Tag Archives: Tikorangi: The Jury garden

Oxalis – by no means all bad

Sunny Oxalis luteola. These bulb oxalis only open their flowers in the sun.

It is easier to maintain specific plant collections when you have a nursery. In that situation, special plants are maintained under nursery conditions and given more individual attention and care than in general garden collections. We used to carry a large array of different bulbs when we were doing mailorder and they were repotted on an annual basis, or at least every two years. We only listed bulbs if we had enough stock reserved to keep going for the following years.

Lilac O. hirta with apricot O. massoniana behind

We put out our last mailorder catalogue in 2003 – twenty years ago – even though I still get email and phone requests from people wanting to order plants from us! In the years since, I have planted most of the good bulbs in the garden, scrapped some that may have been botanical curiosities to half a dozen afficionados throughout the country but were of little merit as garden plants and the rest have languished under a regime best described as benign neglect. Some have not survived this laissez faire approach but, with an extra pair of hands, we are starting to salvage what has.

Zach’s oxalis collection is continuing to grow

Our gardener, Zach, is doing his apprenticeship and one of his modules is on plant collections. I suggested the ornamental oxalis as a well-defined collection he could assemble in one place. There is no doubt that most of these thrive and look their best in containers. I have never forgotten Terry Hatch’s magnificent display of oxalis in pots at Joy Plants and that must be 30 years ago.

13 different flowers and 10 different examples of oxalis foliage.

For years, I maintained a collection of my favourite oxalis in pots to be brought out when they look their best in autumn and early winter. I hate plastic pots in the garden so they were all in terracotta, ceramic or vintage concrete pots and truly, I just got fed up carting these heavy pots out of the nursery and into the garden and then back again when they were over, not to mention the annual repotting. I gave up and planted them out and let them fend for themselves. The most invasive of them, I put in shallow pots and sank the pot in the garden, but I rarely repotted them.

One of the very best oxalis when it comes to good behaviour and generous flowering over a long period of time – O. purpurea alba

Zach has so far isolated 23 different forms of ornamental oxalis that grow from bulbs. Most are from the garden here and a few he has added from his own stash of plants at homes. (Note: he has just sourced another five from a local market, he tells me.) Amazingly, I think we only lost two varieties in the years between my getting them out of the nursery and him getting them back in again and they weren’t a great loss. I suggested that he also pot up the weedy ones we battle all the time. The creeping oxalis – O. corniculata – which we have in bronze and green is the worst and we have a pink one in a patch of grass that may be O. corymbosa.

O. bowiei

Then there are the more herbaceous oxalis. The best known of these is probably what we call a yam in Aotearoa New Zealand, although technically it is growing from a tuber. Commonly known as oca in Spanish, it is a food crop and one we grow ourselves, semi naturalised in the vegetable garden. Botanically it is Oxalis tuberosa.

Oxalis peduncularis

We have Oxalis peduncularis growing in one of those awkward, narrow borders against the house and it looks and grows more like a succulent, flowering for most of the year. Now that I am getting my eye in again, I have spotted another plant that is like a dwarf peduncularis but I have never even thought about what it is because it has just always been there, in its place. It must be another oxalis.

The family is huge overall with somewhere over 550  different species in the wild across most of the world except the polar areas. I have only just discovered that we have a native one – Oxalis exilis. It is a small creeping one and I think it is probably one that I assumed was corniculata, too.   

Oxalis massoniana – one of the prettiest in colour and because of its compact growth, it can form a tidy mound

The thing about plants is that the more you learn about them, the more interesting they get. There are many worse rabbit holes in life that one can go down than the intricacies of the oxalis genus. I can see that Zach’s oxalis collection will probably continue and expand long after he has fulfilled the requirements for his level 4 apprenticeship.

O. eckloniana – probably the largest flower one we have

I am wondering now whether I can get him onto isolating and sorting the intricacies of the lachenalia collection next. That went pretty much the same way as the oxalis collection when we retired from mailorder but is more complicated because of their readiness to cross with each other and produce natural hybrids. He doesn’t need to do it for his apprenticeship but I think he would find it very interesting and it would be satisfying to sort it out again. At least all the lachenalias are bulbs and there are only about 133 species so that makes it more tightly defined.

Judge not by the worst members of the family

Dramatic dahlias

When the sun returned on Friday, I realised that it was not the rain that had dampened my spirits, it was the low light levels. Clearly, I was never destined to live in northern Europe where I am sure I would suffer from seasonal affective disorder for months every year.

