe next week while we are at peak bloom. Beyond that, I don’t know where they are available but don’t expect them to be cheap like mass produced daffodils and tulips.

As I gathered single flowers to show the range of colours we have here, I picked up a few that had been snapped off. The one in the centre I think I can blame on Ralph dog who is no respecter of gardens. The ones on the right were clearly leaning over onto the grass where they fell victim to the lawnmower. The ones on the left are weevil damage on the rockery. If you zoom in on the second left, you can see the telltale damage on the stem which eventually weakened it to the point of breaking and flopping near the flower. Notwithstanding an exuberant dog, lawnmower and our localised patches of weevils, there isn’t much else that attacks these plants.

Nerine pudica on the left and bowdenii on the right

While we favour the sarniensis hybrids as garden plants, we also have a fair swag of N. bowdenii seen here on the right. There was only stem open so far two days ago when I took these photographs because it comes into bloom a little later than the sarniensis. It is easier to grow with stems that are strong enough to hold up the truss of flowers and is certainly more widely available than most others. On the downside, its truss is not as full of flowers and it basically comes in shades of hot pink although there is a white form, the internet tells me.

On the left in the photo above is N. pudica which I had forgotten about until this stray pot in the nursery opened its blooms. Several years ago, I planted a whole lot out, mostly in the rockery, and I had forgotten about them because I can’t recall them ever flowering there. I think I have found one patch of them which I shall watch to see if they do bloom. The same thing happened with the Lycoris aurea that I planted in the rockery a decade ago. They have never flowered again which is a pity because they were lovely – a most attractive shade of yellow and looking just like a yellow nerine except they are a lycoris, not a nerine. I live in hope that they are still there and pretending to be a mound of non-flowering nerines, so they can spring forth one year and delight me.

A range of the colours we have from pure white (named ‘Sacred Heart’ from memory) through soft pinks to alarmingly bright pink, coral, smoky shades, blue tones, reds through to bright orange

Nerines became popular as a cut flower because they have long stems and last well in a vase – hence the ‘Guernsey lily’ moniker. I rarely pick them because they last longer in the garden and, when a bulb only puts up one flower stem, it feels like flowercide to cut it to bring indoors to die. They are not as easy to produce as many other flowers for the cut flower trade so I would not expect them to be cheap to buy.

Autumn nerines

The autumn rockery this week

Look at the nerines. Autumn stars, these are.

We grow a few different species but what is coming into bloom now are what we refer to as the N. sarniensis hybrids. I will admit that I do not know what they were hybridised with. As they appear to have been popular in both Europe and Japan by the 1600s, I am guessing the genes are pretty mixed by now but dominated by the species, N. sarniensis.

It really is shocking pink or highlighter pink, brighter even than in this photo

All nerines hail from areas of southern Africa and there are currently 24 species recognised. Notwithstanding that origin, the common name internationally is the ‘Guernsey lily’ owing to that island in the English Channel adopting the flower early on as its own and establishing a cut flower trade with it. I have no idea if it is fact or legend that a ship carrying a load of nerine bulbs to the Netherlands was wrecked nearby and the bulbs floated to the shores of Guernsey Island and naturalised themselves on the coastline. It is a good story and bulbs had to get there somehow.

The history of nerines in cultivation seems to be pretty murky, maybe because it goes back over 400 years. I had always assumed – based on the photos of the Guernsey lily that appeared to be predominantly red – that sarniensis in the wild was red. Mark thought it was orange, based on Nerine fothergilla major (which has now been reclassified as sarniensis, just to confuse us further) but it appears that the colour may be variable in the wild.

Our nerines range from pure white through pale pink, pink and white bi colours, mid pinks, coral shades, shocking pink, cerise, crimson, shades of orange and scarlet.

Ageing to blue purple tones

“Oh lord,” said Mark, looking at the purple ones on my flower lay, “the phone will ring next week with people wanting a purple nerine. Reader, they don’t open purple. Mark spent a bit of time crossing and selecting to get the blue and purple lines in the flowers and those ones age to purple. We never named any of them and we don’t know if other breeders have similar shades which they have put on the market, which would seem likely. Whether any are available in New Zealand is another matter.

Very few of our nerines have ever been sold commercially. We have a few named cultivars originally from the Exbury collection in the UK (where they have to grow them under glass), Felix Jury named a few but not many and I think Mark named one that we once sold. It is all a bit academic now because we just enjoy them in the garden and it doesn’t matter to us whether they are named cultivars or unnamed hybrids.

These nerines are deciduous and they put up their flower spikes before putting out the fresh foliage. I don’t love the foliage in spring when it is getting tatty and tired and we have some quite big clumps of them, but they make up for it in autumn. Because they have foliage through the winter, sarniensis nerines are frost tender and they struggle in cold, wet conditions. They need to be in full sun with sharp drainage and the large bulbs nestled into the soil but with their top half and necks exposed to bake in the sun. They are quite particular about conditions and won’t flower if they don’t like them. Nerine bowdenii which flowers later is much easier, hardier and less particular but only comes in pink, I think.

