Tag Archives: Tikorangi: The Jury garden

Good things take time *

Pleached Fairy Magnolia Whites in a row shaped to a flat plane. We have two such rows.

Behold our pleached rows of Fairy Magnolia White! I am delighted. A goal has been achieved. It has taken 10 years and that was starting with big plants. In retrospect,  I admit that it seems quite a long time but such is the way of gardening. It has looked fine and established for maybe 6 or 7 of those intervening years but finally, we have it how it was envisaged.

Pleached street trees in Vernon

Pleaching is creating a hedge on stilts where the foliage is knitted together to form a length that is more or less flat on two sides but uninterrupted in its length. I photographed pleached street trees in Vernon, the small French town closest to Giverny back in 2014 but I think it was Mark who drew my attention to them because he already had the plan of pleached rows defining our summer gardens, on which we had started the groundworks back at home.

Lloyd on our baby tractor, moving in trees one at a time back in 2014
The start of the summer gardens, when we were all a decade younger. You can see the peg in the ground – they were working to string lines to get the spacings even and straight.

So it was Mark’s vision and his and Lloyd’s hard work that saw large plants going into the new ground in the spring of 2014 and autumn of 2015. We already had the plants growing in a field on our property across the road. They were our original stock plants from when we first released Fairy Magnolia White and they were trained to a strong central leader or trunk. It was no mean feat digging them and getting them across the road and planted but Mark and Lloyd were 10 years younger then. As an aside of useful advice, as soon as they were planted, Mark removed about a third of the foliage, which seemed brutal at the time but was all about reducing the stress on the plants after transplanting.

This is what it looked like a month ago when Fairy Magnolia White was in bloom

In the years since, they have been trimmed once a year – as flowering finishes – to get them to the form we want but it was when our gardener, Zach, joined us that it all started to come together. This must be the third or maybe fourth year that Zach has trimmed them and he has it just right now. As garden tasks go, it is not a massive job – I think it only took him just over two days – and the heaviest part is managing the ladders, which are large. But it is a skilled, precise job. It is all secateur and handsaw work – not hedge clippers.

Squared off to be narrow in width, as viewed from one end of a row

It will look sharper when the hedge of Camellia Fairy Blush beneath also gets its big trim this week and the gap between that hedge and the pleached michelias above is fully defined. I was impatient to record my delight with the clearly defined, more-or-less two dimensional appearance (height and length but little width).  

We have three archways of Podocarpus parlatorei. This front one still needs to thicken in the middle but it is getting there.

Credit to Zach, too, for creating the archways of Podocarpus parlatorei in the same garden. Mark had always planned either arches or gables – to echo the gables on the house. Realistically, had it been left to us, I am guessing we would probably have taken the easier route and just trimmed to tight columns but Zach has trained them over to be arches and they have almost filled out to final thickness. They are tied in, in case you are wondering how he did it. The key is getting it tied in when the new growth is soft enough to bend. When it has hardened, it will break. The podocarps are trimmed annually but he has kept the arch tied and trimmed every few months. Again, getting the ladder into place is the most onerous part of this task. Mark, Lloyd and I are all getting a bit old to be carting the largest ladders and working at height. This is just yet another reason why I appreciate younger generations.

Time, too, has seen our clivia plantings go from strength to strength and they are certainly starring this spring. You can have too many clivias in a garden; the orange and red ones are very strident. I am not a fan of mass plantings of clivia but we have integrated them amongst other plants in shady areas and they glow. Ours are almost all seedlings raised here from controlled crosses. This means that Mark has taken the pollen from ones he thinks are good and used the pollen on other selected specimens, marked the pollinated flowers and gathered the ripened seed to sow in nursery conditions. It is quite a bit of faffing about but increases the likelihood of getting superior seedlings rather than leaving it all to Nature. We now have so many that we just weed out seedlings and thinnings.

Mixed colours and mixed plantings are our style, not blocks of single coloured clivias

The reason why clivias are usually expensive to buy is that they are slow growing. It takes much longer than most common perennials to get them large enough to set flowers and sell in garden centres – years more, in fact.

Gardening really is about the longer game but it is particularly rewarding when you see visions realised and areas that get better as plants mature.  

