PNCI seedlings

This is the time of the year I love. The Pacific Coast native irises (PCNI) – native to the United States, that is – are germinating.
It is always exciting to see the little children that one has carefully planned popping up through the soil. As always, I have far more seedlings than I can possibly plant out, so I will have to do some culling at the time I prick the seedlings out. At this stage, it is just fun to look at the grassy foliage of the new seedlings, and then come back here and look up the breeding books, that will give clues as to why particular crosses were made.
Just as importantly, this year’s divisions seem to have worked well too. I have been under some pressure to start naming and releasing some of my seedlings, as PNCIs are so difficult to find in New Zealand. I am keen to ensure they are plants that will shift well, as the PCNI have a bad reputation of not shifting easily. I divided my ten favourite plants, with at least ten divisions of each, about three months ago. So far, all seem to be going well, so I have my fingers crossed.

Yum, yum -yams and other oxalis

Unlike most gardeners, I have a love/hate relationship with Oxalis. Most of us have an out-and-out hate relationship with the many species of this widespread genus. We find them forever trying to take over our vegetable gardens by burying their many corms deep in the soil, or we find them steadily encroaching underneath the fence from the neighbours garden. Other species are persistent weeds in acid soils in lawns, while yet others make pests of themselves in container-grown plants.
So how could I have any kind of positive relationship with them?
There is one species I could hardly live without over winter – Oxalis tuberosa. This is an interesting plant from South America, where very many Oxalis species are found. It has the shamrock shaped leaves that many members of the family are blessed with, and it is a reliable grower throughout most of our region, although the tops are slightly frost tender.
It is, of course, the vegetable crop that most of the world calls oka, but which we Kiwis call the yam – not to be confused with the tropical crop that is also known as the yam.
As you might expect of an oxalis, this plant is relatively easy to grow, even though it does need a long growing season. The little tubers are best planted once the weather has warmed up, perhaps in late October or early November, at the same time we are all planting our other summer-growing tender crops. They are best planted in raised rows, similar to potatoes as they flourish in light, free draining soil. They are good feeders so it pays to work in some potato fertiliser at the time of planting, but they prefer a slightly acidic soil (you will not be surprised to learn, as they do, of course, contain oxalic acid) so you can go easy on the lime.
They need to be grown as long as possible; the bulbs are not produced until the night length is the same as the day length. They will require watering over the driest of our eastern summers, but seem to be relatively pest free. They will be ready to harvest when the tops dry off, usually in late March or April.
I have a small collection of some of the many decorative Oxalis species, largely in terracotta pots. At this time of the year the various forms of O. pupurpea are at their best. This is another South American species, from Chile, and is grown for its attractive winter flowers. There are a number of forms available in New Zealand. The one I like best is a purple foliaged variety (which I assume gave the plant its name) which I have seen described as ‘Nigrescens’ but I am not sure it is not the same forms grown in the rest of the world as ‘Garnet’. The deep leaves are wonderfully offset by the glowing pink flowers. These flowers are very difficult to accurately capture – they have a shiny gloss and the flowers always appear lighter in photographs than they do in the garden.
I grow two other forms of O. purpurea, with (oddly enough) green leaves, one with glowing white flowers, the other with shining pink flowers. There are yellow and cream forms of this species too, but I have not grown them.

