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.

Apples ...

The Head Gardener and I had a very pleasant afternoon recently, walking through a well-established orchard that friends have planted on their lifestyle block on the outskirts of a Wairarapa town, crammed with apples, pears, peaches, nectarines, quinces, feijoas…. almost any hardy fruit you care to name, including more unusual varieties, such as medlars. It was a slightly humbling experience to walk among the many different apple varieties, choosing fruit to sample from those later fruiting types.
Any what types! Fruit glorying in a range of seemingly eccentric names – Kentish Fillbasket, Peasgood Nonesuch, and Merton Russett – and displaying a great variety of colours, sizes and – as we found out – flavours.
Not everyone is going to have the space and the inclination to grow such a wide range of apples but most gardens can fit in one or two varieties, either on dwarfing rootstock, or as espaliers.
I am a great fan of the Greytown fruit breeder James Hutton Kidd, who was breeding apples a century ago. His ‘Gala’ variety is in the background of most recent New Zealand varieties, so his work has had huge influence of the apples we export.
Among his once-popular types are a few that fell out of favour for a while, but are staging a comeback. ‘Kidd’s Orange Red’ is a reliable late-season fruiting variety, similar to Cox’s Orange Pippin, with a rich, aromatic taste with a good balance between the tart and sweet flavours.
‘Freyberg’ is a greenish-yellow fruit with hints of russetting, so it does not look the shiny red apples we have come to expect in supermarkets. But the fruit has a much more complex flavour than modern types, with nuttiness combined with sweetness. It ripens in the mid season but will keep on the tree developing further complexities of flavour.
“Laxton’s Fortune’ is a variety bred in England in 1904, but a famous nursery family. It has lovely colour, with red stripes over green/yellow skin with a little russetting sometimes. It has a lovely sweet flavour, again more complex the later it is picked.
‘Sir Prize’ has yellow green skin and tender flesh. It is an excellent keeping, late fruiting, ‘Golden Delicious’ type. It was one we were able to pick from the orchard, and both enjoyed eating.
If you want to keep yourself even healthier than the traditional “apple a day” will, try another surprise, ‘Monty’s Surprise’, a good crisp, late-ripening apple that is shiny red over light green. It has been shown to have enormous potential for prevention of disease, and is regarded as the best anti-cancer apple in the world. It was found as a wild seedling in the Manawatu, but is now available throughout New Zealand.

Do not forget the natives!

For a long time botanists considered there was only one New Zealand species of kaka beak – Clianthus puniceus, found in East Cape and northern Hawke’s Bay, and also in isolated places in Northland, where European scientists first found it. Maori had long treasured it for its red flowers.
That view has now changed and botanists say there are two species – the critically endangered Clianthus puniceus which is now found in only one place - Moturemu Island in the Kaipara Harbour - and the only slightly less endangered Clianthus maximus, which is found in the East Cape area, in a small number of sites.
This second plant is the one most commonly met with in gardens, although often described as being the first named species. By far the most usual form is ‘Kaka King’, a selected East Cape variety, cutting-raised and all stemming from one wild plant.
The number of plants found in the wild is plummeting remarkably. In 1995 over 1000 plants were found growing naturally. A decade later the number had fallen to just over 150.
So what is happening?
The plants threatened status is due to two factors – changing environmental conditions, and excessive predation.
In the wild, these plants are early colonisers of bare ground, often being among the first plants to invade slips and other gravelly sites. Over time they get shaded out by taller growing species like tutu and kanuka, but there is always fresh ground to invade.
The young seedlings are soft and succulent, as anyone who has grown these native treasures from seed will know. This has made them very prone to predation from deer, which browse the screes and slips the kaka beak once colonised. And goats, which are an increasing pest in the East Cape area, also love to eat the young plants.
At first glance it would appear that gardeners could have a part to play in keeping kaka beak safe for the future, but it turns out to be a faulty concept. Unfortunately, almost all the plants grown in the trade are grown as cuttings, and thus there is a very much reduced gene pool.
The answer has to be action in the wild. One programme has seen school children planting thousands of seedlings on the roadside, and a journey through the East Cape in October is enlivened buy the site of strips of the bright red flowers of kaka beak.
That is not to say we cannot help. Some nurseries are now starting to raise plants from seed rather than from cuttings, and, as many gardeners will tell you, kaka beak plants will set seed in the garden, and germinate well in light, open soil.
In the garden these plants do best in full sun – remember they die out if planted in the darkest depths although they can cope with light shade. They prefer well worked soil, preferably well-drained, and should be kept out of strong winds. They can a slightly frost tender, but should cope with most sites in the lower North Island.

