Tag Archives: Tikorangi: The Jury garden

Ninfa-ish or Ninfa-esque. Sort of.

One of the iconic vistas at Ninfa

I don’t think I have ever felt so flattered in my life as when Australian garden expert, Michael McCoy came here two weeks ago saying that a Wellington landscaper friend told him he must come, that our garden is ‘like Ninfa but without the ruins’. Well, I was even more flattered when he endorsed that observation after we walked around for 2 ½ hours in rain. It took that long to get around because we found so many shared gardening values and, indeed, experiences.

Not exactly Ninfa, our Wild North Garden, but I guess it has a similar ambience but without the ruins

Upon reflection, it isn’t so much that we are like Ninfa (and we certainly lack ruins), but that these two younger professionals in the garden design scene saw the romanticism that we have embraced in our garden. We have reached it in a different way to Ninfa but soft-edged romanticism was the goal and this was an endorsement that we are reaching that goal.

Ninfa with lush growth that is not commonly seen in the hot, dry climate of southern Italy

For those of you who don’t know Ninfa, it is a garden in southern Italy that is often hailed as ‘the world’s most romantic garden’ and it is built around the remains of an entire town that was occupied from Roman times through until it was sacked in 1370. So 750 year old ruins. Our only ruin is a collapsed low brick wall which fell back around 1960s or 70s. I don’t think that counts. Ninfa is renowned for its roses and we don’t have a mass of climbing roses. Neither Mark nor I could recall long grass at Ninfa; I went through my photos from our visit and they don’t have long grass and meadows as we do. So how are we like Ninfa without the ruins?

The Court Garden last week here at Tikorangi

Soft-edged gardening is what it is all about. I see I wrote a piece about romantic gardens for Woman magazine at the beginning of last year and I must be getting old because until I reread it, I had no memory of writing it at all. ‘I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled’, to quote T.S. Eliot in his Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. At least I still dare to eat a peach.

Higo iris now in bloom in our park

Before I found those earlier thoughts, I had been musing all week about what makes a romantic garden. In no particular order, I would list the following:

Water is an integral part of the garden at Ninfa
Same principle Mark arrived at long before we even heard of Ninfa – creating small drops to enable the flowing water to be heard as well as seen. We have so little fall from where water enters our property on one side to where it exits on the opposite boundary that this tooks some thought and effort to achieve.
  • Water – a reasonably large body of water that is moving so it brings the element of sound. Ninfa was exceptional in that it was in a dry, arid part of Italy but it had its own river which gave the feeling of an oasis in a barren landscape beyond. Years ago, when Mark was playing with our onsite water, he worked on ponds and rapids to achieve small drops in level to get the sound of flowing water.
  • Lush growth – onsite water plays a large part in being able to manage a lush garden. I don’t think I have seen a dry garden that could be described as romantic. Water and lush growth also encourage birds, flowers bring bees and other insects and these natural creatures bring more life to a garden. We do lush growth very easily in our little corner of the world where three weeks without rain has us muttering darkly about drought.
  • No straight lines, right angles or hard edges. Formal gardens may be many things, but romantic they are not. And no wretched edging plants defining the line between garden and path. To our mutual amusement, Michael McCoy and I share an intense dislike for suburban edging plants.
  • Avoid evidence of maintaining the garden with glyphosate, too. There is not much that is less romantic than edges that have clearly been sprayed, or indeed expanses of liverwort which are too often a sign of long-term maintenance with glyphosate (Round Up).
Dappled light and glimpses beyond in our Wild North Garden
  • Light and shade and dappled light which usually means some taller trees. Too often, the delight in variations of light and shade are not factored into planning gardens but they add another dimension beyond flowers, foliage and form. With light and shade come views through. Designs with tightly enclosed garden rooms may be cosy and contained, but they are not often romantic. Glimpses beyond hint at further areas to be experienced.
Romanticism at Gresgarth, Arabella Lennox-Boyd’s lovely garden in the north west of England.
  • An absence of dominating man-made features or much that is modern. As soon as you add man-made features into a garden, be it a gazebo (oft referred to as ‘gazzybows’ here), a Japanese-style bridge painted red or any other piece of brightly painted garden structure, a modern sculpture or a stark white statue, the eye is always drawn to that piece rather than to the wider environment. Old ruins or suitably aged and mellow pieces can be added but in great moderation and with care. Less is more in a romantic garden and any additions should blend and meld, not shout out to be noticed. Forget focal points which are to direct the eye – they belong in more structured garden styles. The romantic garden is more of an absorbing experience than a directed one.
Ixias used as meadow flowers
  • Flowers are generally in simpler, looser forms. Not necessarily small but if large, they look better if they are on the blousy side. Flowers with the tight form of, say, auriculas or formal camellias are more at home in more controlled situations. The same rule of thumb applies to plants with rigid, stiff forms. Looser forms also give more sense of movement – they will sway and respond to the slightest breeze.
Mown paths give definition – in the area we refer to as the park here at Tikorangi
We have a few roses but not a lot. Because we don’t spray them, they are integrated into plantings that will hide their poor foliage and generally disappointing form when they are not blooming in profusion. The dog, as you may gather, is my constant companion.