Robinson Park

It has been an interesting gardening week, even though the weather has been terrible. These weeks with rain every day do not do a lot for the gardening spirit, but I did manage to get one or two important jobs done, none more so than my annual pilgrimage to a small local park. The reserve was named in honour of the well-known plantsman and plant breeder Laurie Robinson and his family have taken it upon themselves to rejuvenate it.
For some years the reserve was allowed to become slightly overgrown, and a jungle of unattractive trees and shrubs established themselves along the southern boundary. For four years the family had been cleaning the park up and replanting the fresh ground with a variety of native trees and shrubs.
I was delighted to be asked to be part of the team that does the planting.
One of my earliest horticultural memories is of Laurie Robinson spending an hour one Saturday morning, giving me a tour around his nursery and showing off some of his special plants. He took me into a secluded private area where he was bulking up some special red flaxes, the variety that was eventually released as ‘Ruby Dazzler’. It was nothing like the very modern flax varieties, with their mix of brown, pink, cream and yellow – it was purple leaved with a flash of red – sometimes. It was not the most stable of plants, and often reverted to just purple. I do not think it is on offer in any new Zealand nursery today.
I was thinking about my memories of Laurie as we planted another hundred or so shrubs into the embankment on Saturday. He would have approved of what we were planting, but many people would not be happy there was a fair sprinkling of modern cultivars among them. Many people would prefer that ‘native’ plantings were confined to naturally occurring species, and that no cultivars would be allowed.
Others go a step further, insisting that only ‘eco-sourced’ material should be used. Plants are only raised by seed, not by cutting, and the seed has to be gathered from the closest possible naturally occurring stand.
This is an important concept when you are considering revegetation projects, as there is considerable genetic variation between different strains of the same species. Some plants, kowhai being a great example, are very widely divergent throughout New Zealand, and they are also very promiscuous – they will readily cross with each other. If we used a west Auckland species, for example, in a major rural planting, we risk bringing a new set of genetic factors into the local population.
There are some examples of some plants that could have an influence on their environment. I am sure botanists are worried about the widespread planting of the strong-growing Renga lily, Arthropodium ‘Matapouri Bay’. This has successfully colonised the nursery industry and is planted extensively throughout much of the country. It will now be spreading its Northland genes through all sorts of other wild populations, perhaps changing them forever.
Having said all that, I am sure we are doing the right thing by planting cultivars into the rejuvenated Robinson Park. We are not undertaking a revegetation project, we are creating a garden and the hybrid Hebes, Coprosmas, and even the golden totara, all look in place.

A posy

I spent some of this weekend pruning my roses, and giving some of the flowerbeds a general cleanup, and as I went I picked a little posy of flowers for my office. I was pleasantly surprised at how much out in the middle of winter.
The Daphne bholua in the Head Gardener’s border is almost at the peak of its flowering. This is a Himalayan species that has only been commonly found in New Zealand gardens for about twenty years. The forms from the highest parts of the Himalayas are deciduous, especially in colder climates, while those from the slighter warmer areas of the mountains are evergreen. I have grown a couple of different varieties in my garden and both stayed evergreen in our climate.
If you are only familiar with the “common Daphne”, D. odora, this species will come as a bit of a surprise. Instead of the slightly untidy, sprawling habit of D. odora, D. bholua has upright growth and can reach as tall as three metres high, although our plants seem to have topped out at about two metres. It is a tidy growing plant with attractive foliage, not shiny and longer than D. odora. If you want to keep it lower growing, it responds well to being trimmed – it can be cut back harder than common daphne, which does not like anything other than a light trim.
The whiter flowers, tinged with pink, have a lovely scent, reminiscent of D. odora, but not as strong. I love having a sprig or two of it on my desk, whereas I find D. odora too overpowering in close contact.
The Head Gardener has another winter-flowering shrub growing at the feet of the daphne – Correa ‘Dusky Bells’.
The Correas are underrated little Australian shrubs. There are about 11 species, but there is a lot of variation among the forms and it is quite likely that a detailed survey would result in more species being attributed.
‘Dusky Bells’ is probably a hybrid between C. reflexa and C pulchella. It will grow to about a metre high, with a similar spread, although it is usually confined to a lesser height. It carries drooping carmine-pink flowers through winter and into spring, and is at least hardy enough to cope with our garden, where it gets its share of frost. It can cope with full sun – Correas were once very popular in pebble gardens – but probably does best with some shade. It will grow well in moist soils.

