When I left school back in the 80s my aunt got me a job as a Pharmacy Aid at a public hospital. I lasted a few months before I quit and went to university, where I spent the next 3 years failing a Bachelor of Arts. I should’ve stayed at the hospital and taken more time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, but I was in such a rush. I was too worried about getting left behind. That’s a young person’s greatest worry. Now, at the age of 51, I couldn’t care less, getting left behind sounds like my kind of place.
At long last it’s spring. The beginning of which, with its tender buds, fresh green leaves and promise of so much, is the best part of the year. It’s a lot of fun looking forward to things. And it’s the looking forward to things that’s, almost, more exciting than the things themselves. The days are longer, the sun is higher in the sky and the garden keeps changing and getter fuller. Winter in Wellington is a mere 3 months, but the short days, icy winds and endless grey days make it seem longer. Sometimes summer never makes it to temperate Wellington but spring always arrives.
Here are some photos of my garden, taken over the last few days.
The leaves on the oak tree are unfurling.
The violets are flowering.
I don’t know my Narcissuses. I wanted paper whites and I ended up with these, Narcissus ‘Erlicheer’, which I like. They have an old fashioned look about them. My son told me that they stink and I know what he means, they smell a bit like chemical air freshener when you bring them inside.
This isn’t the first rose in my garden to flower, that’s Blackberry Nip (a climbing Hybrid Tea) and Étoile de Hollande (a climbing Hybrid Tea, 1919). The wind blew the petals off the flowers before I could photograph them. The rose in the photograph above is Madame Isaac Pereire, a Bourbon from 1881. I bought it at the end of last summer and I’ve moved it twice. This is its first flower for me. According to my rose books the first ones are not supposed to be as good as the second ones. I don’t mind. I’m excited that it’s happy enough to make a rose bud.
Here are the first leaves on one of my orange Asiatic lilies. I started out with one plant and now I have at least 6. It isn’t scented but it’s very robust and reliable and its orange.
I have 2 Melianthus major plants and I’ve had them for a year. They’re flowering for the first time.
I’m making a Rugosa Rose hedge out of 2 different Rugosas - a Rosa rugosa ‘Alba’ and Blanc Double de Courbert. Both roses have white flowers. The one in the photograph above is Rosa rugosa ‘Alba’.
Here’s an excellent exotic grass called Chasmanthium latifolium or ‘oat grass’. It dies down over winter and as you can see above, it’s making lots of new leaves. I’ve found it easy to divide in winter.
I always look forward to this plant growing leaves and flowers. It’s a shrub called Calycanthus ‘Hartlage Wine’. At the moment it’s just a bunch of sticks, but the buds are getting ready to open.
These lovely plum coloured leaves belong to one of the best red roses. It’s a Hybrid Tea called ‘Barkarole’ from 1988. The flowers are dark velvet red and fragrant.
I tried to kill this camellia a number of years ago but it grew back. Now I’ve accepted that its a permanent part of the garden and I do love its leaves. I keep it trimmed into a lollipop shape to keep it small. While its buds look red, its flowers are definitely pink, which is disappointing. I like pink flowers. I even have a pink and purple flower garden but this camellia isn’t in it. This camellia is in the red corner of my front garden, along with: a red azalea, a karo tree with red flowers and a red flowered kakabeak. The pink flowers are red enough (redder than this photo suggests) to hang out with the other red flowers. Every spring I find myself wishing it were red and not pink.
I’m very excited. This Euphorbia mellifera is about to flower (above and below). Like lots of plants in my front garden I’ve had it for a year. Eventually, it will grow into a big shrub of 1.5-2 metres. The flowers are a brownish colour and will be honey-scented when fully open. I’ve planted it beside the new shed.
This purple pot is one of the many pots my nana made back in the early 70s, when she took a pottery class. most of the pots are lost or broken. This is my favourite, and in it I’m growing a plant that came from her garden, Echeveria elegans. It’s growing tiny Echeverias in the centre of the rosette of leaves.
I’ve been working on this garden over the weekend (above and below). In between watching my son’s football game and painting the shed door. I don’t have a name for this part of the garden so I’ll call it the ‘apple garden’ on account of the ‘Monty’s Surprise’ apple tree growing in the middle of it. It’s the bare tree in the photo above. The photo above is the north end of this garden, whereas the photo below is the south end.
I’ve been weeding, chucking out plants ( pineapple sage), moving plants in the wrong place (3 Asiatic lilies), pruning and feeding roses, planting new plants (a yellow hot poker) and propagating some sedums (pulling small side plants off the main plant and potting them up).
In a few weeks time this garden will look completely different. The bare shrub below is Viburnum oculus ‘Sterile’, the Snowball Tree. To the right of it are the thin rambling stems and leaves of my rambling rose ‘Apple Blossom’, 1932. There are 2 other roses in this photo: a salmon-copper-yellow 'Hybrid Musk ‘Clytemnestra’, 1915 (on the far left) and a yellow climbing rose by the late great Sam McGredy called ‘Casino’, 1963 (on the far right). I’m training a clematis up the trunk of the cabbage tree. The clematis is either Clematis Caroline or Clematis Majorie, bought from a wonderful nursery in Upper Hutt (attached to a woodland garden) called Aston Norwoood Nursery. I bought both clematis from the nursery but forgot which was which. Both I’ve trained up trees.
