Tag Archives: Rhododendron Festival

The growing popularity of garden workshops

Lifting and limbing allows us to garden below our avenue of huge rimu trees

Lifting and limbing allows us to garden below our avenue of huge rimu trees, now 130 years old (which is very old for New Zealand gardens where there is a widespread apprehension of anything older than about 20 years)

In one of those rash moments when our annual garden festival was a long way out, I volunteered to take a workshop here in our garden. These are fast becoming a feature of our event. The popularity of workshops suggests a growing demand for quality information. Predictably, muck and mystery (as English garden writer Alan Titchmarsh used to call compost) attracted the largest number – presumably those driven by a desire to demystify the secrets of making the good stuff. I say predictably because compost is closely tied in to the Great Vegetable Garden Boom still in full swing. But all workshops attracted good attendances and all but one were based in festival gardens.

Several of our attendees commented later that one of the unexpected bonuses of coming to our garden festival here was the presence of knowledgeable gardeners who are available and willing to share ideas, name plants and give good advice. It is one of the characteristics that set us apart from other such events around the country. Back in the early days of our festival when most gardens were free and there were many more open gardens, there was little expectation placed on garden owners. They weren’t even required to be there. In fact, some just left the gate open when they went to work. I always wondered why there weren’t more burglaries because I felt sure that any burglar worth their salt would have cased out the joints. But maybe forward planning is not a mandatory qualification for your average burglar and thief. That aside, there is something slightly disturbing about not being formally invited onto private property to look around the garden and quite often garden visitors would comment that they felt very uncomfortable looking around where there was nobody home and they left quickly. It is all a bit like snooping into your host’s private cupboards or drawers.

It was precisely because of this, the requirement that every garden be hosted was brought in some years ago. Nowadays we expect a great deal of our garden openers and most in fact deliver even more than is expected of them. Not only do they have to get their gardens up to opening standards (and pretty well without exception, our garden openers are their own toughest critics and have lifted standards higher every year), but then we expect them to front up to the public and meet and greet and chat to them for ten days on end. There are other festivals where this does not happen, where the garden owners are not visible or available. The Trinity Garden Festival in Auckland (which doesn’t seem to be running any longer) was the most often cited event – students employed to do the gate and a completely impersonal experience with nary a gardener and garden owner in sight. But it is not just that our gardeners are available, it is also that they are voluntarily up-skilling themselves so that they are more knowledgeable hosts. It is one of the defining characteristics of our festival and a reason why it has run without interruption for 22 years and is apparently going into another growth period.

I started by saying it was a rash impulse which saw me offering to take a workshop here. It always looks a long way out when you agree to do something but it is a bit like an exam – some of us don’t start worrying until it is almost upon us. It actually takes quite a bit of thought and discussion to marshall one’s ideas and key points and it may even be harder to make a casual workshop coherent than it is to present a formal lecture. Whatever, we chose the title of Taming the Wilderness and then started worrying about what direction to take it. I am not going to try and summarise all we covered but it was interesting that for us, personally, there were three critical points.

  1. If you have a property with large trees and shrubs and you are not sure what is what, seek out some good advice as to which plants are special so worth saving and which are the long term trees. You can’t buy maturity and too often, ignorance sees some pretty special plants lost forever. At the risk of making enemies, tree surgeons and arborists tend to be the people you seek out when you have decided which trees you want saved and which ones felled. They should do the work safely and efficiently for you but by no means are all these people knowledgeable about tree varieties. You need a plantsperson or dendrologist for this and the really able enthusiasts are often found in the voluntary or amateur sectors.
  2. Lift and limb. Gardening is about working with nature. Just by cutting off the lower branches of trees, you can open up an area to light and air movement. You don’t have to return a tree back to juvenile size if it is too large. You can celebrate the stature of large plants by managing the lower metres of trunks and canopies so you can garden below, rather than growing dense forest. At our workshop, Mark did a memorable demonstration of lifting and limbing – showing what a difference dropping merely a couple of large limbs can make, creating vistas and views and opening up around the plants.
  3. Reclaim space around individual plants. Much of the appeal of juvenile, freshly planted gardens is that each plant stands alone in its own space. As gardens grow, plants become intertwined and thugs can dominate. Over time, plantings can become forests or hedges. To reclaim a sense of managed garden, create space around individual plants by judicious pruning and thinning. It is also better for plant health.

