a bit more on the philosophy thread
- To: m*@ucdavis.edu
- Subject: a bit more on the philosophy thread
- From: T* N*
- Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 09:52:10 +1000
I have been at home this morning with the Snr propagator and his assistant
from the Horticultural College I manage. I've only been in the job a few
months and an slowly beginning to swing the place around to a focus of
sustainable water use and creating gardens suited to our (Mediterranean
climate) place. The propagator and his helper came to collect material for
cuttings, root divisions and stem cuttings of some of the Medit-plants that
I am growing and 'playing' with in my garden.
They were particularly interested to see, and get pieces from, my best
experiment: a sort of garrigue, maquis, phyrgana composite that I have
planted up. It started with several seedlings of silver-leaved forms of
Yucca that I got in one of those back-of-beyond nurseries that still exist
somehow. To these I added Artemisia canescens, a very hardy ground covering
plant and a mix of culinary thyme seedlings - no fancy, 'soft' cultivars
from the UK. A little later I added several grasses, not all as successful
as I expected but this part of my garden has awful soil - shale rocks,
clay, pine tree roots and decomposed pine needles, twigs and cones. Not
very promising stuff. The best grasses are 'Karl Forster' and
'Rotstahlbusch'. Having seen peonies growing in the wild in the
Mediterranean I decided to emulate the genuine example and planted several
peony species in the rocky soil. These were Paeonia rhodia, P. mascula, P.
daurica, P. mlokowitschii, P. emodi and P. graeca. A little later the
chance purchase of several seedlings of the Tree Peony 'Fen Dai Ban' saw
those put in too. By now the foliage and form of the plants was beginning
to be very delightful - the grasses, the silver mounds and silver carpets
of artemisia and the very strong forms of the peony foliage. A visit to
Victoria, and to David Glenn's 'Lambley' nursery gave me an opportunityto
expand the idea with a selection of sedums - Munstead Red (not so good in
my view), Burgundy Glow (v. good), Vera Jameson (excellent) and a new
anthemis called 'Sauce Hollandaise' (silly name but quite a good cream
flower). On the same trip, nursery crawl really, I aslo called at Graham
Cook's Romantic Cottage Garden nursery. Graham is introducing more and more
Medit-plants and from his new imports from France and Germany I got sedums
- Purple Emperor, Morchen, Bertram Anderson, Sunset Clouds and Hester; all
good plants with beautiful slaty purple red shaded leaves, Morchen being
more reddish brown. these all went onto my Medit patch along with sveral
more artemisias to give some height along a fence line - Faith Raven and
Lambrook Silver. Much lower growing and of a different growth habit are
Poquerolle and Powis Castle. It is a shame that all these good plants have
become so badly confused and mixed up in such a short space since their
introduction. Such is the race to get them onto a receptive market that is
seems nurseries have lost control of the quality mechanisms in their
production lines. While not yet finished the whole scheme is knitting
together quite well, as I thought to myself as I walked around this morning
with my crew from college. I introduced several plants of Clematis texensis
hybrids that scramble around over the yuccas and artemisias, enjoying the
cool shady root run and flowering well in the sunny position. For further
interest there are Pancratiums (not flowered yet), small yellow jonquils,
Allium spaerocephalum, Euphorbia nicciensis (sp???) - all feathery and
silver, and invasive unless in a very dry spot, Euphorbia myrsinites,
Euphorbia characias 'Green Velvet', Cyclamen repandum, Nepeta 'Walker's
Low' and a large white flowered perennial stock. The peonies seem to really
enjoy the rough cover provided by the low sprawling plants and are maturing
nicely. From seedlings to flowers in 4 years seems pretty good growing. It
is an idea that I will pursue further in more planting experiments.
good gardening
trevor n
Trevor Nottle
Manager-Education
Torrens Valley Institute of TAFE
School of Horticluture
505 Fullarton Road
Netherby
South Australia 5062
AUSTRALIA
Tel. +61 +8 +8372 6801
Fax. +61 +8 +8372 6888
e-mail <trevorn@torrens.tafe.sa.edu.au>
