Wellington Botanic Garden, September 4 2016.
It's spring, only you wouldn't know it because it's cold, the wind is blowing and it's raining. I'm not ready for it anyway. I've been sick for over two weeks and the list of jobs I have to do in the garden is growing: lots of plants need to be moved, there are plants sitting in a bucket of water waiting to be planted (they had to make way for a water pipe) and a new snowball tree Viburnum opulus 'Sterile,' is still sitting in its plastic bag waiting for me to find the right spot. There's hydrangeas to prune, roses to feed and weeds are growing everywhere.
Broad-leaved dock, Rumex obtusifolius
One of the worst weeds in the garden is broad-leaved dock. It's pernicious, springing up where ever the clay soil is compacted. Its long taproots are impossible to dig out. I recently read an article in Gardens Illustrated, June 2014, which made me see dock more positively. An English fashion designer called Katelyn Toth-Fejel uses plants from foraging trips to dye fabric. Dock was one of the plants she liked to use. Young dock foliage makes a bright green-yellow dye, older leaves make a mustard dye and the roots (which need to be boiled for several hours) will make rusty pinks, oranges and golds. Katelyn says that dock dye works best on silk or wool. If you add an acid or alkali to the dye then you can increase the number of shades. The dying process she described sounded simple. First you chop up the leaves or roots and steep them in water for anything from a few minutes to a week (for roots). Then you simmer leaves or boil roots and strain the liquid. Next you add the fabric to the dye and soak it: sometimes you add a mordant (like alum) to fix the dye to the fabric. Last of all you wash the dyed fabric with mild soap and leave it to dry. Dock isn't a completely useless plant after all. I've read that it's good for rubbing on nettle stings.
Last weekend I visited my local garden centre and bought 4 red lily bulbs on special, a snowball tree and a $20.00 pear tree whose tag read 'Unknown'. ' As a lover of simple plants, underdogs and good mysteries I was won over immediately. It took me 10 minutes to fit the long 'unknown' pear tree into the car with help from the garden centre lady.
As soon as I saw the 'unknown' pear tree I had a vision. I saw a beautiful tree, weighed down by jewel like fruit, underplanted with meadow flowers and grasses. The whole scene had a romantic overgrown orchard sort of look. It was the sort of scene that Mary Lennox would have stumbled across in The Secret Garden. Buying the pear tree was the first step in making my meadow/prairie garden. My vision was soon to be a reality.
Pear tree.
I planted the pear tree in the vegetable garden. You may remember that this vegetable garden has never really been a vegetable garden. I made it last year in winter; then in spring I planted it with beans, tomatoes, sweet peas (the flowers), potatoes and snow peas. It was a complete disaster because it didn't get a lot of summer sun. Most of the seedlings died and the ones that soldiered on produced small sickly crops. For the time being the pear tree has excellent sun but in a few weeks the oak and sycamore trees will get their leaves and cast the area into shade.
I did a quick search of pear trees on the internet. I wasn't going to make the same dumb mistakes that I'd made with my plum tree, which is planted in the front garden. I found an article on 'Stuff' published in 2015, called 'How to grow the perfect pear,' by Kate Marshall. The good news is that the lady in the garden centre was right; pears are very adaptable to different climates and different soils. They have very few pests and diseases and only need to be sprayed if they're growing in hot locations (Wellington definitely wouldn't pass for hot). If I wanted good fruit production then the tree would need 5 hours of sun every day and its branches would need to be trained so they grew horizontally, either by tying or weighting them down. Apparently pear sap runs more slowly along horizontal stems then vertical stems. Slower moving sap means more fruit. It all sounded easy, especially if I got the sycamore branches pruned to let in more light. However, by the time I'd finished reading the article my mood had changed and I wanted to dig up the bloody tree and throw it on the pruning pile.