In a place with some very large trees and a well established garden, we are constantly working to hold the forest and potential overgrown wilderness at bay and to keep a sense of garden and open space within that mature framework. It is simply what we do here.

Maintaining social status if not economic value – the rhododendron in Taranaki

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The generic pink rhododendron photo - in fact an unnamed seedling from our park


2009 may not go down in history as having the best ever display of rhododendrons in Taranaki because spring came somewhat early this year and festival dates are somewhat late. But it is rather a happy collision of different occurrences that sees us wearing a rhododendron crown in the first place. It is not that we grow them hugely better than everywhere else. We just happen to have Pukeiti here and that organisation and identity has given an enduring regional focus to the plant genus, along with our longstanding annual garden festival. In fact going back in history, that garden festival was first floated by Pukeiti and owned and run in the early years by the Taranaki Rhododendron Group.

Why rhododendrons? Just as tulips commanded prestige and price well beyond their actual worth in Holland in centuries past, rhododendrons were the high status and high prestige plant for the post World War 11 gardeners and we had a cluster of serious gardeners in Taranaki at the time.

Douglas Cook, the father of Pukeiti, bought land here primarily for rhododendrons because it was clear to him that these aristocrats from lower mountain slopes in Asia would never be an option for his first choice location near Gisborne, where he set up Eastwood Hill with its heavy focus on drought tolerant deciduous trees.

Around the same time, a number of Taranaki gardeners and plantspeople were creating their gardening masterpieces. These included Bernard and Rose Hollard near Kaponga, Russell and Mary Matthews on Mangorei Road (Tupare), Les Jury at Sunnybank on Tukapa Street, Harold Marchant and Les Taylor near Stratford, Jack Goodwin at Pukekura Park and Pukeiti – and Felix and Mimosa Jury in the garden here at Tikorangi. The rhododendron family featured large in their plans and individual collections were highly prized.

Historically, back in those mists of time around the late forties and fifties, Duncan and Davies were becoming the major force in commercial production and that happened in Taranaki partly because all plants were field grown in those days (in other words in the ground in real soil, rather than in containers and planter bags in modern nurseries). With its friable, volcanic soils, high sunshine and regular rainfall for 12 months, Taranaki just happened to have the best conditions in the country for field production. It needs also to be said that the charisma and dynamism of V.C. Davies was a major influence.

Times keep changing. These days the market value of a rhododendron plant has plummeted so far that you can go to any plant shop and buy one for around the same price as a perennial, a clipped bay tree, even a semi-clipped buxus or a large succulent. I can tell you, dear Reader, that there is a vast amount more skill and time required to get that rhododendron onto the shop floor than the other plants and that they are dreadfully underpriced, almost without exception. I am frankly astonished that rhododendrons have to some extent kept their elevated status in theory, even though reality has them relegated well down the plant equivalent of the social scale. It is a conundrum.

But then we still lay claim to the rhododendron in Taranaki even though the local nursery industry continues to dwindle away (we certainly can’t claim to be the Southern hemisphere power house of plant production these days!) and even though most home gardeners would rather plant a fruit tree than a rhodo. The rhododendron gives a focus, an icon, to our garden festival which sets it a little apart from others all round the country – except for Dunedin who shamelessly (though quite justifiably) continue to challenge our claim to having the Rhododendron Festival.