* The heading is a reference that it is likely only New Zealanders will understand. Cheese. Yes cheese. A reference to a long running advertisment for a brand of tasty cheese.

Too many bluebells!

So pretty beneath the trees in an area that is not cultivated garden

The romantic haze of blue of a drift of bluebells – how delightful. And yes, it is but only in the right place. I have written about bluebells down the years and we went to some trouble to establish drifts here. Ironically, back in 2007, I wrote: “The bluebell planting was a bit of triumph for Mark. He had been gently nurturing a patch in the vegetable garden to build numbers and came up with about 2000 this year. Now 2000 bluebells may sound a large amount to most people but his mission, he explained, was to try and get that 2000 to look more like 20 000. It takes a huge number to have much impact in a large area.”

I was first inspired by a natural bluebell wood in Scotland back in the early 1990s and I loved bluebell season when our friends, Bruce and Lorri Ellis, had Te Popo Garden. I have a childhood memory of my mother’s treasured bluebells. She was a good English gardener, my mother, and she encouraged us to pick flowers as long as we picked them with long enough stems to be put in vases. But the bluebells were prohibited; we were allowed to pick the common, blue grape hyacinths (muscari) but not the bluebells.

We also enjoy the bluebells in wilder areas, These all grew from seed Mark scattered. The presence of pink and white ones tell you that they are Spanish bluebells.

I once spent some time unravelling the differences between Spanish and English bluebells  and came to the conclusion that what we have here are all Spanish bluebells, or maybe Spanglish hybrids, but not the more desirable English species.

Our mistake here has been to allow some into cultivated areas of the garden. Bluebells are best kept to wilder situations. I speak from experience. Bluebells are thugs; in well cultivated garden conditions, they are more than thuggish and can spread at a frankly alarming rate. Not only do the bulbs multiply over-enthusiastically , but the seed disperses freely and germinates happily where it lands. We started trying to deadhead our garden bluebells some years ago. Now we – as in Zach and I, but mostly Zach – are trying to eradicate them from some areas and to drastically thin them where eradication is not possible. Bluebells may be pretty but we don’t want them everywhere.

Bluebells are fine in this situation, around a tree trunk where they are contained by mowing. The narcissi are bulbocodiums and you can tell the tree is a eucalyptus by that interesting twirl on the trunk.

I am sure we could hit them with spray but that is a last resort here and we haven’t quite reached that stage of desperation.

What to do with all the bulbs that have been dug is the question that is now troubling us. I don’t want to give them away seeing we have decided they are weedy. They can’t go into the compost because they won’t die in there. Some of the early ones went into buckets of water to see if they will rot down but that is taking a long time and we don’t need buckets of water so much as tanks or drums. Also, we won’t appreciate stagnant water as temperatures rise and mosquitoes become active.  

I don’t think they are going to die here, even sitting on weedmat

Some have been spread on a stand-out area covered in weedmat in the hope that they will dry out and dessicate. But they are actually growing and flowering there. Maybe when the heat of summer comes, we can keep turning the heap and drying them out but I reckon they are tough enough to survive.

We have resorted to removing the foliage and putting them into plastic sacks. The theory is that black sacks will heat enough over summer to cook the plants inside them and it mostly worked on wandering willie (wandering jew or tradescantia) in the past but the volume was considerably less.

Our landfill wheelie bin is not to be used for green waste unless it is noxious weeds. I may make a professional decision that bluebell bulbs are indeed noxious weeds and start putting a bag a fortnight into the landfill bin but it will take months to clear them.

Any helpful ideas?

Ajuga – a better behaved blue drift in a garden situation

The moral of this story is not to repeat our mistake and allow any bluebells at all into garden beds. Ajuga is a much more garden friendly option to create a blue haze.

The meadow we are developing in the Wild North Garden with a scatttering of bluebells, but mostly pinkbells, at the top of the photo

It has taken us years to learn how to create a sustainable flowery meadow in our conditions of high rainfall and high fertility but I feel we are succeeding in the Wild North Garden. Looking at it this week, I thought that a flowery meadow that goes from spring to autumn is more rewarding than a bluebell drift that looks lovely for three weeks of the year.

