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
Plant Collector: Lepidozamia peroffskyana
Lepidozamia peroffskyana - an Australian cycad
Difficult name, I know, but this plant does not appear to have a common name. It is a cycad and one native to Australia at that. Some mistake it for a palm because it grows a trunk and sprouts it leaves in a palm-like habit, fountaining from the top as it matures. Those leaves can be up to 3 metres long, which is extremely large when you think about it. But it is a cycad which is an entirely different plant family to palms. This particular plant is a seedling from a mature specimen we have and I photographed it because of its spectacular cone which has split open in a wonderful spiral. This split is to release its pollen, rather than to create a perfect pattern.
Lepidozamia peroffskyana cone
Normally we remove cones to stop the plant putting its energies into trying to set seed. It is suspected that forming the cone robs the plant of too many essential micro nutrients which can lead to yellow banding disfiguring mature leaves. It looks like sunburn. Our mature plant suffered badly in the past from this yellowing but it is still a little early for us to be able to state with confidence that de-coning it solves the problem, though it is looking hopeful.
This is an east coast rainforest plant from northern New South Wales through to Gympie in Queensland (I have been to Gympie though I cannot say I recall seeing lepidozamia there). In our conditions, it will tolerate light frosts and cooler temperatures overall. The natural rainforest habitat gives an indication that it likes fertile soils rich in humus, growing in company and in ground that never dries out. I had to go searching to find out for whom this plant was named – Count Peroffsky, a Russian nobleman and benefactor of the St Petersburgh Botanic Garden where this plant was first cultivated beyond its natural habitat. First in gets dibs on the naming rights even now.
First published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.
Grow it yourself: garlic
Freshly harvested garlic is a very different proposition to the stuff that has been hanging about for ten months and has lost most of its potency. We are not, perhaps, served well by the traditional wisdom of planting on the shortest day and harvesting on the longest day. We prefer Kay Baxter’s advice and moved to autumn planting in order to get it in growth before it has to deal with the cold, sodden soils of a wet winter. You can even successionally sow from May to August to extend the harvest season. Fresh picked green garlic is delicious.
Garlic needs to be grown in full sun, in heavily worked, fertile soils. It is a greedy feeder and good drainage is critical. If you are organised, you can prepare the beds now and sow a quick green crop. Dig that green crop in two weeks before planting the garlic. This, allied to late autumn warmth, will give them a real kick start into growth.
Always plant only the biggest and the strongest cloves from the garlic bulb and never but never plant the cheap, imported Chinese stuff (wrong hemisphere so out of season, may be carrying virus which threatens the local strains of garlic and will have been chemically treated). If you follow Kay Baxter’s advice and plant at 10cm diagonal spacings, you can get 100 plants to the square metre. We prefer a wider spacing of up to 15cm in parallel rows. Cover the cloves with a couple of centimetres of soil. Keeping the area free of weeds stops competition but also keeps the soil well cultivated, thus helping with drainage in the wet months. Some gardeners liquid feed regularly. We don’t, but we mulch with compost which is effectively a form of slow release. It is important that the crop never dries out or it will stop growing so be particularly vigilant from November onwards. Garlic can be harvested as soon as the tips start to turn brown.
First published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.
In the garden this fortnight: Thursday 23 February, 2012
The natural look can take a surprising amount of effort and intervention
We have been making a major, combined effort to return our natural stream closer to something resembling pristine condition. I say natural stream because it is entirely natural where it enters and leaves our property but in between we manipulate it quite a bit. We have ponds, we play with the levels to create little rapids so we have the sound of water running and we have total control over what happens with flood water when we get torrential rain – achieved by a simple weir, flood channel and stopbanks. What we don’t have control of is the build up of silt and invasive water weeds.
What started as a pleasant summer activity reducing the water weeds (Cape Pondweed, oxygen weed and blanket weed are the worst), has grown to be something more major. We have hand pulled and raked most of the weed out. The clumps of streamside planting (mostly irises but also bog primulas, pontederia and a few others) are all in the process of being dramatically reduced in size. We hadn’t noticed quite how large they had grown in the years since they were first planted. The build up of silt in the water channel – up to my knees in places – is being stirred up and then flushed through to settle in the ponds. To flush it through requires holding the water back and then releasing it in one swoosh. To do it properly requires the building of a second, simple weir. Once all the silt is in the ponds, we will hire a sludge pump to clear it. Trying to stay on top of water weeds (none of which we introduced ourselves) is an ongoing task. We are thinking a bit more regular maintenance may keep the silt under control. Our access makes getting a digger in very difficult and the mess afterwards is such that we prefer to do things by hand.
The end result is that we will have a natural looking stream again. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to achieve and maintain a natural look in a garden.
