Made our first visit to the capital of Slovenia recently and discovered a lovely central city with picturesque old buildings, remains from the Roman settlement of Emona (the Danube River was the Roman Empire’s northern border), lots of pedestrian and cycle-friendly streets – and inner-city allotments.
Allotments in central Ljubljana. Photo: Sandra Simpson
In fact, we were following the signs to find the old Roman wall when we spotted the allotments with people, mostly women, working the beds as spring announced itself. (Temperatures were suprisingly warm during our visit in early April but plummeted a week or so later before bouncing back again.)
Since the establishment of Slovenia as a nation in 1995, the Miunicipality of Ljubljana has had a goal of self-sufficiency in food and, according to the World Green City Awards of 2024, has 1,200 allotment gardens in nine areas in the city. Among other initiatives, it has placed bees and other wild pollinators “in the middle between the preservation of biodiversity and self-sufficiency in food”.
A direction sign in Ljubljana’s Botanic Garden includes a traditional painted front from a bee box. Photo: Sandra Simpson
Unfortunately, the Museum of Apiculture in Radovlijca was closed the day we visited that pretty small town, but Slovenians take great pride in their long tradtion of bee-keeping. In 2017 the United Nations declared World Bee Day to be May 20, the birth date of Slovenian beekeeper Anton Janša who, in 1770, became the first teacher of bee-keeping to the royal court in Vienna. Only Carniolan honey bees are kept in Slovenia.
Traditional Slovenian beehives, which are widely used, are smaller than our box hives and open from the back instead of the top. They can be slotted into the walls of apiaries which then give them protection from the weather. Photo: Wikipedia
Back in February, a lovely email landed in my inbox, from Mary Maxwell-Rogers who had found my 2017 post about a very old lemon tree in Northland. “This year there will be a 200-year family reunion of descendants of Richard Davis who helped found the Waimate North Mission just inland from Kerikeri,” Mary wrote. “He arrived as a farmer in 1824, trialled growing many crops and developed a wonderful flower and fruit garden which Charles Darwin wrote about when he visited. (It was the only place he liked in New Zealand!) Davis became an Anglican missionary and is buried in the cemetery at the church site.”
Mary’s husband is a direct Davis descendant and her son Alex has been a co-organiser of the reunion that will take place from August 15-18 (more information here). “Late last year on a visit to the mission Alex took a lemon from a very old tree growing on the site, managed to sprout 6 seeds and our immediate family now each have a healthy small lemon seedling around 30cm high. We call them the ‘Davis Lemon’.” How cool is that?
One of the young lemon trees, grown from the seeds of a fruit from the old Waimate North Mission tree. Photo: Mary Maxwell-Rogers
Mary believes the lemon tree at Waimate must be about the same age as the tree growing near the Marsden Cross Historic Memorial Reserve at Rangihoua Bay referred to in my earlier post. “There is also [at Waimate] an ancient grape which would have been planted at the same time to provide alter wine.”
Mission stations needed to be fairly self-sufficient as they were being established very early in New Zealand’s settler history and in isolated places. Good relations with local Maori were an absolute must in terms of food security.
The use of lemon juice to prevent scurvy and for cleaning was perhaps why these trees were some of the first to go in at mission stations. In its early years, the site of the Kawhia Mission Station was known as Lemon Point (now Te Waitere), for the lemon trees that Rev. John Whiteley planted there in about 1835.
The first plants to go in at The Elms Mission Station in Tauranga in 1836 were fruit trees and from Rev. Alfred Nesbit Brown’s permanent arrival in 1838 he threw himself into gardening and quickly created a nursery, with seeds, cuttings and plants seemingly freely exchanged between mission stations and other settlers. Figs, grapes, peaches and roses all made their way around the country via the mission stations (as did grass seed – ryegrass seed, for instance, arrived in Hawke’s Bay in 1834 or 1835 from the Bay of Islands). Read more about The Elms here.
Interestingly, Adela Stewart, who with her husband Hugh established a home and farm at Athenree near Katikati as part of the Ulster Irish settlement there, wrote in her memoir My Simple Life in New Zealand that until they landed in Tauranga in 1878 they had never seen a lemon tree – but went on to plant several in 1882 (varieties supplied by Mason’s of Auckland).
Sheila Natusch (1926-2017, MNZM), who grew up on Rakiura Stewart Island, is a name that deserves to be better known in New Zealand, as a botanist, as a botanical illustrator and as a writer. This link will take you to a Radio NZ library of interviews with her and about her.
