Summer is for lilies
Auratum lilies in the summer border
Flowers mark the seasons for gardeners. To us, autumn means nerines. Winter is for camellias, late winter brings snowdrops, bluebells and magnolias. Spring means rhododendrons and cherry trees. And summer? Lilies are the flowers of summer.
Not roses. They look wonderful in late spring but by the time summer arrives, the roses are past their best. They tend to be happier in drier climates with low humidity, often with the advantage of cold winters to kill greeblies and fungi. To keep them looking good in warm, moist climates with high humidity requires a rigorous spray programme and good management. It can be done but we don’t do it.
But the lilies need no such fuss and they reward us with masses of blooms throughout the summer season, though to have a succession of them, you need to grow a range of different types. Fortunately there are plenty to choose from. There are well over 100 different species and that does not include the hybrids. Nor will I sidetrack onto plants that are referred to as lilies by name but are not lilies by nature – zantedeschia or arum lily, gloriosa or climbing lily, let alone daylilies and waterlilies.
We start with what we call the Christmas lily which is Lilium regale. It is a fragrant trumpet lily from China which is flushed deep red on the backs of the petals and is usually in flower for me to pick for the Christmas table. If you are thinking of a pure white Christmas lily (much favoured by florists), you are probably referring to Lilium longiflorum which hails from Japan. The renowned madonna lily, with its pure white trumpets, is yet another species (candidum) from southern Europe but it is distressingly prone to virus.
The Aurelian lilies are an earlier flowering favourite
Dovetailing with the Christmas lily, we have some lovely, sweetly scented trumpet lilies of the Aurelian type. These are a personal favourite. I love the soft honey apricot and lemon colours of the ones we have here and they are easy to grow in a garden border. Like most lilies, they pick well.
The tiger lilies lack scent but are easy to grow
The tiger lilies are pretty common and dead easy to grow but they lack scent, which can be a bit of a disappointment. If you can overlook that deficiency and you garden with orange tones, these lilies are perfect in mixed plantings. They rarely need staking and after flowering, the foliage dies down pretty quickly. The petals are described as reflex – in other words they curve backwards, not unlike a crown. There are a number of other lilies with this flower form (referred to as Turk’s cap lilies because they resemble a Turkish headpiece), but the tiger lily is in fact Lilium lancifolium, sometimes referred to as Lilium tigrinum. We don’t find the proper Turk’s caps (being L. martagon) anywhere near as easy to grow. If you know someone with tiger lilies, they produce masses of tiny bulbs (called bulbils) on the lower stem and these will reach flowering size in a couple of years.
All these lilies are but the prelude to the extended display we get from the astounding auratums. I wrote about these in Plant Collector over a month ago, the wonderful golden rayed lilies of Japan. They are still in full flight here and a major feature of the summer garden. They are big. They are beautiful. They are very fragrant. One might consider they are a bit over the top – but never vulgar. If planted by a path, they will need staking to stop every passerby being touched with golden pollen. Similarly, when a clump gets too congested, they will be inclined to fall over, unless staked. In garden borders or beds of tidy, compact little plants, the auratums will look out of place. But in big borders with big plants, they are superb. For us, they are the number one flower of summer.
The final flurry for the season comes from the late summer Lilium formasanum, which geographically inclined readers will understand means that these are indigenous to Taiwan. This is another scented trumpet type, predominantly white often flushed rosy pink on the petal backs, generally unfussy and commonly seen in gardens. Formasanum will seed down readily (too readily, some say, but we have never found it a problem) and grow even in semi shade and open woodland areas of the garden. It will flower in just its second year from seed. It makes a particularly good garden subject because its foliage is light and fine so it is not too intrusive in the dying down stages and it does not usually need staking.
I pick lilies to bring indoors. I love the way just one stem can scent an entire room for many days on end. Lilies produce the leaves and the flowering stem all on the same spike. It is important to remember when picking that you must leave sufficient stem and foliage for the bulb to continue photosynthesizing. This is how it builds up enough strength for it to flower again next year.
Lily pollen stains badly. I am guessing florists carefully brush the pollen from each stamen, being careful not to allow any to fall and mark the petals. I nip off the pollen coated tips, leaving the central stamen. It seems a shame but I know from experience that I do not want to be trying to get pollen stains off carpet and upholstery. You have to keep doing it as buds open in the vase but it is a small price to pay for one of the very best cut flowers I can think of.
First published by the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.