Dreaming of hosts of silver daffodils

Narcissus 'Thalia'

For those who love spring flowering bulbs there can be no time of the year more exciting that autumn – not even spring. In spring the flowers may or may not come to fruition, but in the autumn, every bulb holds the potential of beauties as yet unseen, is a perfect vision as yet unrealised.
My letter box, and my e-mail Inbox, are filled with fliers, announcements and catalogues from various bulb growers and importers each autumn, and each year I find myself being tempted by another batch of new varieties.
As much as I love the multitude of ‘other’ bulbs – tulips, irises, crocuses and hyacinths - there is no doubt that the flower we most associate with spring is the (usually) golden wonder, the daffodil. I cannot imagine any garden without a good selection of these charmers.
Pure white kinds look great in the garden, especially if planted alongside darker foliaged plants. My favourite is a slightly smaller variety called ‘Ice Wing’, with reflexing petals and snowy white cup. I have a large clump in a pot – it is fantastic. There are similar types -‘Thalia’ is also fabulous, and the old species N. triandrus ‘Alba’ is a treasure.
I am always a sucker for miniature bulbs, and the dwarf daffodils are no exception. I love the bright little Hoop Daffodils, with their comparatively large cups –usually bright gold but sometimes paler, even white – and their almost non-existent petals. These are very easily grown, and look fabulous in a large terracotta bowl.
Other favourite miniatures which have done well for me include ‘Tete a Tete’, a perfect miniature daffodil with bright yellow flowers, two or three to each head. ‘Jetfire’ is a sunny, bright little bulb with backwards-curving yellow petals and lovely orange-red cups. This has proven a reliable bloomer with us, and also makes good increase.
‘Rise and Shine’ is another pert little scented flower, with backwards curving white petals and small cups. They open slightly orange then fade to yellow. Another great little plant.
Daffodils are the easiest of bulbs. As long as the soil is not too dry –they are pasture plants in the wild – and the site is not shaded (they fade away in the shade), they will stay in the garden and provide colour spring after spring.
As always, we have bought some new varieties this autumn, so I must away and get them planted. And say a little prayer that they will be as pretty as I am now imagining they will be!

Red Pouch Fungus

I am on annual leave - sort of. By that I mean I am also giving speeches and attending meetings during my time off, but I have managed to make some time for myself.
The first day of my leave was gloriously fine so I went west - then north, then east...
What I mean is that I climbed up the East Holdsworth route to the Holdsworth summit. This is a longer route than the usual one but is more interesting and prettier - or, at least, so I think. The round trip took about six hours.
There was little of horticultural merit on my trip but I did find a patch or two of this red pouch fungus, Weraroa erythrocephala which grows to about 30mm in the forest litter. In a few months time there will be a much grander array of fungus in fruit on the mountain, but this is a charming little thing.

Verbena, verbena, verbena

This summer I fell in love all over again - with an old gardening favourite, the American verbena.
In New Zealand there are essentially two different types of verbenas – those that are grown as annuals, and those that we treat as perennials.
I think the annual verbenas are not planted anywhere enough. They provide a steady stream of colour right through the summer, and are available in a wide range of colours.
I have a particular soft spot for bi-coloured flowers, and was taken with a red- and white form I saw bedded out in a local garden. I think red and white make brilliant companions in the garden – I remember a planting of red and white petunias in an elevated brick planter, backed by a white trellis covered in Dublin Bay – and this planting in an elevated bed was very memorable.
It is difficult for the home gardener to get access to single colours in many annual varieties, although it is simple enough for commercial growers. Some companies make it easier though. My Taranaki friends at Egmont Seeds (whose catalogue is on line) sell single colours to the public.
I think their most popular strain is the older ‘Crystal Ball’ which is composed of solid coloured flowers in a wide range of colours – it includes apricot, blue, white, magenta, rose and deep pink – and is able to cope with light frosts so it will survive well into the autumn.
The Quart series is a marvellous one for bedding, for baskets or for containers. There is a mix of solid and two-toned types, and again, a wide range of colours. There are also some interesting mixes available, with a ‘Waterfalls Mix’ which includes lavender, purple and white forms, and ‘Merlot Mix’ (which should attract those of us who like alcoholic drinks) which features plain burgundy, burgundy with a white eye, magenta, rose and white.
I think my favourite variety of all the bedding verbenas is still the wonderful ‘Peaches and Cream’. This is an international award winning strain that we first grew in the nursery about ten years ago, and fell in love with straight away. It is absolutely brilliant in association with terracotta, so is ideally suited to pots. It has a unique two tone orange and peach colour pattern, brighter when opening, but then fading to a creamy shade as each flowers ages. Like most bedding verbena, it is a half hardy perennial best treated as an annual.
All the bedding verbenas will do well in any well-fertilised soil, with adequate moisture and full sun. The requirement for an open position is fundamental to solving the only problem that these bedding beauties have – they are a little prone to mildew. In the shade – especially in damp shade – they will quickly cover themselves with the tell-tale silvery powder that is an indicator of the disease.

