Tag Archives: Tikorangi: The Jury garden

What makes a garden? The wild garden debate.

‘Wild’ gardening may be all the rage in the UK these days but it is not a discussion that we are rushing into with any enthusiasm in Aotearoa New Zealand. Maybe we are a bit sensitive in this country to the status of weeds, given that so many of our biological time bombs are garden escapes. Or maybe not. There is a possibility that the majority of homeowners in this country still prefer a neatly maintained section with tidy borders, sharp lines and an immaculate lawn.

We call this our ‘Wild North Garden’ but it would not pass the test of a wild garden in more purist circles

Whatever the case, I found this article interesting. We will gloss over the fact it is in The Telegraph, a UK publication of somewhat questionable political affiliations; it does seem to have some good gardening pieces. I will park Alan Titchmarsh to one side because I think he is a spokesperson for a past generation of gardeners. It was Monty Don’s comments that interested me because some of us are familiar with his garden through BBC’s Gardeners’ World and I would have described much of his garden as being ‘naturalistic’ in style, verging on ‘wild gardening’ at times. It seems that ‘wild gardening’ in the UK is a great deal wilder than I had thought.

“It is as though a so-called ‘wild’ garden that mimics natural conditions is somehow worthier and more moral than one in which mankind’s creative skills are more obviously played out.

“This is puritanical nonsense.  If you want a truly wild garden then simply walk away. Leave any patch of ground completely untouched by human hand and it will happily become whatever it wants to be.

“The result might be beautiful and richly satisfying as well as very good for wildlife of all kinds, but it will not be a garden.”.

Monty Don in The Telegraph
This was the first deliberately wild or naturalistic garden I had seen, in Marlborough back in 2008. While looking very natural, the whole area had been recontoured and replanted, using native plants of the area. I loved it and how it sat in its wild landscape, even though it was not pretty and contained no elements traditionally associated with gardens. At the time, I wondered if it was a garden or a landscape; now I am happy to describe it as a garden.

I think he makes a useful distinction. I see he has been on this topic for a while. The best in show title at Chelsea Flower Show last year was won by a so-called wild garden created by two people who describe themselves as “passionate ecological restorationists”, rather than gardeners. I can’t read the whole article about Monty Don questioning whether their display was actually a garden at all because I am not willing to sign up to The Telegraph, even though they offer the first month free. I have my own standards when it comes to media. Ecological restoration is a different kettle of fish, to my mind. It involves eco-sourcing plant material (limiting plants to those sourced from local plant populations), keeping to native plants only with a purist vision of returning land to how we think it may have been in earlier times, usually prior to European settlement. Aesthetics are not a factor when it comes to ecological restoration, although the end result may well be visually pleasing to some.

Yes, we do ‘garden’ this area, but differently to other areas.

Of course, many of our weeds in this country are native wildflowers in the UK so rewilding with those may have a prettier result without being tainted by the connotations of rampant, invasive pest plants. We are a bit thin on pretty- flowered, native perennials and annuals in this country, although we have a wealth of beautiful flowering trees and shrubs and some splendid grasses.

Our personal take on wild gardening here at Tikorangi would not meet the purity test. Not by a long shot. We started the Wild North Garden with a mix of both native plants and exotics and have continued with that. We still carry out weed control. We have to in our conditions or it would deteriorate into a weedy mess in a single season. But we don’t remove every weed as we attempt to in the more tightly managed areas of the garden.

Wild gardening is NOT a case of shutting up an area and letting Nature take over, as some assume. It is not an excuse for lazy gardening. It is a different way of managing an area, a lighter hand, way less emphasis on tight control and instead viewing an area through different eyes with different expectations.  

Simple solutions, not man-made focal points

We have shunned contrived ‘focal points’ and garden features that are clearly made by human hands. The simple bridges and a couple of bench seats are the only man-made structures although, in reality, the whole area has been reshaped, re-formed and planted by human hands. We do a lot of lifting and limbing to get view shafts and a sense of distance in the area. There are no defined borders or garden beds but we continue to add plants that we think can blend in, add interest, compete with competition from other plants and survive with minimal maintenance. There is no deadheading, seasonal cutting back or staking. Management of the area – which our property title tells me is close to 4 acres or a hectare – is light-handed but manage it we do.