Ageing in the garden

There is a famous saying about old age - it never arrives unaccompanied. I think it usually means that as we age our physical health and strength deteriorate and we find it more difficult to do tasks we once thought of as inconsequential.
Ageing gardeners find this particularly so. Our backs, once strong and resilient, no longer enthusiastically embrace the thought of a day’s good digging in the vegetable patch. Even the idea of bending down for an hour’s weeding has them twitching. And the almost daily cycle of working in a large garden is simply too much for many previously active gardeners to contemplate..
Many older gardeners want to be able to continue when they downsize their properties and they come up with some clever answers.
Fred (obviously not his real name) lived just down the road from me, in a nice house with a large section – over a third of an acre. He came from the noble New Zealand tradition of gardening providers, his father being an enthusiastic vegetable grower. He recalled that this was commented on at his wedding reception, when one speaker said it was the sign of a happy marriage when the father was outside in the garden all the time, and not under his wife’s feet. (I must say I am not convinced about that – I recall one of our neighbours furiously turning over the potato patch whenever the domestic peace had been broached.)
Fred grew enough vegetables to make a dent in the family’s greengrocery bill (he and his wife has six children) by growing a good range of vegetables, although he forswore brassicas, claiming he could not bear the battle with white butterfly – a complaint I have a lot of sympathy with. He also grew a number of fruit trees.
He retired ten years ago. Shortly after that he suffered a bad angina attack, and decided it was time to downsize to a more moderately sized garden. He and his wife shifted into a town house, a short walk from the town centre. He now has two raised beds where he still grows vegetables, concentrating on potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and lettuces.
He also has some fruit trees, but not the large trees that once graced his large section down the road. This time he has two dwarf apple trees, and an espaliered pear tree. Like many of his generation, Fred’s big OE was after he retired rather than before he married. While he and his wife were in Norfolk he saw an avenue of ‘Ballerina’ apples, and was so impressed he decided he could look after a few of them in his new garden.
Fred also likes pears. On his OE he also visited Devon where he saw some ancient espaliered pear trees growing against a brick wall. This again inspired him and he bought a twin grafted tree, with ‘Red Bartlett’ and ‘Doyenne du Comice.’
Fred insists he is an ‘elderly gardener’, but someone who is prepared to take on new ideas in his retirement seems to hardly fit that mould.

Winter colour

The Head Gardener has been working her magic again. She has somehow managed to persuade the African Violet that has sat unflowering, on our kitchen bench for more years than I care to recall – more then ten I think – to pop up a flower spike.
To make the story even more remarkable, this turn of events has come from a large “cutting” she took some months ago. My parentheses indicate that this was far from a planned propagation – a large cluster of leaves fell off the aged plant when she was clearing the bench, and she popped it into a new pot, with some unused potting mix. I, of course, scoffed, telling her that African Violets took more skill than that to propagate, and that she was wasting her time.
In the time-honoured fashion of wives, she took delight in proving me totally wrong – the velvety purple flower being the proof of her advanced horticultural skills. Or her green fingers.
It made me think back to the time I was working in the retail side of the horticulture industry, and the large number of indoor plants we used to sell. Fashions have changed and ‘pot plants’ are nowhere near as popular as they once were – it seems few people have the time to take the sort of care special plants like maidenhair ferns require, and perhaps we have out houses a little warmer and drier nowadays., also making it slightly harder to grow many of the old favourites.
In many ways African Violets are great indoor plants for the not-too-serious gardener, as they are not very fussy about their growing conditions, even if they can be a little parsimonious with their flowers. They are small enough growing to be able to be kept on a window sill (or a kitchen bench) and they prefer to be kept slightly dry rather than overly moist, so a little forgetfulness in the watering department is not going to be punished.
They do not need a large pot – they seem to grow fine if their roots are a little constrained – although they do require a high potash fertiliser to keep them flowering happily.
The best way to water these plants is to fill the saucer the pot is sitting in until it cannot take any more water, then leave it until it has thoroughly dried out again before watering. Do not keep the saucer filled with water all the time – it will kill the plant.
The trick to keeping them flowering well is to feed them often – something we have been neglecting to do with our specimen. When each flush finished flowering, remove the old heads and then use a ‘flower and fruit’ liquid fertiliser. In extreme cases, you can put the whole plant in a dark cupboard for four or five days, and the shock will often induce flowering.
Or, of course, you can break it up and pot in a new mix!

