Camellia 'Little Liane'

As winter approaches most of the garden goes into a slow decline.  It is the time of the year to take care of the perennial garden, cutting back last year’s growth, dividing where necessary, and applying a little bit of fertiliser for the upcoming year.

This is also the time of the year that the autumn/winter flowering shrubs kick into their blooming season, especially those wonderful autumn flowering sasanqua camellias.

The arrival of camellia petal blight has seriously curbed my enthusiasm for the majority of camellias.  The way their flowers turn brown almost as soon as they open has driven even the most ardent camellia growers to rethink their passion.  The trouble is a fungal one, and it seems there is no chemical cure for it.  It spreads very rapidly,   and survives through the summer as spores in the ground, only to reappear as the flowers open in late winter early spring.

The sasanqua camellias seem much less prone to the disease, although I suspect it is largely because the fungal spores are not about at this time of the year.  Either way, it does mean we can enjoy these lovely camellias before the blight strikes.

We currently have one in flower, the very compact growing ‘Little Liane’, one of the Paradise range of sasanqua camellias, raised in Australia and released onto the New Zealand market in the past few years.  It is small-leafed, compact shrub growing to around a metre tall, although our’s has assumed a rather odd shape.  When freshly planted it was knocked over and, it being of sight, I did not notice for a year or so.  It grew almost horizontally before sending up some vertical branches, so it is now wider than it is high.  The flowers are small white, of loose informal peony form and supposedly with a faint pink margin, although my spectacles must not be rosy enough because I have never noticed that.  The flower centres is a scramble of stamens, petaloids and small petals, making for an interestingly informal flower. Because of its dense compact flowering habit, this variety was specially selected suitable for low hedges and topiary.

It is probably most like the older form ‘Mine Yo Yuki’, which was once the most common white sasanqua camellia, and still has many fans.  It is taller growing but is still quite compact in form, and is often used for hedging.

The other white sasanqua often seen in older gardens is the fabulous ‘Setsugekka’, which carries an abundance of large wavy white blooms with prominent yellow at this time of the year, each bloom being softly scented.  This makes a great sight in the garden, growing taller than the other white varieties mentioned above, getting up the three meters after many years.

Perhaps the best-known the sasanqua camellias is not one – the old favourite ‘Hiryu’ is actually a form of the closely related species C. hiemalis, but looks for all the world like one of its cousins.  It has masses of beautiful, large deep rose semi-double flowers, shading to red at the petal edges, and is as hardy as can be. 

Another old form to keep an eye out for is the venerable variety ‘Plantation Pink’.  This has been grown in gardens for many years now, but it is still as popular as ever, with its cheerful clean and clear pink flowers providing such good garden value at this time of the year.

Among the Paradise varieties that are worth looking out for are ‘Belinda’, with large, glowing pink flowers; ‘Blush’ with flowers that open from deep pink buds, to become almost white with a pink reverse on the outer petals; ‘Gillian’, which has delicate semi-double blooms, white faintly edged with soft pink; ‘Glow’, which is basically  an improved version of ‘Plantation Pink’, with large deep glowing pink, single flowers with a centre of bright yellow stamens; ‘Joan’, which has very showy large red loose informal double flowers, and ‘Vanessa’, with very large brilliant white flowers which have a pink flush on the outer petals.

Medlars and Chinese quinces

The Head Gardener and I wandered around Eastwoodhill Arboretum one morning recently   while on holiday in Gisborne, delighting in the various coloured trees – mainly oaks at this stage, but also many other types of deciduous trees.  It was quite dangerous in places, because the pathways were strewn with thousands of acorns, and I kept imagining those with less steady footing falling over easily.  We had the obligatory map but were quite happy to just follow our noses, usually following Robert Frost’s dictate about the road less travelled.

We came across an area that seemed dedicated to edible plants of the more unusual kind, included a medlar, Mespilus germanica, in full fruit.  I have seen the fruit before, and have seen trees before, but have not seen a tree laden with fruit before.  It is an interesting subject, being a member of the vast rose family (as are many edible fruits) and seems to fit somewhere between the pear species (of which there were many at Eastwoodhill) and the hawthorn. 

It makes a small tree, growing about five metres high, with a similar spread, and looking not unlike an apple.  It also has the great habit of colouring up well in the autumn, usually taking on yellow and orange shades.  Before then, though, the fruit become ready for picking.  They are unusual-looking fruit – sort of like oversized rose hips in a way, brown and with a calyx on the crown.

This southern European fruit was once quite popular but has fallen from favour, probably because so many similar fruits, such as apples and pears are readily available, and you do not have to wait until the fruit is rotten to eat them.   The technical term is “bletting”, but it amounts to the same thing.  After two to three weeks in storage,  the fruit becomes soft, mushy brown, and is said to be both sweet and tasty, with a hint of spicy applesauce.  If you do not fancy eating rotten fruit, perhaps it would be better to make a jelly from the fruit – it is also said to be delicious.

Before we left for holiday I had someone come in to see me at work, holding what at first appeared to be a semi-ripe mango.  When they explained it was growing on a tree in their garden in Masterton I soon worked out it was not a tropical fruit of any kind, but was a little puzzled.  I cut the fruit open and could see lots of seed inside, and could discern very little scent– but there was just enough for me to realise what it was. 

What I was looking at was a fruit of an unusual deciduous shrub from China, fruit I had not seen for about twenty-five years.  It was from Pseudocydonia sinensis, another aromatic fruit tree from the rose family, and another that is basically inedible!

This is an attractive small tree – only about three meters tall – and is closely related to both the quince tree of Europe, and the ‘japonica’ of the garden – Chaenomeles species. In spring it has pale pink flowers, which are later followed by the ovoid fruit, about the size of a large pear.  They are green for a long time, then take on reddish hints before turning butter yellow as they ripen.  They have a wonderful aroma, and a bowlful of them will scent the whole house.

These fruit are very astringent and very hard, and no amount of bletting will make them edible (at least not in my estimation) but they do have a use – they make the most wonderful conserve, not unlike quince conserve but much more aromatic.  We had a specimen of this tree in our nursery, probably about fifty years old or even older.  It only fruited once for us but what it lacked in regularity it made up for with enthusiasm, being heavily laden.  A young student,  who was working for us on work experience, decided he wanted to use the fruit and took some home to make the conserve.  I’m not sure if he or his Mum made it, but it was superb – it went really well with stewed apples.

I think I’d prefer a jar of that to some freshly bletted medlars.

Feeling seedy

I have been following some interesting threads of discussion on the internet over the past few days, after receiving a number of invitations to sign a petition against the American chemical company Monsanto, probably best known as the inventor of Round Up.  The petitioners allege that Monsanto has gained patent rights on all vegetable varieties and will enforce a ban on gardeners and farmers saving their own seeds.

It has certainly vexed some people and there are some outraged people, posting all sorts of strange stories on-line. Needless to say the story is more interesting, and less alarming than that.  Monsanto has bought a number of seed companies over the past few years, including Seminis, a large supplier of commercial strains of vegetable seeds.  Monsanto does not have a monopoly on seeds, and only has any patent rights on vegetable seeds that were patented through Seminis.