We do a lot of lifting and limbing of trees and shrubs to create view shafts and vistas while keeping a more natural feel.

That is what we are calling wild gardening. At a personal level, when I am leading people through the garden, I always finish up in the Wild North Garden and as I walk down the hillside to enter it, I can feel myself breathing out and relaxing. I find I talk less and more quietly. It feels different to every other area of the garden and very, very different to the more tightly maintained, detailed areas. I love that different feel.

Regenerating native vegetation on a roadside bank just north of the Tongaporutu Bridge. it was beautiful enough in the morning light to make me stop the car to look but it is not a garden.

I am with Monty Don, though. I think, by definition, a garden requires a human vision, a sense of aesthetics and human hands in its creation and ongoing management. Nature can be very beautiful and natural environments can nourish the human spirit or even take one’s breath away; Nature can establish and support an extensive ecosystem if given the opportunity. But that does not make it a garden. Wild gardening or naturalistic gardening is a human attempt to find the meeting ground between a garden and the natural environment that also fulfils a purely human aesthetic.  

This is from one of our most favourite gardens ever – Wildside in North Devon. Most of Keith Wiley’s remarkable garden is anything but wild – it is highly detailed naturalistic plantings. This was a new area he was just starting to expand into and it had that loose, soft feeling that I associate with wild gardens.

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A pleasing project

Gardening here tends to come down to routine maintenance, emergency response (usually storm damage and fallen trees) and new projects. Projects are the most interesting but we have done all the large projects we planned so we are down to smaller ones now. It gives a break from routine maintenance which, by definition, is never-ending.

Opening up a new, main path to link the Avenue Gardens to the Summer Gardens

The latest project was getting the central path in to the Summer Gardens from the Avenue Gardens. It was always on the drawing board but sometimes it takes a bit longer to think through how best to achieve a good result. After three years of somewhat desultory thought, it was remarkably straightforward in the end. I was stuck on the idea that it had to be straight ahead, centred from the main Court Garden. The breakthrough came when Mark pointed out that while one end needed to be dead straight, where it came through to the avenues didn’t need to be. We could curve it so that the visual end-point was a large tree – a sterile Prunus campanulata, as it happens. That was the compromise that made sense to me.

Lloyd and Zach set about removing plants that were in the way. Digging out about five solid camellias to create an opening in the hedge was the biggest job although removing some rather large roots from another tree also took some muscle. Lloyd, being a man of precision, set about levelling the path, laying a base course for drainage and moving leftover cream-coloured limestone and shell gravel to match the path surfaces in the Summer Gardens. Where we transitioned to the woodland area, he spread coarse woodchip and we will let leaf litter build over it.

The line between the whitish gravel and the woodchip is a little stark at the moment, but otherwise, it all looks as if it has always been there and that is our goal – avoiding the look of something glaringly new in a well-established garden. The concrete post is still under debate. It is a relic from times past and Lloyd, who has already dug one out previously and therefore knows just how deeply those posts are bedded in the soil, has delegated this one to Zach, if we want it gone. I will wait and see if it annoys me over time.

A view shaft in creation was a nice surprise

I am delighted by the fact that there is now a view shaft from the Court Garden through to the Avenue Gardens – a leafy tunnel that leads to light from both directions.

Freshly replanted and in two sections now, the back border features gossamer grass and cardoons

The end border of the Summer Gardens was never a feature border, just a softening backdrop. When we prepared to reopen the garden in 2020, I wasn’t sure what to do with it so I bunged in a whole lot of yellow Wachendorfia thyrsiflora and a selected blue agapanthus. It was pretty enough for three years but never a permanent planting. They are now gone to compost. In a job that I thought would take me about a week but Zach accomplished in a day, (oh to be young and strong!) the border was stripped out and replanted so the dominant plants are now our native wind grass or gossamer grass,  Anemanthele lessoniana, and giant silver cardoons. Well, some of the cardoons are quite small because we were dividing the three I bought in last year, but they grew at an astonishing rate so I am hoping they all survive to be large this summer.