Ralph, back to sniffing out rabbits or maybe rats down in the bamboo grove

For those of you who expressed concern about our dog, Ralph, after last week’s post, I am pleased to report he is not far off being back to his normal self. He appears to have some damage to his lungs with a persistent cough. We have our fingers crossed that this may heal over time. Organ damage is a known side effect of the poisons he ingested but whether it will be permanent remains to be seen. Otherwise, he is back to his usual exuberance and if he were human, he would thank you for your concern. We are deeply relieved.

Spring in the woodland gardens

Red Hippeastrum aulicum, pale yellow calanthe orchids and Crinum moorei varegata are all mainstays of our woodland plantings

It has been a difficult week, so all I have to entertain readers with this week is scenes from the spring woodland. We like highly detailed woodland.

High shade is the key – here in the Avenue Garden

The key to woodland gardening here is to manage light levels. The charming scenes we see of European and British woodlands – the expanse of white birches underplanted with snowdrops and crocuses and that sort of thing – are beneath deciduous trees which let light in during winter and shoulder seasons.

Trilliums are a bit marginal in our climate so it is always a thrill to see their understated charm
Scadoxus, however, are so happy here that they have pretty much naturalised themselves. This is S. puniceus which flowers in spring. S. katherinae will feature in summer.

In Aotearoa, somewhere over 99% of our native flora is evergreen and most people tend to garden with exotic evergreens as a preference. In our years of retail, I encountered many gardeners who would reject anything deciduous. As a result, we don’t get the seasonal light coming into shaded areas. Also, with our rapid growth rates, trees tend to grow much larger. As UK author and horticulturist, John Hillier inscribed in our copy of Hiller Manual of Trees and Shrubs, ‘double heights and halve the time for New Zealand’. Dare I say it, UK woodlands often look quite spindly to my eyes.

Orchids, we have a few. These are pleiones. We lost all the yellow ones that need more of a winter chill but the purple, lilac and white varieties thrive under laissez faire management in the woodland garden.
More orchids – dendrobium to the left and cymbidium to the right

Woodland gardening means dappled light and some shade, but not deep shade. There aren’t many flowering plants that will perform in deep shade. Lifting, limbing and thinning are needed to create high shade and to allow reasonable light levels below.

The Rimu Avenue has such a dense network of roots from trees that are now over 150 years old that we have had to rebuild soil below to allow underplanting

There are also times when the soils below will need some extra texture, volume and replenishment in order to get small plants established. Small plants at ground level won’t thrive if they are bedded in amongst dense tree roots which have dried out the surface.

It is not all bulbs in our woodlands. Azaleas, vireya rhododendrons, camellias, hydrangeas and other shrubs add mid-level detail and height.

On the upside, even high shade and dappled light is enough to hugely reduce weed growth and the visual delight lies both in the detail below and the play of light. It is much lower maintenance than gardening in full sun.

Why a difficult week, you may wonder. We nearly lost our beloved dog Ralph to poison – not our poison and not deliberate but traumatic, nonetheless. We thought he was going to die on Tuesday night. He is still recovering and we are now confident he will survive, although there is a possibility of long-term organ damage.

Ralph in happier times

It is perhaps little understood in this country that our predator-free goals are only achievable with the extremely widespread use of slow-acting poisons, one of which has no antidote. There is a pretty gung-ho attitude and light regulation when it comes to the use of poison. We choose not to use it and will trap and shoot instead. Ralph’s ordeal this week is a reminder to us of why we made that decision. Our lives would have been so much poorer had he died so needlessly and in distress.

Charming erythroniums or dogs tooth violets – best left undisturbed as much as possible because their long, thin bulbs sit vertically in the soil and are fearfully easy to snap when digging.
Lachenalia aloides tricolor on the margins of woodland where light levels are higher. With a white trillium popping up through them and snowdrop foliage to the right.

Magnolia delight

The roadside. On the far left is Honey Tulip and there is a Black Tulip also there that is not visible. Fairy Magnolia Cream, Serene, Iolanthe, Felix Jury, Athene and Fairy Magnolia Blush.

I see it was twelve years ago that I wrote about generous gardeners. Not those who readily share plants but those who plant up areas for other’s enjoyment. I remembered that article this week because of a beautiful stretch of roadside on the outskirts of our small town that I drive by almost every time I leave our property. It is a spectacular row of magnolias that goes from strength to strength every year. It edges grass paddocks where the owners graze a few stock.

