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.
Garden fashion – from designer trend to cliche
I fear my scatter cushions are more of the shabby chic genre than designer...
I attended a really interesting garden lecture on Saturday. Some readers may know Neil Ross from his regular contributions to the NZ Gardener magazine. He spent some years as head gardener at Ayrlies in Auckland but these days is back gardening, designing and writing in the UK. His talk was loosely on gardening trends in Britain and I thought readers might enjoy a summary of what is going out of fashion and what is on the rise, based in part on his analysis of the cutting edge garden installations by leading designers at Britain’s superb garden shows – Chelsea, Tatton Park, Hampton Court and the like.
Passing over (so they will look dated very soon in your garden, should you be contemplating them) are painted walls – usually solid plastered walls installed as a garden feature and painted in a dramatic shade with colour toned plantings. Sorry, passé now, along with gabions, thank goodness. The latter are wire cages, usually filled with rocks but sometimes with au naturelle branches and trunks cut to length or even pine cones. We always thought that gabions looked better when used for their original purpose of slowing erosion. They are a bit too industrial altogether in a garden.
Dribbly water features that look like urinals (Neil’s description, not mine) are looking dated, irrespective of whether that trickle of water is flowing out of a terracotta head, a gargoyle of any description or just a modest pipe. Keep to ponds (lakes are better), natural streams or at least a decent gush of water if you feel the need for a water feature.
Box balls, Neil reports, have been so over-used as a formal feature that they have been done to death. Though he thought, in New Zealand it is not just buxus balls. It is the whole mini-Sissinghurst look of clipped buxus hedges and edges containing formal standard plants (be they roses, bay trees or choisya ternata) – a man after my own heart on this issue. Also done to death are designer scatter cushions accessorizing the display garden. I have to admit that I have been known to employ the scatter cushion on our rather unforgiving stone seats though mine are of the shabby chic genre (all my late mother’s tapestry, now heavily faded) rather than designer colours and textures. I only put them out when our garden is open and I went off that idea the time I forgot to bring them in and it rained….
The Missouri Meadow Garden at Wisley - perhaps the pinnacle of the prairie garden style
The prairie garden is in danger of becoming yesterday’s design in England though we have never embraced this style in New Zealand. The Missouri Meadow at the RHS flagship garden, Wisley, south of London, is the finest example we have seen. But it relies on low rainfall and low fertility which hardly describes the dairy farming areas of New Zealand so we may never see prairie plantings popularised here.
If you want to be cutting edge, Neil’s advice is that the new trend is to keep chickens and indeed anything that is edible or food producing in the garden. I don’t think guinea pigs count. Beehives are all the rage, especially in cutsie-pie bee frames. Insect hotels are all the rage in English gardens though the research is that insects are happier in a natural environment (leave an old log to rot down) than in your designer Hilton.
Green walls are still a hot item but we agreed that they are expensive to install and a lot of work to maintain. It is easier to grow plants in the ground rather than in vertical frames, if you can.
Glass is in fashion, preferably exquisite, hand-blown glass features. At a pinch wine bottles might fit the bill in a creative wall construction which may suit the winos amongst us. But the suggestion I have seen to use old wine bottles as a garden edging is a really bad idea from a practical point of view, let alone the dodgy aesthetics. As you plunge your spade in to turn over the soil, you are just as likely to hit a bottle and break it.
Predicting the Return of the Conifer
And conifers are due to make a return. Not in a reincarnation of the awful 1970s style some readers may recall – a mass of prostrate junipers and the like plonked in through black plastic and then covered with that nasty red scoria. There were good reasons why that particular style of gardening fell from grace but the poor old conifers themselves did not deserve to be cast out to the wilderness along with the garden style. The conifer family is huge and there are many fine specimens from tiny treasures to handsome, long-lived landscape specimens. Used judiciously as accent plants throughout the garden, they can give a splendid year round shape and definition as well as variations in colour. Thank goodness we still have ours – after sixty years, some are getting venerable and we would not be without them.
In place of prairies and meadows, more block planting of perennials is returning – check out the work of Tom Stuart Smith or Piet Oudolf.
The final caution comes not from Neil but from the Garden of Jury – beware of rills and obelisks. They are on the cusp of passing from innovative to hackneyed. It is a very short step.
First published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.
Crystal ball predictions for the 2010 gardening year
Ah, that wonderful Christmas – New Year hiatus. In the days before the Boxing Day sales and indeed before seven day trading, it used to be more of a coma than a hiatus but even now, in this country, we settle in to holiday mode. Why else would we tolerate the truly appalling offerings on television where there is rarely anything worth watching? Clearly we are all meant to be reading the Christmas books or chatting to family and friends instead. And the print and electronic media, yours truly included, sink into a period of reflection, summarising the year past and bravely making predictions for the year just starting. This is at least one step better than recycling earlier offerings under the headings of “ 2009 Highlights” or “Best of…”. So I shall resist the temptation to recycle a piece from earlier this year (though I will admit to being proud of the series I wrote on English summer gardens which is still on this website) and look into my crystal ball.
