Welcome back to our resident gecko, Glenys
Gecko, probably Hoplodactylus pacificus.
We are very pleased to see our resident gecko back sunning herself in the same spot as last year on the gnarly old pine tree trunk. As this is apparently the behaviour of a pregnant female, it means we have more than one gecko in residence. If she was successful in bearing her babies from last year and they survived all the predators which includes adult geckos, it may mean we have several. Given that spotting one gecko is a rare occurrence (last year’s event caused considerable excitement amongst local herpetologists), we are never going to know, but we are hopeful that Glenys’s behaviour may become an annual event. The sunbathing is apparently part of the incubation process of the young.
It takes an eagle eye to spot a sunbathing gecko. We may well have others in less prominent spots and we may have had them here all the time and just never spotted one before. It is likely that Glenys is a fine specimen of Hoplodactylus pacificus.
Earlier stories from last year:
1) Gecko update
2) The first story (and best photo) about our gecko, as well as the flocking kereru and monarch butterflies which were delighting us at the time – Wildlife in the Garden, New Zealand style.
No. We do not have a Mediterranean climate here
The romance of lavender - though it can be shortlived in our climate
We were watching an interview with the head gardener at Tresco Abbey on the Scilly Islands just off the coast of Cornwall. The garden is notable for growing a whole range of plant material which is too tender for the mainland and the gardener claimed they had a Mediterranean climate. He then proceeded to elaborate and it could have been me describing our climate here.
“We never get very hot and we never get very cold,” I say. “In fact we are almost frost free and we get regular rains twelve months of the year along with high sunshine hours.” Is that a Mediterranean climate? I don’t think so. It is what we call a temperate, maritime climate. Wikipedia agrees with me. A Mediterranean climate is that which is experienced by all those countries ringing the Med – places like the south of France, Portugal, coastal Spain, Italy, Greece and down to the coastal areas of North Africa. It is also found in California, south and west Australia and parts of South Africa. These are places where they grow wonderful pistachios, luscious olives and grapes, where lavender, bourgainvillea and red geraniums flourish. Hot, dry summers and cool, damp winters are what characterise the Mediterranean climate.
Almost a signature plant for Mediterranean gardening
Head inland from these coastal areas and you get to the classic continental climate – hotter, drier summers and much colder, dry winters. The closest thing we have to a Mediterranean climate in NZ is probably Hawkes Bay while only Central Otago could be said to have a continental climate. There are reasons why they are the cherry and apricot bowls of New Zealand. The rest of us fall pretty much into the aforementioned temperate, maritime class with the upper reaches of Northland leaning to the subtropical end of the spectrum.
No amount of wishful thinking and attempting to redefine our climatic definitions (we have seen wild claims that the North Island is subtropical) is going to alter the actual temperatures and rainfall distribution we have. Most of us would like to be a degree or two warmer all year round and a little drier – or at least have the rain fall at night and please make it warm rain. But we are not a sub tropical Pacific island and we have to understand what we have in terms of climate and garden within that.
This is not to say that we can’t grow some of those Med plants. We can and we do but they are not always long lived. Many of those plants are the grey foliaged ones – whether the aforementioned lavender, cistus (rock rose), oleander, even artemisia (the wormwoods), rosemary and succulent sempervivums. In areas of higher rainfall, the one critical issue to growing these types of plants is superb drainage. Most of them also need full sun. In New Zealand, they are often recommended for coastal conditions where sandy soils give sharp drainage and dry out quickly in summer.
The same is true of many of the Australian native plants which have adapted to drier conditions. Some put on terrific floral displays – the grevilleas, some of the wattles, anigozanthus, even the fragrant boronias which many of us have tried and lost. It is usually the wetter climate and fertile soils that are the death knell of these plants, as indeed with most of the showy proteas from South Africa.
It is not all bad. We do have quite a bit of success with some of the Australian plants from their subtropical forest areas. These plants are used to higher humidity and heavy rainfall while tolerating the cooler conditions we have. Plants like the doryanthes (spear lily), the subtropical cordylines, the aromatic myrtles such as Backhousia anisata and citriodora will all thrive in our climate if given reasonably protected conditions.
Gardening styles and plants have evolved for very different conditions in the Med - this is Portugal
The problems often come with the desire to recreate the romance of a holiday. For many New Zealanders, the Mediterranean areas with their long history, their breathtakingly quaint villages contrasting with the grandest architecture imaginable, crowned by a blue as blue sky (most of us visit in summer) are the pinnacle of sophisticated style. If it is sophisticated there, it must be sophisticated at home, right? Wrong. Mediterranean gardens and plants have evolved for Mediterranean conditions. They are more likely to look contrived, verging even on the pretentious, when set in this green and verdant environment of ours.
Experienced gardeners often like to push the boundaries of what can be grown in their conditions. It is enormously satisfying to look at a thriving plant which would generally turn up its toes and die in such an alien location. But experienced gardeners rarely try and create an entire garden using a genre from a foreign land and an incompatible climate. Nothing shouts novice louder.