Without ruins and rambling roses, we have basically done it with long grass and meandering mown paths following the natural contours of the land (no straight lines!). The paths are what give definition and stop the long grass from looking like the area has just been shut up and left. In our climate, the grass growth is so strong all year round that we have to mow everything down twice a year – in midsummer and midwinter so the end of January and the end of June. But long grass, flowers growing semi-wild and meadows are not a defining characteristic of a romantic garden. They are just one style that sits within the romantic genre.

It is not all about long grass here at Tikorangi; sometimes it is about views through, gently leading from one area to another rather than straitjacketing areas into tightly defined garden rooms.

Romantic gardens come back to being in the garden, not looking at the garden, gardening with Nature more than by controlling Nature and creating gardens that sit within the landscape rather than on the land.

It is not everybody’s cup of tea.  It is bringing different eyes to a garden situation and with that, different expectations. It makes us happy,  brings us delight and, mostly, that is all that matters. But I am still honoured and flattered  that others have referenced Ninfa as a comparator.

Ninfa with its moat and decorative white swans (and a distinctly vulgar orange hybrid tea rose on the right that disturbed me)
Lacking both moat and white swans, we have to make do the neighbour’s white runner ducks who visit the Wild North Garden from time to time.
Finally, just as a point of comparison – NOT romantic in our Wave Garden and lily border – too sharp-edged, too pristine, too tightly managed to be considered romantic. I like it, I like the contrast and it may be described in various ways, but romantic is not one of them.

Needs must when drastic pruning is required

We generally prefer to lift, limb and encourage the natural form of a plant like this mature Camellia ‘Tiny Princess’ but it isn’t always possible.

We carry out a lot of pruning in our garden but not a whole lot of drastic, hard pruning to reduce a plant to juvenility. Generally, we like to celebrate maturity in plants and to shape or clip to bring out their natural form if required. But sometimes there are plants that are beyond that and drastic action is needed because they have lost what ornamental merit they had.

I was delighted to find some perfect blooms on a specimen of Camellia ‘Mimosa Jury’ on a former nursery stock plant this season but it is many years since the original plant in the garden has looked like this.

So it is with some of the original camellias bred by Felix Jury, some of which are now household names. We regard the original plants as having some intrinsic value simply because they are the very first one but there comes a time when they can lack any aesthetic merit, especially these days when camellia petal blight has robbed them even of pretty flowers. In particular, ‘Mimosa Jury’, ‘Waterlily’ and ‘Softly’ had reached for the sky and left nothing but bare legs and messy, blighted blooms and aborted buds visible at ground level.

What remains of Camellia ‘Softly’ after a brutal prune but we expect it to recover. It must have been at least six metres tall last week.
That is Zach, to the left of the blue circle, taking down ‘Mimosa Jury’ which was taller than the one still standing behind. In front is the mountain of material taken off already.

A word of warning: we have a fairly long season when we can do this sort of extreme pruning – late winter through spring is best, so August to October. We can get away with going into November this year because spring has been a little late and we get regular rain. It really is too late and risky for people in climates who are staring down the barrel of a long, dry, hot summer which may start very soon. Your plant may just sigh and die rather than springing into fresh growth.

This specimen of Camellia ‘Tiny Star’ had become leggy and way too tall to appreciate the dainty blooms. It was cut back very hard indeed two years ago so has just put on its third season of fresh growth and should be as pretty as a picture in flower next spring.

You can cut back to ground level with camellias and they will grow again but you get a thicket of young shoots and no form to the plant. We prefer to cut off to anywhere between a metre up to three metres, depending on the situation, so that the plant will look established again quickly. If we can, we will leave a few wispy branches that still have leaves on them, even if we trim them off later when the new growths have appeared. In this case, ‘Softly’ is back to bare wood while ‘Mimosa’ has a few thin branches with leaves. We shape the remaining trunks and branches, often reducing them to a strong central leader and maybe five or seven branches from that leader.