Roses in winter

June has certainly got off to a freezing start – I do not think I can remember such a cold Queen’s Birthday weekend for many years. As gardeners, of course, we are a bit disappointed in the rapid chilling of the ground we work, but all this cold weather will hopefully result in a great benefit for gardeners when the new season arrives.
Surely the chilling will greatly help those tree that require a sustained period of cold during the winter to properly initiate flower bud formation, and with any luck the severe weather will have taken its toll on the pestiferous insects that can survive a warmer winter.
For some other jobs the cold weather has been a bit of a pain.
This is the traditional time of the year for planting roses, but the wet and cold has made planting just a little uncomfortable. There is still time though to get to work on preparing beds for new varieties, although the sooner the better.
Roses do best in fresh soil. If you have to replace a variety in an existing bed it pays to completely replace the soil with fresh loam – about a wheel barrowful per plant will be needed. This is because roses are very prone to a condition called ‘rose sickness’ – spoil that has already grown roses is almost toxic for some (but not all) varieties. As a matter of interest, some other members of the rose family (apples in particular) seem a little prone to the same problem.
Chose a nice sunny position for your new roses – they really do not flourish when planted in shade. There are, however, one or two varieties that do prefer a little bit of shade as the cooler temperatures will help stop the blooms from fading too fast. Even these varieties need to be planted in soil away from the competition of other plants, especially trees, as roses need good levels of fertility and moisture.
If you have not prepared the soil for fresh beds, make sure you get onto it straight away. The best soil is a stiffish garden loam, with good humus levels. Even then, I think it pays to add some farmyard compost (well rotted, of course) or bucketloads of compost. It is also a good idea to add in some general purpose garden fertilise too, then leave the soil to settle for a month or six weeks.
If you have bought your roses and the soil is not ready for planting, make sure you keep the roots well watered. In the golden days of the nursery industry we used to line out our bare rooted stock into beds of sawdust. They would be perfectly happy in that medium until the spring, when the few that had not sold need potting on into potting mix – or even better, into a customer’s garden.
When it comes time to do the actual planting, make sure to dig a big hole – not one big enough to squash the roots into, but a generously sized hole that will enable you to spread the roots out. I always like to have a slight crown in the centre of the hole so the base of the roots can spread naturally downwards. If the soil is dry (hardly likely this year) pop about half a bucket of water in the hole and let it settle before filling it with the soil mix, making sure to firm it lightly with the sole of your boot. When the plant is placed correctly, the union of roots and branches, where the named variety has been budded onto the stock, should be sitting at the level of the soil. The plant will have been sprayed in the nursery so it will not need any further care until the spring.

Beating the blight

One of the interesting imponderables facing gardeners in the next few years is going to be the fate of the much-fancied camellia. All flowers come in and out of fashion, and the camellia has certainly had its peaks and troughs of popularity. In Victorian times the heavily doubled, and intriguingly splashed, formal types were in favour, but in the 1970s and 1980s, more relaxed forms, with plain colours predominating, became the norm.
They once again became very popular with gardeners again. Their evergreen manner and the dark glossy leaves that look so attractive even when the shrub is not in flower, made them favourites with people looking for year round value, and a more easily maintained garden.
Then along came the dreaded flower blight and everything changed again. This horribly disfiguring disease is caused by a very virulent fungus and effectively destroys the beauty of the blooms by browning them. There is no sign of any effective control yet, and those who passion is growing camellias must be throwing their hands up in frustration.
For us general gardeners, who are faced with messy camellia bushes, there are a couple of little tricks we can do to help things.
I have read other garden writers talk about extra care with hygiene being a partial solution, but frankly, I think they are dreaming. The theory is that because the disease is soil borne, if all diseased flowers are swept up from underneath the trees and deep mulch applied, the spread of the disease will be halted, and some form of control attained.
I think the advice is at best hopeful, at worst misleading. The spores can clearly move in the air, as its spread throughout New Zealand was remarkably quick, so any thought of sweeping up all the bold flowers to keep the disease at bay is just fanciful.
The answer is to plant Camellia varieties that get their flowering out of the way before the disease starts to kick in, in August and September. The best varieties to go for are the sasanquas
These are derived from a species grown in Japan for centuries, valued for its white flowers and gentle scent. It flowers from early autumn into the early winter, although other types flower later in the winter, even into early spring.
They have a more open growth habit that the more familiar Camellia japonica and hybrids, with narrower leaves and willowy growth in many cases. They make wonderful wall shrubs, when allowed to splay out in one dimension, but some of the denser growing forms also make very good hedges.
‘Yuletide’ has certainly become the most popular of the reddish forms, with compact growth and a great display of single red flowers, each filled with a great boss of golden stamen. This is a very tidy grower, and although it is not the fastest growing of the sasanquas, it still makes a great hedge.