If you want that Med look, it may be easier to move. What we do have in the centre and north of the North Island is one of most benign climates imaginable and the result is lots of lush growth which is the envy of those from harsher climes. We are better to start with what we have rather than to try and recreate an inappropriate fantasy from foreign shores.
There is a certain folly in trying to recreate the romance of a Greek island holiday back home
First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.
Of matters related to social class and social conscience
Cardoon - the next trendy crop for basil sophisticates?
I have fun with Twitter, the social networking stream where you have be very brief and succinct and most interaction takes place with strangers. Not that gardening tweeps (the lingo says a participant is a tweep, not a twit or twitterer) are generally inspiring, witty or memorable. But Twitter delivered me two gems this week of a horticultural bent.
The first tweet linked me through to a column from the Dominion Post discussing baby names – which has nothing whatever to do with gardening unless you draw the long bow and comment on the growing popularity of flower names such as Lily and Poppy. Goodness, maybe Daphne is due for a recall. Mark suggested when our daughters were born that we could go for Astelia or Aciphylla – the latter being a spiky native plant and his favoured option, even more so if we chose the botanical reference Dieffenbachii as the poor wee mite’s middle name. But I digress. That column by Dave Armstrong referred to the “basil growing classes”. I laughed out loud. As a definition of middle class, urban, somewhat leftwing New Zealand, the basil growing classes seemed wonderfully apt. There is a limit to how versatile basil is and there is only so much pesto one can eat. Salads of sweet tomatoes, sliced fresh mozzarella and basil leaves are equally delightful but the price of mozzarella (the white stuff cocooned in water, not the nasty long life stuff) limits how often this appears in our household. I can remember that there was indeed Life Before Basil in this country – a time when only those who had backpacked through Italy had been introduced to the seductive fragrance of freshly picked basil leaves. Now it is a defining herb of the middle classes here and to grow your own makes you trendier.
Cardoon flowers are showier than basil flowers
So, if your children bear names like Oliver, Samuel and Amelia, you probably drive an urban SUV but your husband bikes to work, you have tomatoes in a grow bag, a worm farm and pots of basil growing, consider yourself one of the basil growing social class. In which case I have a hot tip – cardoon is my prediction for the new basil. It is sufficiently obscure to be interesting. It is extremely decorative in the garden. It is edible. We have eaten it. To be honest, we weren’t blown away by it (not like Florence fennel) but it is fine. In case you want to know more, instructions for growing it are below.
But I was ever so slightly crushed this week when Mark asked me to Google burdock. He was debating about what to do with the small plants he had growing after being enticed to buy seed from Kings Seed Catalogue. In fact we decided on balance that burdock is probably not worth the garden space, has dangerous weed potential, does not sound particularly tasty at all and has a very low yield to space required. But there, amongst the burdock information was the one line: Burdock: peeled leaf stalks are parboiled and used as a substitute for cardoon.
Wow. Some have never even heard of cardoon. Some don’t know that cardoon is edible. Some are still at the experimental stage of determining how edible it is. It is not yet showing up in any cookbooks I have seen, even though I receive review copies of many of the latest publications. But it is already such a staple in some people’s diets that they have found a substitute for it? I am amazed. My advice is to not delay if you wish to catch the wave of cardoon as a fashion crop. I will try and be earlier with my next prediction.
The second tweet was not so much as a source of amusement as vindicating a stance we have been taking here for some time. An American tweep, @InkandPenstemon, posted the comment: “The static monoculture of a lawn is never more unattractive than when it is exposed in the winter.”
We prefer to talk about grass rather than lawns these days
It has felt a little lonely at times, standing on our high horse bemoaning the obsession with the perfect lawn. At last I am seeing more talk challenging the high value we place on completely unsustainable and environmentally unfriendly lawn maintenance. There is a column in the latest NZ Gardener by Steve Wratten on this very topic. The author just happens to be Professor of Ecology at Lincoln University. He goes further than we do in that he eschews the motor mower in favour of an electric mower. I will own up to the fact that we use a pretty damn fancy lawnmower and we use it extensively. Because we have an open garden, there are standards we feel obliged to maintain and mowing large areas of grass is part of that. Perhaps we could offset that against the fact that our car usually gets to leave the garage only once or twice a week?
I make no apology for continuing a public crusade. We should not be embracing gardening values which are environmentally damaging and the worst one of all is the perfect lawn. A smooth monoculture of a single species of grass is a completely unnatural state of affairs which can only be maintained with chemical intervention. If you insist on killing off the earthworms as well (as some do to avoid the surface being pocked by worm casts and tilled by birds), your crimes against nature are compounded exponentially. It is time we questioned this particular gardening value.