Looking back from halfway along the row

The thing about this row of magnolias is that its purpose is to delight passers-by. The owners, Pat and Brian, can’t see it from their house which is on the adjacent section. Pat, in particular, is a keen gardener and they keep a detailed and heavily ornamented garden around the house but the row of magnolias is for the benefit of passing traffic, be it in vehicles or on foot.

Magnolia Athene
Fairy Magnolia Cream

I called in yesterday to ask their permission to share the photos and, with their usual generous spirit, they said ‘any time. Our garden is your garden’. I had thought I might ask Pat if I could photograph her but it was a rushed visit and I didn’t want to embarrass her. She commented that she thought the magnolias were better this year than ever before and many people are admiring them. “I tell everybody they are Abbie’s magnolias.”

Magnolia Felix Jury just finishing flowering in Pat and Brian’s roadside row

We have had this conversation before. What you have to understand is that this row of magnolias is not far off being a complete collection of Jury magnolias. In vain, do I tell her that they are Felix and Mark’s plants. In Pat’s mind, they are mine.

I do remember giving Pat this plant of Honey Tulip
Honey Tulip – Mark’s only yellow on the market. So far.

She remembers me giving her most of the plants. I remember giving her one and may have given her a few more but she was a very good customer of ours in the days when we used to retail plants. I have always admired Pat’s eye for a good plant. She lacks any curiosity about plants, rarely remembers names, won’t grow bulbs because they are untidy when they finish flowering but she has a good eye and picks out plants she likes solely on their appearance. She has a garden with plants like Camellia yuhsienensis, Rhododendron veitchianum and other choice varieties tucked in with garden centre utility options and plants she has picked up on special. I find her approach to gardening refreshingly honest and unpretentious while also being very capable.

Pat’s plant of Rhododendron veitchianum. It wasn’t until I got up close to it that I realised the striking colour contrast was cineraria.

What makes these magnolias interesting to us is that Pat and Brian garden very differently to how we do. The magnolias are planted in the open, exposed to pretty much every wind that blows. They are not mulched and the ground around them is kept bare. They are not trimmed or clipped. I would guess that they were well fertilised when getting established but are now left to their own devices. In those exposed, open conditions,  they are performing better than many of the ones we have here in our own garden which is sheltered from most winds.

Serene is one of Felix Jury’s lesser known hybrids but worthy of more attention. A later season magnolia, it is very lovely.

Wind is a big issue in this country of long thin islands set amidst vast oceans. Wind hardiness is a big factor in the selection of magnolias in our breeding programme. Petals that are of a softer, thinner texture and flower forms that are looser in structure fall apart when it blows hard. We see it every year on some of the magnolias here – particularly M. sprengeri ‘Diva’, M. sargentiana var. robusta and even the stellatas (star magnolias) and their hybrids. We have seen spectacular displays on some of these and similar magnolias in less windy countries – memorably in the Dandenongs in Australia and in the north of Italy. We don’t have that leeway here. So, it is interesting to see the Jury magnolias in very open conditions, still putting up mass displays of blooms that are largely untroubled by the many storm fronts that pass over in our early spring time.

A small plant of Magnolia Iolanthe with many OTT blooms

A few doors down from Pat and Brian’s home is a house with this little Magnolia ‘Iolanthe’ in bloom – showy enough for me to stop the car and photograph from the roadside. The plant can only have been in the ground two or three years and I haven’t noticed it in flower before, although there is a young plant of ‘Felix Jury’ a few metres away in the same garden that catches my eye when in flower, every time I drive past. But look at ‘Iolanthe’ strutting her stuff! I counted around 30 blooms and opening buds on this very small plant.

Magnolia Iolanthe

I am a big fan of front gardens and roadside plantings. They make the world a better place for us all, or at least for those of us who notice them.

STILL pruning…

It is an experience shared by most gardeners. I will just get this (smallish) job done and then go on to something else. And that smallish job expands from a few hours to days or even weeks. So it is with trimming camellias, about which I wrote last week. I am still doing it.

A rare sight these days – good flowers on Jury’s Pearl.

We don’t trim a lot of camellias, I thought to myself. And then I added them up. Excluding the camellia hedges – and there is a fair distance of those – I reached about 40 that get individual attention every year. That is not a lot compared to the number of camellias we have which must be several hundred, but it is still quite time consuming. Some we trim to be feature plants; some we trim to freeze them in size.