The snowball tree is too close to the apple tree (above). I reckon I can put off pruning either tree for another year.
The photo above shows the southern end of the ‘apple garden’. It features one of the many bottles from my nanas bottle collection. She put them along her kitchen windowsill to catch the morning light. I put them on the ends of bamboo stakes. The shrub in the middle is an orange Abutilon, which the wax-eyes and bees love. I’ve trained a purple clematis through its branches and it’s flowered well for the last few years. I think it’s Clematis ‘Honora’ Beside the Abutilon is a climbing Hybrid Tea called ‘Breath of Life’, 1982. It’s lightly scented with apricot flowers. To the left of the blue bottle is another Sam McGredy rose called ‘Matawhero Magic’, which I bought after seeing it growing in the Wellington Botanic Garden. It’s orange and the fragrance, which is supposed to be a very strong musk, isn’t as strong as the one in the botanic garden (my bush doesn’t get as much sun, maybe that’s why). The glaucous leaved plants at the front are honeywort, Cerinthe major, which self seed all over this garden and the one beside it (actually it’s all one long garden but I think of it as two seperate ones).
Remember way back in the beginning of this blog I wrote about my first proper job. The only reason I got to thinking about hospitals was because I was thinking about spring and then I remembered a poem about spring I studied at university. It’s by that wonderful American poet and doctor William Carlos Williams. He wrote about a red wheelbarrow, flowers, locust trees and others nature related things. Here’s his famous spring poem (you’re welcome to skip it if it’s not your thing, personally I love it).
Spring And All
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast -- a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines --
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches --
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind --
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined --
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance -- Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken
William Carlos Williams, 1923.
I’ve started reading ‘Cuttings - A Year In The Garden With Christopher Lloyd’. My dear friend Ali gave it to me for my birthday (along with lots of other plant books). This book is a lot of fun. I do appreciate a garden writer with strong opinions. I’m reading in sync with the seasons. I’ve just finished February. I’ve learnt a few things. He says I’m planting my plants too close together (easy for Mr Lloyd to say when he has, or had - he died in 2006 - a very large garden), and according to him I’m one of those ‘mindless’ people.
‘Don’t make a fernery or a bed devoted entirely to ferns, not because they look bad, but because that’s the sort of mindless, pigeon-holing exercise we see too much of in the gardening world already. Far better to integrate your ferns with other plants that enjoy the same conditions. Then they’ll help set one another off.’ (Christopher Lloyd)
Yesterday, I was going to plant 2 May Apples, Podophyllum emodi, into my fernery, but I didn’t. I was worried that the dogs would dig them up or sit on them, so I planted them in the front garden. Half the plants in my fernery are non-fern plants. Several months ago I planted 2 Clivias, last year I planted 2 stag horns (actually I tied them to two tree ferns), and two years before that I planted a nikau palm and 2 whau trees. Technically, my fernery isn’t a fernery (if you go by the numbers), only ‘fernery’ sounds a bit more special than a ‘shade garden with some ferns’ - obviously Mr Lloyd wouldn’t have agreed.
In the February section Mr Lloyd writes a section called ‘Consistently Good Performers’. I was surprised to read about a plant from New Zealand called Olearia solandrii, coastal tree daisy, a plant that’s never registered on my radar as being anything special. He wrote about the plant smelling of heliotrope (the flowers and the leaves)…well that’s something I need to check out, being a lover of scented plants. Mr Lloyd wrote about Bupleurum fruticosum. I’m growing an annual species called Bupleurum griffiti from seed (it looks a bit like euphorbia). He wrote about Melianthus major, of which I have two plants (but you know that because I showed you a photo of one of them in flower). They’re beginning to sprawl all over their neighbours. Mr Lloyd tells me that I need to chop them back at the end of March (September for Southern Hemisphere dwellers).
Here’s Heuchera ‘Fire Alarm” I wrote about last week. I found it looking depressed on the ‘sick and shabby’ plant stand at Mitre 10. Well it’s happy now in my garden hanging out with another rejected Heuchera.
Last week a box of plants arrived from Wake Robin Nursery. I planted them yesterday. There’s something about looking at a box full of different plants. This is what I ordered. See if you can guess which plant is which.
Podophyllum emodi x 2
Lilium pumilum x 2
Penstemon ‘Stapleford Gem’ x 2
Pyrethrum ‘Double White’ x 2
Sanguisorba tenuifolia ‘Rubra’ x 2
Erysium ‘Orange Flame’ x 2
Pyrethrum coccineum ‘Robinson’s Red’ x 1
Campanula Tall Deep Purply Blue x 5 (bits)
Verbascum chaixii ‘Album’ x 3
Something really nice happened to me at the end of last week. A gardener, on the other side of the world, who I follow on Instagram shared my page with all her followers. Thanks very much lindajames83. If you want to see a gorgeous garden and gorgeous photos then look no further.
Have a great first week of spring or autumn. See you next Sunday.