A couple of years ago I was gifted three of her small books and turned to Wild Fare for Wilderness Foragers (1979) looking for something autumn themed. And in the chapter ‘Random Recipes’, there it was – and her introduction is a corker (only part of it is reproduced below).
I never measure anything, nor do I use a book when preparing food for human consumption. Imagination, commonsense and whatever is in the house at the time are thrown into the crucible; and I never know whether friends come back in spite of the food or because of the company. I do know that I am better company if I have not worked myself into a state attempting a spotless house and a complex menu in one day …
Under the heading ‘Mushroom, Puffball, Penny Bun or Other Edible Fungi’, Natusch immediately says: Check first, for goodness sake, that the specimen is edible. The best way to do this is to take a good book into the field with you, do not rely on memory alone. Ordinary field mushrooms grow in grazed paddocks so are easy enough to identify and Natusch suggests cooking fungi as my mother always cooked mushrooms on the farm – fried in butter. This story lists some other edible fungi found in New Zealand but repeats the warning from Natusch. Make sure you know what you’ve got. The Virtual Mycota from Landcare Research may be helpful for field mushrooms.
Betty’s Apple Butter (from Unfolding Seasons by Kerry Carmen, 1992) 2kg well-flavoured apples, stemmed and quartered 2 cups cider or water Sugar 1 tbspn cinnamon 1½ tspn ground cloves 1½ tspn ground allspice
Put the apples in a pot with the liquid and cook, stirring occasionally, until soft. Force the apples through a sieve or mouli. For each cup of puree, add half a cup of sugar. Stir in the other ingredients and cook over a low heat for 1-2 minutes, still stirring, until the mixture sheets from the spoon. Pour into hot, sterilised jars; seal and store in a cool, dry place.
The author notes that this apple butter is wonderful on scones, toast, pancakes, teacakes, muffins or fresh bread and butter. It does need to be kept in the refrigerator once opened. (There are a zillion recipes for apple butter on the internet and many also include vanilla, but just as many don’t.)
What seasonal bounty are you enjoying? Figs, grapes, pumpkins, walnuts …
It is one thing for nature to provide a respite from war but quite another to create gardens in the very midst of it. Yet, this is what happened during the long drawn-out fighting on the Western front … Gardens were created by soldiers, chaplains, doctors and nurses. Some were small, some substantial, some decorative, others productive. It helped that the conditions in France and Flanders were conducive. The climate, the rich soil, the long stalemates and periods of inaction all combined to make gardening possible. Trench warfare revealed the power of the garden to answer to some of humankind’s deepest existential needs.
Sue Stuart-Smith, from The Well Gardened Mind (HarperCollins, 2020)
Ms Stuart-Smith also writes about John Stanhope Walker (1871-1955), hospital chaplain at the 21st Casualty Clearing Station who started making a garden in 1916, not long before the Battle of the Somme which saw his field hospital swamped with wounded and dying. The sides of the tent would be lifted so the soldiers could see the garden, which included flowers and vegetables … the first row of peas is ready, the huge pods are much admired by the blood-stained warriors. Apparently Surgeon-General Sir Anthony Bowlby appreciated the garden.
There are many interesting contributions on this topic of gardening during World War 1 at the Great War Forum, including that the British Expeditionary Force held a vegetable show at Le Havre in August 1917, complete with medals for prizewinners. The National War Museum has the medal won for best cauliflower. See it here.
Kenneth Helphand, a professor of landscape architecture, has written about war gardens and the link will take you to a radio interview with him (and others, including a US soldier who served in Iraq), as well as some images: Tending ‘Defiant Gardens’ During Wartime. Prof. Helphand shares some of his text here.
They’re the deluxe flowers we love to love. But how did hydrangeas – for so long something that grew wild on roadsides – become chic? Roger Allen will tell you that it’s all down to breeding and has himself spent 23 years adding to the range of these super-size sensations.
Roger Allen holding a young Green T. The hydrangeas in the background are some of the rejected seedlings he’s planted in his garden. Photo: Sandra Simpson
Roger’s growing career goes back to his childhood with a father who grew flowers commercially in Christchurch, and encouragement from H M Garrick, who invited the schoolboy who peeked over his fence to have a look at his cacti and succulent garden, now part of New Zealand’s largest public collection of these plants in Christchurch Botanic Gardens.
Roger began to take the idea of flowers seriously while working for a dairy farmer at Matamata. He had bought wife Judy chrysanthemums for Mother’s Day, the bouquet tied up with the idea she might like to grow them for sale. Their employer was happy to offer a patch and they ended up with a regular clientele.