Pear trees have very very fussy blossoms. Pear trees need to be pollinated by another pear tree; they aren't self fertile. The problem with this is that each variety of pear has a specific variety that it pollinates with. As I haven't a clue what kind of pear I have I will never be able to find out which pear variety it's matched to. And even if by some good luck I was able to find another pear tree that could pollinate with it and I could find a place to plant it (which I can't), I have the small problem of poor nectar producing blossoms. Kate Marshall recommends growing pear trees away from other flowering plants. Pear blossoms she says, while very beautiful, are not as sweet as apple blossoms or most other flowers. Bees will ignore pear blossoms if there is sweeter nectar to be had. A pear tree is probably the most unsuitable fruit tree to use in a meadow/prairie garden. I'm starting to think that this $20.00 pear tree wasn't such a bargain.
The Dominion Post has a weekend magazine with a regular gardening page. I couldn't really call it a column, it's a series of bullet points. This week there were 16 chores from taking cuttings, planting gladioli, spraying fruit trees to sharpening gardening tools. I felt like a loser by the time I got to the 16th point. When was I going to find time to do a third of the things on the list? Some of them, like sharpening garden tools, were directing me to do things I hadn't a clue how to do. To make myself feel better I watched a video on YouTube showing me how a master gardener sharpened a pair of secateurs. I was heartened by how easy he made it look. There were no fancy techniques or expensive bits of equipment. All I needed was some steel wool, a sharpening stone or a file with some sort of diamond shaped bits and some 3-in-1 oil. First, the master gardener used the steel wool to clean the metal blades and rub off any raised bits. Second, he sharpened the slanted side of the blade, using the sharpener in a circular (polishing) motion. Finally, he wiped the metal parts with oil and squirted a bit into the moving mechanism. I reckon it took him all of 3 minutes.
Kings Seeds
It's easy to waste a lot of time perusing things on the internet. Last weekend I spent over an hour searching for nurseries that sold the sort of plants I read about in Margery Fish's book 'We Made A Garden', old-school cottage garden plants. I found a place with the charming name, Marshwood Gardens Nursery, which is situated in Invercargill. They have a large online catalogue of flowering plants like: campanulas, dianthus's, erysium and primulas. They have lots of different varieties. For example, there are at least 8 different sorts of monarda and 17 different sorts of aster. I've always fancied a Gertrude Jekyll's styled aster garden, but that will have to wait until I finish the meadow/prairie garden, dying cloth with dock, sharpening my garden tools and all those other tasks I haven't got around to. Incidentally, Marshwood deliver all over New Zealand. Eventually, I stopped daydreaming and placed an order with Kings Seeds in Tauranga. I got a bit carried away as you can see from the photograph above. Margery Fish talked fondly about growing penstemons and when I saw them in the Kings online catalogue I had to order a couple of packets. Anything that vaguely looked like an umbellifer I bought. I found an unusual one, an ornamental carrot called 'Purple Kisses', Daucus carota. Anything that sounded like it could've come from a film noir movie or an Agatha Christie novel I also bought. I have Cleome, Honesty, Mignonette, Verbascum and Veronica. The seeds arrived within 3 days, but they won't grow themselves so I better get busy with some potting mix.
As for the 'unknown' pear tree, I've decided to keep it for now. At least I don't have to muck around trying to make the branches grow horizontally to slow the sap down. And given it won't be growing any fruit I don't have to worry about the poor nectar producing blossoms. I can plant as many flowers under and around it as I like. Nonetheless, the tree is on notice; if it doesn't thrive then it's straight onto the pruning pile. I'm not going to torture myself like I do with the plum tree, which I see everyday from the lounge window. It looks good in spring with its pink blossoms, but fails to produce any fruit (despite it being self-fertile). It gets bigger and bigger and more harried looking with every passing year. The plum tree ought to be cut down; it brings a tattered careworn look to its corner of the garden, only I can't bring myself to do it.
Here are a few snaps to show you that spring has arrived. These are a few plants from Wellington Botanic's Scented Garden.
Ericaceae, Rhododendren 'Pavlova'
Fabaceae, Erythrina crista-galli, (Coral Tree)
Hamamelidaceae, Corylopsis spicata, (Spike Witch-Hazel)
Daffodils