Tag Archives: Tikorangi: The Jury garden

A postscript – or maybe an update –  to my last two posts on digging ‘n dividing and bluebells.

I photographed this patch of asters trimmed to the ground because I thought it was a good example of when not to let sleeping asters lie. Digital photography is very handy for dating things and I see it is only three years since these were last dug and divided. It had become a seamless carpet of aster in the time since. Both Zach and I noted that it did not look as good as it should have last summer. They weren’t helped by getting hit by mildew which has not happened before, but there was no mass flowering.

It should have looked like this last summer, but it didn’t. This is from summer 2024.

Time for a dig and divide, which Zach did this week. A perennial that has to be lifted and split every two to three years is on the high maintenance side and we don’t have many in that category. My friend, Sue, who leads the team of volunteers at the pretty Te Henui cemetery, told me she is culling plants that are too high in maintenance for their labour resources and this aster might fit that category. I must ask her for her latest list of culls. Fortunately I have Zach to carry out such tasks or I might be casting around for a less demanding plant option.

Enter the rabbits. After a quiet few months on the rabbit front, they are back and there is nothing they like more than an area of soft, freshly dug garden and mulch to dig. I sent Zach a text yesterday telling him that the rabbits were undoing his work. He was equally unimpressed but at least the photo shows you the size of division he split off from the previous carpet to replant.

I have just replanted the casualties, filled in the holes and spread blood and bone. The rabbits don’t like blood and bone and will stay away from that area but it does need to be replenished after rain and we have had plenty of that this week.

A whole lot of bluebell bulbs, just from the Iolanthe garden. There were more. I have already disposed of some.

The war on bluebells continues and I am at an advanced stage of boredom. I took this photograph as proof that I am not exaggerating. This is by no means all of the bulbs I have dug out of just the Iolanthe garden. Most were never planted there but I will have spread a few when I planted that area in 2019. Some have already been disposed of and still there are more to be dug.

They did not dehydrate in the summer sun. They grew instead.

Bluebells have no place in the cultivated garden. I found a couple of photos from last year, recording our attempts to deal with some culled from the Avenue Gardens. I worried about how many we were dumping on our wild margins and they don’t rot down in the compost. I had the idea that if we spread them thinly on weedmat, they would dehydrate and die in the summer sun. They didn’t. They kept growing. I then thought they might compost in plastic bags in the sun, as wandering tradescantia does. Some did over the summer months but others in those bags were still firm and viable. Responsible disposal is quite a big problem.

Nor did they rot down in the plastic bags, as I hoped.

We have a lot of bluebells in the park and the Wild North Garden and they can stay there. To get rid of them, we would have to go for repeated use of some heavy-duty sprays and we try and avoid that. Besides, they are very pretty in spring. Ours are all Spanish bluebells or hybrids; the more desirable English bluebells are extremely scarce in this country. I don’t think I have ever seen them.

“If they stank like onion weed, they would be seen as a weed,” said Mark. “They are a weed,” I replied.

If we had our time over again, we would think twice about introducing them to our property. Mark put a bit of work into building up numbers in the first place. A decade or so on, I am putting a great deal more work into digging them out from some areas, all but sifting the soil to get the baby bulbs. You have been warned.

From happier bluebell days

What even is ‘a garden for all seasons’?

Today is the arbitrary date that is set to tell us that we are in the first day of winter. In colder climates and far-off places like the north of the northern hemisphere, the ground can be covered for snow for months or simply freeze solid. Gardens are put to bed for winter. People retreat indoors and the view from the windows becomes extremely important. Structure and form come into their own because that is all there is to look at.

Not here. We only get periodic warnings of winter until it strikes around the solstice at the end of June and even then, it only lasts about six weeks. I retreat indoors when it is either raining or bitterly cold but otherwise, I can continue in the garden.

So what do our summer gardens look like as winter arrives? These were designed to bring us summer colour and are largely planted in perennials.

The Wave Garden, named for its undulating hedges (when trimmed) comes into its own in spring and summer. Ralph is doing his daily morning check for rabbits.

The Wave Garden is at its least interesting stage. Even the form is not strong until we clip the hedging when the little species camellia – C. microphylla –  has finished flowering. The only other flowers out are the white alstromeria which seems to bloom effortlessly for about 10 months of the year.

Zach weeding is the most interesting aspect of the lily border this week. This stretch is all about the auratum lilies in high summer with a second outing in mid to late winter when the michelias and camellias bloom.

There is nothing to see in the adjacent lily border. In a few weeks, the Camellia yuhsienensis which punctuate that border will be in flower and they are eyecatching. I can see the first flowers opening now. The backing hedge of Fairy Magnolia White will start to bloom soon after but at this time, the only reason to look at it is to monitor the damage by the pesky rabbits digging holes.