Planting in May, 2019. The white tassels are the flowers on miscanthus.

Then it was onto the Miscanthus ‘Morning Light’ in the Court Garden. When I planted this garden in 2019, I had drawn it all out on graph paper and thought I had the plant spacings right. I didn’t. We did one major thinning two years ago but still the miscanthus were getting too big and were planted without sufficient space between.

A senior staffer from one of the public gardens contacted me a few months ago to see if we had any spare miscanthus. He was struggling to find enough large plants to fill a big space. Why yes, we had plenty to share and it was a perfect solution. Because we had warning, Zach lifted and divided a few surplus plants from elsewhere, heeling them into the vegetable garden, ready for when we needed them.

Loading out the surplus miscanthus. Some of the clumps were so large, they needed at least two to lift.

This week a team of six descended upon the area and efficiently dug out all the large miscanthus and loaded them out. I think there were 33 large clumps and when I say large, I mean they could be chopped into at least four, some maybe eight to ten sizeable clumps to replant and still give instant impact this spring and summer. There should have been enough to furnish a large area.

The next day, Zach replanted the divisions he prepared earlier but at wider spacings and fewer in number. Job done for another few years and very painless it was, with many hands.

I think this was late afternoon light rather than morning light, but no less pretty for that.

What amazes me is that this plethora of Miscanthus ‘Morning Light’ all descend from just one small plant that Mark bought originally. It was still just one plant, albeit a large clump, when I first lifted it and started dividing it in 2017. We have just kept dividing since. In those six intervening years, that one original plant has now yielded several hundred sizeable clumps. Astonishing, really.

When your gardening life lacks a handy takahē or two

Time for the winter clean-up in the Court Garden

I have spent the last week on my knees. Not praying, you understand, but grooming the large grasses in the Court Garden. “What you need,” said Mark, helpfully, “is a takahē.” He had read or heard somewhere that in the wild, takahē  get right into the crown of grasses and clean the debris and dead patches out. That would be a fine thing. Besides, takahē  would look very handsome browsing amongst the chionochloa although we might have muzzle Ralph.

Takahē (photo credit: John Barkla via Wiki Commons)

The takahē is a large, flightless bird belonging in the group unromantically named swamp hens or rail. The North Island takahē  was likely extinct by the time European settlers arrived although the South Island takahē is something of a miracle story. It, too, was thought to be extinct by the end of the nineteenth century until its rediscovery in a remote Fiordland valley in 1948. Latest figures show there are 440 live takahe, every one known individually, as a result of human intervention to save this handsome bird from extinction. There are now enough for breeding pairs to be cautiously relocated to safe sanctuaries which are free from predators.  Their status has been changed from Nationally Critical to Nationally Vulnerable so they are a shining success story of saving a species in a country where we have managed to lose too many due to human settlement.

Ralph, wondering about his lack of ability to fly

I fear Ralph would deal to any that crossed his path. Given that his biggest regret in life is his failure to master the art of flying despite all his best efforts, I do not think he would be able to resist taking down a ground bird. Indeed, dogs are one of the biggest threats to takahē, along with contracted shooters who can’t tell the difference between a pukeko and a takahē.

Pukeko which we have in abundance in this country
Takahē – spot the difference? (Photo credit Judy Lapsley Miller via Wiki Commons)

In the absence of such handy helpers, it is I who is on my knees with my trusty tools. My theory is that the native grasses we have which have a reputation of not being long lived as garden plants have an issue with a build up of debris that rots down and keeps the centre of the plant so wet that it can rot out. This is of course because our native grasses are all evergreen so they don’t shed their spent foliage. The amount of debris I pulled out from the large toe toe (Austroderia fulvida) was prodigious and there was certainly evidence of growing tips rotting out beneath the debris so I am hoping that the plants will heave a sigh of relief and stay healthy.