A long wait for a florum

Autumn as well and truly with us now, with cold nights and dewier mornings predominating, along with a good dollop of rain for most of us. The garden centres are responding to the autumn surge – they seem to all be stocked up with fresh spring flowering bulbs. This weekend I went down to my favourite nursery to pick up some annuals for winter colour and found myself tempted by some of the small flowering reticulate irises I always fall for.
But autumn is not only a time for buying bulbs, it is also a time to enjoy those bulbs whose dormant time is over summer and who bounce into growth at this time.
I have had a surprise appear in a pot in the glasshouse. About ten years ago I sowed some seeds from an overseas supplier, which included a lot of seeds of bulbous plants. One in particular I was interested in seeing – one of the so called autumn crocuses, the Colchicums. The seed I bought was from C. longiflorum, one of the smaller species of this widespread northern hemisphere genus.
A few years later a number of leaves appeared in the pot and I anxiously awaited the first flowering of my new plant. There must have been a mix up as the flower that finally appeared in the bright blue pot (in spring I must add) was most assuredly not a Colchicum – rather it was a lovely form of the white Narcissus triandrus, one of my favourite bulbs. I was slightly disappointed, as I am a bit of a fan of Colchicums, but the treat of the lovely icy-white flowers took the edge off my disappointment.
Imagine my surprise then, when I went out to sow some Pacific Coast Iris seeds recently. There in the little blue pot that housed my white miniature daffodil is the most perfect little pale pink Colchicum flower– my long-awaited, and to be completely honest, nearly forgotten C. longiflorum. And what a little pet of a thing it is. It is about 100 mm high with a spreading set of six petals, more open than most other Colchicums I have seen, and with the most delicate baby pink colourings. I am entranced with my newest seedling – as I should be after ten years waiting for a flower.

Those smelly beauties

I love autumn. The first of the autumn rains has freshened up the soil and the tremendous heat of the summer is starting to dissipate. Although much of the garden is preparing itself for a winter slumber, some plants are at their decorative best at this time of the year. This year I have noticed that the English Oak trees appear to be having a very good cropping season – their bright green acorns seem to be displayed more prominently than usual.
There is another reason I love autumn though – it is the time to start ordering and buying spring-flowering bulbs. I love most times of the year in the gardenbut the flush of spring flowers is surely hard to beat.
This year I have been thinking about onions, garlic, leeks and their kin – not only the ones in the vegetable garden either.
The ones in the vegetable plot are doing fine, although I had some worries with the onions. This year they just did not want to form bulbs, growing thick stems instead, and looking like giant spring onions. In the end most of them made bulbs, but not until late in the season. I may have planted them a little deep – they prefer to grow almost on the surface – and the soil may have had too much nitrogen, forcing leaf growth rather than bulbs. The problem seems to have fixed itself, and we will be picking the crop very soon – as soon as the leaves, now folded over, have died off.
I have always been a fan of the ornamental members of the huge Allium tribe, and grow two or three different species and hybrids here. But this year a new form has taken my eye, a hybrid between Allium christophii and A. macleanii called ‘Globemaster.’
It was A. christophii that first got me interested in these oddities of the garden world. A lovely clump was well-established in the first garden I loved, that of my grandparents. It threw up the most glorious globular heads of silvery pink flowers in mid –spring. The flowers lasted for a couple of weeks, then gradually lost their colour until they remained as a dried seed head, much treasured by my grandmother for her flower arrangements.
‘Globemaster’ takes this style a step further. Each head of flowers is up 20 cm across, held on chunky stems of up to a metre high. Every starry flower in the head is bright violet, and shines in the sun. British gardeners have acclaimed this as the best large flowered Allium yet bred. I cannot wait to see this flowering in my garden next spring.
‘Gladiator’ is also around for the first this year. This is taller and the flowers are deeper. They look, according to one catalogue I have looked at, “like giant softballs.” I do not know whether that is an inducement to plant or not, but they make brilliant accent plants for the middle or rear of the border.
It might pay to think carefully about placing these bulbs as they tend to lose their foliage early in the season and can leave a bit of a gap in the garden. I think they would work well with some mid-sized Dahlias planted in front, to take over when the Alliums have finished.