I believe we will diversify from vegetables. Veg gardening is not fad or fashion but the all consuming obsession is showing signs of dilution. There is a hint that some would like to read about other types of plants and gardens as well as home food production. I recall an Auckland journo wryly commenting on the $70 lettuce. That is the cost for some of producing their first and sometimes only produce after buying planter boxes, the bagged potting mix and compost, the most basic of tools and punnets of small plants from the garden centre.
Serious vegetable gardening will continue for some, but many of those who follow fashion and trends will be realising by now that to be a successful vegetable gardener requires some expertise and skill and quite a bit of time. You can not just plant the seeds or baby plants and then ignore them. Dilettantes will lose heart and move on. The declaration that one will only plant productive trees and shrubs may be a sign of naivety and not the higher moral ground. It could be argued that the doom and gloom of the recession had us all looking to survival mode. Now that the clouds are lifting, increased optimism allows space for aesthetics and beauty in life as well. And I can assure you that while the walnut tree I see outside my window fruits and we enjoy its harvest, it is but a poor aesthetic specimen compared to the magnolia nearby which is lush and opening its summer flowers. We need to nourish more than just the body and to titillate more than the taste buds. In our eyes, the complete garden goes well beyond just fruit and vegetables, although they are an important element.
The upside of the vegetable craze has been the return to some old fashioned values of seasonal eating, taking pride in home produce and super fresh ingredients given a new twist with some rather more sophisticated international flavours. I reviewed a rather large number of cook books last year for the food pages (Second Daughter was fearfully impressed last week with my shelf of recipe books and I only keep the ones I like) and certainly the current focus is very strongly on eating locally sourced foods in season. The delight in being able to transcend seasonal limitations by buying food which has crossed the hemispheres is a thing of the recent past for many of us. We now care whether the garlic and onions come from China, the grapes and nectarines from USA, the kiwifruit from Italy and the pork from Australia. We would rather it came from Te Kuiti or the Rangitikei, thank you, if we are to move outside our local area. So I would expect we will see farmers’ markets go from strength to strength.
The local focus of the farmers’ markets may well extend to wider gardening practices. Here, we raise our eyebrows at the widespread use of mulches, potting mixes and composts shipped across the country when there are local alternatives with much smaller carbon footprints. Pea straw is the classic. It has a great reputation as garden mulch (though it is a myth that it adds nitrogen to the soil because the nitrogen is in the roots of the pea plant and pea straw by definition, is the dried tops only) but have you ever asked yourself where the nearest commercial production of peas takes place? It is being shipped hundreds of kilometres in a large truck in order to cover your garden when there are local alternatives which will do just the same. Try locally produced granulated bark or compost, pine needles, even barley straw from South Taranaki.
The move away from poisons and sprays is a trend we expect to see escalate. Our tolerance level in this country for the use of some extremely heavy duty toxins is very high indeed, often justified as a lesser of two evils. 1080 is the classic: this mass poisoning on a grand scale with a particularly unpleasant toxin which enters the food chain is government sanctioned but we are seeing the tide of public opinion turn. At least 1080 is tightly controlled, whereas the over the counter poisons that are freely and abundantly sold here are arguably worse. Rats, mice, possums and rabbits – you too can bowl into a shop and buy some nasty poisons. The trouble is that many will enter the food chain, some have no antidotes, some are appallingly slow acting and unpleasant and in this country we are all too cavalier in our use of them. Worry whenever you see the term by-kill. It is the unintended death of other life than the target. A cute little dog named Wilfred, in our case, and the poison that killed him did not originate from our property. While we shoot all our possums here, a common possum poison used by others is very slow acting and can enter the food chain. We are having to review our long held practice of feeding the carcases to our animals. The time when we see a sharp reduction in the usage and availability of such toxins can not come soon enough for us, or indeed for the environment of our country.
Buffy the cat, potential by-kill, even even though Mark shoots all our possums. Slow acting over-the counter poisons may mean the carcase is already toxic.
Organics, we predict, will become more mainstream and increasingly widely practiced. It may not be organics as the purists know it. Indeed it is highly likely to be a heavily diluted form and possibly derided by the dedicated converts. But anything which sees gardening move away from practices and habits which rely more on the use of chemicals than on good gardening strategies has to be an improvement. If we follow the European trends, ever tighter government controls will stop home gardeners having access to a range of sprays and artificial fertilisers which have been used to prop up poor gardening practices, poor plant selection or unsustainable habits.
The wheel is turning. After a decade or more of rampant consumerism, conspicuous wealth and people who are time-poor, gardening is on the up again and for that we have the vegetable craze to thank. It all looks a great deal more wholesome and cheerful than a few years ago. Happy New Year and may 2010 be one of good gardening cheer for readers.
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