So what are plant patents and how do they affect gardeners?

All of our vegetable varieties have been derived from wild species, usually by many generations of gardeners saving seeds from varieties which are an improvement over the wild kinds.  In that way beans and peas were cultivated for their sweetness and the increased size of the seeds, while carrots were changed from pale-rooted vegetables into the (usually) orange vegetable we are familiar with.  Perhaps the most remarkable series of changes has taken place within the Brassica group of vegetables, where one species has been, through patient selection, turned into kale, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels Sprouts, broccoli and collards. 

That process of careful selection meant that a century ago seed companies were able to offer their own strains of most vegetable types, and employed breeders and manual labour to ensure their varieties were true to type, and to also instigate new varieties.  This would be achieved by hand crossing two differing varieties, each with a particular point the breeder was interested in -  early cropping, better colour, larger size for example – then the resultant seedlings would then be reselected until the best traits were combined in a stable strain.  This was usually achieved by growing the vegetables in large numbers, keeping only the very best for seed and ruthlessly rouging out any plants that were not true to type. Then, and only then, would the strain be released onto the market.  This type of seed is pollinated by insects and is referred to as Open Pollinated, or OP.

But once it was released, any seed was fair game, and could quickly be bulked up and grown and sold by any competitor, thus denying the original breeder of the full fruits of their labour in developing the variety in the first place.

That all changed with the introduction of the Plant Variety Protection legislation in the United States, and later in other places, especially when that was extended to seed strains as well as cloned cultivars. 

In a local sense, this idea of being able to patent a plant variety came too late for Robinson’s Nurseries who bred the phenomenally popular Photinia ‘Red Robin’ in the 1940s.  Nowadays they would be able to license such a variety and would be able to secure a payment for every plant sold around the world, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.  Then they only had the introducer’s bonus, of being able to bulk to a sufficient number of plants before they were released onto the market.

In recent years plant breeders have concentrated on producing F1 hybrids, with interesting results for gardeners.  These are strains where two different parent strains are kept going, and crossed with each other, thus producing hybrid vigour, and much better uniformity.  This is a similar technique to that used by farmers for generations where they cross Romney ewers with Southdown rams to produce vigorous lambs.

The seed company only sell the seeds resulting from the first generation of crosses, thus the home gardener cannot replicate the strains, and is forced to buy seed fresh each year.  This is worthwhile for some varieties, but of less value for others, as F1 seed is usually exponentially dearer than OP seed.  I would never grow OP broccoli as F1 plants are much better, and the same applies to cauliflower, tomatoes and peppers.  On the other hand, OP lettuce and cabbage are generally fine – in fact, F1 hybrid cabbages tend to be too big for the home gardeners and older varieties, such as ‘Derby Day’; are probably a better bet.

Monsanto, and other chemical-producing firms have taken plant breeding a step further – a step too far many people - by using human genetic modification to breed plants with specific traits not found in nature, especially so in the case of Monsanto, which has released a Round Up resistant variety of soybean to the market, and has quickly captured the majority of the seed market.  They have also bred strains of maize and other crops that are also Round Up resistant.   They are remarkably popular as they allow farmers to sow seeds much closer as they can use Round Up as a post-emergence spray thus obviating the need for mechanical tillage between rows.

There is an inherent risk in this, of course, that being the possibility of the gene for Round Up resistance passing to a weed, this removing Round Up’s efficacy.  So far that does not seem to have happened.

The other area of concern for some is the issue of ‘terminator seeds’, varieties where the seed produced is sterile and cannot be used for a second generation.  This is obviously an issue for poorer farmers in less developed countries, and although it is claimed that such seed is produced, in fact it has not been commercially produced by any company. 

So, in short, Monsanto is not going to try and patent all vegetable varieties, and does could not if it wanted to, so you will still be able to grow ‘Great Lakes’ and ‘Webbs Wonderful’ lettuce,  ‘Moneymaker’ tomatoes and ‘Nante’ carrots without adding to the riches of the shareholders of Monsanto.

Couch in the border!

Through the last few months I have been watching a piece of couch grass make its way out of the back lawn and into the end of the large mixed border in our backyard.   It had made its way into the middle of a clump of variegated Solomon’s Seal before I noticed it, then it spread its runners out into a couple of clumps of lungwort.  I have been waiting for the soil to freshen up before tackling it, knowing that digging in the hard soil would only snap the runners.   I was probably the only person in the region who was happy to have a wet weekend, and to have the chance to deal to this pesty grass before it got too far out of control.

The first task was to carefully take the perennials growing in this area out.  I wasn’t unhappy about that as it was more than time to do that as some of the plants had been in large clumps for many years.

The variegated Solomon’s Seal had been nibbled away at last year, when I took some rhizomes off the edges of the plants as part of my contribution to the new border in Queen Elizabeth Park.  They are now well established down there, and part of a wonderfully refurbished border that is a credit to the Friends of the Park, and to Doug Bailey and his team.

Variegated  Solomon’s Seal, Polygonatum odoratum 'Variegatum', has great foliage value, having arching stems which carry lance shaped, green leaves with white margins but it also has delicate, creamy-white, fragrant, bell shaped flowers dangling from the stems in mid to late spring.   I love this plant in spring, when it is quite light green, as it makes a good contrast to the iris seedlings that grow alongside it.  It is a little bit of an expander – it spreads by finger sized rhizomes – but in all the years that it has been here it has only grown to about 60 cm across. 
The pure green form is just as good in the garden although it is a big more vigorous, growing perhaps a metre tall as opposed to the 80 cm the variegated form stays at.   Either form will grow well in full sun, but I think they are both best with light shade, and slightly moist soil.

Growing among these rhizomes in my garden, and slightly difficult to tell apart from the nodes on the couch, were a few clumps of the pink form of Lily of the Valley, Convallaria majalis ‘Rosea’.   The white form of the plant was a major favourite in my mother’s garden – she grew masses of it underneath the living room window in a very damp spot, and it always thrived.  I have a few measly plants of the white form struggling along in the garden, and an equally small number of buds of the pink form, also struggling.  I am sure my failure to grow these well is simply that I do not have a wet enough spot in our largely dry garden.

It is, of course, like a miniature version of Solomon’s Seal, with hanging bells of white (or a slightly muddy pink) pretty enough to look at in their own way, but mainly grown for their outstanding sweet scent.  For those of you who are royal fans, they featured in the Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding bouquet.

The two biggest clumps in this part of the garden were both lungworts, Pulmonaria.   These are outstanding foliage plants, doing especially well where conditions are a little less than ideal – in slightly shady areas, or those that are a little dry.  They derive both their common name and generic names from the supposed similarity between the leaves and the inside of lungs.  Personally I hope my lungs are not bristly haired and green – I cannot imagine that would be good for my health – but I accept that the name largely derives from the spotted nature of the leaves.  As a result of this look-alike perception, herbalists believed that the leaves were good for alleviating lung problems.  Science does not back this claim.