Summer Clematis

I always say I am the easiest person in the world to buy a present for. Any kind of garden voucher or book voucher will suit me fine. Those who know me really well might even be able to work out what sort of garden plants or books I would like.
The Head gardener knows my tastes better than anyone, so I was not surprised that she returned from a recent trip to Taranaki with a book or two – albeit rescued from the sales table at the Inglwood Public Library. As well as a novel or two, there was an interesting book on the cultivation of Clematis, written in Australia.
I grow a few native Clematis species, and have grown some of the more popular garden varieties, but there is an amazing number of hybrids available, most of which I have never grown.
I am keen on some of the autumn flowering species and varieties, but there is a problem with some of them – they have delightful fluffy seed heads which convinces everyone that they are the dreaded (and mis-named) Traveller’s Joy, C. vitalba which has become such a pest in our native forest lands.
One of the best of these is the delightful yellow-flowered species, C. orientalis. This, in its best forms, has butter yellow flowers that nod on the end of stiff stalks. It flowers from about Christmas time, with spluttering of flowers through until autumn. At the same time silken flower heads are forming, providing a nice contrast.
This species is quite energetic – it can grow about eight meters in a season – but looks great when grown among dark-leaved trees. It is deciduous, losing its leaves over winter, when it can be trimmed back.
I have grown the similar looking C. tangutica, although it is not in our present garden. This also has small lantern-shaped flowers, lighter yellow in this species. This is sometimes called the orange peel Clematis, although that common name really belongs to C. orientalis.
Again, this flowers from about the New Year, and later flowers will be held among the silken flower heads. These heads will stay safely on the plant until the winter winds and rains destroy them.
Both the above are very hardy and will cope with anything our climate throws at them. They should be planted relatively shallowly – do not plant and deeper than the mark in the planter bag – and make sure you keep them well watered while they are being established. Once safely away they require no special looking after.

Dirty confession

I have a dirty confession to make – I have some Montbretias in my garden.
This is a shameful thing to admit because Montbretias are a pest plant in many parts of New Zealand. Their ancestry in damp and warm areas of South Africa has allowed them acclimatise to New Zealand conditions with startling rapidity.
At this time of the year river banks splashed with burnt orange can be found all over the country. Last year, when I walked the length of the Ruamahanga River, I found wild samples of these weedy corms in big patches along the river, coming across my first clump underneath the first road bridge across the river at Mount Bruce.
Since then I have found clumps further into the hills, but still alongside streams, indicating their method of dispersal - they move along in the floods and when they find themselves stranded on the banks, put down roots and set up home, eventually starting a family who, in turn, migrate downstream.
Montbretias are in fact Crocosmias – Montbretia is an old fashioned and osolete name. They are native to south-eastern South Africa, and are mostly winter deciduous bulbs. They are members of the vast iris family, with flowers that look a little like an orange or yellow Freesia when seen up close.
The problem plant in New Zealand is the hybrid Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora, first bred in France in the nineteenth century. It has been extensively developed in England, when it is a popular garden plant. The English winters make this a slightly tender treasure in all but the southern counties.
There are some non-invasive species and hybrids suitable for New Zealand gardens. The one I grow in my garden is C. masoniorum ‘Lucifer’. As you would expect, this has bright red flowers, and has received awards in the United Kingdom. It is popular all over the gardening world.
There are other varieties available. Well-regarded English plant breeder Alan Bloom (yes, I know his name is a pun!) breeds many perennial plants at his Bressingham gardens, and he has been playing with Crocosmias. The wonderful butter yellow ‘Jenny Bloom’ has recently been released in New Zealand, and is a variety to keep an eye out for.
If you do have a patchy of the weedy forms, do your best to get in under control, especially if it is on a waterway. Small clumps can be dug up, but larger ones are best treated when they are growing strongly, with a dose of Round Up or something similar.
This great image from the University of British Columbia webiste www.ubcbotanicalgarden.org

