Tag Archives: Taranaki gardens

Tikorangi Notes: Monday 6 June, 2011

Latest Posts:
1) What does your lawn say about you? (Subtitled: a plea for sustainability in lawn management). Abbie’s column.

2) Plants that Delight – a reprint of an article featuring my seven favourite plants in the latest Weekend Gardener – although a cynic might suggest that this is in part the seven plants for which I had good photos. When Mark is asked what is his favourite plant/magnolia/michelia/camellia/rhododendron, he is inclined to reply: “Whichever is in flower this week.”

3) Tikorangi Diary No. 2. What we have been doing in the garden last week, including praise for our big walnut, Freshford Gem, and a lament for what has happened to the garden pages in our local paper. My ruggedly independent advice for garden tasks for the week has been replaced by garden tasks as recommended by a local garden centre: you need three different fertilisers when planting your roses. I have not heard of chitting garlic prior to planting before and you are meant to get out and spray all your deciduous plants with copper now to hasten leaf drop. We blenched at the prospect in a garden our size. Besides, I rather thought deciduous plants dropped their leaves when they were ready to. My beloved Plant Collector has been replaced by a shopping reporter. My columns and Outdoor Classroom have been replaced by low grade stories about people who have gardens of some description but no particular skills and no interesting insights. Sigh. Serves me right for having an argument with the deputy editor.

Luculia pinceana Fragrant Cloud

Luculia pinceana Fragrant Cloud

Tikorangi Notes: Sunday 5 June, 2011

How lovely is the luculia? Well relatively lovely if it is the garish little, candy pink Luculia gratissima Early Dawn and particularly lovely if it is the wonderful Luculia pinceana Early Dawn or Fragrant Pearl.  These somewhat tender Asian shrubs are a feature of our early winter garden.

Alas Mark found the first instance of camellia petal blight today – in a japonica. It seems to appear earlier every year. We have never seen it in sasanquas and I was a little surprised this week to hear of claims that in warmer climates, sasanqua camellias are susceptible. We would really like to hear confirmation from anybody who has actually seen it in sasanquas (as opposed to having heard reports of it). We had thought that these Japanese camellias were resistant. Blight has certainly never shown in ours and we are reasonably eagle-eyed on the matter.

Tikorangi Garden Diary number 2, June 3, 2011

A magic run of autumn weather has seen all three of us out in the garden every day. Temperatures remain very mild even though we are now technically in winter. I am nearing the end of my marathon on the Avenue Gardens – another two weeks of reasonable weather and it may be done. We are not big on measuring (and counting plants does not even enter our orbit – we can never believe people who boast that they have 245 roses or 415 rhododendrons. Who can be bothered counting?). But reading a brag book boast by somebody else, I had to pace out the Avenue Gardens to see if I was exaggerating my current task. It measures somewhere over 4300 square metres which I think converts to over an acre of intensive garden. No wonder it is a major task.

Dividing the streptocarpus

Dividing the streptocarpus

Today has been lifting and dividing streptocarpus – members of the gesneriad family. We are not big on bedding plants here but the streptocarpus survive well in reasonably hard, woodland conditions. They have tiny root systems and seem to muddle on very successfully despite benign neglect so I am hoping they may thrive in freshly tilled soils. They are frost tender and more commonly grown as house plants (like their siblings, gloxinias) but add a touch of the exotic as garden plants.

Mark has been doing a weeding round. He is the Chief Weed Controller here and takes his role very seriously. In a large garden, weed control is the first line of defence against the encroaching wilderness that hovers forever on the boundary, waiting to make inroads. We admit to using glyphosate. There is no way we could maintain the garden without it. The push hoe is fine in summer for the veg garden and for emergency intervention, but glyphosate is indispensable. Mark lives in fear that research may one day rule that it is unsafe, but as long as we can believe that it is not an environmental threat, we will continue its use. The aim here is always to avoid any going to seed. Good weed spraying should be as close to invisible as possible, which means getting the weeds when they have just germinated and never, but never, spraying edges. Various edging tools were designed to get clean, crisp edges, not weedkiller which leaves an unsightly dead fringe.