When I say reestablish ‘quickly’, I mean two years. The plants will push out new shoots this season and bush out again next growing season but they won’t flower and look lush until they have that second growing season behind them so into the third flush of new growth. Patience is a virtue in gardening.

As is our usual practice, we deal with the waste by retrieving what is suitable for firewood and putting the leafy and twiggy remains through the chipper to use as mulch.

The bare branches of an established plant of ‘Velvet and Cream’ – an extreme example of getting a decent shaped plant out of it after we failed to train it adequately from the start.

You can do this style of extreme pruning on michelias, too and we have reduced a M. laevifolia ‘Velvet and Cream’ to a leafless frame this week as well but you do need to start with a strong growing, healthy specimen. If it is not growing vigorously, it is may die. If you are wondering about hard pruning a michelia (botanically magnolias these days), there are more before and after photos over time here from an earlier effort on another specimen.

Work has stopped until the babies fledge and fly. Then, sadly, it is farewell to Picea albertiana ‘Conica’.

Some plants are beyond rescue. Work has stopped, temporarily, on the Picea albertiana ‘Conica’ in the rockery. It was once a fine specimen of admirable size and form. It was also kept in good health because Mark sprayed it for red spider once a year. As it grew larger, it became harder to spray and Mark – He Who Used To Do All The Spraying here – became increasingly reluctant to routinely spray to keep plants healthy. We decided that good environmental practice was more important than keeping inappropriate plants alive in the garden. In the years since he stopped spraying, the red spiders have pretty much taken over and the tree has gone into serious decline, as well as developing a pronounced lean. Time for it to go.

Cutting down has stopped because what remains houses a bird’s nest with babies. It may just be a common old blackbird but we are not willing to knowingly kill a family simply because we want to finish a task. Completion can wait a little longer until the branches are no longer occupied.

Talking of birds, Mama Thrush is bringing Zach and me delight although Ralph the dog is not so appreciative. She built her nest in the grapevine that grows beneath the verandah on the front of our shed which happens to be our main seating area when Lloyd and Zach are here at work. Her early anxieties appear to have faded and she has become accustomed to humans below. We can co-exist.

Mama Thrush’s nest outlined in blue – sheltered from the weather but taking a few chances on the humans nearby.

Life amongst death

Te Henui cemetery

I have been a little quiet here for the past few weeks. In part this is because life can get in the way and indeed, some fairly large chunks of my time have been consumed by matters unrelated to gardening. And sometimes I think I have nothing worth saying that I have not said before. But I am back again.

I dropped in yesterday to Te Henui cemetery yesterday, not to pay respects to the dead but to revel in the flowers. It was a while since I had last visited. On a day with bright sunlight and a strong, blustery wind, it was distinctly less than ideal conditions for photographs but the graveyard never disappoints.

The catalyst to visit came in part from being sent a newsletter written by Michael McCoy who had visited it in the pouring rain a week earlier. McCoy is not a name that is well known in this country and when he came here the following day, I wished I had googled him before he arrived because he certainly has a much higher profile elsewhere – particularly in Australia – and an impressive résumé to match. Garden designer, writer of books, TV writer and host and leader of masterclass tours, he has covered his ground internationally and in an extended conversation with him, we found so much common ground that I was both inspired and affirmed.  

Alas, his newsletter to subscribers (like my Canberra daughter who forwarded it to me) does not appear to be posted to his main website (https://thegardenist.com.au/)  and I can’t find it on line to add the link so I can not share it in full. Suffice to say, his joy in the experience of visiting the cemetery made me proud to be a local and to have a loose connection to some of the volunteers who turn this place of death and often long-forgotten memories into a place that celebrates life with colour and light. His concluding sentences are:

“But what I’m forever chasing, and experience with joyous regularity, are those magical moments when conscious enjoyment turns to inexplicable enchantment. 

I never imagined it could happen in a cemetery. In the pouring rain.”

Just those lines have started me thinking about those magical moments I have experienced in other people’s gardens in this country, in other parts of the world and, indeed, in our own garden. There is a good thought to carry me through the day. But in the meantime, I will leave you with some (mostly) joyous moments from amongst the tombstones. I still think of this graveyard as the grown-ups version of miniature gardens and sand saucers that so many of us made in our childhoods and that adds to its charm.

Alas poor Annie and Clarence

Out and about but just across the bridge in Lepperton

Rhododendron Lollipop Lace

We have had quite the week here. Although the garden is no longer open to the public, we hosted the NZ Rhododendron Association conference attendees on Friday. They were two years later than originally planned; the 2021 conference was cancelled at the last minute due to Covid dramas. I thought I would get some photos to record the event but there were so many people, so many vehicles to park – including three coaches – and so many staggered departures to catch flights and the like that we were scrambling to keep all the juggling balls in the air. Not a single photo was taken to record this event so all I can do is illustrate with  Rhododendron ‘Lollipop Lace’, a lesser-known Jury hybrid that was looking very pretty on the day. And say that it was a highly successful visit and it is very affirming for us to have so many people really enjoy the garden.