Watering in time of drought

My dear old Auntie Molly, who died last year in her nineties, was right on the button about climate warming. On one of my visits to her there was a lull in the conversation, and being the experienced conversationalist she was – she was in her nineties, after all – she told me she did not believe in global warming.
I was initially surprised that a ninety-something year old should hold an opinion on the subject at all. I quickly assumed she meant that she was a sceptic on the matter.
She proceeded to put me right, telling me the problem should be thought of as climate change, not global warming, as some places were going to get colder and some places were going to get warmer. And some places were going to get warmer in summer but colder in winter.
It looks pretty much like she was right. We have been having record high temperatures, while our northern hemisphere cousins freeze under record cold temperatures.
Those of us who garden on the eastern coast of both New Zealand’s main islands are going to have to gradually rethink the sort of gardens we aim for, and make some alterations in the plants we grow. We are fooling ourselves if we think we are going to be able to continue to irrigate as though there is a never ending supply of water for our horticultural needs. Councils are going to introduce more stringent watering restrictions, and societal tolerance for those who water outside those rules will be zero.
So what do we water first when watering is restricted?
When prioritising plants for water, make sure you protect reasonably recently planted trees and shrubs, especially those in exposed, windy positions. Mature trees and shrubs will have a much more extensive root system, and, as such, will be far better able to cope with a water deficit. Keep an eye on such plantings though, as they will still be prone to water stress if the drought continues long enough. Fortunately such trees will normally show early signs of being under stress. Their leaves will wilt, perhaps even drop, when they are water stressed.
Make sure you follow a few other sensible guidelines when watering any trees and shrubs.
Do not water the leaves – it is a waste of time and water. Trees cannot absorb water through their leaves, and much of the water thrown in the air is wasted through evaporation. Instead water at ground level, and make sure you water to a depth of 30 cm at least, remembering to water inside the tree’s drip line.
It is also important to keep an eye on the rate of water application – too fast and the ground will not be able to absorb the water and it will run off. Water slowly over a long period, so the flow of water gets deep down to the trees roots. Watering for short times only encourages shallow rooting which can lead to more drought damage. Do not be tempted to dig holes in the ground in an effort to water deeply either. This dries roots out even more and causes more damage.

P.s. photo courtesy Iowa State University - thanks folks!

Lake Onoke Spit

I am still on leave so took the chance to go visit the other end of the Ruamahanga River today – the Lake Onoke Spit, the barrier between the waters of the Ruamahanga system and the sea, on the shore of Cook Strait.

The Lake Onoke ‘spit’ is a mixed sand and gravel barrier beach that has formed by concurrent processes of marine sedimentation and tectonic uplift. In the process it has impounded an embayment to form a shallow coastal lake, Lake Onoke.
Mixed sand and gravel beaches are uncommon shorelines types and the examples that occur in New Zealand are internationally significant. The shallow coastal lake and gravel barrier system is one the largest of its kind in New Zealand and its relatively unmodified state makes this feature an outstanding example of its type.
I was expecting to find the colony of Caspian Terns that my friend Colin Scadden has been documenting for many years, but I saw no sign of it. I was accompanied by Black Backed Gulls at times, and saw a few shags, oyster catchers, dotterels, and a group of four gannets, swooping along the shoreline, parallel to the coast.

There were signs of visitors, including this shelter which has probably been constructed over the summer.

The spit is partially colonised by plants, including the lovely nihinihi, Calystegia soldanella. Those of you who are gardeners will recognise this as a member of the convolvulus family. It does not grow naturally inland, so I assume it is frost tender.

In many New Zealand coastal places Hare’s Tail Grass, Lagurus ovatus, is a common component of the flora – here on the spit it has made one or two extensive lawns, which look quite pretty in late summer when the seed heads are full.

On my way back along the spit I found a fish - but the birds had found it first!

Chamberlain's Creek and beyond

Today is the first anniversary of the day I started walking down the river. As I am on leave, I celebrated by walking up into the bed of the Ruamahanga from Roaring Stag hut, venturing further upstream than I have ever been.
It is about a 150 minute climb up and over a steep hill from Putara to get into the river at Roaring Stag, and then another 75 minute clamber to get as far up the river as I went today. The river gradually gets narrower and, at the place I stopped, it is in a gorge. I even walked past the dreaded Chamberlain's Creek, the most dangerous little creek in the ranges according to some. Looked calm with summer flow, of course.
I did not need to swim on any of the pools, but I would not venture past the point I finished at without a party to help.


I have talked to others about the last remaining section of the river – and none of my tramping friends have ever been into the upper gorge, which suggests it is not a place for the fainthearted, and perhaps not a place for a nature-loving bushwalker – much less a 56 year old one.
Time will tell whether I am spurred to clamber up to Cattle Ridge, for example, and then drop down through untracked country into the southern arm of the river, then out through the two upper gorges.