I probably cleaned out a third the volume remaining in dead and spent foliage – our native toe toe or Austroderia fulvida

I wrote about cleaning up the grasses last year so in brief summary, it is:

  • Deciduous plants like the miscanthus get cut to the ground when the feathery plumes all start to fall over and lose their charm.
  • Semi-deciduous plants which just look scruffy and awful – particularly the calamagrostis – also get cut to the ground.
  • Evergreen grasses – which are all our natives plus the non-native Stipa gigantea – are dead-headed and individually groomed to remove spent foliage. The exception is the smaller carexes, particular C. buchananii and C. comans. These just get left alone with excess seedlings thinned out. They are such enthusiastic seeders that if any of them kark it, there are plenty there to take over and fill the space.
  • The advice to leave these plants until spring in order that birds may find winter feed belongs in the northern hemisphere where most of their birds are grain feeders and winters are so cold that birds can die of starvation. Our winters are mild enough that there is plenty of feed and almost all of our native birds are nectar or fruit feeders.
Two different named phormiums (flaxes) backed by Miscanthus ‘Morning Light’. We have just lost the names of the flaxes but they are very good.
Astelia chathamica looks a bit like a silver flax but is a different plant family. With Ralph emerging by the Elegia capensis

While I was down on my hands and knees, I also groomed the native flaxes and astelias growing in that garden, cutting off spent and damaged leaves at the base and they look a whole lot better for that. And I thinned the Elegia capensis, knocking off some of the new shoots that are appearing beyond their allotted space. No wonder it all felt quite a major clean-up this year.

Mark often refers to gardening as the act of tidying Nature. But after our discussions on the takahē, he noted that my recent efforts were ‘not so much tidying Nature in this case, as filling in an ecological gap left when humans squeezed out the birds that would have done this in the past’.

Have chionochloca. Just lack takahē.

Aspidistra! Who knew? I didn’t.

Aspidstra in a woodland planting

I was this number of years old before I learned that the large patch of healthy but utilitarian ground cover we have growing in one area of shaded woodland is in fact an aspidistra, probably Aspidistra elatior. It was our gardener Zach who told me and all I can say is that a garden apprentice who can teach you things is a treasure.

I had only ever known aspidistras from literature – characterised as a dull, often dusty plant languishing in a corner, sitting on a lace tablecloth in Victorian parlours. They are, I find, commonly referred to as the cast-iron plant because they are seemingly indestructible as a house plant. The Victorians favoured them because they tolerated gas fumes and coal smoke as well as low light levels and drought. They only required occasional dusting, really. It is just a shame they are, perhaps, a litttle… dull.

I had looked at this large clump of ours without ever really pondering what it was. I was more disappointed in the fact that I had never seen it flower. I imagined a plant with foliage like that putting up a white spadix-type of bloom, not unlike a peace lily. No, Zach, told me. The flower comes from the base and you have to ferret around the base to find it. No wonder I never saw it flower. The clump has always been one of those anonymous plants that is just there to furnish a space.

The aspidistra flowers are not what I expected

The flowers could be described as curious or, equally, underwhelming. They come up from the rhizome on stems about 1.5cm high and are a fleshy looking cup with a starry burgundy inner about 2cm across. They are very small. And shy. Interesting but never showy.

Aspidistras are a large family of forest-dwelling plants found throughout areas of Asia. In terms of woodland ground cover, they are useful, making a lush clump around knee-high to hip-high. Presumably they are not particularly tasty because the damage from slugs, snails and caterpillars is minimal. The old foliage dies off gracefully and they continue to look lush all year round with absolutely no grooming. All I have ever done is to pull out a bit debris that has fallen from above. In 40 years, we have twice taken bits off to spread a little further in that area – and once was this week. Otherwise, they have kept more or less to their original space, quietly minding their own business.