Top tasks:
1) Continue reducing mossy cover and lichen on rocks and paths in the rockery. In our humid climate, we have continual moss growth and while some of it softens hard lines and adds a certain look, too much of it obliterates lines altogether and makes the place look unloved. I use a wire brush and I know I will probably have to continue doing it for the rest of my gardening life here.
2) And on the theme of having too much of something, no matter how good, I need to finish my radical thinning of the black mondo grass (ophiopogon) and the cyclamen hederafolium which seem determined to try to choke each other out. The mondo grass goes on the compost heap. The large cyclamen corms I am laying as ground cover in an area where I have given up on both Rubus pentalobus (orangeberry) and violets which both proved to be too strong growing.
A fortnightly series first written for the Weekend Gardener and reproduced here with their permission.
Lunar planting – your very own personal organiser
Mark has had A Revelation. If he turns around three times in an anticlockwise direction in front a pot of fresh sown seed, the seed germinates and grows more rapidly. He is fairly sure this has something to do with channelling cosmic energy and just to prove it, he is going to sow two pots at the same time but hide one around the corner so it can’t see his actions. He is confident that the seed that has received the special attention will grow better and this experiment will give conclusive scientific proof.
Silly? Of course.
We have been looking at planting by the moon, in an attempt to see if there is any independent evidence to back up the claims. We are seeing lunar gardening being featured ever more widely in this country, almost to the point of becoming mainstream. Is there any scientific foundation to it? Not that we could find. Well, there is the work by Nicholas Kollerstrom but there is a bit of a credibility gap with him – he being best known as a leading Holocaust denier. Beyond that, it is all affirmation, testimonial and anecdote.
We could comprehend the theory that the times when the moon’s gravitational pull is at its strongest are the best times for plant growth. I don’t say we believed, but we could understand it. What we failed entirely to get a grip on was why this meant you could ONLY plant at this time for best results. Some seeds can take a long time to germinate. If you planted them two weeks early (when the gravitational pull is weaker), what is to stop them just sitting there waiting until the time is right? Why are they allegedly so disadvantaged when compared to seed planted 14 days later at the right phase of the moon? Logically, should not the gravitational pull be a deadline, not a tight time frame? We also failed to get to grips with the differentiation between the positive forces of a waxing moon and the negative forces of a waning moon when the gravitational pull is roughly equal at various stages.
There is a fair amount of wiggle room. There does not seem a definitive source of guidance so beyond the principles of gravitational pull and the lunar influence on tides, most other interpretations appear to be flexible. Some claim that you should only water on a waxing moon, others that if you mow your lawns or clip your hedges in the last quarter, you will slow regrowth. This might be termed residual effect? It appears that timing is everything and we can indelibly affect the long term behaviour and subsequent performance of plants based simply on the exact timing of planting, pruning and other gardening activities.
It didn’t get any better when we delved further. Fertile and barren days are apparently linked to the zodiacal belt. You know, the signs of the zodiac. That is astrology and you have to be of a certain ilk to take astrology seriously in your daily life.
We came to the conclusion you have to be a believer. Planting by the moon in modern times has more to do with pagan moon worship than scientific fact. And it arouses great passion and devotion amongst followers, a sense of belonging and a belief that all will go well – as long as you follow the rules.
Ancient practice alone is not validation. We are so selective in our use of history. Fortunately we no longer think that sacrificing the odd virgin or two will bring better harvests. In the days before calendars and clocks, it is likely that the ancients did indeed use the moon’s phases to determine planting times, along with other factors like day length, temperature change and seasonal rainfall. Productivity and harvests have long been wrapped up with religion and both the moon and the sun were objects of veneration. How curious that moon worship has persisted in this form and remains a major source of spiritual inspiration.
And yet, just as the outcome of biodynamic practices can be sound organic land management no matter how flaky some of the underpinning rules appear to be, so too can planting by the moon have beneficial outcomes. As far as we can see, it is the perfect tool for people who need deadlines to get themselves organised and motivated. “You must plant this carrot seed within the next three days or you will have to wait another month by which time it will be too late.” You obediently follow instructions. Whereas the non believer procrastinates and delays, thinking there is still plenty of time, so often doesn’t get around to planting the seed at all. Lunar planting is your own personal organiser but, as far as we can see, it does not actually have anything to do with the moon’s gravitational pull.
Organics, biodynamics, permaculture, planting by the moon – these are all ways of encouraging sound gardening practices which enhance the environment rather than harming it. I just wish some of the proponents and their devoted followers didn’t feel the need to use pseudo science to try and justify what are sometimes faith-based gardening systems.
First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.