As gay as a row of pink tents

The Head Gardener has a theory about my passion for small bulbs and rock plants. She reckons the plants I like have such long Latin names that I have to have labels that are larger than the plants. I think the final straw for her was the pretty little annual American daisy I grew – called Haplopappus phyllocephalus. I told her the first name meant “happy” (or at least sounded like it) and the second part meant “head”, so she should just call the plant “happy head” or “smiler”.
Some plants, though, have names that reflect their nature perfectly – although it is not always intentional. Take that flamboyant climber, the Campsis. Its name comes from a Greek word for “something bent”, an allusion to the curving stamen, but the flowers on this vigorous climber are as camp as a row of pink tents. Perfectly named, if you ask me.
There are only two species of Campsis in the wild, both Northern Hemisphere climbers of woodlands. They are strong growing plants and need a little bit of care in smaller gardens, but in an area where they can be allowed to grow almost unchecked, they will flounce about with gay abandon, giving an amazing display of orange or yellow flowers during the hot months of the year.
Despite being woodland plants in the wild, they will grow well in full sun, and free draining soil. Remarkably, they are very tolerant of salt winds, so they are a popular plant for the seaside.
They can be pruned rigorously if their natural exuberance needs controlling.
A suburban garden near my first garden had a remarkable example of this. It featured Campsis growing up some verandah poles. Each winter, when the plant lost its leaves, the owner used to trim the whole plant back to the stems. Each spring it would bounce into growth again, and flower profusely over the summer, before being trimmed back to its bare state in winter.
You do have to be a bit careful about digging around the roots though. If you cut a root you will have a new plant or two – a great easy way to propagate if you are a nurseryman, but a potential nuisance in the garden.
There is another potential problem with this plant. It is a self-supporting climber. It produces aerial roots which cling to branches or netting – but they will also work their way into masonry, so do not plant these climbers against a brick wall.
The two most common forms seen in New Zealand are ‘Madame Galen’ and ‘Guilfoeyli’ and I have sent hem described as C. radicans, and also as forms of the Chinese Trumpet Vine, C. grandiflora.
They are actually both varieties of the hybrid between the two species, C. x tagliabuana – and I am sorry about the Latin name again. The “tagliabuana” bit comes from some well-known Italian gardeners, the Tagliabue brothers, who first crossed the two species.
‘Guilfoeyli’ is an Australian raised variety with panicles of about ten orange-red trumpet flowers through late summer, while ‘Madame Galen’ has flowers more in the orange-yellow range.
There is also a lovely yellow form of the species C. radicans, sometimes seen – it is nowhere near as common – called ‘Flava.’ The flowers are smaller than the hybrids, and its seems the plant is a little less vigorous.

Hibiscus

It is one of the quirks of history that our gardening ancestors learnt their craft in the cold lands of the Northern hemisphere. The plants they most valued were those they were most familiar with – the Rhododendrons, Camellias, and roses.
We have followed the tastes of our British founders, to a large degree, when it comes to the garden. I wonder how different our gardens would look if we came from a different gardening heritage.
Take our fascination with the Rhododendron. It is regarded by many gardeners as the ultimate tree or shrub. It is available in a wide range of colours, it is dependable, some varieties are a challenge to grow, and it is delightfully evergreen.
But if we inherited the gardening traditions of another, warmer clime, I wonder whether we might not be cherishing another plant that we tend to be a bit pretentious about – the wonderfully flamboyant tropical Hibiscus.
Among the many species and hybrids of this wide-spread genus, there must surely be the loveliest of all the summer flowering shrubs for the New Zealand garden, with amazing flowers held on tidy plants.
They are, of course, frost tender, and most varieties will need careful placement. In our inland towns they will need to be placed against a north-facing wall, preferably in full sun, and with well-drained soil. All varieties hate clay, and will not thrive at all in water-logged soils, so it pays to completely replace the soil if you are stuck with gardening on clay – or grow some of the smaller varieties in pots.
We have grown a couple of shrubby hibiscus for many years in containers. They are slightly neglected – they are never fed and seldom pruned – and I am sure we could do a let better if we spent a bit of time on them.
Firstly, we should be feeding them in spring/ early summer. Once established, Hibiscus are relatively hungry feeders, and will respond well to a good application of a general fertiliser. A slow-release form, designed for trees and shrubs, would be even better.
Hibiscus only flower on new wood (like roses, come to think of it) and a regeneration of branches each year is needed. Just prune back at the same time as you are pruning the roses in July/August, and they will respond with a flush of new growth that will bear flowers from December through to winter.
Hibiscus can cope with a very vigorous pruning. If they are starting to get a bit leggy and woody (they look very uninspiring when they do) just cut them back. Within a year they will have bounced back with a whole lot of new growth, and more crops of flowers.
Most varieties branch near to ground level and make attractively thick growth. If you have a mind to, they also can be trained to make wonderful espaliered shrubs.
A childhood neighbour grew a luscious pink Hibiscus against her chimney – it grew right up to the gutter of the house and threw large single flowers all summer long. I think the frost was probably training it, as I do not recall her ever trimming it.
The most common Hibiscus seen in New Zealand are the Fijian varieties. They are smaller growing, bushy shrubs, and are slightly hardier than their Hawaiian counterparts.
Perhaps the most common varieties are ‘Suva Queen’, with her double pink flowers, ‘Agnes Gault’, a single pink that was probably what my childhood neighbour grew, and ‘D J O’Brien’, semi-double tangerine.
Hawaii has a number of native species which have been crosses with the older forms to give a new race of plants. They are tenderer than the Fijian types, and need more sheltered growing conditions. This far south, they probably do best in a conservatory in all but the warmest sites.
‘Golden Belle’ has rich bright yellow flowers in abundance; ‘Hawaiian Sunset’ is cerise pink with yellow edges; and ‘Nathan Charles’ had large flowers of crimson red.
Some of the Hawaiian forms are not very vigorous on their own roots and thus need to be grafted.
The Fijian and Hawaiian varieties have been crossed and recrossed, and there are now literally hundreds of varieties around, many of them bred in New Zealand and Australia. It would pay to have