‘Scintillation’ is one of Roger Allen’s pink hydrangeas. Photo: Sandra Simpson
Realising they wouldn’t progress on the farm with their employer’s son in the wings, the couple began looking for land and in 1970 bought at Whakamarama, in the foothills of the Kaimai Range, about 20 minutes from Tauranga. “It had a stream, bush, everything Judy wanted,” Roger says. “What it didn’t have was power or water and we lived in a caravan for 3 months over winter with a baby and a dog while I built a packing shed for us to live in.”
They moved again 25 years ago to Plummer’s Point, near Whakamarama but at sea level, starting their new mixed-crop floriculture business with sandersonias for corms and including ericas and lecuadendrons. By this time daughter Stephanie was working for a flower wholesaler and could advise on what was selling well.
“We tried Viburnum opulus ‘Sterile’ but it was a season of 2 weeks at the most,” Roger says. “We managed to stretch it to 2 months using different methods, but decided there had to be something better.”
‘Red Terror’, which Roger says is his best red so far. Photo: Sandra Simpson
A nearby grower suggested hydrangeas and delivered 25 plants. Roger took to them with an axe and made 75 plants. “I planted them in August and by January we’d made more than $1,000 off them. I thought, ‘this is what I’m going to grow’.”
His hydrangeas have always been bag-grown, sitting on a layer of impervious material – a lesson learned after the roots of his pink blooms found their way into the soil and turned blue. “Wanting reds made us focus on bag growing,” Roger says. “Our volcanic soils are high in aluminium so it’s difficult to get good reds or pinks if you’re growing in the ground.”
After attending the inaugural Hydrangea Society international conference in Belgium in 2007, Roger decided the only way he was going to get the flowers he wanted was to breed them himself. “We’d bought a lot of overseas varieties that turned out not to be any good. We needed plants we could be confident with in New Zealand conditions.”
‘Envy’ has proved popular with florists. Photo: Sandra Simpson
Despite initially not knowing where to look for the seed capsule on a hydrangea, Roger learned quickly. “The seeds are in little urn-shaped capsules and are like little grains of nothing, they’re so fine.”
Of the first 12 plants he produced, Roger thought two might be worth keeping. “One turned out to be very useful. The other was the sweetest flower you’ve ever seen, but got mildew easily so out it went. The most important thing about breeding is selecting – and realising that it’s an expensive hobby. There’s a lot of potting mix used, a lot of space taken up, a lot of time spent and not much to show at the end of it.
“I started with hydrangeas because there was money in it, but it’s turned into a bit of a love affair. It’s a really nice bloom and I’m in awe of it – a flower changes on the bush daily until it goes ‘antique’ and changes completely.”
The export hydrangea flower business he started, more recently run by daughter Vania, closed in 2019 but Roger continues to hybridise and reckons his 2022 crop of about 450 seedlings was his best ever, and has kept 30 to assess.
Roger calls this unnamed seedling with its ruffled petals an exciting development. Photo: Sandra Simpson
He has released three hybrids – red ‘Bush Fire’, green ‘Envy’ and pink ‘Irene’ – and is thrilled that the last has exporters requesting it by name, rather than colour.
“It’s a retirement hobby now,” he says of his breeding. “I’m only selling plants to flower growers and there’s not many of them left. All my success has come at the wrong end of my life. I have full enthusiasm in my head but my body won’t keep up.”
This article was first published in NZ Gardener and appears here with permission.
When you peel a banana, you’re on the receiving end of a near-miraculous $10 billion supply chain. One that sends seemingly endless quantities of a tropical fruit halfway across the world to be among the cheapest, most readily available products in supermarket aisles … But, incredibly, there’s no inbuilt backup plan or safety net if the one variety that most of the global trade depends on starts to fail.
That quote is from a recent column for The Guardian by food journalist Dan Saladino, under the headline ‘There are more than 1,000 varieties of banana, and we eat one of them. Here’s why that’s absurd’. He’s not the first to point out the dangers of relying on the Cavendish variety for the world’s commercial banana crop and certainly won’t be the last. As a by the way, 33% of the world’s bananas are grown in Ecuador.