Photos for this article here have been sourced from Wiki Commons. Photo credit for lunar eclipse time lapse: A. Skorochod.
“Easy Organic Gardening and Moon Planting” by Lyn Bagnall
Easy Organic Garden
This is organic gardening as carried out by a dedicated moon planter but easy it is not. The author subscribes to the why-use-one-sentence-when-you-can-use-ten school of writing. It is very long and wordy, filled with so much detail that even the experienced and knowledgeable gardener can end up seriously baffled. You need to be a believer to want this book. As it is in its second edition, there are either a fair number of believers out there or there is a thirst for knowledge on the topic of organic gardening. I suspect the latter but I am not convinced this book will give the answers.
I am very keen to see books which will separate the organic gardening concepts from faith and mystique. Psuedo science does not do it. Nor do sweeping statements. When I read statements like: “I must confess to not fully understanding the science behind this particular portion of moon-planting principles, but I do know it works in practice,” I start to worry. The author is referring to the changed polarities of yin and yang in Virgo and Libra. I get irritated by the careless use of the word chemical as a synonym for all that is bad and destructive in gardening. A chemical is simply a substance or a compound. In itself it is neither good nor bad. I raised my eyebrows at the claim that synthetic fertilisers lock up essential nutrients in New Zealand soils. Really?
I am all for sustainable gardening practice and I think it is all to the good that we are questioning some pretty dodgy habits. If you are willing to drill down into this book, it promotes good environmental practice, aimed at the author’s homeland of Australia. It covers both ornamental and productive gardening and even has a helpful section on bushfire season. There is just an awful lot of smoke and mirrors to get through first and the husband still doubts that it is possible to get a tomato crop through in our climate without a little non-organic intervention.
(Scribe; ISBN: 9781921372605)
First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.
Plant Collector: Tecomanthe venusta
The pink bells of Tecomanthe venusta
We are so excited by our Tecomanthe venusta in bloom. That is because it is tropical but we are not so it doesn’t often flower for us. And I have to admit that there are only a few clusters of these pink flowers in evidence. A garden visitor once told us there was a specimen at the entry to Whangarei Gardens’ glasshouse which flowers magnificently. We have not seen it but it would figure that it is happier further north because it originates in New Guinea and is the most cold-sensitive member of the tecomanthe family, all evergreen climbers in the bignoniaceae group.
The tecomanthe family is not large and some readers will know our own T. speciosa – a tender but rampant climber which was found in the wild as a single, surviving specimen on Three Kings Islands. It needs a frost free position which rules it out for most inland locations and it needs a bit of training and management if you want to see the lovely creamy trumpet flowers. It will shoot up the highest tree available and flower only at the very top if left to its own devices, but if you train it along a horizontal support, it can be encouraged to flower along its length.
Back to T.venusta. We grow it under the cover of a deep verandah with opaque roofing. When it does decide to flower, it puts out clusters from its bare vines, which is very obliging because they are so obvious. Most plants set flowers on either new growth or last season’s growth but venusta appears to be quite happy to do it on gnarly old growth. We get a far more spectacular display in spring from the species we have as T. montana, also from New Guinea, which is grown in the same conditions but there is a delicious unpredictability to venusta.
First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.
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.
Grow it yourself: spinach
Silver beet and spinach are close relatives. Indeed, somebody very close to me claims they taste the same when cooked, which I can’t argue against because it is so long since I have eaten the former. Texturally, I much prefer the finer, softer leaves of spinach and will happily eat those. Spinach is a winter vegetable. It will continue growing in colder temperatures but as soon as the weather warms in spring, it will bolt to seed. It is not quite as amenable as silver beet to grow and while you can leave plants in the ground and just pick as much as you need, it does not have the same cut and come again characteristics.
Well cultivated, well drained soil rich in nitrogenous fertiliser and full sun are the keys. Spinach is usually direct sown from seed and most of us now know to pick the thinnings and eat them as micro greens in salads or stir fries. The final spacing is in the 10cm range. In the right conditions, it is a quick crop because it will mature within a couple of months and you may have been eating immature leaves all that time. Some gardeners like to sow successive crops every few weeks to ensure continued supply.
There are a number of different spinach varieties, including New Zealand spinach or kokihi which is a different plant altogether (though similar taste and texture) and is our one great contribution to the global world of vegetables. While most spinach are spinacia, it is Tetragonia expansa. We recommend shunning the heirloom strawberry spinach (Chenopodium foliosum), being of the opinion that the reason it has been around for over 400 years is because it seeds so freely it is nigh on impossible to eradicate once you have it. The leaves are pleasant enough but the so-called strawberry seed heads are not.
First published in the Waikato Times and reproduced here with their permission.
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