More time on the river

The Mangatainoka River










This weekend I journeyed north to Putara, to take the next steps along my river walk. I walked in to the headwaters of the Ruamahanga by going up the valley of the Mangatainoka (of ‘Tui’ beer fame) then crossing a ridge to Roaring Stag Hut.



Roaring Stag Hut











It was blowing real hard there, and the swingbridge was rocking as I gingerly crossed over it. The wind took my hat on the way. I managed to sneak up-river and downstream shots as I went over.















I jumped into the river bed there and rock-hopped another two hours down to just below Cleft Creek, the point I started my journey last February. On the way out, I used my still camera to take this video of myself crossing an un-named stream – reportedly the largest stream in the Tararuas without a name.

Thalictrums

When our elder son spent time here over Christmas, his girlfriend insisted he show her around our garden. They are new gardeners, always difficult in flats, and they have concentrated their efforts on vegetables – but Ana was keen to see how much plant knowledge is absorbed by someone brought up in a nursery.
He did not do too badly, managing to name about half the flowers in the garden, and even surprised me by remembering the name of ‘Strawberry Parfait’ Dianthus. I assume it must have been the association with a dessert that kept it on his mind.
One of the Head Gardener’s favourite plants had them guessing though. She has a few clumps of a perennial growing in one of her gardens, with tall stems that are foaming with small mauve flowers at this time of the year.
The geneticist son had no idea what it was. His research scientist girlfriend thought it might be a different coloured form of “that filler you see in florists’ flowers”. She was thinking of Gypsophila of course, but the two plants have only a passing similarity to each other.
The plant that had them flummoxed was a Thalictrum, one of more than a hundred species in a large genus found over much of the Northern Hemisphere, with representatives also in tropical South America and southern Africa. They are essentially plants of damp or shady places (unlike the Gypsophilas). Their common name is “meadow rue”, but this is a little confusing as they are not closely related to the true rues, but are members of the vast Ranunculus family. The garden forms generally grow to a metre and a half.
They are dainty yet robust plants, usually with maidenhair fern-like foliage, and are ideally suited for a woodland garden, or a border with other tall perennials. The flowers are also valuable for picking, if you can bear to take them off the plants.
One I like is T. auilegiifolium – with divided leaves looking much like a Granny’s Bonnet, and heaps of tiny mauve flowers in early summer.
T. delavayi flowers later in the season, but also has a myriad of light mauve flowers. There is a stunning white form – more commonly found than the mauve one, and called with great imagination, ‘Album' – as well as an amazing form with double flowers. ‘Hewitt’s Double’ has masses of tiny little pom-pom like flowers. It is great for floral work.
A newer variety is quickly becoming a favourite among perennial gardeners – the intriguingly-named ‘Black Stockings’. In a way it is a stock standard Thalictrum – blue-green foliage, thousands of mauve flowers – but these flowers are held atop black stems. It makes a wonderful display in the garden.
There are a number of yellow flowers species. The most commonly found one in New Zealand is T. flavum. It has blue-green foliage and masses of light yellow flowers at about this time of the year.
The Thalictrums are generally no-fuss plants. They will do best in slightly heavy soils that retain moisture. They certainly look best in reasonable sized clumps, and are easily propagated. They look great when grown with other large perennials, especially those with large leaves