Unexpectedly delightful in the little Lepperton church.

The annual garden festival here opened the same day and we are deeply relieved to have retired from that 10 day event. Despite being a little zombie-like yesterday, I headed over to nearby Lepperton where I found an unexpected delight. Floral art is not an area in which I have any expertise at all; I lack even a framework to understand any of the principles and skills involved. I rarely cut flowers to bring indoors because I feel that as soon as I cut blooms, they start dying and I would rather see them living longer in the garden than commit flowercide. But in Lepperton, I found a floral art display which made me stop and reach for my camera.

The little Lepperton church is, I am told, 123 years old. From the outside, it is a typical white, weatherboard church of that era, inside it is unexpectedly charming and the floral displays were simply spectacular. Immaculate blooms arranged by floral art enthusiasts make a grand display. If you are local or currently visiting the area, it is well worth a visit.

Not your usual orchids on display in the Lepperton church hall

Out the back of the church is a little church hall with an interesting display of lesser-known orchid treasures put on by the Taranaki Orchid Society, which is well worth a look as well. There are a few crafts and local honey on sale, as well as our gardener, Zach, selling plants he has potted up for the season, which was my main reason for visiting.

Out the front of the church, there is a splendid white azalea in bloom. I didn’t ferret around the base to see if there is more than one plant growing or whether this is all just from a single original plant layering along the ground, but it does show the size these plants can reach if not kept clipped to the tight, little mounds that most gardeners seem to favour.

Down the road and round a corner or two, a roadside rhododendron was showy enough to make me turn around and go back for a second look. It appears to be an old house site to me because there were other ornamentals also left edging an empty section. Offhand, I don’t know which one it is but it will be an early cultivar because it is quite old.

The Lepper Garden in Lepperton
Most of the plants I recognised in this garden were of the woody tree and shrub type but I am pretty sure Pauline bought this Farfugium tussilagineum argenteum from us and the pink petals are from Felix Jury’s Camellia Dreamboat

There is quite a cluster of gardens open this week around Lepperton for both the main garden festival and the fringe festival but I only had time to visit one. I chose Lepper’s Garden because we used to know the creator of this garden – the late Pauline Lepper. I was only halfway round the garden when I thought, ‘my goodness, Pauline must have spent a lot of money at our nursery back in the day’. There were so many plants that I recognised as coming from us that it was like meeting old friends. If Pauline is looking down from above, I am sure she will be smiling to see the next generation continuing her garden and watching the plants she chose grow to maturity.

Simple bedding plants but I like the blue haze and the repetition of blue at ground level through the garden

This is the biggest garden visiting week of the year in our area. We plan to visit a few gardens that we haven’t seen before and hopefully there will be many others out appreciating the huge amount of work garden owners put in to preparing their gardens to open for others to enjoy.

Of rhododendrons and the roof

Mark’s ‘Floral Sun’

As the deciduous magnolia season draws to a close, it is time for the rhododendrons to star. And Mark’s rhododendron hybrids ‘Floral Sun’ and ‘Floral Gift’ have indeed been starring this week. Not only are they gorgeous, they are also scented, Gift even more so than Sun.

On Friday next week, we have the New Zealand Rhododendron Association conference attendees coming here. This was originally scheduled for 2021 but cancelled at the last minute as large parts of the country went into the second Covid lockdown. We agreed to them coming this year even though we no longer open the garden.

We are not the rhododendron garden we once were. They were a key plant when Felix and Mimosa started the garden here and Mark started the nursery on rhododendrons. We produced a huge range, including many of the showy American rhododendrons that were all the rage back then. Some readers will remember the days when everybody wanted ‘Lems Cameo’, ‘Lems Monarch’, ‘Puget Sound’ and the likes.

Mark’s ‘Floral Gift’ has been a bit of a sleeper star. We worried that it was a bit sparse on foliage at the start but it has gone from strength to strength as a garden plant. This plant was moved a few months ago from an area where it had become too shaded and it has not worried at all about that relocation.