The irony is that it is probably the very same basil growing classes who are likely to wise up to this situation and act upon it in the first wave of concern. Clearly there is a lot to be said for basil as a defining social measure.
Earlier articles on lawn care here include “What does your lawn say about you?” from 2011 and “The lawn as a political statement” from 2006.
First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.
Tikorangi – the new Texas?
Next door - not quite the Tikorangi locals signed up for when they settled here
I can’t honestly say we are thrilled to learn of the deal between Todd Energy and Methanex which will see up to 25 wells drilled to frack the sub strata of the area where we live. Tikorangi isn’t very big and the first three wells are next door to us, with more scheduled to follow on the same site.
But we are pretty much alone in that. Industry thinks it is wonderful. Most Taranaki locals think it is wonderful because it brings jobs and money. The mayor thinks it’s wonderful. Somewhat disturbingly, the CEO of the regional council thinks it is wonderful (I say disturbingly because that is the body tasked with regulating and monitoring the industry’s activities and it is clear that they are very kindly disposed to the key players). The editor of the local paper thinks it is wonderful – which indicates that the paper will maintain its position of being the PR mouthpiece for the energy industry.
The bottom line is that the oil and gas industry may well be good for the national economy. It is certainly very good for the regional economy and means we have a superior class of cafe and restaurant in New Plymouth.
An increasingly common sight in our landscape
But there ain’t nuthin’ good for the locals who live by the sites. Nothing. At. All. They are ugly, industrial sites in the middle of rolling, green countryside. Drilling is noisy. The increase in traffic, especially heavy transport, has been major over the years. Flaring is abominable – flaring being the exercise of cleaning up the wells and testing the flows by igniting the gas. Considering there is nothing good for the environment in drilling either, I am somewhat surprised that the industry continues to get away with flaring. Don’t even try and tell me that anything I can do to reduce carbon emissions will help the planet – not when I live in an area where flaring takes place.
Over the years we have seen changes and some for the better. The first well drilled next door to us, maybe three years ago, was flared for many weeks on end. It was so bright, we could see the glow as we drove out of New Plymouth, 25km away. It lit our house all night. But worse was the noise – the constant, unabated, low grade roar which meant that living here was like living on the flight path to Heathrow, but this was 24/7. When you have lived for years in the relative silence and total darkness of the country, flaring has a huge impact on quality of life.
Flaring was greatly reduced for the second well on the same site and I am hopeful that the third currently being drilled (we can hear the rig grinding away in the quiet of the night and the morn), may see flaring reduced further.
Less high handed bullying from the companies is another change. We are lucky. We are dealing with Todd Energy who appear to be one of the better companies to deal with. I had thought the divisive bully-boy tactics of the petrochemical cowboys were in the past now (though only the relatively recent past) until I saw the media statements coming from another company on another site.
But we have also seen changes in the way the councils handle consents and the winding back on the definitions of affected parties. It is very difficult to convince councils that you are an affected party now and if you acquiesce and sign the agreement for one well, essentially you have signed away all rights to object in the future.
I have met with successive mayors and councils over about fifteen years, pleading with them to be more proactive in planning to mitigate the negative effects. They are terribly concerned and sympathetic and nothing happens. Planning, such as it is, remains completely reactive.
I have tried to get District Council to require, as part of the consents process, that sites be screened from public view by planting. I think they should only be visible from the air. High security industrial sites have no place in a rural landscape. Nothing has happened.
Today’s newspaper, where both District and Regional Council hail all the positive benefits of the economic boom gives me no confidence at all that any negative aspects will be even be acknowledged, let alone addressed.
I try not to look but in this case, it is both sides of the road. They should be screened from view.
So the gentle area where we live, a soft rural landscape with reasonably high density population and a solid core of very longstanding families, both Maori and Pakeha, will just roll with the changes as we have for the past decades. We will be the guinea pigs for fracking here. We will let you know if it does cause earthquakes or contaminate our water supplies. The ground below us is about to be fracked in every direction. We will adapt to the increase in traffic though we probably all hope that the ridiculous practice of laying gas pipelines down our roads and verges won’t happen again (how to cause maximum disruption to the largest number possible and completely without apology!) We will grit our teeth and only complain when the noise incidents get beyond the pale. And some of us will wait.
I think it likely that in a decade or two, all the viable reserves of oil and gas beneath us will be gone. The companies will pull out. The multitudes of small industrial sites I try not to look at will be reclaimed by long grass and then by other vegetation. Processing plants will be mothballed. The traffic will reduce and peace will return. I have to take the long view because the juggernaut that is the petrochemical industry rolls on unchecked in Taranaki in the short term.