Bigger is better when it comes to walnuts. Standard walnuts to the right, what we think is Freshford Gem to the left

Bigger is better when it comes to walnuts. Standard walnuts to the right, what we think is Freshford Gem to the left

We are drying walnuts and have a good crop from our large walnut this season. As far as we know, it is Freshford Gem, an Australian selection. It is far more rewarding to work with big nuts, rather than the standard size so if you have a choice when it comes to buying trees, chose the ones that boast very large individual nuts.

I was just ever so slightly put out this morning to read the garden pages of our local paper (until last week, I contributed the bulk of copy) and to see that my beloved Plant Collector column has been replaced with indecent haste – by a shopping reporter. Sigh. Gone is the freedom I had to write about any interesting or appealing plant, regardless of whether it was available to purchase or not. Now garish synthetic clogs are the order of the day. It must be a sign of the times. The Philistines have taken over.

Garden Diary – the first entry May 28, 2010

Mark covets the neighbour's wife's toy - her Bosch trimmer

Mark covets the neighbour's wife's toy - her Bosch trimmer

Ha! I knew I loved writing, but I didn’t realise quite how much until I stopped the weekly routine. So herewith the first of a new series. Instead of casting around each week to dispense advice on what readers should be doing in their garden, I thought instead I would record what we have actually done.

Mark has been playing with a new toy which belongs to Lloyd’s wife (Lloyd being our neighbour, friend and one remaining staff member). I don’t think his wife knows they are over here but despite initial scepticism, these battery powered clippers by Bosch have proven to be so useful that I can see Mark needs a set for his birthday. He has spent hours cutting back the long grass from the bulbs he has naturalised in the park (dwarf cyclamen, dwarf narcissi, snowdrops – galanthus – lachenalias and more). The clippers are much faster to use than snips and have saved a major flare-up of his RSI. He is besotted with them and loves to demonstrate how easily they cut back spent perennials and seed heads as well. To me, they resemble hairdresser’s clippers. Not that I have anything against hairdressers.

Drying the maize crop for the pigeons

Drying the maize crop for the pigeons

In the edible garden, which is entirely Mark’s domain here, he has been continuing his nightly rat and mouse bait round to combat the growing population. He gathered the maize which he grows to feed his pigeons (I call him the Jack Duckworth of Tikorangi) and has it spread out to dry. He continues to eat fresh sweet corn every day for lunch. The walnut harvest is being dried, the last of the tree-ripened apples were gathered this week but there is a major failure in the vegetable garden. He did not follow the advice we dispensed weekly a couple of months ago and there is a dearth of green vegetables. I have had to buy some – the first vegetables we have bought for close to a year.

Lloyd has spent much of the week weed-eating areas which we can not mow. If he times this autumn round well, grass growth slows so much that it does not need to be done again until we open the garden at magnolia time. An amazingly mild autumn may upset this routine. Grass growth continues unabated.

Our most reliable Friend of the Garden, Colin, has been up for the week. He likes to escape his retirement village (widely known in this country as a Home for the Bewildered) and spend an intensive four days in the garden at least once every six weeks. As a retired horticulturist, he is one of the few people we trust with areas full of treasures so he has done a major clean up of Mark’s cold border in the park – just in time as the trilliums are pushing through.

I am continuing my major revamp of the Avenue Gardens – this week a badly overgrown area of choking and choked perennials which has involved some pretty heavy digging. I have taken out the lot, divided them and discarded large quantities which are surplus to requirements before replanting in freshly dug ground. I have also been dividing and potting Soloman Seal (polygonatum multiflorum) to sell during our annual garden festival at the end of October and digging and dividing some large clumps of a particularly good variegated form of Crinum moorei. We know only too well that one of the drawcards here is our ability to offer plants for sale that can’t be found elsewhere.