I am looking at them with more respect now that I have stopped hoping for some large white spadix-type blooms. It seems that as a woodland ground cover, they are as easy-care and accepting of benign neglect as they were in Victorian parlours.  Just keep them out of the sun, is apparently the secret.

Growing from rhizomes, aspidistra are easy to divide but also obliging about staying where they are planted and not spreading far and wide

Remedial action

We had our arborist in again this week and there is nothing like getting some tree work done to refresh an area.

The leaning tower of gum and rātā which was rather larger than it appears in this photo

The catalyst was this leaning gum tree which carried the weight of a rātā vine. The host tree was in poor condition and the lean was certainly getting more pronounced. We worried that the weight of the rātā at the top of the tree would bring it all down, potentially bringing down other trees with it and, in the worst case scenario, cutting the power lines to the house. With increasingly frequent extreme weather events these days, we err on the side of anticipating risk and trying to avoid damage.

Circled in blue is the foliage of the rātā vine weighing down the twin trunks of the old gum tree. it looked to be a case of when, not if, it would fall.
Rātā vines climbing the old gum tree trunk

I just looked up rātā, which are a native plant. The Department of Conservation site tells me we have 11 species – 3 are trees, 1 shrub and 6 climbing vines. It is probable that ours was Metrosideros fulgens. It did bloom for us but was never as showy as its cousin, the pohutukawa and the flowers were always right at the top of the canopy so only visible from a distance.

We chose to keep some of the trunk to keep the rātā. It may still fall but it won’t cause much damage if it does.

We chose not to fell the gum completely but left about 3 metres of it to keep the rātā. While here, we asked the arborist to drop the last remaining silver birch tree nearby which was not in good health. Once it was down, we could see from the stump that it was completely rotted out in the middle of the trunk with a hollow centre. Silver birches are not good in our climate and their only redeeming feature, in my eyes, is that beautiful tracery of the bare branches against the winter sky. And we dropped a third small tree that had died. It was one Felix had brought back from New Guinea in the late 1950s but it was never as interesting as the lovely Schefflera septulosa, Ficus antiarus and Rhododendron macgregoriae that we still have from that intrepid plant hunting trip.

The silver birch set against the blue winter sky, just before it was felled

Dropping trees lets light in again and opens up areas that then need a touch of renovation. In mature gardens, getting light back in to shaded areas is a constant issue and often requires some quite major work on large trees. Not many plants are happy to grow in deep shade, and few of those are desirable ornamentals.

A mix of birch and gum for firewood and waste wood from the unnamed New Guinea tree

Our arborist is very good at cleaning up after himself so he left that day leaving clear space. Empty, but clear. Lloyd, bless him, removed the lengths of firewood to our enormous woodshed the next day and Zach moved in to replant. It was all done and dusted in a couple of days but, with more light, Zach and I are now turning our attention to somewhat messy areas beyond that immediate zone. Which brings me to Zach’s orchid structure.

An installation of orchids that looks right at home from the start and adds a point of interest in an otherwise unremarkable spot

The wood from the felled New Guinea tree was too light to use for firewood. It needed to be stowed elsewhere to break down naturally and I suggested to Zach that he use it to make a base for some orchids as a punctuation point at the uninteresting end of an adjacent garden bed. Zach is a keen orchid man. A couple of hours later, I came back to find his construction which exceeded all my expectations. That is all waste wood, already filled with cymbidiums and dendrobiums which are divisions from other plants around the garden. What was a dull space is now a feature which will look charming as the orchids come into flower over the next months and already looks as though it has always been there.

Dropping trees is not a cheap activity but it opens up new possibilities.  

A postscript, for those of you for whom chainsaws are a part of life. Our arborist used an electric chainsaw and he declares them to be an absolute gamechanger in every way – safer, quiet, much cheaper to run and a massive improvement in environmental terms. We are still using petrol chainsaws here but Mark was saying that next time we need to buy one, we will buy electric. I have heard others praise them but to have a professional give such a glowing reference convinced me they are the way to go.