These are lovely garden plants, with some older forms having a mix of blue and pink flowers on the same plant, but modern forms tend to be coloured with one colour only, and the spots have been developed to become more dominant.  One of the clumps in the garden that I divided this weekend  is of the modern variety ‘Raspberry Splash’,  which has slightly more pointy leaves than average, all covered with lots of white spots.  The flowers are deep reddish pink, and carried in late spring mainly, although there will be sporadic flowers later.  This has made a sizable clump in my garden, and always looks tidy.

‘Majeste’ is the other variety I grow – and this is something special.  The flowers are pink and blue, but to be honest they are not the attraction for this one, it is the magnificent (or majestic) solid silver foliage, covered with fine hairs.  Again, this has been in the garden for a long time and always looks fantastic.  

Blooming good at Easter

Was there ever an Easter like this Easter?  One when the sun shone unremittingly throughout the whole weekend?  Although we are all hoping the drought will break soon, for a variety of reasons, most of us were secretly  happy that it did not happen through the long weekend.

The Head Gardener and I managed to a little time away to catch up with family, and spent some time on family history matters, but there was still a spare hour or three in the garden, with some lawn mowing and garden tidying carried out.

I loved working among some of my favourite plants that flower at this time of the year, but they are almost all plants the Head Gardener has no time for – at all. 

Take the wonderful paintbrush lily that is flowering its head off in a large container on the patio.  This was originally a gift from a gardening friend about twenty years ago, but it has still to arouse the enthusiasm of the Head Gardener.  It is one of the many South African members of the Amaryllis family, and like many of its relatives it flowers on naked stems before there is any sign of leaves.  But unlike its kin the naked ladies and the wonderful Crinum, this one has a short stem, about 15 cm long, and relatively squat flowers, with small petals. 

The species in flower at the moment is Haemanthus coccineus, probably the most common of these plants in New Zealand gardens, although none are really found that often.  It is totally summer deciduous (a pointer to its coming from winter rainfall areas of southern Africa) and the first signs of life in the autumn is a colouring at the lips of the large bulbs, which sit slightly above the surface of the soil.   These orange-scarlet buds slowly creep upwards, until they are about 15 cm high, when the tightly sealed lips of the lower open to reveal an astonishing ball of golden anthers, looking for all the world like a big red shaving brush.

The Head Gardener is even less impressed with the white species H. albiflos, which flowers later in the year, but I would not be without these charming and slightly oddball South African bulbs.

And I would not be without a toad lily or two either, although again, the Head Gardener is less than impressed with them too.

These are Tricyrtis species, members of the Lily family, generally from Eastern Asia, and they are perennial plants that grow naturally in the moist soil on the edge of forests, so they are ideally suited to semi-shaded places in our gardens.  I guess that it because they live in damp places they are called toad lilies - I cannot think of any other reason.  The flowers are certainly not toad-like, but rather like refined orchid flowers, usually with curious markings on the petals.

They flower at this time of the year when the garden can be a little barren of colour, and even though they are not extremely showy they are attractive perennials.  They are at their best in the same sort of conditions that hostas, hellebores and other moisture and shade loving plants thrive in. 

I grow a couple of different forms but T. hirta, one of the best, is probably the most commonly found species in New Zealand.  It has white flowers generously splashed with purple.  The leaves in this species are also attractive – clean, mid-green with ribs reminiscent of hosta leaves.

I was standing at the counter at the weekend, with a few bulbs, thinking I was a bit crazy to be thinking of planting daffodils in such a sustained dry spell, when I noticed a young woman coming towards me, pushing a trolley loaded up with shrubs.  I thought she was really going to struggle with keeping her new plants alive in the drought, and felt rather superior.  You know the sort of thing I mean – experienced gardener smiling at a greenhorn who was going to make an elementary gardening mistake.

Turns out I could not have been more wrong.  As she got closer I could see that plants she had chosen, and it became very apparent she was very much more switched on to environmental concerns, and aware of the certainties of climate change, as she was clearly planting a grey garden for a sunny and dry situation.

She had started out with some lavender.  I could not see what variety they were (I did not want to pry too much) but they were English forms, with flower spikes hovering over the bushes.  There has been a huge upsurge in interest in these plants, and there are probably hundreds of different forms available in the market, ranging from deep purple through to sort-of-pinks (although you need rose coloured glasses to really think of them as pink), to a neutral shade sometimes called cream or white, as well as all sorts of mauves and soft purples, and even greenish hues.

I have found these will cope with growing in almost no soil – we have an area alongside the driveway that is simply compacted fill, and has little or no nutriment.  I popped a lavender in among the few other things that will tolerate it, and it has flourished, even casting seeds that germinate in my near-by iris seedling bed.  I suspect the less the food lavenders get the hardier they grow, and the more concentrated their scent becomes.

The French lavender, L. stoechas, is probably the best for the average garden, having large flowers with the characteristic rabbit’s ears petals on the spikes, and again is available in lots of different forms.  With all garden lavenders, it pays to make sure they are trimmed each year after flowering.  It pays to trim back by about a third to encourage new growth.

Among the other shrubs in the young lady’s trolley I noticed a silver-leaved favourite of mine, Convolvulus cneorum.  This is a prolific flowering, low growing shrub growing probably 50cm high and about a metre across.  It has evergreen (or should I say eversilver) foliage that covers the plant all year round, then starting in spring  starts a crop of cup shaped white flowers which  and continue throughout the summer and autumn months.

Like most silver-leaved plants it does best in a sunny free-draining position – it hates damp feet and does not tolerate shade.  It does not like severe frosts as it is establishing, but after that will cope with anything a Wairarapa winter throws at it.  It is not often used this way, but it makes an interesting small hedge, providing a great contrast for larger-leaved varieties.

Autumn flowering bulbs

One of the ironies about this time of the year is that as well as being the main planting season for the wide range of spring flowering bulbs, it is also the time for the autumn-flowering bulbs to start putting on their displays. 

Probably the best known of these autumn flowering bulbs are the naked ladies, Amaryllis belladonna¸ their long-stemmed clusters of lily-shaped flowers being a feature of many older gardens, and a plethora of country driveways.  But my favourites for this time of the year are much smaller and altogether more delicate looking, and although they are related to naked ladies, they are respectably clothed in bright green foliage when they display their flowers.

I am talking about the bright yellow Sternbergia lutea,  often known by the common name of Lily of the Field, but you are more likely to come across it as one of the many “Autumn Crocuses”.  It has crocus-shaped flowers of daffodil yellow, but this charmer is not actually a lily, a crocus or a daffodil, although it is closest to being a daffodil as it is in fact a member of the Amaryllis family, as are Narcissus.  A native of Italy, it has been cultivated in Western gardens for many centuries, its bright autumn flowers, appearing with the first autumn rains usually, being much appreciated.

In our garden the flowers usually appear in about mid-March, perhaps a little earlier if we have been watering a lot, and they do look just like bright yellow crocus flowers.  They grow about 100 mm high, and have leaves that appear shortly after the flowers.  The leaves are flat like some daffodil leaves, rather than grass-shaped as is the case with crocuses.  They stay on the plant through the winter and into the spring then fall off for the heat of summer.

