I use the term ‘fall’ not in the North American sense of autumn, nor in any spiritual, biblical or metaphorical usage. I mean it literally. One of our big old pine trees will fall and I am picking sooner rather than later. It has always had a bit of lean to it but that lean has increased significantly in very recent times and it appears the base is parting company with the ground.
Looking up at the remaining length that is likely to fall one piece
It shouldn’t be devastating when it happens. It is already dead and has lost its side branches so it is just a long thin length with a predictable fall area. It is just that the length is probably over 40 metres. Our old pines are dwindling in number and we are well practiced at dealing with them when they fall. They are Pinus radiata, original seed planted by Mark’s great grandfather in the 1870s, so long before this country settled on selections of that particular tree as its forestry tree of choice. They are at the end of their lives.
The palm which it is resting one is just a native nikau palm – lovely palms but they self-seed here so we are not worried about losing it.
Why not get the arborist in to drop it now, you may wonder. There are additional reasons as well as the cost. The tree is dead; we don’t know how much is rotten or soft and trees with extensive decay are hazardous to the operator when it comes to felling. But also dropping a tree that size would require bringing it down in sections and the amount of damage caused by it coming down in sections would likely be greater than letting it fall on its own. Because we have no access for larger machinery to that part of the garden, it would all have to be reduced to the largest size that could be handled by two men and our very small tractor.
I took this photo to show the new home for half the huge vriesea bromeliad that Zach removed from danger but it also illustrates two other aspects. Firstly, that is a previously fallen tree that we have left in situ and are just planting around as it will gently decay over years. The second is to credit Zach with showing skills in transplanting a fairly large plant and getting it bedded in so only we know it has been there for all of 30 minutes.
No. It can fall when ready and we will do our usual clean up. This involves cutting through to reopen pathways and clear lawn areas, removing all broken branches, pruning any other trees or shrubs it damaged as it fell and then just gardening around the lengths that remain in place. It only takes six months to a year for it to have all settled down and the lengths remaining in situ give added height and natural structure in the garden.
The same plant from another angle. I think it is one of the forms or maybe hybrids of Vriesea fosteriana. It started with one rosette some years ago, planted on an old tree trunk that was right in line for the new tree trunk we expect to fall. It had increased quietly to maybe 10 or a dozen rosettes. This clump is half of them.
In the meantime, Zach has relocated a few plants that we would be sad to lose – the vireya R tuba, a charming little wedding palm Lytocaryum weddellianum and an excessively robust bromeliad that has taken some years to reach its current size.
That is the remaining half of the bromeliad relocated to a new position out of danger. As you can see in this photo, we like highly detailed woodland plantings.
Viewed from the other side to the previous photo, Zach moved some rounds of a previous fallen pine into position where there was a space and stacked them three high to give the plant elevation and to create pockets to plant in. That is a dendrobium orchid moved onto the rounds as well. The wood will decay over time but by then, the plants will have established their own little home.
I gave Zach a health and safety briefing which largely consisted of three pieces of advice. The first was to be very aware if he is working in the projected fall area and to think in advance which side to retreat to if necessary. Move sideways rather than trying to run away. And not to wear Bluetooth ear pods when working in the fall area so he can hear the first cracks before the crash.
Zach wondered if we should be running a sweepstake on when each of us thinks it will fall. I say any time but probably soon. Lloyd was guessing the next storm. Mark was saying it was dead and he thought it would just break up and fall over time – but I don’t think he had looked at the increased lean from all sides as Zach and I had.
Red Hippeastrum aulicum, pale yellow calanthe orchids and Crinum moorei varegata are all mainstays of our woodland plantings
It has been a difficult week, so all I have to entertain readers with this week is scenes from the spring woodland. We like highly detailed woodland.
High shade is the key – here in the Avenue Garden
The key to woodland gardening here is to manage light levels. The charming scenes we see of European and British woodlands – the expanse of white birches underplanted with snowdrops and crocuses and that sort of thing – are beneath deciduous trees which let light in during winter and shoulder seasons.
Trilliums are a bit marginal in our climate so it is always a thrill to see their understated charm
Scadoxus, however, are so happy here that they have pretty much naturalised themselves. This is S. puniceus which flowers in spring. S. katherinae will feature in summer.
In Aotearoa, somewhere over 99% of our native flora is evergreen and most people tend to garden with exotic evergreens as a preference. In our years of retail, I encountered many gardeners who would reject anything deciduous. As a result, we don’t get the seasonal light coming into shaded areas. Also, with our rapid growth rates, trees tend to grow much larger. As UK author and horticulturist, John Hillier inscribed in our copy of Hiller Manual of Trees and Shrubs, ‘double heights and halve the time for New Zealand’. Dare I say it, UK woodlands often look quite spindly to my eyes.