Auratum lilies with lobelias
Grow it Yourself – oregano and marjorum
I am not alone in getting these plants confused. Marjoram is the sweeter, milder, softer option but they are all members of the origanum family and related to mint. Origanum vulgare is what is usually regarded as oregano while Origanum marjorana is marjoram (sometimes referred to as sweet marjoram). It also has smaller leaves. I grow both and tend to use them in tandem when cooking. It appears that in the wild and in harsher climates, oregano develops a much stronger taste and the flavour difference is marked. But in our soft and lush conditions, the flavours of both are very mild.
The relationship to mint gives a clue as to growth habits. These are clumping perennials, easily increased by division once established. In colder climates they are largely deciduous, but grown in a well cultivated garden border, I can harvest from them for most of the year. It is best to divide them in spring or summer when in full growth. If you are growing oregano for cooking, don’t succumb to buying the golden and variegated forms which lack the flavour. You can plant these herbs as ground cover in herbaceous borders though they can be so enthusiastic in growth they may swamp more retiring neighbours. They will grow happily in sun to part shade but the flavours will be intensified in harsher conditions – full sun and poorer soil. I have decided I am being too kind to my plants and am getting masses of lush leafy growth at the expense of flavour. Their Mediterranean origins are an indicator that they will take harder conditions. What is sold as Greek oregano is reputed to have the strongest flavour.
First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.
From big picture gardening to small picture detail
Ours is not a rockery for growing alpines
My mission to weed our stream and ponds, about which I wrote last week, has been subsumed. That is to say it has largely been taken over by the menfolk in my life and turned into something much larger but I am not complaining. I was trying to clear the water weed. They are now building an additional weir, flushing the stream and hiring a sludge pump to clear the ponds. I know my limits. I have moved up from the park and into the rockery.
Moving from the open areas to the intimacy of the rockery is going from one extreme to another. The former is big picture gardening and much concerned with giving large trees space to grow and anchoring the whole picture well into the surrounding environs. This used to be called borrowed views and vistas before those terms became so pretentious they fell into naffdom. The rockery is all about little pictures, highly detailed gardening. I wouldn’t be without either, but I really enjoy the attention the rockery requires.
Traditionally, rockeries were about creating an environment that resembled scree slopes of mountains in order to grow alpines. We cannot grow alpines. We’ve tried but it doesn’t work. Our high humidity, high rainfall and mild year-round temperatures conspire against alpines. For us the rockery has become the place to keep track of treasures and to confine dangerous but attractive bulbs. Most gardeners know how easy it is to lose bulbs in garden borders. Some get swamped out by neighbouring plants, some are so anonymous when dormant that they get pulled out with other plants, some just seem to go, we know not where. If they have their own pocket in the rockery, it is possible to label their location and restrict competition.
Rockery conditions are surprisingly harsh. All that stone and other hard material heats up in summer so the soil dries out quickly. The gentle, steady rain we had last week didn’t penetrate very far. This means you have to be pretty selective about small shrubs, perennials and other plants but the bulbs don’t usually mind. In the wild, most are used to marginal conditions.
Too much of a good thing - Cyclamen hederafolium with black mondo grass
Two summers ago, I took the rockery apart pocket by pocket. At the time, I estimated there were about 500 separate compartments and it took me a full month’s work. At least I got to know it and all its inhabitants. This time I am only concentrating on the messy bits and the areas where plants responded a little too enthusiastically to the earlier renovation. The combination of black mondo grass and pink Cyclamen hederafolium is very pretty, especially as snowdrops come through the marbled foliage of the cyclamen in the depths of winter. But you can have too much of a good thing and all three inhabitants were trying to outcompete each other. I am thinning them drastically.
To garden in this style, you have to be willing to tolerate the messy season bulbs have, when their foliage is looking past its best. Most bulbs use the time after flowering to build strength below ground so they can flower again next year. When they have done that, their foliage dies down naturally. With some, this is a quick turnaround. Others, like nerines and colchicums, take many months. We just try and ensure that other areas of the rockery have more attractive displays to distract the viewer and leave the plants to their natural cycle.
I used to think that every pocket of the rockery should have something of interest in it all the time. This is actually a lot harder than it sounds because you then need to use a succession of maybe four different plants which can co-exist quite happily – and each compartment should have different combinations. In other words, for me this would be getting on for 500 miniature gardens. Rockeries are no place for mass planting. I flagged that idea – too hard and not necessary. Some compartments will have periods of the year when they appear empty and that is fine as long as there are no weeds. There is no place for any weeds at all in this intensive style of gardening.