Going nuts

This season has been wonderful for feijoas. Our own tree has cropped well despite a fair measure of neglect, and a friend has kept our breakfast plates overflowing with enough large fruit to sink the muesli under a sea of milk. Delicious.
There has even been enough to make a few feijoa and walnut cakes. Fortunately we have also been given some fresh walnuts to use in the cake, as our small section could not harbour a walnut tree.
Two friends have given us walnuts, and the nuts could not be more different. One set of nuts are small and bullet-like – the second lot are large and easily crushed, with a large number of them filled with delicious meat.
Walnuts are among the most popular of nuts in New Zealand, and once upon a time, when gardens were all larger and people were more concerned with a higher degree of self-sufficiency, most backyards would have featured a large walnut tree. Maybe with the increased interest in home produce, we might see a swing towards growing walnuts, and other nuts, again.
The so called English walnut Juglands regia, (it comes from a wide stretch of Southern Europe and Asia but not England), is the most commonly planted walnut by a long way. It is a rapidly growing, ultimately tall tree, so some thought needs to be given to its placement. Your neighbours are not going to be too happy if you plant it along a fence line and take out all their afternoon sun!
Choose a deep, well-drained fertile site, preferably with some shelter from the worst of the spring winds, which will give the foliage a going over. If you are in a cooler area, make sure it is not planted into a frosty dell as late spring frosts will play havoc with the flowers, meaning little or no nut production.
There is some debate about whether it is important to choose a grafted tree or not. Some companies insist that seed grown trees will catch up with grafted varieties after ten years or so, while others insist that it is always best to go with a grafted form. The seed grown trees will be bigger, but they will take longer to crop and you will not be absolutely certain what the nuts will be like. On balance, I think it is best to pay the higher price and get a grafted tree. They will be quite a bit dearer, but a walnut tree is a long term investment.