Blue spires

For the last few weeks I have been writing about some members of the sage family – some of the many garden Salvias, both for the herb and ornamental gardens.
In my back garden I have a bit of a problem with a plant that is sometimes called a sage, the “Russian Sage”, Petrovskia atriplicifolia ‘Blue Spires’.
I love the effect this plant has in the garden, with its long spires of mauve-blue flowers springing from finely divided ferny-like silver branches.
This is a great, no-fuss plant; it is not fussy about soil conditions, does not worry about pH levels, and is also very drought tolerant. Mine grows in a semi-shaded spot among other perennials, but I suspect it would be best in full sun, along with most other silver-leaved plants.
Its growth habit is a problem though. It is a sprawling shrub, although usually grown as a perennial. I planted mine too close to the edge of the bed and it sprawls across the other plants near it and then lazes across the perimeter of the lawn.
This year I decided I had to do things better by it. I have always cut it back hard after flowering – and by hard, I mean very hard. At the end of the season it has branches about a metre and a half high, with a slightly larger spread, and I cut them almost right off, leaving stubs of about 20 cm over the winter. Russian Sage is very hardy and will not be damaged by such brutal action over the winter.
This encourages the plant to make good growth in the following spring – too good, in fact, as the soft growth flops all over the place later in summer. This year I remembered early enough in the season, and I nipped all the growths in the bud – tipping them when they were about 30 cm high. It has made an enormous difference. The plant has responded with better branched stems, and a better flowering effect at lower heights.
During the pruning, I found the foliage has a strong “herby” scent – reminiscent of wormwood or one of the other Artimesias – and not that pleasant! Still, I am sure it is now doing good work in the compost pile.
It would be fun to experiment with plantings to associate with this plant. I have it growing with some purple Delphiniums and a clump of the lovely Penstemon ‘Alice Hindley’, as per the photograph above, but it would look even better with pink coloured flowers I think. It also combines well with lavenders and other silver foliaged plants.

The end of the holiday season

My all-too-brief season holiday is drawing to a close.
We have done the usual Kiwi Christmas things – eating too much in the warm weather, buying too much rubbish – but we have also taken part in some family rituals. One of those was our annual trip to Pukaha, Mount Bruce Wildlife Centre. This time we had two PhD students – our evolutionary geneticist son and his partner, a neurophysiologist – and one playwright, our younger son. The highlight was not the kaka feeding, from whence this photo comes, but the discovery of a tiny rifleman, high on the ridge overlooking the centre, at the ends of a new track.
Our other annual tradition is a beach visit, usually to Mataikona, a rugged beach east of here. The geneticist and I spent a lot of time searching in the rock pools for blue starfish, crabs, shrimps and his beloved snails. Also had some time to fly kites in the light wind.
Somehow the archive does not sound as appealing as flying a kite in the breeze…

Common sage and pineapples

I have already achieved the first of my New Year resolutions – I have planted out my plant of common sage, bought from the friendly herb seller at my local car boot sale. It is many years since I grew this sage, and I am not even sure I know why I have kept not it in the garden.
It can hardly be that it is hard to grow. Common sage, S. officinalis, is one of the easiest of all herbs. It is a small woody perennial, or sub-shrub perhaps, that needs only a moderately sunny place in the garden to succeed. It will flourish in most soils, but prefers slightly less fertility than most other plants. If grown in very rich soil it tends to grow too floppy and lax, and will not last so long. It will do best if restarted every four or five years, as it tends to get a bit woody. It is simplicity itself to grow from a summer cuttings, as it strikes with alacrity.
If you like an ornamental sort of herb garden, there are a number of forms with coloured leaves. The purple leafed variety is probably the best known, but there are also golden-leaved and variegated types around too. These are perfect if you are looking to plant a herb garden on a parterre pattern.
In the kitchen, common sage is probably most-often used in the preparation of poultry or pork stuffing, although it can also be used in sauces and drinks. It has a variety of medicinal uses too – in fact, a recent trial suggests it might be useful in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. As a matter of interest, the very name “Salvia” comes from a Latin word meaning “to heal,” and “sage” means wise.
I mentioned last week that I had planted a red flowered sage, a dwarf from of the once-ubiquitous ‘Bonfire’ salvias. Not everyone is keen on this plant, thinking it too much a blob of red pigment.

Most people would agree that another red flowered sage, the Pineapple Sage, S. rutilans, is a plant of a totally different kind. It is much larger for a start! If growing in suitable conditions it will happily grow to two metres in a season. It is a slightly frost tender perennial, but it will not matter if it gets slightly hit by cold over the winter as it will happily grow back to two metres the following summer.
And what a two metres it will grow to, with long stems of the most deliciously pineapple-scented leaves, topped with spikes of bright red flowers in summer. The flowers will be raided by bees, and children for that matter, all in search of the honey-like nectar stored in the long red tubes at the back of the flowers.
The leaves can be chopped up and used in salads – both green and the more fruity varieties – and can also be used as a garnish. The flowers are also edible, making a great splash in summer salads as well as giving a honey-sweet taste.