Orchids, we have a few. These are pleiones. We lost all the yellow ones that need more of a winter chill but the purple, lilac and white varieties thrive under laissez faire management in the woodland garden. More orchids – dendrobium to the left and cymbidium to the right
Woodland gardening means dappled light and some shade, but not deep shade. There aren’t many flowering plants that will perform in deep shade. Lifting, limbing and thinning are needed to create high shade and to allow reasonable light levels below.
The Rimu Avenue has such a dense network of roots from trees that are now over 150 years old that we have had to rebuild soil below to allow underplanting
There are also times when the soils below will need some extra texture, volume and replenishment in order to get small plants established. Small plants at ground level won’t thrive if they are bedded in amongst dense tree roots which have dried out the surface.
It is not all bulbs in our woodlands. Azaleas, vireya rhododendrons, camellias, hydrangeas and other shrubs add mid-level detail and height.
On the upside, even high shade and dappled light is enough to hugely reduce weed growth and the visual delight lies both in the detail below and the play of light. It is much lower maintenance than gardening in full sun.
Why a difficult week, you may wonder. We nearly lost our beloved dog Ralph to poison – not our poison and not deliberate but traumatic, nonetheless. We thought he was going to die on Tuesday night. He is still recovering and we are now confident he will survive, although there is a possibility of long-term organ damage.
Ralph in happier times
It is perhaps little understood in this country that our predator-free goals are only achievable with the extremely widespread use of slow-acting poisons, one of which has no antidote. There is a pretty gung-ho attitude and light regulation when it comes to the use of poison. We choose not to use it and will trap and shoot instead. Ralph’s ordeal this week is a reminder to us of why we made that decision. Our lives would have been so much poorer had he died so needlessly and in distress.
Charming erythroniums or dogs tooth violets – best left undisturbed as much as possible because their long, thin bulbs sit vertically in the soil and are fearfully easy to snap when digging. Lachenalia aloides tricolor on the margins of woodland where light levels are higher. With a white trillium popping up through them and snowdrop foliage to the right.
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.
The remaining stump doesn’t look very large in the photo but the poor abies was between 60 and 70 years old.
I think we all breathed a sigh of relief when the last of the Cyclone Dovi major damage was cleared and repaired. The abies that fell over the high bridge in the park has been cleared; Lloyd has reinstated the stopbank which had been ripped apart by the tree roots and the he has repaired the bridge.
The bridge was beneath the tree
The challenge with the abies was what to do with it. Mark had no interest in the timber for firewood. We have plenty already and abies is a lighter wood that does burns quickly so was not desirable. Had it been somewhere with vehicle access, we would have given it away but it was too much of a challenge to try and get it back up the hill when the only access was by our baby tractor or Lloyd’s quad bike and trailer.
Installations, maybe.
The job of cutting it up fell to Zach. Given it had fallen right across the stream, we are lucky that we have had a dry late summer and autumn with low water flow because he spent a few days working around the water with gumboots that are no longer waterproof. He burned the foliage on site as he went. The wood was cut to manageable lengths. A few were used nearby as ‘installations’, we might say. Most of it, he carted halfway back up the hill to build what we have come to call The Barricades.
The Barricades
For readers not into musicals, this is a reference to ‘Les Miserables’. Of course it is. Zach is a fan of musicals and we have been been a Les Mis household ever since our second daughter played Little Cosette in the stage show at the tender age of 10.
That is a Bardo Rose dendrobium freshly planted in the wood
Meet our barricades. Essentially, they are a way of dealing with surplus wood while giving some structure and height in a casual woodland area. Over the years, they will rot down but, in the meantime, they give all sorts of cavities in which to grow plants as well as being not so much a trendy hotel for insects, as an entire insect resort. Or condominium. Zach started with planting a few orchids in it and we will continue to add more plants as suitable candidates become available.
Early March after the initial clean up in the Avenue Gardens
Meanwhile, the rate of recovery in the Avenue Gardens has been rewarding. When Dovi hit, this area was completely covered by fallen pine and the lower canopy of jacaranda, camellia and cordyline. After it had been cleared, it was a bare wasteland with everything tramped into the ground by heavy boots dragging out the debris. We covered it in the woodchip mulch – of which we had small mountains heaped around the area and this was how it looked on March 5.
Early May. The poor jacaranda is unlikely to rally again but the rest is recovering.
Two months on, in autumn, it has already recovered to this point. We are still missing the middle canopy layer, but it looks as if the perennial groundcover will return afresh.
Further along the damage zone, the plants are already softening the length of trunk we decided to leave where it fell. In a few years’ time, Cyclone Dovi will just be a memory.
I wrote about Mark’s hippeastrum hybrids back in 2019. Another one has opened and is positively glowing in the Rimu Avenue. Everyone that has bloomed so far is red. It would have been nice to have had more variety, given that one parent is H. papilio. But what is more interesting is their random blooming. H. aulicum flowers like clockwork for us in September, H. papilio in October. These hybrids are popping up the odd flower any time of the year. It will take a few more years to see if they settle down to a predictable seasonal pattern but, in the meantime, it is quite delightful to come across unexpected, over the top blooms glowing in the woodland gardens.
