Re: More about Phormiums (was Divide phormiums

robin corwin wrote:
Dear Tony and Moira,

Many thanks for your info on dividing phormiums. They are very popular plants here in southern California, many new and exciting cultivars are released every year. It helps to know how to grow and manage them.

I confress that before I knew about their needs, I lost a beautiful specimen which I grew in a pot. It had sunk in the pot and with the winter rains we get, succumbed to crown rot. Now I am very careful of drainage for all I grow and they are thriving.

Our Sunset Western garden book, which is the gardening bible for those of us in California, also mentions that although dividing a very large specimen can be daunting to impossible, you can always just take divisions from the outer edges of the plant to contain it and get new plants.

Hi Robin
I think we would have been happy to take only outer fans from the monster I described, but our brief was to remove it entirely in exchange for the planting material. I once knew a much bigger clump of plain P.tenax at a house which we used to visit which was presumably very old. It would have been at least eight feet wide and as much across. Later that house and its garden were removed to make way for a municipal swimming pool. I always wondered how this was accomplished, but presume the Council brought in heavy machinery!

I don't know if you are aware that there are two species of Phormium with different habitat requirements. P. tenax is by far the larger grower and is typically a lowland plant and though it will grow in fairly dry situations is very often in nature found in swampy areas forming almost pure stands. There is more than one such flax swamp within easy reach of where we live and these are now carefully preserved. This flax is considered Taonga (treasure) by the Maori, who before encountering European culture had no other good source of fibre to make fabric. Flax weaving has been revived in recent years, particularly in the making of ceremonial feather cloaks which always have a flax base, and has become a popular and much admired art form among Maori women. The other important and still current use is in the wall panels for Meeting houses whose traditional weaving patterns are highly symbolic. In the old days they had selected lines of flax plant particularly suited to fibre production and many of these have now been gathered up and preserved in the Wellington Botanic garden.

In the horticultural world only a few varieties of pure tenax are available I think, most showing various amounts of mainly yellow variegation which may be fugitive in some. They tend to be on the large size for many smaller modern gardens and most of today's hybrids have a large proportion of the blood of the other species, P. cookianum, which is not much more than half the size of its brother. This is known as the mountain flax, but occurs also in lowland situations and in particular is often found at the coast growing on rocky cliffs, as it does on many places around Wellington harbour. It does not grow in swamps but only on well-drained sites.

P cookianum seems to be much the more plastic species with regard to both growth habit and colour and is certainly the principal if not only parent of a majority of the many beautiful forms now available in the trade.

Apart from size, an infallible way to distinguish the two species is by their flower colour. P tenax has dull red flowers and P cookianum yellow ones. Both kind are a very popular source of nectar and much relished by our native honey-eating birds, the Tui and Bellbird.

Moira
--
Tony & Moira Ryan,
Wainuiomata, North Island, NZ.     Pictures of our garden at:-
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/cherie1/Garden/TonyandMoira/index.htm
NEW PICTURES ADDED 4/Feb/2004

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