Here in Taranaki, Aotearoa New Zealand, we sit at 39°S which is a similar latitude to California, Ibiza and Sardinia – or Madrid is the usual northern latitude comparator to our country. Not that our climate bears any resemblance to those locations. We are a long, thin country set in the middle of vast oceans which moderates our climate and brings us regular rain – too much rain of late. We have a very clear atmosphere and that clarity of light is apparent in every season where we live. At the winter solstice, we still get around 9 ½ hours of light a day and that is often bright light. No wonder I am accustomed to high light levels.

I have few photos of herbaceous dahlias but this one in an open garden in Canberra, trained, cosseted and protected by an umbrella amused me at the time.

The return of the sun had me out looking at the tree dahlias. These are difficult plants to accommodate in the garden but they certainly have the wow factor at this time of the year. All summer, I have seen friends posting photos of their prized dahlias and, while I admire their enthusiasm, the big, blousy, summer dahlias do not bring me joy. Too many murky colours and novelty forms for my personal taste. The tree dahlias are a different matter.

Dahlia imperialis

What is not to love about the soaring heights of D. imperialis lilac chalice blooms? When I say soaring heights, because we are growing them in semi shade, they can be stretched up to around 5 or even 6 metres.

Dahlia ‘Conundrum’

D. imperialis is of course a species and the other species we have, D. excelsa, flowers even later in the season and grows even taller. It is not even showing colour yet. New Zealand plant breeder, Dr Keith Hammett, has done a lot of work over the years to create more amenable tree dahlia hybrids. We don’t have many of them and don’t have the right places to grow many more but I wouldn’t be without his yellow ‘Conundrum’ which flowers pretty much all summer and autumn coming into winter.

Dahlia ‘Timothy Hammett’

‘Timothy Hammett’, named for Keith’s son, is a beautiful and unusual shade of cerise-purple with smaller flowers. Because these tree dahlia blooms have visible central stamens and pollen, they are alive with bees and butterflies at a time when other food sources are getting sparse.

I watched the monarch butterfly flicking away the bee in an irritated manner

I have long since lost the name of the larger flowered, strong pink one we have – if it was ever named – but it is another worthwhile Hammett hybrid. If you want to know more about Keith’s tree dahlias, this article by him in the April Gardener is well worth reading. There is an impressive flower lay showing the range of colours he has reached in his breeding, starting from just four different tree dahlia species.

All too common a sight as one of the leaders falls over

I think we need to lift and divide our plants. This has not been done for many years and the tubers on some are very close to the surface. All we have done is to cut them down to the ground when they have finished flowering and reached their weather-beaten, scruffy stage – that is, if they have not fallen over with their own weight before then. They are brittle and vulnerable, especially the tall species. They are not exactly on a scale that I can stake, either.

A small but showy array

I think if we lift them and thin out the tubers, replanting them somewhat deeper than they have been, they may well reward us with sturdier growth and, hopefully, stay upright longer – or at least until they have finished flowering. Until then, I will just enjoy their glorious display as we count down to winter’s arrival. I prefer my life filled with light and colour.

A purple parcel day

In a week of more greyness and rain, the colour purple took my fancy this week. How pretty is my purple flower lay? I was surprised how many purple flowers I found in the rain and the first blast of winter cold. I included some pastel lavender flowers; had I extended into the pinker lilac hues, I could have doubled the number of different flowers.

It was not the coronation of King Charles that made me think of purple. It is the traditional colour of emperors, reserved for them because it was so difficult, tedious and expensive to extract the purple pigment to use as dye from snail mucus. Charles 111 may have many titles but emperor is not one of them, I think.

I saw very little of the coronation but it seemed, as the king changed his cloaks of many colours, that the colours of the British crown are more about red, white and royal blue with liberal lashings of gold.

No, it was the arrival of Mark’s Veitch Memorial Medal accoutrements. These were despatched by rather slow mail from London, on account of us not being able to travel to the official ceremony. Some of us remember when airmail was the expensive Fast Post option and the cheap alternative was slow boat. These days, airmail is a great deal more expensive but without the speed of delivery. Indeed, it can take as long as the old slow boat option. The certificate is impressive – a full A3 size. Oddly, because we are not given to public displays of such things, Mark felt it warranted hanging so it is destined to join the rogue’s gallery of family photos and pictures that adorn the private area of the spacious upstairs landing.

The purple boxes were discreetly impressive. One holds the medal while the other holds a golden and enamel lapel pin. They can go in the sideboard that holds his father Felix’s matching Veitch medal.

Mark is a reserved man but his delight was palpable.