As our festival starts today, never underestimate the importance of this annual event on our regional garden calendar. It is the single event which keeps Taranaki right up at the top nationally in the garden scene. The 10 days of festival deliver more visitors into most of our open gardens than will be seen on the other 355 days of the year. It is the single event which makes it worthwhile to maintain gardens to the high standards we currently reach. Without festival, there would be no incentive to keep lifting gardening standards and setting the benchmarks.

If you want it, you may have to produce it yourself

So twenty years of Rhododendron and Garden Festival (or Rhodo Fest as participants tend to refer to it) has been and gone. Blink your eyes and it is over for another year. We could all have done without the unrelenting rain on the last Sunday but them’s the breaks. It is certainly not the first time that the weather has not cooperated and it won’t be the last.

And another year of eager beavers searching out particular rhododendron cultivars has gone. We assume R.elliottii was not flowering at Pukeiti this year because nobody asked for it. And we could tell that BriRee was not open this year because they used to have a spectacular rhododendron whose name escapes me offhand, that many people asked for. The trouble was that nobody but the good gardeners at BriRee could do much with this particular variety so it was not readily available.

No, it was Lemon Lodge that was at its peak flowering this year around the province and therefore much sought after. Lemon Lodge was selected and named by Pukeiti and it has big trusses of sublime lemon coloured flowers. The problem with Lemon Lodge is that it prefers a cooler climate and certainly will never be happy in Auckland or Whangarei. Even for us, with a warmer climate than Pukeiti, Lemon Lodge looks superb for its two weeks in full flower and pretty tatty for the rest of the year. It also has a fairly poor success rate from cuttings so is not easy to propagate.

Curiously, we were also asked for Lems Cameo several times this year so there must be at least one garden left with a good flowering specimen. Lems Cameo was the must-have plant of the late eighties and early nineties. It has a gorgeous flower in a colour range not really available in anything else of similar shape – big frilly flowers in apricot cream and pink. The trouble with Lems Cameo was that it was very difficult to propagate – had to be grafted and even then with poor success rate – and that it really wanted to live in a cold climate like Taupo or maybe Tekapo. Over the years most of the plants around this province have died, even the large specimen in our park which held on longer than most.

The big, fragrant pure white trumpets of the nuttalliis and nuttallii hybrids were also much admired and these are plants which are not readily available commercially, either. They rarely appear in garden centres because they don’t set flower buds on two and three year old plants and they don’t give much in the way of cutting material so they are not a starter for mass production.

The problem is that there are few, precious few, specialist rhododendron growers left in the country so we are seeing the range get smaller and smaller. The interesting species have all but disappeared from production. Varieties which require grafting or are difficult to propagate and grow in the nursery have also pretty well disappeared. Similarly, azalea mollis do not fit modern methods of mass production and are hard to find. The longstanding specialist nursery, Crosshills in Kimbolton is still flying the flag in the rhododendron world and probably the only source left for a number of cultivars. As far as I know, they still do mailorder too so are worth seeking out if you are after something special.

Mark is of the view that we may see a return to home propagation skills in the face of a declining plant range. For the past three decades, gardeners have expected to be able to source just about any plant they want, as long as it is in the country. Some are still of the view that the advent of the internet should make sourcing even easier but the bottom line is that you can only source a plant if it is actually being produced. With a contracting range, gardeners may have to return to learning how to propagate at home if they are to be able to grow the special plants they covet.

Sadly, dear Reader, there are easier plants to produce at home than most rhododendrons. The vireya rhododendron group are simple and many will root without special facilities. Similarly, evergreen azaleas are pretty easy. But the deciduous azaleas and the classic rhodos require more skill and better facilities. For the home gardener who lacks a hot bed with bottom heat and protection, layering is possibly the easiest method. Layering is simple, as long as you have a long enough branch. It involves pegging a branch to the ground (you can use a wire hoop or even a stone or brick) and being patient for two years or more, in the hope that where the stem is in contact with the ground, it will put out roots (like a sucker). When it has formed roots, you cut the branch from its parent and dig it up and move it. There is no substitute for patience here and you don’t always get the best shaped plant.