A relatively dry winter has meant we have had a better show this year. It doesn’t resemble the mass displays we used to get before the devastation wrought by camellia petal blight but there have been some pretty blooms. Most of our larger flowered camellias are retained as shelter, screening, wind breaks or their attractive form, certainly not for floral display because that is but a memory and the larger flowered types get hammered by petal blight. It means more work to ensure that in key spots in the garden, we have to make that attractive green form visually effective in order to justify keeping them. We have a strong preference for the small flowered varieties which do still put on a good show. And autumn flowering sasanquas, of course but they are long finished.

Fairy Wand has been reduced to a skeleton and we may drop it lower yet. We try and keep a good framework when we are cutting camellias very hard, not cutting off at ground level.
That is A LOT of Fairy Wand piled up to be mulched

Camellia ‘Fairy Wand’ started life as a miniature back in the days when miniature only applied to the flower size and not, as most people assumed, growth habit. Bred by Os Blumhardt in Whangarei, Mark planted it, ‘Gay Baby’ and ‘Tiny Star’, also from the same breeder, beside our driveway. After about 40 years, they were all about six metres tall and in a decidedly leggy state, with wayward branches being cut off to keep the driveway clear. We stagger our extreme pruning here. ‘Tiny Star’ was cut back two years and is now a bushy little column shape about two metres tall. This week was ‘Fairy Wand’s’ turn for drastic treatment. ‘Gay Baby’ will be done at some stage in the next two years, when ‘Fairy Wand’ has rejuvenated. We don’t want a row of three massacred plants. It took Zach all of an hour to cut back the Fairy and about the same length of time for Lloyd to mulch it up for wood chip.

Taking Fairy Wand down behind gives this tableau of clipped camellias a whole lot more impact, especially the cloud-pruned sasanqua Elfin Rose. We are now thinking of dropping Fairy Wand behind even lower so it stays below the cloud pruning.

As an aside, it is possible to rejuvenate most michelias in the same manner. You do need to start with plants that are growing strongly because if they aren’t, the shock may kill them but we have, upon occasion, cut michelias as ruthlessly to promote bushy fresh growth.

Itty Bit in the centre after being reduced in size by about 40%

While Zach may only have taken an hour on ‘Fairy Wand’, I have spent many hours on others and that is because we want the form and shape on a healthy plant. I probably removed about 40% of ‘Itty Bit’ to reach this stage.

Camellia Hakuhan-kujaku – a shadow of its former self

It took me ages to get ‘Hakuhan-kujaku’, the peacock camellia, to this state. I took out at least 60% of it and it looks a whole lot better for the time spent. Shapely, not hacked or massacred.

Camellia minutiflora front right, Itty Bit behind

Little C. minutiflora is one of my absolute favourites, though hard to get photographs that do it justice so you will just have to take my word that it is a little charmer. It is a more recent planting so I probably only took 25% off it. At least it will only be a tidy-up trim for the next few years until there is so much congested growth and crossed branches that it is time to spend hours laboriously picking over every branch again.

My secateurs and pruning saw are my best friends at the moment. If you are wondering where to start on this type of pruning, I start by looking at the plant from every angle. Because we are trying to keep the plants from getting tall and leggy, I first take out growths on top that are going straight up instead of bushing out sideways. Then I work around the perimeter, reducing the spread, always trimming growth flush to the branch or trunk. Then I get into the middle and take out crossing branches. Finally, I get underneath and trim from below, making sure there is cover across the top while taking out surplus growths and branches below. I spend a lot of time looking and tracing where main branches go. This is why it takes time.

Look! Just look at this exquisite little chaffinch nest lined in soft feathers. Must the chaffinches start all over again because we humans destroyed their nest? Disclaimer – this one was blown down in a storm.

At this time of the year, I remember the warning from friend and colleague, Glyn Church. Pruning needs to be finished very soon on taller trees and shrubs. The birds are nest building and will be laying eggs. Unless you are okay with destroying days of hard work by individual birds and killing off their young, time is of the essence.

They are just common, pesky blackbirds but it still does not feel right to kill them for human convenience or by human carelessness.
A tui nest.