From flowers in the gloom to the Coronation quiche

You can tell from the peeping blue sky that this photo is from my archives and not from the unrelenting greyness of yesterday. But the Dahlia imperialis is in flower again and looking very pretty, despite the rains.

We may be growing older but at least we keep learning things. I recall when our nation first learned about liquefaction in the Christchurch earthquakes. Next was graupel which must have been during the snow event of 2011. This year it is atmospheric rivers. I doubt too many of us knew about these before the Auckland anniversary floods followed by Cyclone Gabrielle. We received weather alerts this week about a potential atmospheric river becoming stalled over Taranaki from Wednesday.

In the event, it didn’t amount to anything close to the devastating floods suffered by many in more northerly and eastern areas of the North Island already this year. It rained hard on Wednesday night – over 90ml which is heading towards 4 inches, Mark tells me from his rain gauges – but since then it has just been showery and drizzly and unusually gloomy. Given that an atmospheric river can release more water than is in the Amazon, we feel we may have dodged a disaster this time.

Lapagerias in red and white at the back of the house beside the wheelie bins. They are not a tidy climber and usually need a great deal of patience but, once established, their flowers through autumn and winter are a pleasure.

But gloomy is as gloomy does. At least it is not cold. While autumn is here, our daytime temperatures are still sitting around a pleasant 20 celsius and the nights are mild. When the rain stopped yesterday, even though it remained unrelentingly grey, I walked around the garden looking for bright spots.

Salvia madrensis in yellow with Chionochloa rubra in front and Miscanthus ‘Morning Light’ behind
Salvia mexicana ‘Limelight’ with Elegia capensis

I have been slow to be won over to the charms of the salvia family. The plants tend to be rangy, leggy, things lacking form but now I have the right places to grow them. They are generous in their blooming habits, flowering for months on end and what I earlier saw as formless sits comfortably in more casual plantings. I think I may need to expand the range and there are certainly plenty to choose from.

Plectranthus don’t have a good reputation but we accept a few in more casual areas. At least they are easy to hack back and to pull out when they start straying beyond their designated home space. I enjoy that lilac-blue haze behind the Ligularia reniformis. I have no idea which plectranthus this one is but it has a lovely burgundy colour on the underside of the foliage. That gnarly, dead-looking trunk in the centre of the photograph is the remains of my treasured jacaranda that was taken out by Cyclone Dovi in February last year.

But wait! That is new life on the gnarly old jacaranda trunk. To our great surprise it is shooting again. When Zach spotted the first tiny signs of life, we thought it unlikely to survive because the outer layer of bark on the trunk had been stripped away entirely and we didn’t see how it could sustain new life. But here we are. That shoot is already quite substantial.

I am somewhat dismissive of abutilons which seed way too readily. We weed out most of them but I try and keep the odd one in pure yellow, at least one pure red one and any that have clearly crossed and come in a pleasing orange shade. Anything in murky colours – and there are plenty of those – or in the wrong place is unceremoniouly pulled out and consigned to compost.

Underneath the rimus, the bromeliads provide us with winter colour and a somewhat unique perspective on exotic woodland plantings. Ralph is a bit underwhelmed but he does have a resting sad face and that does not indicate a sad nature. The startling pink variegations in that photo with him are pretty interesting and seem to have stronger colour this year for no discernable reason.

Vireya rhododendron macgregoriae

Right on cue, Felix’s New Guinea collection of R. macgregoriae flowers again, as it has done for sixty-five years now. For a vireya, that is an extraordinarily long life span. In our conditions, they are all too often short-lived. All we ever do is dead head it and take out any dead wood. It doesn’t get fed at all but each year it puts on a mass display.

I can not in all honesty say that my corner of the world has been gripped by Coronation fever but I was amused when Canberra daughter announced that the Coronation Quiche looked preferable to its predecessor, Coronation Chicken. Never having tried the latter, I had to google the recipe and that combination of chicken and dried apricot with mayonnaise is very 1950s/60s. Daughter entered into the spirit of the occasion by making an acquaintance with lard, albeit Australian lard, and even posted a photograph of her preparations.

Sadly, she was underwhelmed by the result. While the lard gave a good, flaky pastry, she declared the ratios to be “a bit weird, it’s a lot of cheese and a lot of spinach. The spinach made it a bit earthy and herbaceous. Plus I had forgotten I don’t really like tarragon.”

Not the Coronation quiche, in the end

She remade it, substituting parsley for much of the spinach and adding bacon and declared that preferable.