Rosemary, I love you

I was trying one of my favourite winter meals this weekend, a roast leeks and fish dish from one of Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks. It requires the use of a few herbs, so I raced out into the wild windy and watery evening to grab a few sprigs of rosemary and thyme, only to find my rosemary was an ex-rosemary.
It was my own fault.
I had planted the trailing rosemary a few years ago, on the edge of an elevated garden bed, but I had planted it near a Magnolia grandiflora, which has grown in the interim, and now completely shades the area where my rosemary should have been. A self-sown kohuhu, Pittosporum tenuifolium, with small grey scalloped leaves, has also grown in the area, so my poor old rosemary did not have a chance really.
Rosemary, Rosmarinus officianalis, is a Mediterranean plant and needs full sun and good drainage to succeed well. In the past I have found they will flourish on the edge of elevated gardens, and will even survive in dry stone walls, as along as they are well watered during their establishment period.
Once growing they should need no watering or feeding, and will only require the occasional trim to keep them tidy. They are not predated by any insects that I know of, and will prove hardy down to more frost than you will find in our area. They make a great seaside plant, as the “marinus” part of their Latin name will let you know.
They are, of course, useful plants inside the house as well. Oil of rosemary is an important ingredient on Eau de Cologne, and it is an important ingredient of numerous culinary recipes. Sprigs are said to impart a lovely flavour to barbecued meat if they are thrown on the embers.
I will replace my one soon, and will probably use an upright one this time, in a different garden. ‘Tuscan Blue’ is probably the best erect form. It has rich green foliage and deep violet-blue flowers. It makes a rigid upright form, quite narrow when young, and as the branches sprout from the base, it can be used to make an effective hedge. .
‘Lockwood de Forest’ is a prostrate form of the above variety, with the same deep flowers and dark, narrow foliage. The other common weeping form, ‘Prostrata’, has much lighter blue flowers, and lighter green foliage. It does make an interesting mat, almost assuming bonsai like growth at times. It is fabulous for use among stone walls or elevated rock gardens.
There is a pink flowered form around, but the “pink” needs to be seen through rose-coloured glasses to be satisfactory. There is also a white flowered form, but the flowers are not clean, and surely the point of rosemary is that it is blue?
Some friends in the local herb society recently gave me a copy of a small book they have produced called ‘Herbal, Green and Practical Tips’, which is a useful compendium of useful hints and remedies – I guess it is the accumulated wisdom of centuries of gardeners. I looked in it to check something I was told when a child - that rosemary made a good hair conditioner. Sure enough, there it is in the book – use rosemary for greasy hair!
The book also recommends rosemary for use with lamb and chicken (not fish I noticed!) and a few leaves in a cup of tea are said to give a pleasant taste, and also help the memory work well (if you remember to do it of course) and aid the nervous and circulatory systems.
This was a not of much use to me – I have no rosemary bush at the moment.

Poppies

One of my earliest gardening memories is gathering poppy buds with my mother. She would carefully cut each stem with a pair of scissors, selecting those that were not quite open. The stems were then brought inside and the end of each stem scorched with a candle flame. I was always intrigued by the way the black hairs on the end of the stems were quickly consumed, while the stem ends were singed. My mother told me thr flowers would keep better in water if treated this way.
Perhaps that is why I have always had a soft sport for poppies. They have a bold simplicity of form, with their (usually) single bowl-shaped flowers, and often have subdued colour clarity.
The most popular poppies are undoubtedly the Iceland Poppies. They are derived from the wild short-lived perennial species, Papaver nudicaule, which occurs naturally in the high latitudes of Europe and Northern America. They are found in, naturally, in Iceland. In the wild they are only yellow and white, but over the 250 years they have been cultivated, a wide range of colours has been developed, especially into the deep orange and pink shades.
In the garden they tend to behave like biennials, although they can be kept a live for more than one flowering season. We usually plant them out in autumn for spring flowering. They do best in well-drained soil in full sun. They look fabulous in areas where the sun can shine through the translucent petals.
There are many varieties of Iceland Poppy available as seedlings, most very similar. I usually grow the older variety ‘Artists Glory’, which has a good range of different colours, with some two toned forms. If you are constrained for space, try the ‘Wonderland’ series, which has a similar range of colours but only grows to about half the size at about 20 cm. The flowers are correspondingly smaller.
There are, of course, many other poppies, some of which hold a special place in the hearts of the general populace, while others hold special places in the hearts of serious gardeners.
The red soldiers’ poppy has come to commemorate our fallen soldiers - a wonderfully evocative floral symbol of remembrance. It is the red corn poppy, which spread across Europe as our first ancestors moved across the continent with their cereal crops. The poppy came along for the ride as a cornfield weed.
Its significance as a remembrance symbol derives from the Canadian doctor John McCrae’s evocative poem In Flanders Field, where he draws on the way the blood red poppy bloomed on the killing fields of Flanders. This so moved one woman that she campaigned to have the poppy accepted as the official symbol of remembrance for the United States, from where it spread to Commonwealth countries.
The single red soldiers’ poppy can be bought for the garden, but its descendants, the Shirley poppies, are more common. These are the result of an observant English country vicar, the Rev William Wilks, who noticed just one flower with a white rim around the edge of the petals. He took seeds from this plant and grew them in his garden at Shirley, selecting for both colour and flower form until he had singles, doubles, and intermediate forms, in colours ranging from white and pale lilac to pink and red. Following generations have also been at work on this species (P. rhoeas) and have made the flowers much larger, until they now match the largest of the Iceland Poppies