My clump is planted in well-drained soil in a very sunny site, and it has slowly increased over the years.  The original half a dozen bulbs have probably grown to about 20 now and we get a good succession of flowers for about three or four weeks. My mother used to have a large clump in very similar conditions, along a north-facing wall, and it thrived for her.  I suspect that, in the right place, this bulb might even naturalise, although I have never read of it happening in New Zealand.

This bulb takes autumn pride of place in a garden that is, more or less, devoted to yellow flowers.  I know lots of gardeners are a bit afraid of yellow, thinking it a bit too strident a colour, but I think it is hard to beat at this time of the year, and there are many, many yellow flowered forms of lots of my favourite plants.

Other yellows flowering with the Sternbergias include a soft yellowish dahlia with brown foliage named ‘David’, our older son’s name; some bright Gaillardias planted as annuals about ten years ago and still ticking over; a bright yellow Hemerocallis, and a cute dwarf red hot poker, Kniphofia.   I have lost its label but I think it the well-known older variety called ‘Little Maid’.  This has grass-like foliage that grows about 30 cm high and has a succession of having a wonderful display of soft yellow pokers which gradually age to cream, which gives the clump an appealing contrast as the flowers age.  The flowers grow to about 60 cm. I find it pays to cut the spent flower heads on these dwarf varieties – they usually look past their best before the very top flowers have faded, but they can easily be pulled off.  Doing this also seems to spark the plant into further burst of flowers, extending the season by a few weeks.

Daffodils

A few years ago the Head Gardener and I visited our son in Dunedin at about this time of the year.  During the time we were in the south we ventured up to the Duntroon/Earthquakes area to look at some remarkable fossils and Maori cave art.  The landscape along the various valleys of North Otago was amazing, but there was a surreal quality to much of it, caused by the outbreak of intensive dairy farming in selected areas.  The region is largely very dry, with porous limestone and relatively recent  gravels forming much of the soil, and by the end of the warm summer most of the paddocks are usually mouse coloured.  But scattered among these burnt paddocks were outcrops of outrageously green fields, where the combination of irrigation and fertiliser betrayed the presence of dairying.

This year our garden looks a bit like that – the lawn have died off, except for a small margin of error at the edges where they receive some spill over from watering the gardens, and the only green is in the garden beds.

I am a bit worried about how dry even some of the flower beds are though, as I want to have a bit of a daffodil blitz this year.  Although I am a great iris lover I am also very taken with daffodils, and have a large number of different types growing in the garden and in pots, and this year I want to expand that number a lot – even aiming for a host of golden daffodils perhaps.

If good strong-growing yellow daffodils are what you are looking for there are a couple of older varieties you should keep an eye out for, ‘Malvern City’ and ‘Carlton’.  Both are gold on gold forms – they have both golden petals and golden cups – and are both very reliable flowering forms that are long lasting.  ‘Malvern City’ is very early in the season, and is quite tall, growing to about 50cm at full height.  ‘Carlton’ is a little later and is a bit chunkier, flowering at 40cm, but is perhaps a little hardier.  They will both do very well as cut flowers.

If you are looking for more contrast you could try one of the varieties with white petals and golden cups, as the colour contrast makes them stand pout very well in the garden.  For early in the season you should look out for ‘Moneymaker’, which has cream petals and a large golden cup and always looks bright in the garden.  The petals are probably a little misshapen if you are trying to win medals at the local flower show, but for garden value it is great.

I have grown ‘Ice Follies’ for a few years now – a lovely white daffodil with white petals and cream cups.  I have found it to be a reliable flowering form, growing about 35 cm high and very hardy in the wind and rain.  If you wanted more colour from this kind of form you should try ‘Orange Ice Follies’, which despite its name is not really orange-cupped but rather deep gold toned.

Small flowered double daffodils are, of course, very popular, none more so than the exquisitely scented ‘Erlicheer’, which can even be in flower as early as May in some gardens.  To be brutally honest it is no great shakes to look at, but it more than makes up for its lack of elegance with the powerful scent it carries.  At the opposite end of the season,  ‘Cheerfuless’ provides much the same scent on a slightly tidier flower.  ‘Golden Cheerfulness’ is even better I think, although the colour is a little light to really be called golden – at times it is almost chartreuse, but this moderately-sized daffodil is one of my favourites.

The Head Gardener is a great fan of the pink-cupped daffodils, and we grow a few of them.  My favourite among these is probably ‘Accent’, even though it is not the pinkest (certainly not the luscious pink you find in tall bearded irises).  The cups are more properly called salmon pink, or perhaps even a peachy orange, but this plant is just so reliable and the flowers hold their colour so well that I would not be without this in my large border.

The long summer has continued unabated, despite the Metservice confidently predicting we will have southerlies and showers at least once a week.  You will have no doubt noticed that these are dry southerlies, with a bit of heat relief and even some cloudy periods, but they have been marked by a complete lack of moisture.

I had to tell the Head Gardener to keep a look out for me at the weekend when I mowed the lawns – well, the bits near the edge of the borders that end up getting accidentally watered.  The front lawn has developed such large crevasses I thought I might get lost down one of them and need rescuing!

The hot weather and relentless lack of moisture have suited some shrubs though, and even though some garden plants are literally shrivelling up this summer, there are a few that have been seen at their best this year.

Probably the best performing among these is a plant that is seen surprisingly little in Wairarapa gardens, as it can provide one of the brightest and most floriferous displays in the middle of a sustained warm spell.  I am talking about Lagerstroemeria indica, the Crepe Myrtle, a small growing deciduous tree from Korea and Japan, with many relatives in the warmer parts of the world, including Australia.

In the wild this is a small growing tree that distinguishes itself by amazing displays of crinkled flowers that have earned it the ‘crepe’ part of its name.  These flowers are borne from summer into the autumn and at their best they can smother the whole tree giving a very dramatic effect.

The type species, and the one that is most commonly seen, has lots of lilac-pink flowers, but in over 200 years of cultivation, a wide range of hybrids have been raised.   Overseas this shrub has become a very popular potted plant and dwarf varieties have been released, some of which are now available in New Zealand.  They make fabulous plants for the patio as they can cope with a little bit of benign neglect.

‘Flamingo’ has flowers that, despite the suggestion in the name that they might be pink, are in fact a deep red, while ‘Soire D’Ete’ is a lovely soft pink.  Funnily enough, ‘Petite Snow’ is a dwarf white form, but I don’t think it works as well as the brighter coloured varieties.

These plants are not too fussy to grow in our climate, but they do not like being in the shade, and they do best in well-drained soil as well.  Their ideal spot would be in the full sun in a relatively warm position, where they should flourish and provide lots of summer colour for many years.

I guess that they have not become more popular because people think they are a little tender – and they certainly do look as though they are slightly tropical but they will cope with any frosts that the Wairarapa winter will throw at them.

The other reason they are not commonly planted is, I am sure, the current prejudice against deciduous plants.  The compensation with so many shrubs and trees that lose their leaves in fall is that they often have pretty autumn colour – and this species does – or they have attractive bark – and this does that too!