Ours is an aged example – sixty years to be precise. We have some fine, gnarly, old, characterful dwarf conifers to give year round structure along with some smaller growing cycads (though somebody forgot to tell the handsome Cycas revoluta to stop growing). We have a few easy care, small perennials to soften the edges. A compact little blue campanula is one of the best of these along with a well behaved little scutellaria. We like the tall punctuation marks of some plants drifted through the rockery. The upright orange-toned orchid, Satyrium coriifolium, is the choicest one. The large flowered yellow Verbascum creticum seeds down gently to give the statement in late spring and the amaranthus (Love Lies Bleeding), similarly self seeded, is growing before our very eyes to fill the vertical accent role in autumn. These plants just provide a framework for the real stars – a succession of any and all interesting bulbs we can grow.
It means there is always something of interest to look at. I enjoy that sort of detailed gardening.
First published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.
In the garden this fortnight: Thursday February 9, 2012
A fortnightly series first published in the Weekend Gardener and reproduced here with their permission.
The only justification for growing seeding campanulata cherries - feeding the scores of tui in late winter
A rash of germinating campanulata cherries
We are very cautious about invasive plants here. I know there is an old cliché that says a weed is just a plant in the wrong place but in a large garden, we can’t afford to have out of control triffids. If a plant starts to look dangerous, it probably is. If it is a prolific seeder and the seed is dispersed by birds, it is even more problematic. The campanulata cherries fall into this category and if it weren’t for the scores of tui they attract to the garden each spring, we would do away with them. The seeding bangalow palm (Archontophoenix cunninghamiana) is also a source of angst. The same goes for the Himalayan Daphne bholua which doesn’t just seed. It also suckers below ground. If we lived near a national park or adjacent to a native reserve, we would feel morally obliged to review our hospitality to these ornamental plants.
We are nowhere near as tolerant of wayward perennials and annuals. Forget-me-not may be pretty but it is aptly named. We have been weeding it out for years here and still it stages a comeback. The orangeberry (Rubus pentalobus) had to go when it formed an impenetrable mat after just one year then started climbing and leaping to extend its territory – but never fruited. Some of the ornamental tradescantias (wandering willies) are also invasive. We have a very pretty blue flowered form but it sets prodigious quantities of seed and is popping up in thickets many metres away. The remains of the arum lily Green Goddess still require regular attention to get rid of the last remnants of tiny rhizomes out of the ground.
Where we have plants which set miles too much seed, like the granny bonnets (aquilegias) and the sweet williams (dianthus), we try and deadhead straight into a bucket. From there, they either go to the bottom of a hot compost heap, out with the rubbish or on the burning heap. Composting alone does not kill seeds unless you manage your compost in a way that generates considerable heat. While we don’t mind a certain amount of seeding down of pretty plants, we like to keep them confined to particular areas and don’t want to spread them everywhere when we use the compost as mulch.
I am very fond of eryngiums
Top tasks:
1) Persuade Mark to head out with the chainsaw and cut down some of the self seeded pongas. We don’t regard these as weeds because they are native, but we end up with too many of them. We have them as raised beds in the rimu avenue, where some are now 50 years old. I want to extend the constructions along further and feature more bromeliads. I have never learned to use a chainsaw and am terrified of them. Mark is equally worried by what I could do with one if I became confident so has never encouraged me to learn.
2) Mark has been raising perennials from seed in the nursery and I need to get onto planting these out. I was particularly pleased to see a tray of eryngiums – blue sea holly. It is a little bit prickly but so very pretty. Blue flowers are my absolute favourite. It would have been better had we got onto planting these out earlier but they are perennial so should grow on to star next summer.
Ponga (tree fern) trunks, used to make raised beds andwhich have lasted for five decades already
The battle with the water weeds
We have dropped the water level for me to hand scoop the stream
I have been getting really down and dirty this week, hand pulling the weed from our main stream. As this involves wading in mud up to my knees, I emerge looking decidedly worse for the wear and no, you are not going to see a photo of me in this state.
Our main issues are with dreaded oxygen weed, Cape Pond weed and blanket weed. If we didn’t stay on top of them, the entire water surface would disappear below vegetation, which rather defeats the purpose of having a stream in the garden. I asked Mark if he thought our problems were related to farm run-off and excessive nitrogen but he is of the opinion that it has more to do with slow water flow rates, though he felt the build up of mud and silt in our streambed would be extremely fertile. When we get sudden bright green algal bloom, it is an indication of nitrogen being applied on farms upstream.