Prickly pears

While we were walking around the Gisborne Botanical Gardens recently the Head Gardener and I came across a large cactus collection donated to the city some years ago. Much of the collection was housed in an attractive looking glasshouse, which was closed. I read that it is closed each weekend, which seems somewhat bizarre, but there you go.
There were a large number of prickly customers outside though, including some Opuntia species that were in fruit. When I pointed out the fruit to the Head Gardener, and told her my brothers and I used to eat them when we were children, she looked flabbergasted and a little horrified.
My mother had a small collection of cacti in a large built-in planter box alongside our living room window, in a warm, north-facing position. She always said it was to deter my father from coming home drunk, and as I can not ever recall him doing so, I guess it worked.
There were a couple of Opuntia species. These are the cacti with fan shaped leaves, covered with clusters of fierce spikes. One had “fish-hook” spines, each end tipped over to make extraction even more difficult. One of my uncles fell foul of this brute when he was painting our house and had to be taken to the emergency department to have the spines removed.
The other variety was similar to the species that is such a pest in the dry parts of Australia. When introduced to the large, dry expanses of the outback, these species thought they were back home in the Americas, and took off like wildfire.
Our specimen was hacked back periodically but still grew to the roofline. Each year it had an abundant display of single yellow flowers, followed by a good crop of what we called “prickly pears”.
These little fruit were covered in small prickles and needed careful handling, but they were filled with a crunchy fruit with a flavour reminiscent of water melon. They were packed with tiny black seeds. They can be used to make jellies and jams – even ice cream – but our culinary adventures were confined to eating the fruit raw.
With the trend to edible gardens that is sweeping the world, maybe we could all take up growing a crop of “prickly pears” to make up our “five a day” vegetable and fruit quota.
It is probably easier to grow some other pears though – either European or Asian pears are a lot safer to grow, and can be grown in a confined space without putting any of the family at risk!

Pomegranates

I think it was the poet John Keats who referred to autumn as the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness – a wonderfully evocative description of the time of the year when the sun’s powers diminish and the air cools. This cooling is usually accompanied by an increase in rainfall, but this year late summer and autumn have been marked by a prolonged settled and dry spell, nowhere more evident than on the East Coast of the North Island.
The Head Gardener and I made a trip up to Gisborne in the last week or so, stopping for a while in Napier. The fruitfulness was evident everywhere; Feijoa trees laden with their fragrant swelling fruit; mature persimmons hanging like Chinese Lanterns on trees with colour-changing foliage, and even ripening pomegranates.
Pomegranates are not the easiest of plants to grow in inland parts of New Zealand – they like cool winters and hot summers (which we provide very well) but they are also frost tender, and a good winter chilling will see them struggling.
We have sometimes grown the dwarf form, Punica grntatum ‘Nana Pleno’ in our gardens. This has double orange flowers, looking rather like a bright carnation and was once a very popular shrub, as its dense twiggy growth habit, and the summer-long smattering of flowers made it welcome in shrub borders. Today its deciduous nature has made it less popular.
The double flowered forms do not fruit – you need a single-flowered variety for that. In the Mediterranean, where this is a treasured fruit, the trees can grow to about eight metres high, and look spectacular when in flower. They are a challenge to grow well in New Zealand, but in a warm, sunny position in a sheltered area, where the frost will not be a problem, they should fruit well and given a normal East Coast summer – long and hot – they should have enough time to ripen.
The fruit should be harvested when it has turned bright red, and gives off a metallic sound when tapped. They will keep well at normal house temperatures – in fact, the flavour intensifies as they mature.