I love the arrival of March.  It usually means the temperatures are on the way down and the weather seems more settled, although it also often heralds the arrival of autumn rains.  March starts the long slow festival of changing colour that the deciduous trees undergo as they prepare for winter, and the Head Gardener and I both have birthdays in March, although whether that is something to be happy about is a matter of debate.

What March also brings, very excitedly to me at least, is the start of the spring bulb selling season, with daffodils and tulips galore, but also a sprinkling of a bewildering range of other species.

It all starts with the close cousins, the anemones and ranunculus, superficially similar but quite different in many ways.  They are the first off the block because they are almost all raised in the Northern Hemisphere, and thus are available sooner than home-grown bulbs that require more processing.

Ranunculus are among the prettiest of all the spring flowering bulbs with a range of bright colours, delightful flower shape, and a wonderful succession of blooms from each tuber.  A bed or a pot of single coloured flowers is a dramatic sight, while the straight-stemmed flowers are perfect for picking and displaying in the house.  There are even some strains that have been specifically bred for the pot plant market, and flower at much lower height, although I have to say they seem to be missing some of the grace that makes ranunculus such fabulous garden plants.

When you buy ranunculus tubers they will be dormant, and very hard and dry.  To overcome this and ensure they kick into growth they could be popped into a paper bag and left in the refrigerator for a few weeks.   This will give them a slow wake up from their long slumber, and when they are removed from the cool they can be gently soaked overnight.  They can then be planted into a well drained potting mix or directly into the garden if a sunny spot with good drainage can be found.

The tubers consist are made up of claws connected to a central crown at the top – it is important that the claws should be planted downwards as the tuber will just rot if planted the wrong way around.

I find they do better if I start them in a potting tray, but even then they are a little bit prone to rotting off, so it probably pays to drench the potting mix with a fungicide.  They do like to grow in well fertilised soil, so it pays to work some bulb fertiliser into the bed before planting.  Good general purpose fertiliser will suffice if you do not have bulb fertiliser, and well composted animal manure is also good if worked in well before planting.   Watering can be a bit tricky as ranunculus do not like to grow in damp spoils, but they also do not like drying out, the leaves taking on a yellow cast if they do.

If you keep them well-fed and watered, ranunculus should be in flower for months, providing a long lasting display for the garden and the house alike.

In the distant past ranunculus had a brief period of popularity among the obsessive flower growers on the United Kingdom – along with tulips, anemones and gold-lace polyanthus, they were treasured for the perfection of the flowers.  In the case of the ranunculus, that perfection required multiple petals arranged in a globular fashion, each tipped with a contrasting colour.  These exotic beauties have long since died out, but garden ranunculus remain pretty, multi-petalled plants

Brachyglottis compacta 

This week the spotlight has (literally) been on Castlepoint as the beachside community, and its many friends, has celebrated the centenary of the switching on of the iconic lighthouse that graces its reef.  The lighthouse was showing its true colours at times over the weekend, but at other times was lit with a variety of bright lights, surely making it a shipping hazard, as sailors, drawn by the display,  could have been lured siren-like onto the rocks.

Castlepoint is a wonderful place for a variety of social reasons, but for gardeners and lovers of native plants and wildlife, there are others reasons to venture out eastwards, as the reef and the remarkable castellated hill that Captain Cook called Castle Rock are home to some interesting and garden-worthy plants.

Prime among these is the Castlepoint groundsel, Brachyglottis compacta.  There are many species of Brachyglottis in New Zealand, among them a cluster of yellow flowering evergreen shrubs of coastal habits, but there are also inland, and even mountain species, the best known of which is the rangiora, B. repanda.

Castlepoint’s daisy  is a bushy, evergreen flowering shrub of low growing habits –  about a metre or so – and the only place it is found in the world is on the limestone cliffs at the beach.  It has oval shaped leaves about 2–4 cm long which are green above and white below, with slightly toothed edges. The flowers are yellow and appear in summer. 

As you would expect this is a brilliant plant for dry places, and will flourish through the worst Wairarapa droughts in hot sunny places, its golden flowers following by wispy white seedheads.

Wairarapa is also home to the similar, but subtly  different, B. greyii, which is found in coastal areas to the south, from about Flat Point around to the mouth of the Orongorongo river.   It has slightly greyer leaves, but retains the silvery down on the underside, and gives a greyer appearance that the Castlepoint species.  It has an even better display of golden flowers making this particular species popular overseas.  This is another great shrub that does very well in hot sun, coping well with poor soils.  We have struggled a bit this with plant as it is planted in rubbish soil, a piece of land previous owners filled with road scrapings.  The soil is very heavy and wet in winter, and these plants are not keen on those conditions.
As you might expect, these species have been crossed, and they are the parents of a number of interesting hybrids including the very popular Brachyglottis ‘Sunshine’, which is another very hardy form with grey leaves and a super abundance of yellow flowers.  Overseas there is a variegated form of this plant but it is hard to see how it could be an improvement.  ‘Otari Cloud’ is a similar hybrid, and has heaps of bright golden flowers over grey foliage.

I suspect these plants have become very muddled in the horticulture trade and buying any one of them might mean you end up with one of the others!

There is one form that is quite different – Brachyglottis ‘Leith Gold’ is a Dunedin-raised form with a mix of the attributes of its parents, having  large leaves that are similar in size to rangiora but  having the colour and texture of B.greyii. This interesting plant has a fairly open habit, again halfway between its parents, and it carries panicles of small yellow flowers, intermediate in size between the tiny flowers of rangiora, and the larger flowers of the Wairarapa species.   To get the biggest leaves it is necessary to grow this in some shade, but it will cope with full sun otherwise.

Post fire ruminations

As if the summer season was not hot enough for gardeners and those in the nursery trade, my friends Laurie and Carol down at the Garden Barn in High Street decided to make things even hotter last weekend, with an unplanned bonfire in their potting shed.  Fortunately no-one was hurt in the fire (although Laurie was out of earshot when it started and caused some concern) and, although there was a fair bit of damage, they will bounce back.  This couple know only one way to cope with something like the fire – they will roll up their sleeves, knuckle down and repair the damage.

Being of a naturally cheeky disposition, I have decided to give them some choices for their autumn sale, some suggestions of varieties they may want to run specials on.

First up, of course, are the Cotinus, or as most of us call them, “Smoke Bushes”.   There are a couple of different groups of these, the American and European forms. The European species, C. coggygria, probably deserves the common name more because it has plumes of misty purplish flowers in early summer which fade as summer progresses and become even smokier.  Their foliage colours up in the autumn but the display is nowhere near as good as that of their American cousins.  One form, though, has amazing foliage right through the growing season, the deeply coloured form called ‘Royal Purple’  which has deep wine purple coloured leaves with a shiny surface. It has gigantic flower heads of light mauve over summer, and then for autumn colours up almost as well as the American forms.

The American C. obovatus is taller growing that its European relative, and does not have the same amount of flowers nor the same degree of smokiness.  Perhaps you could call it the politically correct smoke bush – the smokefree smoke bush.   However, what it lacks in flower power it more than makes up for with foliage display, especially in the autumn when the leaves take on hues of orange, scarlet and purple giving a startling display.  I think this may be the best autumn foliage display of any medium sized shrub.