The worst offenders: Cape pond weed and oxygen weed
There is something very appealing about a natural stream but they are not without their problems. Offhand, I thought of three gardening colleagues with natural streams. One has problems with flooding in torrential rain. The water cannot get away fast enough so it builds up on his property. One has no problem at all with flooding because their stream is in a deep ravine, maybe 20 metres below the level of their land, but this means it isn’t really a significant garden feature. The third has a picturesque mountain brook to die for, bar two factors. Their land has sufficient natural fall to clear flood waters quickly but the bubbling brook can turn into a torrent that scours everything alongside. This means that they can’t have streamside plantings of any quality. They tried two or three times before giving up, having seen the plants ripped out and carried away. Their second issue is that the water is of high purity so a number of neighbours have water rights granted. Each neighbour has installed their own alkathene pipe at the top of our friends’ garden where the stream enters, running the pipes along the streambed until they exit at their adjoining properties down the bottom. There must be at least five alkathene pipes, both black and garish white, visible in that stream. It is not a good look.
So be careful what you wish for. None of these people, however, have to do what we do and clear the waterway of vegetation every year or two. We eliminated problems with flooding and scouring but our water flow is not sufficient to stop the growth of water weed. Our wonderfully natural looking stream is actually the result of outside expertise and in-house experience coming up with a low tech solution. We control the water where it enters our property by means of a simple weir. In normal conditions, this allows the water to flow equally down two streambeds. One meanders pleasantly through our park while the other is a deeper flood channel girded by stop banks. The two stream beds join up again on the other side of our property so the flow downstream is completely unaffected. When heavy rains cause flooding, a mechanism is triggered which directs all the water down the flood channel. By these simple means, we eliminated flooding, boggy patches and scouring from the park though we do have to manually reset the weir in order to get the water flowing again.
The pond weed is the direct result of having a relatively low flow through the park area, though our stream is such that it never dries up. Oxygen weed is a curse. We had a bad infestation which Mark finally eliminated entirely for some years. He blames the reinfestation on people emptying unwanted goldfish bowls into the stream at the corner by the road. Do not ever do this. The goldfish are most likely to die but the oxygen weed is an invasive menace in slow moving water.
Our other great burden comes from a former neighbour who, as far as Mark is concerned, should be lined up and shot for liberating such an invasive weed. African Cape Pondweed, also known as water hawthorn, (botanically Aponogeton distachyum) is undeniably pretty, with a very long flowering season. Presumably this is because the former neighbour planted it on the margins of his ponds. Because he had no control over the water flow, the inevitable floods scoured it all out of his place but it found a lovely home in our slow moving sections. I don’t know how many hundreds of hours we have spent rooting it out. It is quite good friends with the oxygen weed because it can grow through it and spread its lily pad-like leaves. Between them they have the potential to turn our stream to bog. Native weeds are nowhere near as aggressive.
It is only yours truly who has shed most clothes to get in and hand pull the water weeds this year. Generally this is done by the two men in my gardening life (Mark and Lloyd) who take it in turns to wield the long handled rake and manually haul it all out on to the bank. It is a slow process and pretty hard on their backs. I thought it would be faster and easier to do it by getting in and so it is proving to be. The water is pleasantly warm, the mud even more so on sunny days. I just have to time my mud wrestling because I can’t exactly stop for lunch or a cuppa. Wisecracks about eels are not welcome.
Lloyd at least stays cleaner on the end of the rake but it is harder on the back
First published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.
Plant Collector – Pinus montezumae
Pinus montezumae - just one of the more special pines
The pine tree family is a great deal more extensive than the common radiata pine we know so well in this country. Perhaps it is because the timber tree is such a widespread and drearily predictable planting that we tend to take little note of the other 100 or so species in the group. The beautiful Pinus montezumae is a case in point. It comes from Mexico and into Central America (think Guatemala) though usually growing in areas with some altitude which cools temperatures. Despite this origin, the Montezuma is hardy for our New Zealand conditions.
What sets the Montezuma Pine apart as a specimen tree is its very long needles which give the appearance of a pendulous or spreading habit of growth. The needles can be 25cm or even more, whereas most pine needles are in the 10 to 15cm range. Because they are so long, they appear to curve and drape themselves in a most elegant manner. They are also of what is called glaucous hue. This simply means they are toned to a bluish-grey in colour, not the forest green we associate with common pines.
