Pink Jazz, one of Mark’s hybrids that is standing the test of time here as a healthy garden plant. It was named for our elder daughter, Jasmine, who had a passion for hot pink in her teen years.
Gardening is as driven by fashion and trends as many other pursuits. It is vireya rhododendrons that brought this to mind. Back in the late 1980s and 90s, they were a seriously hot ticket item. Because they are really easy to propagate, the market was saturated with small plants surrounded by big hype and an endless stream of new varieties being unleashed on an eager buying public. The big luscious looking ones with heavy, felted foliage and big, fragrant trumpets were the most sought after. Here was tropicalia at home even though New Zealand does not have a tropical climate.
Back then, we had a commercial nursery and vireyas were one of our big lines. We produced thousands of them every year and Mark had a full scale breeding programme running on them, naming new cultivars at a cracking rate. I can tell you that they were one of the easiest lines to propagate with the highest success rate from cutting, taking half the time to get to a large grade than the hardy rhododendrons and camellias. It was all downhill from then on. They needed the most intensive spray programme of any plant we produced and even so, there was a high death rate before we ever got them to the market. They are vulnerable to almost every disease that is going, they have pathetically small root systems to support quite abundant top growth, they are frost tender and needed full-scale frost protection in commercial production – even under shade cloth – and they can die almost overnight.
I recall the odd visitor asking the names of certain plants and Mark would toss off that it was a Vireya wiltanddieonyou. Because so many did just that – wilt and die. The species were particularly touchy along the big luscious ones that everybody wanted.
R. konorii is a species with the desirable traits of large flowers, strong fragrance and heavy foliage but the resulting hybrids are not always easy to keep growing well. This is an unnamed one of Mark’s that is still doing well in our garden.
But we would not be without them in the garden. If you have enough of them, you can guarantee that there will be vireya rhododendrons in flower all year round. They don’t get large. They fit in well to subtropical woodland conditions and they don’t need a whole lot of attention. We accept that some will suddenly die, even after many years and we don’t expect every plant to thrive. Those that do, make a worthwhile contribution.
The late Os Blumhardt had a major breeding programme on vireyas and gave us a number of his seedlings, including this good performing one in our swimming pool garden. It is reliable and healthy rather than outstandingly showy
Because vireyas originate from near the equator where day and night length remains pretty even all year round, their flowering is not triggered by changes in day length. This is why they tend to flower randomly and for extended periods, at times many months although we get the best blooming in autumn and spring and that will show up from this month on. With our free draining volcanic soils, we just grow them in the ground.
Common wisdom, particularly in Auckland, was that vireyas are epiphytic so best grown either as an epiphyte on established trees or in containers with their roots tightly confined. Ponga pots used to be rage, maybe still are in some circles. While it is true that in the wild, many species are ephiphytic, the vast majority that are sold are modern hybrids with a distant connection at best. What they want is excellent drainage without getting too dry. Only hard frost will kill a vireya faster than wet roots in a heavy, clay soil. But if you have the roots heavily confined, they can dry out too much and start to look hard done by and scruffy.
Jiminy Cricket is another of Os Blumhardt’s hybrids and is a sister plant to Saxon Glow and Saxon Blush which are widely available
These days, we rank ongoing survival, good bushy growth and an abundance of bloom above other characteristics – often features of the smaller flowered, less extravagant looking cultivars. These are the ones that are standing the test of time as garden plants. The oldest vireya in our garden is the plant of R. macgregoriae that Mark’s father, Felix Jury, brought back from New Guinea in 1957, kickstarting the breeding programme. Astonishingly, it is still alive and healthy when many others have fallen by the wayside.
If you want to try growing plants from cuttings, vireyas can root without special facilities and equipment. You need to use green stems which are firm, not floppy. Cut off a sliver (called “wounding”) on two sides of the stem of the cutting, extending for 2 – 3 cm. Unlike most plants, the roots will form from the wound or callous, which is why you want two to get a balanced root system. Cut the leaves in half to reduce water loss and stick in potting mix. Keep the pot in shaded conditions until roots start to form – usually within about six weeks.
First published in the April issue of NZ Gardener and reprinted here with their permission.
R. macgregoriae is still going strong in our garden after 60 years
After picking flowers, I couldn’t resist laying out some samples of the autumn harvest. I didn’t get too obsessive. There is much that I forgot to include – a good potato crop, sweet corn, another year’s supply of dried beans (not sure we have finished the 2013 bean harvest yet) and I forgot entirely about the show-off avocados which we have in such abundance that we are giving them away by the supermarket bag full. 
It is indubitably autumnal, but no sign of the leaves colouring or dropping yet as we gently drift into the cooler seasons. I shall do a survey of the plants that take us through autumn, I thought, and headed out to the garden with snips and a basket. 