These are relatively easily-grown plants, preferring a sunny situation and cool, free-draining soil.  They do not like the soil to be over-rich, and they certainly do not need fertiliser applied often, because when they are grown in rich soil they grow rather coarsely and do not colour up so well.  However, they do respond very well to trimming and shaping, the neater bushes giving better foliage displays.

I do not even know if my friends stock this next plant, a striking evergreen tree from across the ditch, but perhaps they will soon.  I am referring to the glorious Firewheel Tree, Stenocarpus sinuatus.  This flamboyant tree, native to the coastal forests of Queensland, is frost tender, but I have seen it growing very well in Napier, so I am sure you could get away with it in warm areas of Wairarapa, especially near the coast.

It has unusual foliage – the leaves are glossy green and wavy – and has spectacularly showy bright orange red flowers at this time. The flowers radiate out from a central point, giving the impression of a spoked wheel, and last into the autumn.  This is a great specimen tree (it grows about ten metres high) if you have a frost-free site.

Albizia julbrissin 'Rosea'

This past week has been a trying one for gardeners, with unrelenting heat, temperatures of over 30 degrees for days on end, and little sign of any respite. As I write this on Sunday it is almost unbearably hot, with not even a breeze to cool things down. Then forecasters are saying we might have a windy day tomorrow, with the chance of rain from the west, so I guess there is a fair chance we will not even see much from that quarter.
It seems to me the only place to be in the garden at the moment is in the shade, under an umbrella or in the shadow of a mature shelter tree.
I visited a garden in the south Wairarapa recently, a garden that featured an ancient oak tree – well over a hundred years old I would think. It had been well looked after and I could see signs of recent tree doctor work, with carefully cut limbs visible. The rest of the garden had obviously been “made over” a few years ago, and featured a couple of clusters of semi-mature shade trees, most welcome in the heat of a Martinborough summer.

The first of these was a grouping of the charmingly pink-flowered Albizia julbrissin ‘Rosea’.
This deciduous tree has the most graceful fern-like leaves through summer, and then pink to red fluffy
flowers that feature long silky stamens that give rise to its common name, Silk Tree. This is a quick
growing tree, with a delicate arching growth habit so that it even looks attractive even when without
leaves.

It is perfect as a shade tree as it does not cast a dense shade like a beech tree – in fact, it creates a
lovely filtered shade and it is easy to establish a garden underneath it. It is also a relatively mess-free
option for the garden, as the fine leaves rapidly disintegrate in the autumn, making it easy to keep clean and tidy. Actually, the leaves are so tiny they would probably blow away in a typical Wairarapa
autumn!

Sometimes this tree sets seed – it is a legume and has long pods with large seeds within. In some parts of the northern North Island and in the nelson area it has become sparsely naturalised, so think about planting this if you live in a warm costal area where it might get out of the garden and into the
landscape.

Another kind of garden

Photograph of a bumblebee approaching a Penstemon - Dr David Winter

In the past have I written about the various kinds of gardens that we create – gardens that are filled with flowers,  those that are crammed with a multitude of unusual and rare plants, and those where the concentration is on the overall effect of the garden, with design being a strong component of the joy the gardener derives.

This holiday season I had an insight into a different kind of garden, thanks to the efforts of my scientist son, home from Dunedin. In December Radio New Zealand broadcast an interview with him as he showed their science correspondent Veronika Meduna around his garden – the link is here http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ourchangingworld/20121206   I was intrigued to listen, as he had many admirable skills but top notch gardening is not one of them, and his hillside patch is an interesting mix of pioneer plants (weeds, that is) of various stripes, with a few garden patches interspersed.

Turns out he was not showing her around his garden plants so much as guiding her to various spots in the garden where different insects and other creepy crawlies were hiding out, and regaling her with details of how interesting it all was.

When he came home for Christmas he informed me he was going to be harvesting from my garden for the lab sessions he takes at Otago University, and I thought he was interested in the genetics of some of our plants, but again I was wrong.  He spent a part of each day while he was home gathering bugs of varying kinds that had been attracted to the death trap that is our swimming pool. 

There is a remarkable variety of flying critters of all kinds to be found in different states of swimming and drowning in the pool – cicadas, flies of various kinds, bees (both honey and native), bumble bees, a variety of beetles, and even a few spiders.

It made me see the garden the way he, an inveterate invertebrate lover, sees it – as a place where humans construct an environment to attract as many different kinds of wild life as possible.

He took me on a little tour of my garden, showing me some perfectly cylindrical holes (with piles of soil beside them) in the compacted mulch around the old vegetable garden, pointing out that these were the nests of the small native bees we had seen in the pool. We then went hunting to see if we could find the bees at work in the garden, and quickly discovered them at work on a flowering hebe – there were dozens of them zipping in and out of the small flowers on each raceme.  We also found them at work on a parsley plant I had allowed to flower, alongside native flies and honey bees.

When I spent a morning slowly filling up the wheelbarrow with weeds and trimmings from the garden, I took my time to unload it, looking carefully at the range of invertebrate life I had also accidentally gathered, and was surprised at the variety.  As well as the earwigs and slaters I had expected to find there, I could usually find three or four different species of spider, a couple of different ladybirds (including that lovely steel blue ladybird which has become more common in recent years), and a range of scale insects from trimmings, “fluffy bums” (juvenile passion vine hoppers) and even a few ants and aphids.

It was a bit of an eye opener for me, as I would have said I was an observant gardener who took notice of the environment I was gardening in, but I guess I have not quite seen the garden as such a source of biodiversity, and it made me think about some of the things we can do in the garden to encourage a wider range of wild life into the garden.

'Con C Dor' the lilies

It seems that each summer has a theme in the garden.  It might be a cool and wet year, where the traditional summer crops like peppers, egg plants and tomatoes really struggle but green-leaved vegetables like lettuce relish it and flourish.  Or it might be a very hot and dry summer which gives the flower garden hell, meaning bedding plants shrivel up and roses drop most of their leaves by the start of February and look dreadful.

This summer will be the year of giant lilies in my mind.

A couple of weekends ago a gardener who is a friend of friends rang and asked whether I would like to help identify a large lily that had many, many flowers she had growing in a pot at her back door.  It was a little out of town in a country garden so I happily set out one evening to have a look, more or less expecting it to be an Asiatic or Oriental lily that had been infected with a virus, leading to a dose of fasciation.

Fasciation is a common side-effect of virus infection in many plants, causing “witches brooms” on deciduous trees and distorted growth on perennials.  In lilies it causes increased growth rates, flattened stems and a remarkable profusion of blooms, with literally hundreds of smallish flowers clustered at the end of the stems.  I was expecting having to explain that this had occurred, and that it was probably just a one-off and the bulb would recover.

But what I saw was a remarkably healthy looking lily, growing profusely in a huge terracotta pot, with lots and lots of flowers opened and opening,  and plenty of buds to come – with not a sign of fasciation anywhere.  The flowers were a very soft cream (almost white) with soft yellow centres, about 20 cm across and slightly scented.  These glorious flowers were borne on stems over two metres tall, making this a very imposing sight.