The twin borders star from spring to autumn, but not winter

The twin borders are also largely put to bed. They are never totally flat and bare because many of the perennials are evergreen but the only point of interest at the moment is the startling delight of the yellow kniphofia.

Just recent hard work to be seen in the Iolanthe garden which is largely about flowering in spring through to early autumn

The Iolanthe Garden is currently receiving a great deal of attention but the fruits of Zach’s and my labours will not be seen until spring. The only colour is from the citrus fruit ripening.

Tawny carex carry this area all year round

The grasslands, as we call the area linking the borders and Iolanthe Garden, uses two evergreen, native grasses (everbrown, in practice). At this time of the year, it lacks the zing from the scattering of bulbs and flowers planted between, but it remains well furnished, as it does all year round.

The back border with the OTT Doryanthes palmeri on the right

The back border of the summer gardens is like the back row of the chorus. It rarely gets to sing any solo lines but it adds depth to the whole area. The dominant plants here are another native grass – Anemanthele lessoniana, also known as gossamer grass – and cardoons which get too large and fall over in summer but look great in winter and spring. The Queensland spear lily (Doryanthes palmeri) adds a very dominant presence at one end.

The Court Garden in winter – need I say more?

But it is the Court Garden that stars all year round. The only flowers at the moment are the late salvias, particularly the yellow Salvia madrensis (which tells you how mild our autumns and winters are) but whole area is lush and furnished with contrasting textures and tones of green, bronze, burgundy and silver. We have never gardened in this style before so it still comes as a surprise to me to see how this moderately large area (think tennis court size) performs well all year round.  

I have seen gardens that claim to be ‘a garden for all seasons’ – particularly Pukeiti Rhododendron Gardens. I came to the conclusion that, at best, that means that there is something of interest all year round but you may have to search for it. Somewhat like our patch of yellow kniphofia in the borders. It rarely means that a larger area of the garden stars in the off season. It seems a little personal triumph that the Court Garden can change with the seasons but continue to star through all.

It is not just individual plants starring in their time to shine; the Court Garden doesn’t look the same all year but it looks good in every season.

While we are doing a lot of work on preparing the summer gardens for next season, the woodland areas are coming into their own. The orchids, evergreen azaleas, bromeliads, schlumbergera (zygocactus) and early clivias are coming into flower. The quiet time for the woodland areas is summer but that is another story.  

More lessons learned. Plants to avoid

I am busy a-diggin’ and a-dividin’ perennials. While autumn is indubitably here, the soils are still warm and there should be several more weeks for the fresh divisions to settle in and start to establish before the winter chill of late June and early July. In colder climates this is more commonly recommended as a spring activity but with our distinctly wet spring season and late onset of winter, we prefer to do it in autumn.

I did not realise how much digging and dividing would be needed when we embarked on some large areas of perennials in open, sunny conditions. We have always had plenty growing in shady conditions but they are pretty self-maintaining and undemanding. Give them sun and it is a different story. Sun, mild winters, friable, volcanic soils and regular rainfall – in optimum conditions they R O M P away with gusto.

Much and all as I love Japanese anemones, they are not a good option for perennial beds because of their invasive ways

If I had my time again, there are perennials I would not unleash to start with. Some I have written about before but off the top of my head, I can not recommend planting the following:

Saponaria. Photo credit: Rosser 1954 Wiki Commons
  • Saponaria (soapworts). Pretty they may be in flower but those underground runners run both deep and far. Dangerously invasive. They are not generous enough on the flowering stakes, to justify their existence. And in the absence of a soap shortage, I do not feel the need to keep them to use the foliage as a soap substitute.
  • Jerusalem artichokes – foliage to flower ratio is way too high and they are altogether too enthusiastic at producing tubers.
  • Bluebells in cultivated garden situations. I am digging out every one I come across, knowing there will be plenty I miss but still they are being measured by the bucket-load. They are difficult to dispose of, too. They grow rather than rotting down so I am having to send them to landfill.
Japanese anemones. The pretty flowers belie what is happening below the surface.
  • Japanese anemones. I love the flowers in early autumn but these are another invasive plant genus that either needs to be confined tightly in a garden situation or avoided from the start. Because they put out very long runners, they are difficult to get out when they creep – or sprint, actually – amongst other plants.
  • Mondo grass. Mondo grass. Mondo grass. Too much mondo grass here, there and almost everywhere. I am carefully picking out their seeds as I go, too.
  • Forget-me-nots, be they annuals or perennials. I love their sea of blue, coming in just after the bluebells and they are easy enough to pull out but I am pretty sure every single seed grows. And they are incompatible with Ralph the dog who is no great respecter of gardens and can spend months coming indoors with multitudes of sticky little forget-me-not seeds all through his fur.
  • I have now added violets to the banned list too, after spending yesterday digging out plants I am sure snuck in and weren’t planted. They may have a sentimental attachment, being Mark’s great grandmother’s violets but it doesn’t stop them being invasive. They are another plant that will entwine themselves amongst the roots of neighbouring plants so I have had to dig those out too, to extract the interloper.