Despite that slight sense of mournful decay that can characterise the autumnal garden, there was so much flying the flag for flowers that I had to group them. It is still early for the autumn bulbs. There is a whole lot more to come but the nine in bloom at least indicate that not all bulbs belong to spring. Starting with the white flower at the top of the photo, going clockwise, these are: Crinum moorei, belladonna, Colchicum autumnale, one of the autumn crocus (could be C. serotinus), Moraea polystachya which is an unsung star amongst the autumn bulbs, Cyclamen hederafolium both pink and white, the dainty little Leucojum autumnale, the earliest of the oxalis (hirta, luteola, massoniana and lobata) and the first of the nerines that will become the rockery stars over the next few weeks.
Climbers can be a little bothersome to place. Too many are strangling, invasive things, smothering their host as they scramble to the top, or, like the Rhodochiton atrosanguineus, seeding down in perpetuity. Others are such retiring little dainties that they can be difficult to keep going. Flowering for us at the moment are the bougainvillea (very much in the rampant camp) and one of the more garden-friendly jasmines at the top but we have lost track of which one it is. It has good fragrance, flowers pretty much all the time and is strong growing – bordering on rampant – but not as aggressive as the weedy jasmines. It is planted on the corner of the bedroom once inhabited by our daughter of the same name. Immediately below, the purple flower like a mini streptocarpus is on a soft vine, but its name escapes us at the moment. Well, I have never known it and Mark thinks he raised it from commercial seed but has yet to recall what it is. To the right are the lapagerias – Chilean bell flowers – with their wonderfully long blooming season and obliging habits. Sure it can take several – many, even – years to get a vine established but once there, these are rewarding plants for the shaded side of the house.
The flowering shrubs and trees are not so numerous at this time of the year. Top row left, we have Radermachera sinica (more on this below), Hydrangea Immaculata which is still at peak rather than that fading over to dusky spent flowerheads, next row down is the fragrant osmanthus (though not sure which one) and the so-called African butter knife plant or Cunonia capensis. Then comes the white flowered tibouchina which seeds down far too freely here but does compensate by flowering pretty much all the time in semi woodland conditions. Fuchsias are not a strong point for us, but the one on the left has been here forever it seems, surviving even falling over, splitting apart and drought. The one on the right is the attractive but dangerously weedy Fuchsia boliviana. Second row from the bottom is a sampling of vireya rhododendrons – have enough of these around the place and there are always some in flower, 52 weeks of the year. In the bottom row are the first of the evergreen azaleas embarking on their marathon blooming from early autumn right through to mid spring and the first camellia.
Camellia sinensis will no doubt be of interest to some. It is always the first to flower though with such insignificant blooms that they are easy to miss. This is the tea camellia, and yes, sometimes we do harvest the young leaves to make green tea. White flowered tea camellias are more common and we have a plant somewhere – in the “plant out” area, I think, waiting to get out of its pot.
I was pretty thrilled by the Radermachera sinica when Mark alerted me to it in bloom. It has a divine and heady fragrance. The trouble is that it is sub tropical to tropical so treated as a house plant in the temperate world. But it is a tree and ours is shooting skywards. Besides, we don’t do houseplants so we are yet to decide what to do with this plant besides enjoying its current flowering.
Finally there are the perennials and annuals still in full bloom. In brief in the yellow tones, we start with a damn big yellow salvia at the base and head around clockwise: kniphofia species, one of the gesneriad family whose name we have currently forgotten but which makes an excellent woodland plant, datura, dahlias, simple little autumn zinnias (none of the over-bred, bushy, compact, modern hybrid bedding plants), a handy yellow ground cover which flowers for a very long time and whose name will come back to us at some point, Hibiscus trionum and the common wildflower oenothera which is remarkably rewarding when it comes to blooming on and on.
In the pinks and whites, we start at the top with the under-sung white plumes of Actaea racemosa (syn Cimcifuga racemosa) whose fairy candles light up a woodland area, a simple dahlia seedling, the annual Amaranthus caudatus which is self sown, the lovely wind anemones, assorted daisies, streptocarpus (bit of one-upmanship here – we use these as permanent bedding plants in frost-free locations), one of the saponarias, a really old, self-maintaining strain of impatiens that has naturalised in our woodland, a self-seeded abutilon which should have been amongst the shrubs and some rather large and resilient begonias. 
The whites I wanted for my rose and perennial garden. After a few years, I am now moving them. They are too big and choke and swamp the smaller perennials I have in that area. I have found a couple of spots which they can have all to themselves. I was amused to see English gardener, Keith Wiley – for whom we have huge respect – on TV talking about growing plants in colonies but noting that some plants are so dominant that they do not want to grow in colonies. He cited foxgloves as an example. They are way too thuggish to co-exist happily with many other plants.
Carol Klein on BBC’s Gardeners’ World, once said that she sorted her foxgloves as juvenile plants – the pink ones had pink veining in the leaves and the crown whereas the white ones were all green. I am not convinced she is right though I went through a stage of culling all pink-veined seedlings. I am happy to stand corrected if somebody has been more systematic in assessing this, but I am pretty sure that I have pink-veined ones flowering white and vice versa.