Going back to Coronation Chicken, I do hope that the New Zealand version was not prepared with Highlander mayonnaise back in the day, Highlander mayonnaise being of a similar era and based on a can of sweetened condensed milk. But I bet it was. With added curry powder from Greggs. ‘The horror, the horror.’

Feijoa mania in autumn. Every autumn.

Feijoa season! Very much a New Zealand experience, it seems.

There is something so innocent and wholesome about peak feijoa month in Aotearoa New Zealand. In a time when the world is chaotic and unpredictable, when problems seem to be mounting ever higher and the daily news is pretty darn bleak, this little green oval fruit appears in abundance and suddenly we are all talking about feijoas. Tables appear by gates as children gather the fruit and put them out with an honesty box. $2 a bag seems to be the going rate here, which is usually between a dollar and  $1.50 a kilo.

News outlets come out with the usual fluff pieces. “Today, we have a guest in the studio who has never tried a feijoa (collective gasp of shock) and we are ready with the fruit sliced and a teaspoon for him to have his first taste.” True, I heard that on Radio New Zealand this week. And an evening TV show put up a segment on what to do with your surplus feijoas. Reader, I can tell you there are no magic answers to that issue. All they came up with was to give away your surplus to less fortunate folk who do not have their own, stew them, make feijoa crumble, muffins or feijoa chutney and not much else. I stew some for the freezer, dehydrate them for using in baking and muesli and we eat huge amounts fresh but that is about as far as it goes.

Scooped with a teaspoon and stewed. I don’t add sugar because we find they are sweet enough without.

Predictably there are the naysayers who don’t like the taste or texture but they are a minority. While feijoas have a fairly widespread distribution throughout the country, being a warm temperate to subtropical plant, there are areas where they don’t grow or, if they grow, they don’t fruit consistently because of cold winters. People in those areas must wonder what feijoa mania is all about. But when it comes to home gardens across the nation, feijoas must rank close to lemons and daphnes as being one of the most ubiquitous plants grown.

This popularity has grown through the decades. They have been here since the 1920s but I had never heard of them until I moved from Dunedin to the North Island. With new and improved selections becoming available, their popularity and distribution have grown exponentially.

it is usual to wait until the fruit fall and then pick them up from the ground – for home growers at least – so it is best if the surface beneath them is fairly bare but with a good layer of leaf litter or mulch to give them a softer landing.

They are often referred to as the most democratic fruit or even a socialist fruit but Mark commented this week that really they are egalitarian more than democratic. Despite efforts over the years, they are not a high production commercial crop. They are so easy to grow and fruit so prolifically that their perceived dollar value is low and they bruise easily, making the repeated handling and shipping required by distribution chains problematic. There is an overseas market that is higher value but challenging to meet. The domestic market is very small because so many of us grow our own. Feijoas are something you share around; maybe they are our most socialist fruit after all.

Feijoa sellowiana syn Acca sellowiana is native to South America, particularly Brazil but apparently, we were the first country to introduce preferred selections as home garden plants. Why so popular? Because they are probably the easiest fruit of all to grow. They are evergreen. They don’t need feeding, they don’t need spraying, they don’t get diseased, they have few insect attacks and they are quite happy if you never prune them. You can just plant them in full to half sun and leave them. If you have a good variety and your winters are not extreme, they fruit generously every year.

The dark foliaged plant in the middle is the feijoa. I would describe it as a large shrub rather than a tree. We have four established plants of different named cultivars and have planted another three to cover both early and late season.

In days gone by, seedlings were often sold as hedging plants but honestly, seedlings are not worth having because they are extremely variable and usually have tiny fruit that are mostly skin. Buy named varieties from the garden centre. You won’t regret it. It can be the difference between fruit the size of your thumb versus fruit the size of duck eggs. If you live some distance from neighbours, you either need to buy a variety that is self-pollinating or grow at least two because not all feijoas are self-fertile. It is not generally a problem in urban areas because there are so many growing that your neighbours’ trees will be pollinators.

Sadly the guava moth has arrived in our country, likely blown over from Australia. It is another pest we could have done without. And in areas further north where it has become established, it spoils the reputation of the feijoa as the most easy-care of fruits. There is a lot of work being done on environmentally benign interventions to control guava moth infestations. The internet or your local garden centre will be able to advise you if you are finding fruit with nasty caterpillars and poo inside them. It hasn’t made its presence felt here in the mid-north but I am sure it will at some point in the future.

Even if we have to resort to pheromone traps or other techniques, it will be worth it to preserve our most egalitarian and generous fruit.