There are other plants that need caution and constant management. Crocosmias and ixias are in that group. I removed yellow crocosmia bulbs by the bucket load in late summer but I am aiming for containment on those because I like them in bloom, just not everywhere.

The Iolanthe garden on January 2, 2021
Where have all the flowers gone? The same block on December 30, four years later. Time for some attention.

Zach and I have been working our way through the Iolanthe garden, our bee and butterfly garden which is a cross between a perennial meadow and a cottage garden. I planted the whole area up back in 2019. During summer just passed, I thought it wasn’t looking as pretty and flowery as it had been and too many of the perennials were looking scruffy and somewhat rank. I have high hopes for next spring and summer; it had better be good because a lot of work and time have gone into it so far.

The underplanting on this mixed border has never been exciting but it had crossed to line to neglected
Primula denticulata – somewhere I have better photos of it en masse but goodness knows what I filed them under.

I was distracted from the Iolanthe garden for a couple of weeks onto the border at the back of the sunken garden area. We were in danger of losing the pretty Primula denticulata. At the end of a dry late summer, they were fast dwindling away to nothing.  I realise that to keep them going, I probably need to dig, divide and feed with compost every two years. There aren’t a lot of plants I am willing to give that amount of attention but they are one. Some perennials just quietly waste away if left to their own devices. Stokesias and echinaceas also fall into this category. Having started on that border, I had to keep going because the whole border, I realised, had passed over from being relatively anonymous to so unloved that I was avoiding even looking at it as I walked around. I dug the lot and did a full reorganisaton and cull before replanting. That was when I found how dangerously invasive the saponaria is. Those underground runners were up to a metre long, sending up shoots all the way along.

Freshly dug, divided, carefully considered and replanted all the way along. Now it is waiting for spring.

It was interesting, to me at least, moving between the two areas. The border in the sunken garden is planted in defined blocks whereas the Iolanthe garden is much more casual, naturalistic mix and match. Different styles for different areas but no matter what style we choose, we prefer complex plantings involving many different plant varieties to utilitarian mass planting of a single variety. It is  more complicated to manage but also a great deal more interesting.

It never fails to surprise me, when I lift an entire area, just how many plants it takes to fill the area back up again with fresh divisions. We want it to look well-furnished by spring and summer so I am planting fairly close together. You would not want to be buying the plants unless you have very deep pockets but the advantage of perennials is that most divide easily. I haven’t had a lot of surplus plants to compost – some sedums, campanula and stokesia but that is about it.

I am not big on anthropomorphism but I like to think of the fresh divisions heaving a sigh of appreciation as they settle back into fluffed up, friable soils still warm from the summer but now moist from the autumn rains. Hopefully, these areas will perform for another five years or so with just spot interventions before the next round of lifting and dividing is needed. This is not a low maintenance style of gardening but neither do we want that.

Bluebells – best kept to loose meadow or park situations. Never again will I unleash them in a cultivated garden.

How many Nerine bowdenii did you say?

There is nothing too special about Nerine bowdenii. It is the last of the autumn season to flower for us. We have a particularly attractive patch which is a delight every year, planted on the edge of the main lawn, just beneath Camellia sasanqua ‘Elfin Rose’ which is more or less the same shade of sugar pink.

Camellia ‘Elfin Rose’ and Nerine bowdenii beside the drive

There were three large pots of N. bowdenii sitting on an area of mat left over from our nursery days which I thought I would gather up because I had a space to plant them in an area of the Iolanthe garden which I am working over. “There are more in the propagation house,” said Mark. Good, I thought. I have just the spot where they can star in autumn and be anonymous and unobtrusive for the rest of the year.

I don’t often go into the propagation house; it is basically Mark and Zach’s territory. So when I went to gather up the bowdeniis to plant, it came as a shock. Reader, there are seven trays of them with an average of fifteen pots per tray and many of those pots had multiplied up to be about five per pot. That is a lot of bowdenii.

More surprising to me was the variation within them and it dawned on me that these were not straight species bowdenii,  but Mark’s hybrids. Over twenty years ago, it had entirely escaped my notice that he was faffing around hybridising bowdenii. It is way easier to grow as garden plant and to keep flowering consistently than the more desirable N. sarniensis types and he was trying to see if he could combine that robust nature with the variations in colour and size of sarniensis.

Not many flowers left as it is the end of the season but you get the drift

It was the deep colours that surprised me. The species can show variation but is commonly sugar pink. Indubitably sugar pink. Mark’s seedlings ranged from almost white, through pale pinks and bicolours to very deep pinks verging on red to some knocking on the door of the smoky shades that Felix was working on with his sarniensis hybrids.