The Thousand Finger banana (a fruiting hand is pictured left in the Singapore Botanic Gardens) bears short, stubby fruit which are good to eat. A hand can be 3m long. Photo: Sandra Simpson
Simon Barnes, in his book The History of the World in 100 Plants (link goes to a Radio NZ interview with the author), notes that the most popular dessert banana of the early 20th century was the Gros Michel, another banana where all the plants were alomost genetically identical and which was virtually wiped out in the 1950s by a fungal infection (the Panama disease), the same disease that is now threatening the (almost genetically identical to each other) Cavendish bananas. Brandon Summers-Miller on the Epicurious website last year wrote a delightful story about taste-testing and baking with both the Cavendish and the Gros Michel, which he sourced from a specialist grower in Miami.
Cavendish bananas were named after William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire who, in about 1834 received a shipment of banana plants from Mauritius. His head gardener and friend, Sir Joseph Paxton, cultivated them in the greenhouses of Chatsworth House and named them Musa cavendishii. Although various types of banana had been known in Asia and by Arab traders for many centuries, it wasn’t until the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) formed in 1899 that bananas became a widely known fruit. The company was, however, involved in many murky doings in Latin America. Read more here.
A banana seller’s stand in Kerala, India. The ethylene gas bananas give off when ripening can be used to speed up ripening of other fruit, including apples and kiwifruit. Photo: Sleeba Thomas on Unsplash
The renowned English primatologist and anthropologist Dame Dr Jane Goodall will celebrate her 90th birthday on April 3 – and what a life it’s been.
With the support of renowned anthropologist Louis Leakey, Jane began studying primate behaviour in London in 1958 before going in 1960 (with her mother as chaperone) to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. In1962 Leakey raised funds to send her to Cambridge University to study for her PhD, the university accepting her for a doctorate even though she had no lesser degree at the time (she gained her bachelor’s at Cambridge before her PhD).
Spathoglottis Jane Goodall in the Singapore National Orchid Garden. Photo: Sandra Simpson
The orchid Spathoglottis Jane Goodall was registered by Singapore Botanic Gardens in 2005 with the Royal Horticultural Society. The plant was named in her honour when she visited the National Orchid Garden, part of the botanic gardens, in 2004.
Dame Jane, who will be in New Zealand in June as part of her Reasons for Hope tour, also has a species orchid named for her, Dendrobium goodallianum. Found in Papua New Guinea at about 450m elevation, this large epiphyte has sweetly coconut scented flowers that bloom for only a day. The orchid was discovered for science in 2003 during a collecting trip by members of the Leiden Botanical Garden and Naturalis, and was officially named in 2015 when Dame Jane visited the botanic garden in The Netherlands.
The single plant at Leiden’s Hortus Botanicus grows in a research greenhouse and is not available for public viewing as it is the only known specimen in the world. Unfortunately, no information was gathered during field collection as to how abundant this species was in its original habitat, and since 2003 the region where the orchid was found has succumbed to large-scale logging.
Something less rare is the Dr Jane Goodall rose, launched in 2011 and hybridised by Christian Hanak and La Roseraie Guillot in France. To mark the launch, Dame Jane planted the first of 400 of these hybrid tea bushes in the rose garden of Val-de-Marne near Paris.
Pearl Barley: Processed to remove its hull and most, if not all, of its bran layer, pearl barley is the most common form of barley consumed by humans – it cooks faster and is less chewy than other forms of the grain. I use it in soups, particularly vegetable, and make a nice late summer, warm vegetarian salad with it. This Barley, Courgette, Mint & Halloumi Salad sounds good, as does this recipe for Pearl Barley Soup.
A Papuan woman extracts starch sago from the spongy centre of the palm. Photo: Wikipedia
Sago: The punchline to a classic joke (how do you start a pudding race?), sago is very similar to tapioca, being predominantly starch but in this case sourced from the pith of several types of palm trunk, including the true sago palm Metroxylon sagu. In the South Pacific, sago is also sourced from the sago cycad (Cycas revoluta) and cassava root. The palms are not allowed to flower and cut down at about 15 years of age, as the energy needed for flowering would rob the starch from the trunk. Sago is used in the same way as tapioca (and is fairly interchangeable with it) and in industry is used as a textile stiffener. Here’s a recipe for Baked South African Sago Pudding.
Semolina is ground durum wheat, a flour used for making pasta as its high levels of gluten help keep the shape of pasta during cooking. Couscous is made from semolina, and the grains are also used in baking as well. Here’s a recipe for Lemon Semolina Cake.