I was flummoxed as to what it was, thinking it was probably one of the hybrids between the Oriental lilies, such as the glorious Golden Rayed Lily of Japan, Lilium auratum, and the Asiatic species in the Trumpet group, including the likes of the Christmas Lily, L. regale.

When I got home I looked through my catalogues and thought I had come up with the answer in a catalogue from a South Island grower, a Oriental/Trumpet (OT) hybrid called ‘Con C Dor’,  only it was described as growing one metre high.  When I went delving into the on-line registration catalogue things got a bit murkier as I could not find any ‘Con C Dor’, but eventually I found it, under its proper name, ‘Consa d’Or’, where it was described as growing five feet in England, so I guess the extra foot can be put down to our better growing climate.
Then this week in the Times-Age I saw a photograph of another gardening friend (and ex-client of our nursery) Jean Farley standing alongside another giant flowering specimen of what appeared to be the same variety.  It was interesting that in both cases the plants had come from potted gift plants, suggesting they had perhaps been sprayed with chemicals to keep them small as I cannot imagine a two metre lily in a pot being a good gift for a hospital patient!

The Hydrangeas

In these hot and dry days of summer it is good to have some indicator plants that will let you know when the rapid application of some cooling and quenching H2O is urgently needed, and few garden plants do that as effectively as hydrangeas.  Once they have been in moisture deficiency for a day or two they will quickly hang their flower heads and withdraw the water from their leaves, their dried-up hangdog look a sure-fire indicator that you need to get the hoses out and watering commenced.

The popularity of these summer blooming stalwarts has waxed and waned over the years.  Once very popular in New Zealand gardens, they fell from grace a little, with a generation of gardeners regarding them as somewhat common, but they seem to be having a bit of a revival at the moment, perhaps spurred on by the arrival of a number of new varieties, and the uptake of gardening by a younger generation.

Older gardeners will recall when all gardens had a dollop of hydrangeas, often planted on a south-facing wall and then neglected.  There they would provide deep green foliage throughout the growing season and, as long as they were not butchered too badly at pruning time, they would usually furnish a nice display of flowers over the summer.  My first garden had such a row of hydrangeas, all healthy growing, awaiting my first pruning, then failing to flower for a couple of years as I pruned them too hard and somewhat injudiciously. 

My clearest recollection of those hydrangeas is the role they played in my first attempts of growing plants from cuttings.   I took slips from a number of different rock plants I had in another border, and lined them out in freshly-turned garden soil, using hydrangea trimmings to mark the end of the rows.  The inevitable happened – the only cuttings that struck were the hydrangeas!

All these were the most common form of hydrangea, ‘mop heads’.  This slightly disrespectful epithet denotes that the flower heads are entirely composed of sterile flowers, with much larger florets than the fertile flowers.  These flowers can look a little heavy, and indeed can be more than a little weighty, especially after a shower of rain.

The lacecap types, which have a mix of fertile and sterile flowers, probably should be much more widely grown than they are as they are as easily grown as mop tops, but are perhaps easier to mix with other flowers as the lacecap flower head is looser, more graceful and more subtle in its effect.  Often it is composed of a ring of sterile flowers around a central core of fertile ones.

The common garden hydrangeas as referred to as H. macrophylla, and as I said before, there has been an interesting range of new forms coming on to the market in the past few years.

I have been impressed by the picotee-edged form called ‘Sensation’.  This is a vigorous growing mop top with bright green glossy leaves, and masses of large flower heads with the coolest flowers of rose-pink edged with white.   The new buds are greenish, and an opening head has the most amazing combination of colours.

The new You-Me series is even more interesting, with a range of pastel colours in doubles forms, quite unlike anything grandma grew in her garden. ‘You-Me Forever’ has intriguing balls of double blue blossom while ‘You-Me Eternity’ (sounds like ‘Forever’ to me, but then I am just a linguistic pedant according to the Head Gardener)  has the same form but in dark pink.  These are fabulous plants and worth seeking out in your local garden centre.

The lost tribe of the Inca

Being a basically conservative sort of gardener, things can creep up on me a little.  A plant may be getting a little large for its space, or perhaps suffering from dieback or another ailment and I will not notice it usually.  But the Christmas/New Year period offers a chance to keep on top of those sorts of things.  I have more time to spare to just wander around the garden instead of rushing from plant to plant, and from weed to weed!  And I can also wander around with the Head Gardener, listening to her very subtle offerings about the suitability of various plants.

This year there are a number of overgrown trees that will need to be carefully thinned out, especially a large silver matipo, Pittosporum tenuifolium, which is growing hard against the back fence, and has spread its arms just a little too wide.  A crested iris, probably I. confusa I think, growing at its base has also had territorial ambitions, expanding to cover a large portion of the back border, and intermingling with a similarly-minded red Flower Carpet rose. These will all be trimmed, pruned and perhaps removed, to make room for some more interesting and exciting plants.
While I was sizing them up I also looked at a couple of patches of Peruvian lilies, Alstroemerias, which I planted about 12 years ago.  They were red and golden forms of the Inca series, and were a gift from their New Zealand agents. The Inca Alstroemerias are bred by one of the world's largest breeders, Konst BV of the Netherlands, specifically for use as garden planst.

I confess I was a little suspicious of these plants when they were given to me, being sceptical about the claims of that they were true dwarf varieties, and that they would behave themselves in the garden and not run all over the place.

I have had bad experiences with Alstroemerias before.  We had a patch of the unusually coloured A. pulchella, (also known as A. psittacina) from Brazil, which has flowers that are dark red marked with green and blotched dark purple. It was growing in very well-drained sandy spoil and it was a nightmare to get rid of – it took a few years of assiduous digging to finally get all the little tubers out.

We had a similar problem with a hybrid we bought for one of the back gardens.  A tall form, obviously derived from the energetic old species A. aurea which you will find romping around a lot of old gardens,  this one decided it liked the part of the north-facing bed it was in so much that it would take the whole bed over.  We have been digging it out for the past seven years and it still managed to throw a shoot up every year.  I think I would need to kill everything in the bed, remove all the soil, sieve it all and taking any tuberous remains away, before we would finally get control of it.

So you can imagine my caution about planting these gift plants, but I have to say they have been very well-behaved plants, both eventually spreading to about a metre across after many years, and both giving a great source of cut flowers, albeit with short stems.

Quite aside from their value as bright and cheerful garden plants for sunny parts of the garden, they are also one of the world's most popular perennials for use in bouquets as a cut flower, happily lasting for weeks.

But the time has come for a change, and I have been looking around at some of the newer varieties, including a number of the newer Inca varieties.  One that has taken my eye in my favourite garden centre is ‘Inca Joli’, which has a mass of deep orange-red flowers with a yellow striped throat, on a compact plant.  ‘Inca Pulse’ is similar, with bright and luminous warm red flowers with a bright yellow throat.  If you like more subtle colours, or you are a bicycle fan,

 ‘Inca Avanti’ might be your choice, with soft peach/pink flowers with yellow striped throats.