I have measured out my year in flowers, not my life in coffee spoons (as did J Alfred Prufrock)

As 2018 draws to a close, I decided that I do not have anything to say on new year gardening resolutions that I have not said before. At a personal level, I am resolved to finally complete the two gardening books that have been percolating in my head for several years. This is the first time I have stated that intention publicly. One is at the point of being ready to hand over to an external editor, the other is still in progress. More on them, I hope, as they near publication.

Then the latest posts from a Canadian gardener, Pat Webster, landed in my inbox, charting her garden through the year. I was a bit gobsmacked at four months of snow on the ground. It snowed here once. That is once in recorded history.  I am not sure what I would do in a climate with months of snow. I guess one switches to indoor pursuits.

It is different here where we garden all year round and can expect flowers every day of the year. I have thousands of photographs so finding 12 different garden scenes representing a month each took a bit of effort. It would have been much easier had I just gone for flower close-ups but some readers may like to see the different contexts. Best viewed on a larger screen, of course…

Firstly, January is for lilies. We like our lilies, a whole range of different types, but none more so than the golden Aurelians opening now, to be followed by the OTT auratums which we have in abundance. The new lily border should be a show-stopper this year after our concerted efforts to outwit Peter Rabbit and his extended family, but in the meantime, I give you the auratums in the woodland – planted maybe two decades ago and left entirely to their own devices in the time since.

February is peak summer here, when we get the most settled and warmest weather. And the Scadoxus multiflorus ssp katherinae are just astounding in the same woodland area as the previous photo.  We never planted anywhere near this number. Over the years, they have just gently seeded down and taken over an entire area, so happy are they in our conditions. There aren’t too many people around this country who have scadoxus naturalised in their garden.

March is still summer here although the day length is shortening and the nights noticeably cooler. It used to be a very green time for us, because we have so much woodland garden and there is not a whole lot of high impact flowering in later summer woodland. We went to England three times to look at summer gardens and it is the sunny perennials that flower into this time. It has been really exciting putting in a large summer garden in full sun. I am extremely impressed by the echinaceas which flower from December to April and I have a very soft spot for the blue eryngium, even if I often need to put a stake in to hold them upright.

By April, we can no longer pretend that summer will go on forever. The flowering of the Nerine sarniensis hybrids, the Cyclamen hederafolium and other autumn bulbs in the rockery tell us that time waits for no gardener and early autumn is upon us. We have long spring and autumn seasons in our part of the country.

May brings us the early camellias in bloom, in this case Camellia sasanqua ‘Crimson King’ at the mill wheel bird bath just out from the back door. So too do the months right through to early October bring us camellias, but with advent of camellia petal blight, it is the early flowers that are the showiest, most abundant and the most charming now, which mostly means the sasanquas and quite a few of the species.

June is early winter here. Definitely winter. I could have chosen Mark’s Daphne ‘Perfume Princess’ which flowers on and on through the winter months, but instead I picked Vireya Rhododendron macgregoriae.  This particular plant has a special history for us and, unusually for a vireya, it flowers like clockwork every June and July. Most of this plant genus are less predictable in their flowering times, despite their trigger being day length, not temperature. As a result, we have vireyas flowering twelve months of the year, though we do have to place them in frost-free locations on account of them being subtropical.

July is our bleakest, coldest month. But there is light ahead. July brings us snowdrops and by the end of the month, we have the earliest blooms opening on both the deciduous magnolias and the early michelias. Nothing shouts spring more than the earliest spring blooms. Mark would like some galanthus varieties that flowered later in the season as well and he has tried all that are available, but none of them compete with Galanthus ‘S. Arnott’ for showy and reliable performance and the ability to naturalise in his bulb meadows that are a long-term project.

August – yes there is a lot of snow on our Mount Taranaki. All the better to frame our Magnolia campbellii. There is well over 30km between the maunga (as we call the mountain) and our tree but each year I get out with my camera to close up the gap, as viewed from the path down to the park.

I gave September to the prunus, the flowering cherries. It is probably the campanulatas that are the showiest and they flower in August and I had already allocated that month to magnolias. But we grow quite a range of flowering cherries and this one is down in our wild North Garden, an area that we find particularly charming at this time of the year.

October is mid spring. And for October, I chose the clivias yellow, orange and red, seen here with Hippeastrum papilio and dendrobium orchids in the Rimu Avenue. As I selected photos, I realised I was leaning to what we might call our backbone flowering plants – the ones we have a-plenty. Not all of them. I had to skip the azaleas, the michelias, the campanulatas and the hydrangeas owing to my self-imposed restrictions of one per month.

November brings us peak nuttallii and maddenii rhododendrons. The rhododendrons start in August, sometimes the first blooms as early as July, and flower well into December. But the beautiful nuttallis and maddeniis peak in November and are a source of great delight.

Finally, December is marked by the Higo iris down in the meadow in our park. What prettier way to end the calendar year? And gardening being what gardening is, we start the cycle again with a new year. Best wishes to all readers for a happy and rewarding 2019.