The adjacent house is, I understand, still occupied by a very long term Tikorangi resident
The Weird and Wonderful World of Show Vegetables
We are never going to get show vegetables out of our garden
There is something wonderfully compelling about the bizarre, the obsessive and the freaky which may explain why even our daughter joined us on the sofa to shriek with laughter at the programme on the Living Channel last Sunday. It was all about growing and showing vegetables in the United Kingdom. Before any readers get defensive, I hasten to add that we have the utmost respect for the skills required and the proud tradition of competing for prizes in various vegetable classes. It is just a tradition which has largely bypassed us in New Zealand so we are bound to find the proud woman holder of the title of World’s Best Potato Grower faintly amusing.
Growing vegetables for show does not have a lot to do with eating them. In fact eating them was never mentioned. Growing 900 onions in the quest for the best sets of five perfectly matched specimens, each weighing 250 grams, does leave one with a rather eyewateringly large excess of produce for ahome grower. And what exactly are you going to do with the other 85 heads of celery which did not make the cut when you selected the best five to show? These are celery plants which have been grown entirely under cover, nursed, mollycoddled, blanched and fussed over until they can reach a massive 150 cm high or even more. They are hardly going to fit in the fridge. But once you have seen them being lovingly washed in a large bath of soapy water and gently groomed with a soft toothbrush, you realise this has nothing to do with home vegetable gardening. It is more akin the vegetable equivalent of the prestigious Crufts Dog Show but without the social pretensions.
There are rigid rules as to what is acceptable and what is not. Immaculate, matched onions are presented with a neat tie of raffia to hold the trimmed top tidily (which sparked a comment from the show host along the lines of: “Nothing finishes a perfect onion like a sheaf of raffia,”) but woe betide anybody who steps over the line to flamboyance. A modest knot may be required, a bow is enough to get you disqualified – or so the husband tells me from another show he watched.
Carrots and parsnips are popular crops but growing them takes special techniques and even then you may not get specimens with precision tapering, let alone perfectly matched sets of three identical specimens. Don’t be thinking that you can win with garden specimens grown in soils. These are grown in drums. First these drums are packed with coarse sand. A tube is then used to extract a perfectly straight column in the sand which is filled with the highest quality, fine garden mix. It has to be sieved garden mix because any untoward chunks could cause the plant’s roots to kink or bend. This is a serious business where timing, technique and crop management is critical. Carrots should have a nicely rounded base and are exhibited without their roots. Parsnips should be perfectly tapered and are measured and exhibited with the long tap root attached in its entirety.
We were riveted, as only holiday-makers on a bleak and windy summer Sunday afternoon can be, to learn that in order to clean and present your carrots or parsnips, you have to gently sponge them in a circular motion. If you rub them up and down, you will scratch the outer skin and cause blemishes. That is a piece of new information which just may or may not be useful at some point in my life.
Presumably it is the exhibitionists who grow the freaks. There was an earlier series on growing extreme vegetables – the parsnip, I was told, grew in a length of downpipe which ran three stories high. In this country, the giant pumpkin growing competitions are relatively common and most of us realise that said competitive pumpkins are not destined for the dining table, being of value only as stock food. Size and weight are everything in the freak classes. Beauty, uniformity and perfection count for nought.
Prize money does not count either. It is fame, glory and recognition. Most of the vegetable competitions in the UK (and there are legions of them) carry prizes of a few pounds only. The costs of competing are hugely greater than any financial reward – best grade seed only, packets of potting mix, washed sand, peat, special fertilisers and sprays and that is just for starters. Mark was a little put out to see that the competitive celery grower had a state of the art glasshouse which left anything we have here completely in the shade despite the fact that we have been professional growers of plants for the last few decades.
This is not to say that we don’t have competitions here. Mark recalls judging the vegetables at some gathering in Otorohanga where he was a guest speaker some years ago. I am sure I must have done it for the local Country Women’s Institute here at some stage. Maybe we are just of more pragmatic stock in this country. I am pretty sure that the vegetables I have seen exhibited here were actually edible and were grown in gardens. This is a very different kettle of fish to show vegetables.
First published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.
A Cautionary Tale about Excessive Rain (subtitled: The Bride Wore Orange)
Did I mention the bride wore orange?
As a rule we don’t do garden weddings here but the request came from Second Daughter’s Best Friend so we made an exception on New Year’s Eve. It sounded like fun. The ceremony, cocktail party and dance were all to be in the one place, culminating in fireworks at midnight. Our greatest worry was the potential fire hazard if we had a dry spell. Ha!
The preparation was humming along when the rains started last week. We had the garden ready, edges and hedges sharp and the lawns mowed despite the rain. We just needed one dry spell of a few hours to do the final blower round to present it all at is best. The dry spell never came.
Just like putting up the family tent, really, but on a grand scale and without the arguments (even in the rain). Photo: Michael Jeans
On the Friday morning, the marquee company came in. And the rains continued. In case you have wondered, putting up a large marquee (in this case 20m by 10m – we do have a large front lawn) is not unlike a glorified version of putting up the family tent but without the arguments. The marquee men were wet to the skin and had the second, smaller marquee up when the bride arrived to point out that the large one was not in the agreed place and it needed to be moved about two metres. To their everlasting credit, they moved it (in the rain) with remarkably good grace.