In the time since, we have lost many plants which either faded away or up and died on us, as Mark describes it. This includes a lot of the species, the dwarf varieties which are largely bred from alpine species and the showy hybrids from places with colder climates. Rhododendrons are reasonably adaptable plants as long as they get a winter chill (which they don’t here), a situation which is not hot and dry in summer or too wet at any time. I console myself with the knowledge that the British Royal Horticultural Society’s flagship garden, Wisley, has recently felt the need to relocate a lot of their rhododendron collection to more northerly RHS gardens in order to save it. Wisley has a low rainfall and the combination of increasingly dry conditions combined with milder winters meant that many varieties were endangered.

Public gardens play a major role in preserving species and collections but that is not a responsibility we take on as a private garden. We just go with the flow and adapt. One of those adaptations has been to largely eliminate the use of sprays. Some of our rhododendrons required spraying every year to keep them healthy but there is nothing sustainable in that. So it comes down to accepting that we will lose ‘Rubicon’, ‘College Pink’, the Loderi hybrids and some others.

At least the nuttalliis still thrive here

What we do know is what will thrive and look good without spraying. We have always been fond of the maddenii group and particularly the nuttalliiis. None of them have the big, round, ball trusses commonly associated with rhododendrons but most are scented, keep good foliage, do not get infested with thrips (which is what gives white leaves and weakens the plant), suffer from leaf burn on the edges of the leaves and they are far happier in our mild conditions without a winter chill. I much prefer them to the classic ball trusses now but I spent countless hours trying to persuade customers and retailers of their merits when we were producing them commercially. Too many just wanted rhododendrons with big red trusses.

One of Mark’s unnamed hybrids. Please notice the foliage.

Mark set out to see if he could breed healthy plants with ball trusses and clean foliage in order to meet the market demand. But it takes a long time to breed and assess new woody plants (except for roses which have a super-quick turnaround) and, in the meantime, rhododendrons fell from favour for all the reasons mentioned above, meaning demand dropped away and we retired from the nursery and plant production. So even though some of them are pleasing, they just sit in a long row in a paddock and we look at them from time to time.

It is more about the foliage than the flowers on these unnamed seedlings. Of course they need to put up plenty of good blooms but plants that stay looking good and lush all year round with no spraying, feeding or mollycoddling was the important factor in breeding.

I may pick blooms of those that are looking good to show the conference attendees when they visit. It is not that the flowers are exciting breakthroughs; it is that they have good foliage and a healthy habit as well as mass flowering, even when grown in full sun without ever being fed or sprayed. That is an achievement. One day, rhododendrons may come back into fashion and there is a little resource sitting here for a future generation to capitalise on.

Besides preparing the garden for the conference and an overseas tour due soon after, our roof has been dominating our lives here for the past few weeks. Like other houses from the same era of the early 1950s, we have – or had – a concrete tile roof and those tiles are now so fragile that they break if you so much as look at them. We bit the bullet and decided we could no longer delay replacing the roof. It is not an easy roof and therefore eye-wateringly expensive. The lead scaffolder commented that it is one of the most difficult scaffolding jobs on a domestic house that he has done because of the different roof levels. So we are surrounded in scaffolding, piles of tiles, bricks, new roofing and a whole lot more. And a partially reroofed house with stop-gap weather proofing in a Taranaki spring is high stress. Yesterday’s rain had Mark and me crawling around in ceiling cavities patching remaining cracked tiles from inside and strategically placing buckets. I don’t often concede to age but I came to the conclusion that we really are getting too old to be crawling around in ceiling cavities. If it is fine tomorrow, we should see the main body of the roof finished with only ridge cappings, flashings, spouting and downpipes to go. I am looking forward to the day when we no longer have to worry about leaks and occasional internal floods (two so far this year).

A work in progress

The new roof is an anachronism in materials – long run roofing iron – but not in colour. The old tiles had weathered to grey-brown but we can see that they started off in a shade that was more orange than red and I can remember those startling orange tile roofs from my childhood. The new roof is dark brick-red-brown and that will be fine, probably an improvement on the earlier orange-red. I did not want a grey roof. There is enough greyness in the world without voluntarily adding more.

The chimney was a cause of nagging anxiety

Dropping the back chimney to below roof level was a major job that took three men with a jackhammer and a sledge hammer all day on Friday. We didn’t use that fireplace – we have three others – and we have long worried that the massive brick tower was an earthquake hazard that had the potential to demolish part of the house and take lives if it ever snapped off. We have to take earthquake risks seriously in our shakey, quakey isles. Architecturally, I am sad to see it gone but it will be a relief not to worry about earthquakes or leaks.

Going, going…
… gone.

Whether all this will be completed, cleared and the outside areas reinstated before the conference people arrive at the end of next week remains to be seen but they are coming to see the garden, not the house. At least we are not open for the garden festival because that would have been a problem.