We may be seeing a return to the times of Bernie Hollard where you gave your layers away in exchange for other people’s special layers. Layering, of course, only works for plants which grow well on their own roots so it is not suitable for most grafted plants. Plants are often grafted because they don’t grow well on their own roots so grafting is a means of giving them a transplant of other root systems.

There is no hocus pocus to grafting or to propagation at home. It used to widely practiced by gardeners of previous generations and even Mark set up a little outdoor hotbox unit for cuttings in our first home, long before he went into a career in horticulture. If you anticipate wanting special plants, you might usefully employ your time looking through old books to see how it used to be done. It is not an expensive operation but it does require an outdoor power source and some heating cable. Now the internet might be the place where you can find step by step guides to home propagation, including grafting.

The alternative is that you will only ever get to admire many of the special plants seen in our region’s gardens in the last weeks.

Twenty years, no less.

We are marvelling at the thought that this weekend marks the twentieth anniversary of the Taranaki Rhododendron and Garden Festival. It is a remarkable achievement to have survived so long and to have gained such a foothold in the garden culture of this country. Even more remarkable is the accreditation of so many of our gardens as being rated as nationally or regionally significant – many more than any other province in the country.

We do not subscribe to the view that this external recognition is due to the innate superiority of our gardens here. No, we think it is a downstream effect of the Festival and ever rising standards. Twenty years ago, Taranaki was a major force in plant production (mostly due to Duncan and Davies) but not necessarily head and shoulders above the rest of the country in the quality of its private gardens. Sure we had some notable gardens, but only half a dozen and most other areas of the country can muster half a dozen. Now we have close to 20 which are recognised as top quality gardens nationally and probably close to the same number again on the path to similar recognition. It is an astounding achievement. Even more astounding when you consider that the majority of the gardens are privately owned and managed without great resources of wealth.

What we have here, however, is a wealth of experience in presenting gardens well and an open garden ethos. And while no garden pays its own way, the system which allows garden owners to charge is an incentive to pour more money into making the gardens better for next season.

Look back and remember what went twenty years ago. In those heady early years, pretty well everybody and anybody could and did open. Most were free back then and there was certainly little of the intensive grooming and presentation that marks out the open gardens today. It was more akin to real estate open homes and the majority of visitors were local. Owners were not expected to be present and many times garden visitors walked around the property with nobody at home. Mark would round up the sheep and get them out of our park a few days before opening.

I can’t recall how far down the track it began to seep into garden openers’ consciousness that maybe it wasn’t a good look to peg your washing on the line. That while we all do washing, when strangers are visiting your place, flapping sheets and (horrors) underwear displayed for all and sundry to see is a bit naff. It may have been around the time when there was a campaign to divest the Festival of the practice affected by some of greeting garden visitors while wearing a white lab coat and rattling an icecream container of coins. Elder Daughter, who gets to wear a white coat most days of her life now because she inhabits a laboratory, has always marvelled at how some people think that a white lab coat confers an air of authority. We never went in for the lab coat look here, nor the rattling of coins as people walked in the gate, but I will admit that I used to peg washing on the line. By this stage, I think Mark had taken to mowing tracks in the grass around our park with the old reel mower and there were increasing numbers of visitors from outside Taranaki.

The early nineties were the peak time for visitors. Back then, large coachloads would turn up at the weekend. The Wellington Evening Post ran an excursion train up to the Festival, transferring hundreds of passengers onto coaches which crisscrossed the province. I recall one Friday evening chasing around on the phone for some visitors from Auckland who had arrived without any accommodation booked. Elaine Gill, who in those days was Tourism Taranaki, found them the very last bed in New Plymouth. The city was booked out.

They were heady days of garden opening. Garden visiting was an enormously popular activity and Maggie’s Garden Show on TV (except it was probably Palmers Garden Show back then) was mandatory viewing for everyone.