The second set of contractors was now on site to do the sound, lighting, furniture, stage and dance floor. They too were wet to the skin and amazingly good natured. But the wheels were starting to fall off. We couldn’t dress the marquee because 100% humidity meant tablecloths and seat cushions would all soak up too much moisture. Nor could the parquet dance floor go down. Practicing an aura of calm (after all, it wasn’t my daughter’s wedding), I told the bride’s mother not to worry and I would do it in the morning for her because the bridal party and family all had hair and makeup appointments.
In the morning, the rain was unrelenting. Now all the rain which would normally be absorbed into the lawn was being directed down the sides of the marquees and flowing like a small sea in underneath. Needs must. The dance floor was laid. I dressed the marquees. And as the rain got worse, the need for crisis management grew. We were doing a bit of reconfiguration using four extra small gazebos which was all we could rustle up. I established umbrella stations (we own quite a few brollies) for the dash between covered areas. The cake had to be brought in under an umbrella (couldn’t have the icing pockmarked). The band were loading in gear as fast as they could in the rain. We could at least park the caterers with undercover access though the bar staff were getting saturated moving alcohol and glasses to their location in a wheelbarrow.
By this time, I was soaked to the skin and dressed like an old tramp but abandoned all plans to find the time to get changed and flossied up (we were invited guests at the event) until after the guests had arrived on the three coaches. We have issues with the need to get large vehicles off our road here but are very experienced at managing our available space and can turn and park the largest coach. So did I need to meet prima donna coach drivers who tell me that I have no idea what I am talking about and there is insufficient space? No I did not. But rather than argue in front of guests (I was feeling at a sartorial disadvantage), I headed out to the road to manage any traffic there (it is designated petro chemical highway, is our country road) while the prima donna drivers disgorged passengers and then thought nothing of blocking both lanes as they fluffed around sorting out turning their coaches.
It was about this time, I noticed the rain had stopped. Such are the wonders of our drainage that we only need 20 minutes without rain and all surface water disappears.
I had no idea the garden tour would be so popular Photo: Michael Jeans
Now, I thought, I shall go and have a hot shower. But no. Two late arrivals on the last coach had been flying for 20 hours and really needed to shower and change. Was that all right? Of course. Unfortunately for me, dear Reader, we may be a five loo establishment but we are a one shower household. All I could do was to change for the… wait for it… garden tour. When first suggested, I had scoffed. “People who come to events here are not interested in the garden,” I said. “They are here for the event and to party.” So I thought maybe 10 of the older guests would join me. In fact I had about 70 or 80. Given that they were teetering along in stilettos wearing cocktail attire, I only did the shortened tour of the top gardens but even so, herding up to 80 people along is a mission.
The rain stopped. It was a miracle. The ceremony could be held outside, as planned.
I finally got to shower and change. And the rains held off. The actual ceremony was, at the last minute, held outside as originally planned. The event ran seamlessly and everybody had a wonderful time and absolutely loved the venue. The fireworks at midnight were spectacular. Nobody wanted to leave so the band played on until 1.30am and I completely ignored the prima donna coach drivers who had to sit out on the road with their hazard lights on and wait for the extra hour. If they had been pleasanter earlier, I might have looked after them.
The torrential rains did not return until the pack out the following morning. Over 20 cm (8 inches) of rain we had in that period of under three days. But the lawns are fine. They will recover quickly.
I, on the other hand, have realised there are good reasons why we don’t do garden weddings here.
First printed in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.
Rata and pohutukawa – the metrosideros family
Pohutakawa, maybe Scarlet Pimpernel, in Hamilton on Christmas Day (photo: Michael Jeans)
I have to start with a touch of mea culpa. I will never misspell pohutukawa again. It had never even occurred to me that I did not know how to spell it correctly. See, I had a Dunedin childhood and in the deep south, we probably had rata on our spelling lists rather than pohutukawa. At least that is my story. My only consolation in the matter is that my misspelling of the Maori name for Metrosideros excelsa apparently escaped the notice of everyone else involved with the production of the paper I write for, so I was not alone. But I was probably alone with my embarrassment. In case you missed it last Friday (before I corrected the website post), I turned the second u into an a.
As a peace offering, I give you a photo of a lovely pohutukawa in full flower at Millenium Heights in Flagstaff, Hamilton. The owner, Bronwyn, tells me it was meant to be a dwarf but it is already three metres high and it flowers profusely every year. When she said it was meant to be a dwarf, I thought initially that it might be one of the Kermadec pohutukawa (M. kermadecensis) which is sometimes used as a smaller selection – though only relatively smaller. However, I ruled that out because the Raoul Island pohutukawa flowers intermittently all year in dribs and drabs and it does not put on a mass display as shown. Added to that, it is more frost tender so it is never going to be happy in inland Hamilton. It is more likely to be a selection of the common form, M. excelsa. In fact it may even be the one named Scarlet Pimpernel (which was selected by my late father-inlaw). There is considerable variation within this species. If you start looking at trees you see over the next couple of weeks, you will pick huge variation in colour. Some look almost rusty brown from a distance, some deep red. The ones that stand out in the landscape tend to have orange tones to the colouring which gives vibrancy. It is called seedling variation – they don’t grow identical from seed. To get an exact clone of the parent, you have to propagate by cuttings.