Clearly, I will have to expand the area I was giving over to bowdenii in the Iolanthe garden and it is going to be a great deal more interesting than just a seasonal wave of sugar pink. I am looking forward to next year. In the meantime, my challenge is integrating hundreds of bowdenii hybrids into a garden that is perennial-cottage in style without turning it into what looks like a nursery trial bed. It may be more river than stream or wave.

Planting them in their new home beside the raspberry coop. I expect a good show next year.

In recalling the history of those nerines this morning, Mark tells me he was inspired to start experimenting with bowdenii crosses when Auckland plantsman and nurseryman, Terry Hatch, showed him an impressive hybrid he had high hopes for. “But,” he added, “they are still eclipsed by the nerines created by Monty Hollows in Palmerston North”. I remember over 50 years ago, when we were both students at Massey University, that Mark took me out to see Monty Hollows’ astounding chrysanthemums but I never saw his nerines.

I had to look up Monty Hollows. Brother of more famous Fred Hollows, he died in 2019, aged 91, and is largely remembered as a giant in the local cycling scene. A man of many talents and enterprises, horticulture also featured and he exported nerines to Asia. Monty, others may remember you for your energy, enterprise and loyalty to cycling but Mark has never forgotten your achievements with nerines where you set a very high bar.

Autumn flowering fillers

Truly, I have never given much thought to plectranthus. They are just one of those filler plants that can occupy a difficult waste space and put on a good show in flower but need a tight hand to control their spread. Not unlike abutilon and brugmansia, perhaps.

And then there is this one. I have no idea where it came from although I must have planted it in the borders. Maybe it was in an unlabelled pot in the old nursery and, as a juvenile plant, I mistook it for a salvia? That seems the most likely scenario. It is really pretty and, considering the family it comes from, well behaved. It is also a woody shrub.

Most plectranthus are herbaceous perennials that can spread far and wide. There are about 85 species, mostly from tropical and southern Africa and all in the sage family. Presumably frost controls their spread in colder climates but here it is human hands that keep them contained. Mark tells me there is a large patch in our stand of native bush on our property across the road that we need to eradicate. I don’t go over there much so I haven’t seen it but he described it as now taking about the space of our house beneath the stand of tawa trees. That is not the place for it; we can control it in a garden situation but we try and keep that bush restricted to natives, eliminating exotic interlopers.

Quite a good colour but no woody stems on this one so it is not the same as the one I want more of.

I had assumed that the plant in the borders must have crept in from another part of the garden so I set off to look at the others we have. Nope, it is different. It is a more intense colour and definitely woody as opposed to a spreading perennial. I see it has a layer on it so I will remove that and it should also propagate easily from cutting. I want more of it in the borders as a splash of autumn colour.

The one in the centre is my good, woody one that I want more of. Most of the others were a little washed out in comparison and not the right growth habit. On the left is what we knew as P. argentatum but is now a coleus, not a plectranthus at all.

In looking up plectranthus, I see the silver one we have with pastel flowers and which we knew as Plectranthus argentatus is in fact an Australian native and is part of a whole group of plectranthus that have now been transferred to the coleus family, so it is now known as Coleus argentatus. It is always interesting to learn something new.

The odd red abutilon is acceptable.
i have a soft spot for the pure yellow or clean orange shades.

I mentioned abutilons and brugmansia as similar fillers, except they spread by seed. I can’t get excited about abutilons but they fill a space. They cross readily and I only want clean colours so I pull out any murky colour mixes, keeping only the good reds and pure yellows or oranges. I did see a beautiful, big, bushy one in an open garden last year that was laden with bell flowers in the prettiest shade of lilac. It was a showstopper but the owner, one of the best plantsmen in our area, told me it was also the most difficult abutilon he had ever come across to strike from cutting. It won’t grow true from seed, assuming it even sets seed.

We have brugmansias in semi-double white, peachy pink, apricot and a rooted cutting of a pure yellow waiting to be planted out

Brugmansias are also a great autumn feature. They are very brittle and can get extremely tall but the flowers are best observed from below or from some distance. The few we have are generally in shade so they stretch for the light rather than spreading sideways. They are not what one could call a tidy plant but at this time of the year, they can be striking.

How do you tell a brugmansia, common name angel’s trumpets, from its close relative the datura, known as devil’s trumpets? Brugmansias have pendulous flowers that hang down while daturas face upwards or outwards. Both are highly poisonous but it seems only datura has psychoactive properties as well, known to kill suicidal youth who don’t factor in the toxicity in their search for a free hallucinogenic experience. Interestingly, brugmansias are now rated as extinct in the wild; it is only their use as a garden plant that has ensured their survival.

Some plants need a closer eye kept on them than others. If you have spreading plectranthus, never turn your back on it because, in our climate, it will get away and smother whatever it comes across.