That is an old stone mill wheel from the ninteenth century, repurposed these days as a bird bath
It has been a difficult week in New Zealand. I recall commenting here to an Irish reader (*waving to Paddy*) that if anybody can get rid of Delta, we will. This week brought us the distressing realisation that we almost certainly can’t. Gone is the dream of the return to level one this summer – level one being no restrictions on day-to-day living bar those pesky border controls. Like many others, we were plunged into a state of deep anxiety. All due to just one case entering the country and now spiralling ever larger, creating the whack-a-mole situation we are now in.
I have to grit my teeth with those who declare ‘we just have to learn to live with it’. I don’t think learning to live with Covid looks like they think it does. It does not mean a return to life as it was with some people getting a bit sick and a few dying – but, presumably, nobody known to those advocating this course of action. Learning to live with Covid means living with ongoing anxiety, wearing masks, using sanitiser, scanning, restrictions on movements and gatherings and playing whack-a-mole all the time. Learning to live with Covid means an indefinite extension of the current status quo.
Scadoxus puniceus
The only path out of this is very high vaccination rate. Please, if you haven’t been vaccinated yet, get it done now. Ignore that small group of very loud, insistent anti-vaxxers. Surveys show that there aren’t that many of them, statistically speaking (somewhere between 4 and 7%?) but too many of them seem pretty determined to keep their ‘freedom of choice’ by attempting to abuse and verbally bludgeon everybody else out of exercising their freedom of choice.
Crinum moorei at the front, which will flower white later in the season, dendrobium orchid, clivias, bromeliads, Scadoxus puniceus and the wedding palm – Lytocaryum weddellianum – in a tiered woodland planting beneath giant rimu trees
What does this mean for our garden festival, scheduled to start on October 29? Goodness only knows; we certainly don’t. We were headed for one of the largest attendances ever with coach tours and ticket sales setting new records. That seems unlikely now.
I see three possibilities. The first is the best-case scenario where travel restrictions are lifted to the north of us and we plough ahead but with masks, sanitiser and physical distancing. This is also the least likely scenario.
The second scenario is the border remains in place on our main northern access to Taranaki and numbers are hugely reduced as a result. In which case it will all be much quieter and lower key.
The third is that Covid reaches Taranaki in the next few weeks and all events are cancelled but I figure we cross that bridge if we come to it.
Seedling vireya, very scented, which seems to be predominantly R. konorii growing beneath pine trees Pleione orchids have a shorter season in bloom but are so pretty
It all makes planning very difficult here. When we know we are opening the garden, there is a lot of extra garden grooming that gets done – titivating, one might call it. It takes a lot of time to titivate a garden the size of ours and we don’t do that final flourish if it is just for our own pleasure.
Colourful woodland on rainy morning this week to lift the spirits
But if it all turns to custard, there are many (many, many) worse places to be than here. The colourful woodland this week soothes my soul and relieves my own anxieties. Woodland gardening does not generally conjure up colourful visions bar maybe a sea of snowdrops beneath bare trees if you are British, or perhaps large drifts of bluebells or hellebores.
Finally getting Mark’s neglected orchids out of his Nova house and into the garden in lengths of tree trunk with the centre rotted out We are big fans of the dainty dendrobium orchids from the Bardo-Rose group
We like highly detailed woodland and it certainly is looking very pretty this week. We achieve this by lifting the canopy of our tall trees to let filtered light in below. Over the years, low branches have been removed to keep the lower trunks clear for maybe the bottom four metres or so. These days we do more thinning at ground level than planting and we use various strategies to ensure that plants can grow despite the massive root systems on the trees. Zach has been planting out some of Mark’s neglected orchids – mostly dendrobiums in the Bardo-Rose group – in hollowed out tree rings this week. These stump lengths are from the silver birch we dropped a few weeks ago. The rotten heart of the tree tells us we were right to fell it.
We do not get florist-quality blooms outdoors but the cymbidiums last a long time in the garden and add glamour Cymbidium with Helleborus sternii. I would like more cymbidiums but need plants with smaller flowers. Those bred for cut flowers tend to be larger and can look out of scale in the garden.
Our interest in orchids is basically on plants we can grow outdoors in the garden so mostly pleiones, cymbidiums, calanthes and dendrobiums in practice. I like the little dendrobiums the best but the cymbidiums add a touch of glamour.
Clivias in orange, red and yellow, we have in abundance
Mark’s peach hybrids add variety but this one seems reluctant to hold its flower spikes upwards
Quite a few years ago, Mark did some hybridising with clivias to try and get some peach coloured ones. He rather lost interest but I planted out the best and they are coming in to their own. I wish this one held its flower up better but it is a pretty, pastel variation on the many oranges, reds and yellows we have. Last time I looked, there were quite a few international breeders working on peach tones and then on white and green flowers but I have no idea if these are commercially available here yet.
Wherever you are, stay sane as well as staying safe. These are trying times we are living through. I will be hiding in the garden somewhere, maybe taking photos to share.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 