The yellow pohutukawa are sometimes seen as a novelty. They are pretty enough in their own way but to my eyes they are nowhere near as spectacular as a good red specimen. The yellows are just another seedling variant of the same species, most common on Motiti Island. The reason you see them in mainland gardens and public plantings is because Duncan and Davies Nursery produced them commercially some decades ago – always the quest for the different and the new. It was that quest that also saw variegated forms offered for sale. These are not my favourite. I am not a great fan of variegated plants so I am unconvinced that a variegated form of our iconic pohutukawa was ever going to be an improvement on the usual forms in the wild. But because they were seen as different and new, they sold well for a while and there are big specimens around.
M. excelsa grows naturally as far south as Poverty Bay in the east and North Taranaki in the west. The pohutukawa that grows and flowers in the top of the South Island is a different species, M. parkinsonii. It tends to be rather more scruffy in its habit of growth.
The rata does not just go up, it goes along in every which way
It is of course the rata that is to the South Island what the pohutakawa is to the North Island, though we do have the northern rata as well. These are all the same family (so all metrosideros) but different species. Think of them being like cousins, perhaps. So the South Island rata is M. umbellata and the North Island rata is M. robusta. It is the latter that starts life as an epiphyte, living on a host tree that will ultimately die. The rata sends down roots that eventually reach the ground and develop into a strong vine. Over time, the vinous roots fuse together to form what looks like a trunk (called a psuedotrunk) so, by the time the host tree is strangled, dies and rots away, the rata can hold itself up. We have this rata here in the garden and we find that it does not just go up the host trees, not at all. In an hospitable garden woodland situation, there is little holding it back as it attempts to take over the entire area. I have to have words with it about its smothering ways. There is a limit to how much ground cover we want. Besides it only flowers on the tops and even then is but a shadow of the magnificent display the pohutukawa put on.
The southern rata is less determinedly epiphytic and can establish itself on its own roots in conditions which vary from nearly sub alpine to wet coastal forest. I recall as a child the excitement expressed by adults at the flowering of the rata in the wild, but it tends to be more a haze of red than an in-your-eye statement of summer and Christmas as with the pohutukawa. Unfortunately rampant possums have destroyed much of the impact of the southern rata in bloom.
Of the family, it is the good red pohutukawa or M. excelsa that remains my firm favourite.
First published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.
Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree…
The pohutukawa - often called the NZ Christmas tree
Ah, the Christmas tree. I was a little amused by a comment on Twitter from somebody that their potted pohutukawa had arrived but was considerably smaller than they had expected so their decorations were now placed beside it. Somebody else posted a photo of their potted karaka tree festooned in gold tinsel, Christmas balls and lights. It looked odd, but logic says it is no odder than adorning a pine tree in similar fashion.
Some brand the pohutukawa as the New Zealand Christmas tree. Living near the coast as I do, pohutukawa feature very strongly in the landscape. They obligingly flower at Christmas, lighting up the landscape. But of course there are large parts of New Zealand where they don’t grow or aren’t needed and residents there may well question the seasonal accolades bestowed upon it. When I say they don’t grow, the problem is that this special tree is not overly hardy. Indeed it is distinctly frost tender when juvenile. If you look at the distribution, it is largely coastal because disturbed air flows from the sea prevent frosts. Head just five or more kilometres inland and it can be too cold for them.
The other aspect of pohutukawa is that they are a wonderfully obliging and resilient coastal tree, putting up with salt laden wind and making enormous buttress roots to hold back the ravages of coastal erosion. They will grow where most other trees struggle badly, defoliate and die. Our coastal areas would be barren wastelands without them. Once you move to more sheltered areas inland, you have a much larger palette of trees to choose from so the tough pohutukawa might not be the tree of first choice. So for those of us who live in coastal areas from about the lower middle of the North Island upwards, the pohutukawa is our New Zealand Christmas tree but there will be New Zealanders who have never seen one in flower.