For any local readers who noticed the article that replaced me in the Taranaki Daily News on Friday:
1) The unnamed vireya photographed was Golden Charm (one of ours, bred by Felix Jury).
2) The advice given to cut your luculia back to half a metre high after flowering only applies to Luculia gratissima (Early Dawn is the common sugar pink one in flower now). If you do that to Luculia pinceana types (Fragrant Cloud is the spectacular, heavily scented almond pink one most commonly available), you will kill them. We prefer to let Early Dawn grow. It forms a graceful under-storey large shrub.

In the Garden this Week: May 20, 2011

Arguably the most critical copper spray of the year on citrus now

Arguably the most critical copper spray of the year on citrus now

• Get a copper spray on to citrus trees as soon as dry weather returns. This is a particularly important spray to stop fruit rotting on the trees before it even ripens and to stop leaf drop. Mandarins are particularly susceptible.

• Sow broad beans and you can continue planting the reliable brassicas (except Brussels sprouts – it is far too late for them. Your Brussels should already be half a metre high by now if you are to get a crop in late winter).

• We are dubious of the practice of fertilising and routinely spraying your lawns because it is just all round bad environmental practice but if you insist on continuing to use hormone sprays, getting them on now rather than waiting for spring may contain some of the damage to neighbouring plants. Plants coming into fresh leaf in spring are extremely susceptible to the faintest hint of spray drift. Hormone sprays are used to take out undesirable lawn weeds. Hand weeding is kinder to the environment if you don’t want a bio-diverse lawn.

• Get the last of your autumn harvest in before you lose the lot. Any potatoes still in the ground will be getting eaten. We have finished the tomatoes here but the capsicums and peppers will hold longer in the shed whereas they rot in the garden. Gather nuts and dry them rather than leaving them to feed the local rodents.

• Polyanthus can be lifted and thinned. Replant the strong crowns to get a better display shortly.

• Keep an eye on leaf litter landing in fish ponds and water features. If you let it rot down in the water, it increases the nutrient levels leading to later problems with algae growth and it can even kill the fish by reducing oxygen levels. A kitchen sieve or butterfly net is a useful scoop for this task.

• Lily bulbs are now in stock at garden centres. These are best bought fresh so if you want to grow these wonderful summer bulbs, get in early. Pot them if you are not ready to put them straight into the garden because they don’t store well.

Tikorangi Notes: Sunday 15 May, 2011

LATEST POSTS: Friday 13 May, 2011

1) As autumn closes in, the rewarding sasanqua camellias come into their own and none I know are lovelier than Early Pearly.

2) Battening down the hatches in preparation for winter which will arrive soon – tasks for the garden this week including a message from the Chief Weed Controller here. In the garden this week.

3) Outdoor Classroom this week is in a new format on our website (which is just as well given the hash made of the photographs in the newspaper on Friday where readers would not, alas, have been able to see what to do) – looking at rejuvenating tired perennial patches. Outdoor Classroom.

If only they were coffee beans - excessive seed set on Michelia maudiae hybrids in particular
If only they were coffee beans – excessive seed set on Michelia maudiae hybrids in particular

TIKORANGI NOTES: Sunday 15 May, 2011

We have an extensive breeding programme running here on michelias (now reclassified as magnolias but most people still know them by their former name). The first of Mark’s cultivars is already on the market under the name of Fairy Magnolia Blush and attracting a gratifying amount of positive attention in Australia. The next two selections are being built up for release and subsequent ones are still at the trialling stage. This whole process requires the growing on of pretty large numbers of different crosses and Mark is frankly alarmed at the seed set on some plants – particularly those with M. maudiae in their parentage. If only they were coffee plants, we could be self sufficient in beans but alas the tendency to set prolific bunches of seed is not a desirable feature at all in michelias. The weed potential of some of these crosses is huge. Added to that, too much seed set means the plant is not putting its energies into producing further flowers and foliage. It is not enough to select a plant on a pretty flower alone – michelia selections need to be sterile or close to it to make them worthwhile taking to the next stage of trialling. These seed setters are destined for firewood here.