Sweet, sweet peas

I am not sure what made me think of sweet peas in the middle of Easter.
Perhaps it was the arrival of some special seed (not sweet peas!) from that doyen of New Zealand plant breeders Dr Keith Hammett. A friend generously shared some Amaryllis belladonna seed he had received from the good doctor, and perhaps it made me think of Keith’s work with sweet peas. I was also cutting back some Hammett-bred dahlias, and taking cuttings from some of his pinks, so perhaps that was what caused it.
Or maybe it was removing the last of the climbing beans from their frame. It may have spurred me to think about planting sweet peas along the frame as a crop for late spring/early summer. They have flourished on the frame in years past, although it has been a few seasons since I planted them there.
Then, of course, there was that wonderful edition of Country Calendar showing the Gisborne ladies who grow crops of sweet peas for seed, on contract to British seed merchants. The sight of row after row of gloriously coloured flowers might have been the trigger.
It could just have been guilt though.
I normally pick out some special sweet pea seed from one of the seed companies that sell by individual colours, and then sow them in the glasshouse on March 17. That date is easy to remember – it is the Head Gardeners birthday – so I nearly always remember. But this year, with lots of running around with other things, it slipped my mind. So I made a special trip to the garden centre to pick up some punnets of ‘Fragrant Cloud’ sweet peas and carefully planted them in the soil under the climbing frame.

Easter gardening

Northern Hemisphere friends often comment on how odd our southern Christmases seem. They cannot imagine a yuletide festival where the only branches burning are driftwood logs on the beach, under the shade of a pohutukawa tree, with sausages roasting rather than chestnuts.
I suspect they would be similarly bewildered over our Easter. For them it is a festival of regeneration and resurrection, where the community celebrates the arrival on new life, in the form of spring. Here we are almost completely in the opposite position. It is our harvest festival time, although we fill it with images of rabbits, chickens and lambs.
This Easter was even more confusing, with rumours of frosts, snow-clad mountain ranges, and four days of brilliant weather. I guess I would not have been alone in spending most of the time in the garden, doing some storage, some regeneration and even a little resurrection.
I had to attack a large clump of the wonderful Iris sibirica ‘Windward Spring’. This is a stunning blue flowered Iris, with grass-like upright leaves. It dies right away for the winter, but in spring sends up stately blooms, but I have been naughty, letting it alone for about eight years. That has meant it has not had the rejuvenation it needs to bloom as prolifically as it should. I dug the whole clump up (I needed and axe to break through it) then split it up carefully.
Gardening books often talk about using two garden forks, to break up clumps of perennials, placing them back-to-back among the clump, then wedging them apart, using the fulcrum.
Sounds like a good idea, but I can tell you it does not work for any strong growing perennial, such as this iris. It took a spade and a lot of effort to separate it all, replace the soil and fertilise it, and then replant a tiny fraction of the original plant. I bagged up some divisions for friends too.
I also took cuttings of some of the perennials I was cleaning up, including a lot of different Dianthus cultivars. These also get very woody of left alone, but they are easy to strike from cuttings at this time of the year. I simply take a piping. These are shoots cut from the plant at the second or third joint and inserted, close to each other, in a pot filled with pumice sand. They will strike within a three or four weeks, when they can be potted on. They will be ready to plant out in the spring.
I also took cuttings from my Penstemons, as, although they are best cut down later in the year, they have such wonderful wood for propagating at present. These are again taken as stems with about three or four leaf buds, and placed in pumice propagating sand. I do not bother with rooting hormone. I think the hormones really help those cuttings that were going to strike anyway, but have no affect on those that were not!
Last autumn I crossed some red Chilean bellflowers, Lapageria rosea with the exquisite white form. The seed set and germinated. I pricked out those seedlings this weekend, and also sowed some precious seed of new hybrid Amaryllis belladonna, from one of New Zealand’s best plant breeders.
All-in-all a very exciting Easter.