Did some not make the grade in years past? A commercial grower's roadside field. Spot the two that have never been clipped
For others, it has to be said the common old pine tree is more likely to deserve the award. Many people do not realise it is in fact native to California – it grows wild in a limited area of the Monterey Peninsula. But I think we could probably crown this country as the Pinus radiata capital of the world and certainly other countries don’t tend to use the humble pine as a Christmas tree. The handsome abies family are the favoured tree in Europe, particularly A. procera and A. nordmanniana, and these are so much slower growing that there are good grounds for raising eyebrows at the environmental vandalism of severing them to become temporary frames for Christmas lights. At least Pinus radiata grows so quickly in this country that it is more or less disposable. It also clips very well and if you buy a cut tree from a commercial grower, you should get a well shaped specimen with shorter needles. We were always into gathering wildlings, though the children would have liked better shaped specimens when they were young. They used to bewail the unbalanced shapes, the scruffy branches and the extra bits tied in to pad out particularly sparse areas.
Should you contemplate a growing Christmas tree in a pot as a last minute green alternative, you need to factor in three aspects. A large tree has a correspondingly large root system and is damned heavy. Don’t expect a living tree of two metres plus unless you have a small fork lift. It then takes a fair amount of skill to keep large plants healthy for an entire year so thinking you can keep your living Christmas tree and reuse it in future years may not be entirely practical. You are far more likely to have a moth eaten looking specimen with dead patches, badly root bound and hungry come next December. Thirdly, should you have purchased a living tree with a view to planting it out in the New Year, make sure you harden it off slowly to the bright sunlight when you bring it outdoors, saturate the root ball before planting and keep watering the poor thing all summer. But above all, choose the site carefully. Most living Christmas trees are forest giants in their infancy. They are not generally suitable candidates for suburban gardens, even less so if you are planting one a year.
The grapevine version
If you are still determined to try a live option for the future, take a look at our native matai and start clipping and training it early.
If the live Christmas tree is an ethical option based on concerns about the abject waste of severing a tree in its prime to adorn your house for two short weeks, it would probably be kinder to the environment to stick to the disposable pine tree or go for the reusable option. As a family which shuns the horrors of the tinsel Christmas tree, I am hoping my efforts with the woven grapevine pyramid will be greeted by the returning adult children today as an acceptable alternative.
Merry Christmas everyone and best wishes for a safe and happy festive season.
First published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.
Gardening books that stand the test of time
Over the past decade or so, a fair number of new publications of New Zealand gardening books have come across my desk for review. Precious few remain on the bookshelf. After being critical of the recent offerings for the Christmas market, I wondered at the manner in which NZ publishers are reacting in the face of competition from the internet. With all the information in the world available on one’s computer screen with a click of the mouse, I would have thought that the future of the reference book was as a highly credible, accurate, reliable, expert presentation of related information in one place. After all, one has to wade through a vast amount of dross on the internet and weed out unreliable information. It is often easier and a great deal more convenient to reach for the traditional book, but only if you trust its contents.
Reference books often used to be peer reviewed before publication to iron out errors and to identify problem areas. Wide ranging topics often had multiple authors, each working in their own area of expertise. Authors had solid credentials and there was a general expectation that information be accurate. Books were produced on the assumption that they could last for years, maybe even decades, and good ones would be reprinted. It took time to produce a new book.
Not anymore. The NZ gardening book today is more akin to the glossy magazine. Here today and gone tomorrow but looks good in the short time it is in demand. Who cares about the rest of it as long as the customer is seduced into buying it right now?
In both NZ books and magazines, the advice being dispensed so freely in visually appealing ways is too often coming from commercial interests which want to sell product to the consumer. And it is not always accurate advice, let alone best practice. Bring back independent, non aligned advice and information, I say. You know – the sort of information we used to get from books. I like to think that readers are neither dumb nor gullible. Would that NZ publishers thought the same way. Alas, they have redefined readers as consumers.
This train of thought led me to look at the books which we reach for regularly. We own a lot of gardening books. The dross goes to charity. Many of the specialist ones are particular to our interests but there are a few more general ones that we use regularly and which have stood the test of time and I am happy to recommend for any gardener’s bookshelf. Some will only be available second hand – try Touchwood Books who offer a mail order service.
1) Bulbs for New Zealand Gardeners and Collectors by Terry Hatch and Jack Hobbs. First published by Godwit in 1995, it may look a little dated and it is not the most comprehensive bulb book available. But it is accurate, written for NZ conditions and covers the bulb material available here. We trust it.
2) The Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs (Redwood Press). The version we have has no pictures but is still the best comprehensive listing of trees and shrubs we know. There are good reasons why it has had multiple reprints and editions.
3) Grow It Yourself Vegetables by Andrew Steens (Batemans, 2010). It is not the smartest looking of the latest crop of vegetable books and the sow/harvest diagrams are an unreliable afterthought, but the text is practical, helpful and reliable. According to Mark, the real gem if you can find it, is Vegetable Growing in New Zealand by J A McPherson and F J E Jolie. It was published by Whitcomb and Tombs and we have the sixth edition with no date but it retailed for three shillings and sixpence.
4) Koanga Garden Guide by Kay Baxter (Body and Soul, 2007). Simply the best and most comprehensive guide to organic and sustainable fruit and veg gardening that we have found. It is self published and a little rough around the edges (the edition we have lacks an index which makes it harder to use), but serious gardeners will read it cover to cover and take heed. What is more, they will keep going back to it which is a measure of a good book.