You do need space. It will make a large tree, over 30 metres or more so it is not one for the back yard. As with all the pine family, it likes open, sunny conditions. It is not a forest or woodland tree. What about the pine plantations, you may ask. They are planted at the same time and at prescribed spacings which allows equal sun to all the plants. A plantation is different to a forest. With hindsight, I would plant the Montezuma in splendid glory all on its own. We have a few lower, evergreen shrubs beneath ours and they tend to look a bit scruffy when the falling needles catch in their foliage. At least keep underplanting deciduous for easier grooming.
First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.
Grow it yourself: silver beet
Call it silver beet, chard or Swiss chard. It is what you start planting as space becomes available from now on to offer a reprieve from frozen peas in winter. In fact you can grow it pretty much any time of the year but there are more delicious crops to eat in summer. Some of us think there are more delicious crops to eat in autumn, winter and spring as well but it is the proven ease and reliability which has made silver beet such a longstanding vegetable garden staple. Some people even claim to like it.
Being a leafy green, silver beet likes lots of organic matter, nitrogen and water. This is a crop where you can dig in animal manures, preferably composted first (and definitely composted if it is poultry manure). Sow the seed and cover lightly to a depth of a couple of centimetres. You can eat the thinnings as fresh salad greens when young, achieving a final spacing of around 30 to 40cm per plant. Silver beet can be a handy plant for tucking into odd spaces instead of a uniform row. It will sit there for a long time until it bolts to seed in spring because usual practice is to harvest a few leaves as you need them, rather than picking the whole plant at once. It is that cut and come again ability in cool conditions that makes it so handy. Just don’t cut too much at once or you will weaken the plant.
The rainbow coloured chards with red, yellow and pink stems and leaf ribs may add a decorative element in the garden and to raw salads when young, but they taste no different to the usual white stemmed version and the colour disappears entirely if you do more than the lightest blanching. However, they may encourage children to take a more kindly attitude to what is essentially an obliging but utility vegetable which is dead easy to grow and high in iron.
First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.
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.
In the Garden this Fortnight: January 26, 2012
A fortnightly series first published in the Weekend Gardener and reproduced here with their permission.
The dreaded Onehunga weed needs active management
Onehunga weed is that innocent looking but prickly interloper to the lawn which makes walking in bare feet a misery. It is an annual weed and the prickles are part of its seed setting cycle. We had an invasion of it in some areas and rather than spraying, we tried scalping the lawn just before Christmas. By scalping, I mean cutting on a very low level and removing all the clippings to the compost heap. We normally mulch the clippings back in to the lawn. The lawn looked patchy for the next few weeks but the Onehunga weed was gone – including the new crop of seed heads. There is a risk element to this approach. Had we then struck a prolonged period of high temperatures and sun, we would have had to have started watering the lawn or watched a dust bowl develop. Scalping a lawn in early to mid summer is not usually recommended. As it happened, we had plenty of torrential rain to green up the lawn again.
You can spray for Onehunga weed (though you need to do it earlier in the season before the plants flower and set prickles) but we are increasingly reluctant to use lawn sprays, leaning to the view that maintaining one’s lawn chemically is getting close to environmental vandalism. Recent research from Massey has found a new strain of Onehunga weed which is resistant to the usual lawn sprays -another warning, perhaps, about gardening strategies that depend on chemical intervention. The weed generally germinates in autumn and grows through winter to flower and die in summer. If you have a lush, healthy lawn, it will find it harder to get going in competition with established grasses. Lifting the mower a notch or two higher can help keep a lawn in better condition (a scalped or shaved lawn is never a healthy lawn) and we are big advocates of using a mulcher mower, thereby avoiding having to feed the lawn. Where we need to over sow or renovate areas, we use homemade compost rather than proprietary fertiliser. Our lawns don’t look like bowling greens but they are generally healthy and green.
Onehunga weed is shallow rooted so if you only have a small area of grass, you can hand weed it. It is always better to get in early before it spreads – which it will do at alarming speed if you ignore it.
- This one is auratum Flossie – all the lilies are opening now
Top tasks:
1) An emergency staking round on some of the top heavy auratum lilies. We grow a lot of these for summer fragrance and blooms. Because they are garden plants and not show blooms, we support the flower heads on neighbouring plants where possible, but some just have to be staked. Home harvested, fresh green bamboo stakes are less visually intrusive than bought bamboos stakes. We shun plastic stakes but will use rusty old steel on occasion.
2) The rose garden is looking tired. I have major plans for a renovation of this area in winter but will start by lifting and dividing some of the stronger perennials, potting them to planter bags and keeping them out of sight and under irrigation while they recover. It takes many more plants than anyone ever expects to furnish a garden which has been gutted out. I need to start now to have sufficient plants to do a major rework and replant in winter.
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.
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