I was also rather taken with a couple of other forms.  ‘Bryce’ has unusually-coloured flowers – they are a jumble of apricot and peach, with yellow throats, speckled darker, and I would imagine that would look great planted in a terracotta tub or planter.

So it was a sunny day, and I was under strict instructions that I was not to go into the wilds of the Upper Ruamahanga River on my own, looking for the hidden lake that lies between the aforementioned river and its tributary,  the Ruapae.
So what to do.  It is still, calm and cool at 7.30 but I know it is going to get nicely warm.
Of course, I'll go up Taratahi/Mr Holdsworth.  All the time my son David was home, especially when his lovely partner Ana was here too, we hoped to go for a bug hunt/tramp in the hills, but it never happened, usually because the weather was too wet or too windy.
Of course, now that they have gone it was fabulous!
.
The tramp was delicious!  The first of the Thelymitra are in bud at Rocky Lookout, and there are a few in flower in the Pig Flat swamp.  And there are those who say our wild flowers are dull!

I wish I had David for the walk though.  On the alpine part of the walk I saw what appeared to be three different species of grasshopper; a large green, a large brown, and a much smaller green form as well.  There was a collection of moths fluttering around, mostly too ephemerally for me to be able to identify them, then as I wandered (or more correctly staggered) across Pig Flats on my way back down a beetle (?) landed on my arm - about 2 cm long, dark and slender with four prominent spots on its wings.
And for the life of me I cannot find anything that looks like it online.
Might have to get that macro lens for my camera after all.

Day lilies

At this time of the year our garden suffers a little from “Yellow Fever”.  I do not mean that the Head Gardener and I take copious weekends off and head over to Wellington to watch the Phoenix soccer team (although we do that occasionally) .  No, what I mean is that yellow starts to dominate the flowers in the garden, with many brightly coloured perennials coming to the fore.

Primary among these are the delightful day lilies, Hemerocallis, one of the most popular of all perennials in the United States, yet somehow neglected in this country.

Both the common name and the Latin name refer to the flowers’ ephemeral life span – literally here today gone tomorrow for these guys.  Hemero is Greek for “one day”, while “callis” means beautiful, so when the great plant classifier Carl Linnaeus was looking for an appropriate name for the genus in 1753 he hit on Hemerocallis.

Originally found in the wild in China, these plants have been hybridised for many years now and a wide range of plant forms and colours is available, although it has to be said that the yellow and orange shades probably still predominate.  Many gardeners have been familiar with the old thin-petalled yellow flowered varieties and are rather surprised when they see more modern forms, with their deeper colours, stronger texture, and much wider range of colours.  We grow a number of yellow and reddish forms, as well as one lovely deep mahogany variety, which we planted in our dark coloured border.

Daylilies are very hardy and will cope with anything the weather will throw at them in Wairarapa – they will bounce back from cold very well and will cope with drought reasonably well too, although they do like the occasional drink during the heat of summer.

There are two different growth habits among modern daylilies – some go completely dormant in winter, the leaves dying off completely for the colder months, while others remain evergreen right through the year.  I grow both forms and have to say the dormant forms are probably tidier in the garden as their dead leaves are removed as part of the usual autumn tidy up, whereas some of the evergreen varieties mainly shed their dead leaves in the following spring, and you can end up with a plant covered in flowers, but also with dead and dying leaves in the middle of the clump.  It probably pays to check which form any variety you buy is

Although day lilies will grow quite happily in most soil types, they do best in well fertilised, well drained light-ish soil.  We have some growing in quite stiff clay and although they are growing alright, they do not compare to those growing in better soil.  You can also grow these summer beauties in large containers, using a robust container mix.  If you do not have any, you could make up a variety of the old John Innes mix – equal parts of good garden loam, peat moss (or composted bark) and well rotted animal manure.

Day lilies are true long-lived perennials, with fibrous roots are varying from thin to fleshy and tuberous, extending from the crown, which is also where the leaves and flowers emerge.  They are very easy to divide and increase – just find where the fans are connected at the crown of the plant and carefully cut or pry them apart. You will find that some of fans are not properly connected and you will only need to disentangle their roots.  Try to be very careful when undertaking division because even though snapping some of the roots is very hard to prevent , it is important to keep as much of the roots as possible. If a fan snaps off of the crown without any roots you are doomed ­– the leaves will not grow new roots.   These are vigorous plants, so when replanting make sure you leave enough room around them for their expansion!

A new year's gardening and blogging

What with two books published in the past month, things have been a bit hectic here, and the blog has been suffering - so it is time to start all over!

There is a strange period in the vegetable garden around the New Year, as the first crop of vegetables and fruit, so carefully tended and carried through to provide special treats (new peas, new potatoes, strawberries and raspberries) for the Christmas table, has been harvested and there is a little lull.  It is time, though to start thinking and planning for the cooler winter months ahead, as well as continuing the succession of summer plantings.

I know it seems decidedly odd to be thinking of the dreary months that stretch out after May, but if you do not get under way with winter crops, there will not be a long enough season left for the plants to come to maturity.  In fact, it is probably a little late for some of these crops already, but we will push on and get these under way anyway.

The basic tenet we are working on is that most vegetable plants will stop growing over the winter.  If you have planted later in the season the crops will not have had long enough to mature into full size, and they will go into a holding pattern.  Once spring comes and the growing conditions improve, they will think it is time to flower and they will “bolt”, rendering them useless. 

Planting now (and keeping the newly planted seedlings moist) gives the plants the opportunity to take advantage of the extended growing season, when temperatures are at the most conducive for good growth.   It also means most will be approaching maturity when the temperatures start to fall in late autumn/early winter, and the colder conditions will hold them in a good state for months, enabling a protracted harvest.

One crop that needs to go in soon is a good supply of that winter staple, leeks.  I was thinking about these valuable vegetables the other day, out at ‘Brancepeth’ when we launched a book I co-authored with Alex Hedley about the Beetham family and their remarkable collection of buildings at ‘Brancepeth’.  There used to be very extensive kitchen gardens in years gone by, and I fondly recall the late Hugh Beetham coming in every year and buying multiple bundles of leeks for planting.

Nowadays it is not so easy to find field-grown leek seedlings – most of us have to be content with punnet-grown supplies – but if you can find plants that have been sown in the open ground it is far better to plant these.  They will be much thicker and more robust than punnet grown types which are usually drawn up and thin.  You could consider twice-planting these punnet-grown leeks if you have the space and time.  Just plant them out in small clumps in a nursery bed until they have grown on and made a bit of thickness, then plant them into their final spot.

Leeks like lots of humus in the spoil, so work some well-rotted animal manure (chicken pooh is great!) or humus-rich compost into the soil, working it in well.   If your plants are robust enough to be planted out now, trim the top of the leaves off, keeping about 50mm.  Plant by using a dibbler to make a hole into the well-prepared soil, and then drop one leek into each of the holes, which should be about 125 mm apart.  The best way to plant is to keep all of the bottom part of the leek in the hole, with just the 50mm of foliage showing, then just squeeze the top of the hole to keep the leek upright position – do not fill the hole – and water in very well.  Obviously you should keep the plants well-watered until the autumn rains arrive.