5) Like a shining beacon of hope, came New Zealand’s Native Trees by John Dawson and Rob Lucas from Craig Potton Publishers this year. A comprehensive, high quality and credible publication which is likely to remain on the bookshelf as a key reference for decades to come. We never did get the definitive two volume edition of Eagle’s Complete Trees and Shrubs of New Zealand (latest version is 2007 from Te Papa Press) – equally credible and enduring but more expensive.
6) We still use the 1993 Perennial Gardening in New Zealand by Christine Dann (Bridget Williams Books), particularly for identification.
7) The old (and I mean really old) Department of Agriculture publications on fruit trees – the bulletins and their 1973 book “The Home Orchard”. Treasure these, if you find them. Technically they are still very good on basic fruits though they are way out of date now with modern options and new cultivars. Use them for information on planting, pruning and general care but with the proviso that the excessive and toxic spray regimes can be totally ignored. They have their origins in the Chemical Ali times and we have since moved on.
I cannot think that many of the New Zealand gardening books published in recent times will still be on the bookshelves in decades years to come. Even fewer will be a resource of first choice. What happened to professional pride?
First published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.
A mast year for strawberries in the quest for semi self sufficiency here
It appears to be a mast year for strawberries here. That is a term for when plants produce a significant abundance of fruit. In nature this can be important. Apparently kakapo need rimu to have a mast year in order to breed. But here it just means we are having a bumper strawberry harvest. Not wanting to overstate the case, but they are coming in by the bowl full.
This leads me to the issue of self sufficiency and the observation that if you want to be self sufficient, you have to accept that there will be mast years and there will be famine years for some crops. At least we have the supermarket option these days so the famine stakes are not as high. I have noticed that self sufficiency has become trendy again, often espoused by people who claim that it is terribly easy and achievable in very small areas, taking relatively little time. All I can say is that self sufficiency must mean different things to different people and varying levels of home provision are being hailed as self sufficiency.
We describe ourselves as relatively self sufficient in fruit and vegetables. We produce enough fruit for high individual consumption all year and only buy additional fruit for variation in the diet and seasonal treats which cannot be grown successfully in our area. We generally produce sufficient vegetables but there are times we have to supplement. The husband felt such a failure when I had to buy a bag of potatoes last week because we had run out of old ones and we had eaten the first crop of early ones already. The onion harvest was poor this year so we have had to buy. Purists would maybe go without onions for the year.
But we are nowhere near self sufficient if you take in grains and animal protein. We don’t even attempt to produce our own grains. While we raise our own beef, we haven’t done our own poultry for years. To be genuinely self sufficient, you would need to factor in sufficient grain cropping to be able to feed the poultry as well.
Nevertheless, it is astonishing quite how much area gets taken up in providing sufficient to keep us going at the level we like for just the two of us and how much time it takes on the part of He Who Produces it All (aka Mark). Fortunately he enjoys doing it. If it was left to me, it would be a poor harvest of basil and lettuces at best because I would rather grow flowers. Mark has long scoffed at suggestions that you can achieve self sufficiency in a tiny plot and in dinky raised beds so we returned to The Oracle to see how much land she thought was needed. The Oracle is Kay Baxter, founder of the Koanga Institute. She only preaches what she practices and she has close to 40 years of experience in food production, organics and self sufficiency. We have the utmost respect for her opinion. According to her: “To grow all your veges and grains, you will need 100 square metres per person.” Yes that does include grains, which not many of us produce, but it does not include fruit. That is a hundred square metres of healthy soils in full sun with good shelter – per person. For a family of five – five plots of 10 metres by 10 metres. There are reasons why modern society has turned to the industrialisation of food production and one is the economies of scale.
If you want to produce your food on organic principles, you may need an even greater area. Generally speaking, organic production relies on producing crops at optimum times and not pushing the boundaries either end of the season (because that is when pests and diseases will strike more readily). You also need to be meticulous on crop rotation and soil management because you don’t have the fall back position of a chemical arsenal to rectify problems.
Factor in time as well. Time every week, not just when the gardening bug strikes in spring. To get reliable production in the vegetable garden requires constant vigilance, planning and regular work. If we costed in our time, it would be cheaper for most of us to buy all our food.
For us, it is a measure of a very high standard of living that we can produce most of our fruit and vegetable requirements. It is not a point of principle so much as a measure of quality – quality of both produce and life. When our lives were more frenetic and we had the demands of running a seven day business, there was not the luxury of time to produce food which could be bought cheaper and more conveniently from the local shops. There can be luxury in simplicity. Just don’t believe the current advice that you, too, can be self sufficient in fruit and veg in next to no time with minimal area and effort and it is all wonderfully simple. Ask such proponents again in twenty years time and you may be told something very different.
First published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.
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