Many other areas jumped on to the garden festival bandwagon. Our festival lost its novelty value and numbers fell back somewhat. But dedicated gardeners just worked harder to lift the standards so that visitors would not be disappointed in what they saw. Around this time, we banished the sheep once and for all from our park and bought a super fancy lawnmower which cost more than our car but was the only machine capable of mowing the area which has some steep banks and tight manoeuvres.

There have been ups and downs and some quite major shakedowns since. But after 20 years our Festival is still here. Only now it caters for as many out of towners as locals and is an established part of the tourist scene here. Some may mourn the loss of the early days when garden standards were loose at best and where most gardens were free. Nostalgia is fine thing, but had we resolutely stuck to that early formula, I think our festival would have quietly died a natural death some years ago. Locals stop visiting when the excitement and novelty wears off and outsiders demand more when they have very limited time and when they are spending quite a bit of money to visit.

Taranaki gardeners can stand tall. The Festival is still here and in the end it is the individual home gardeners who are lifting the bar higher every year, presenting their gardens better and hosting visitors with friendliness.

Those of us who open know that it is a wonderful incentive to make you get your garden looking right. I love it when we are all tightly groomed and presented at our best here. And even if visitor numbers these days are more likely to be measured in the late hundreds for most, rather than the earlier days when they were knocking on the door of thousands, the bottom line is that it is really lovely to have many hundreds of people turn up, ready to enjoy themselves and admiring all your efforts. It sure has the feel good factor.

Long may the Festival continue. It is pretty special for our province and has made us a senior player on the garden scene in this country.

October 26, 2007 Weekly Garden Guide

Those who have their gardens open to the public for the next ten days are unlikely to be doing any serious gardening themselves this week.

But others who read this column should try and get out to see a few gardens. If nothing else, visit two – one that you have always intended to get to and one which you think sounds as if it has some good ideas to inspire you in our own garden.

  • Pieris (commonly referred to as lily of the valley plants though they are not related at all to that cool climate perennial) are best dead headed. If you let them go to seed, they tend not to set flower buds on those stems next year. As rhododendrons finish flowering, try and dead head them too so that they put their energies into setting fresh flower buds not seed. Rhododendrons set next year’s buds in their spring growth each season so it is a long way ahead of when they flower.
  • While the seventies may have been the era of conifer gardens, the eighties of cottage gardening, and the nineties brought us the horrors of the minimalist garden, there is little doubt as to what is the fashion of the new millenium. It is the vegetable garden, the more organic the better. If you have never grown your own vegetables, avoid being too ambitious to start with. Remember that vegies need full sun and very well cultivated soil. Lettuces are a good crop to start with. Radishes bring a quick return for minimal effort. Micro greens or mesclun salad greens can be rewarding. Sweet 100 tomatoes are a good, easy care crop for a beginner.
  • If you are in the habit of buying the fresh herb plants from the fruit and veg section of the supermarket, you can extend their cropping by buying the smallest grade of plants on offer and either planting them out in a garden border out from your kitchen or potting them into a larger pot with some quick release fertiliser. Water well.
  • Pumpkins can be started on a mound comprised of layers of soil and lawn clippings. The decomposing grass generates heat which speeds up germination and initial growth considerably. Don’t make the heap too big or you may cook the seeds. A metre wide by 60cm high is about the right size.
  • Grape and tomato plants are very susceptible to hormone sprays at this time of the year, so be very careful if you are still using these types of sprays on your lawn. Magnolias are similarly vulnerable so keep sprays well away from any specimens in or close to your lawn. Better still, put the hormone spray away at this time of year.
  • If you want to grow watermelons and rock melons, this is your last opportunity to start off seeds. They should have been started earlier but you may manage to force them under cover for planting out in six weeks time. Mark did this last week.
  • Don’t delay on planting out trees and shrubs. It is getting late in the season and they are best established before summer.