Cassava roots. Photo: Wikipedia
Tapioca is a gluten-free starch – almost a pure carb – made from cassava root, dried and then processed into, for example, ‘pearls’ or flakes. Native to South America, cassava is now grown in many tropical places, including the South Pacific. The flavourless tapioca flour can be used as a thickening agent, while the pearls are found in puddings and bubble tea (Wikipedia tells me it originated in Taiwan in the early 1980s and is essentially a flavoured cold tea drink with tapioca, the bubbles, added). I was never that keen on tapioca pudding as a child but Mum usually had a box of tapioca in the cupboard, purchased when the Rawleighs man came to call. Here’s a recipe for Tapioca Pudding.
Risotto rice: Rice is a huge topic, one that not only incporporates horticulture but also cultural beliefs and practices. (Read a bit about Bali here and some culture from Japan here.) This recent article in The Guardian about risotto rice, which is grown in the floodplain of the Po Valley in northern Italy, caught my eye so I decided to include this type of rice, if only to highlight the fragility of so many of our food crops.
Italy is Europe’s largest rice producer, growing about 50% of the rice produced in the EU but in 2022, the worst drought in 200 years struck the Po, the river that feeds the system of canals that irrigates the paddy fields. As a result, Italy lost 26,000ha of rice fields, and production of the grain dropped by more than 30%. Last year there was another drought and another 7,500ha lost.
Italy’s rice revolution began at the abbey of Lucedio, near Vercelli, according to this article from the South China Morning Post. The abbey was built in 1123 by French monks who drained the nearby marshlands and began to cultivate the grain in the 1400s. “The monks spread rice culture all across Piedmont and over to the other regions, passing on the know-how to smaller abbeys and monasteries,” says Count Paolo Salvadori, who runs the estate.
Australia grows regular rice and there is some small production of ‘risotto rice’, eg, Arborio and Carnaroli, but production of all types is relatively small.Carnaroli has a higher starch content than Arborio, a firmer texture and a longer grain.
Fellowships have been awarded to Barbara Wheeler (curator, Auckland Botanic Gardens) and Lady Gillian Deane (‘Te Maimai’ garden, Kapiti).
Bob Matthews (Matthews Nurseries Ltd, Whanganui) wins the Plant Raiser Award for his selections: Rosa ‘Anniversary’ (Mattlace), R. ‘Cappuccino’ (Mattcup), R. ‘Cupcake’ (Mattcisa), R. ‘Diamonds Forever’ (Mattdiafor), R. ‘My Best Mate’ (Mattbest), R. ‘My Mum’ (Mattmum).
Tony Barnes (New Plymouth) wins the Garden History Award – in the past 8 years, Tony has focused on identifying and preserving 100+-year-old heritage camellia trees. He also chairs the Camellia Memorial Trust, which funds ground-breaking research on camellia petal blight at Massey University.
Fiona Eadie (Larnach Castle, Dunedin) wins the Horticultural Communicator Award.
Read profiles of all these amazing people and their achievements on the RNZIH Facebook page.
The institute, which last year celebrated its centenary, has uploaded to its website 28 years’ worth of journals from 1973 to 2001, and made them freely available.
The project ‘100 years of horticultural history’ has involved scanning and uploading more than 11,500 pages from 200-plus publications. Work was funded as part of the RNZIH centenary celebrations in 2023. ‘Coming soon’ are tranches of journals dating back to 1929.
The digital library also includes more recent journals as pdfs, which are held back for a year before being posted for the general public.
Polenta, widely used in northern Italy, is a ground cornmeal, usually made from yellow maize. Wikipedia tells me that it used to be considered a food for the lower classes and the name ‘polenta’ once meant a porridge of any kind of crushed grain – before maize was introduced to Europe that included barley, millet, chickpeas and chestnut flour.
Uncooked grains of polenta. Photo: Wikimedia
Development of ‘instant polenta’ has opened up this product to home cooks around the world as previously it needed a about 45 minutes of constant stirring! Of course, ‘anyone who knows’ doesn’t think instant polenta cuts it, but if you’ve never had anything else, it’s fine – and takes only 5 to 10 minutes of stirring (the stirring is important to have a smooth polenta).
The late, great Antonio Carluccio says this of instant polenta in his book Complete Italian Food: It is made by pre-cooking ordinary polenta, which is then dried and milled again. The results are not as tasty as the original, but it is fine when butter and cheese are added to make a polentia concia [dressed polenta] … It is traditionally eaten in winter as it is a wonderful comfort food. And it is his recipe for Dressed Polenta with Sausage that I turn to often in winter, but his Slow-cooked Family Stew with Polenta also sounds worth trying.
Osso bucco with creamy polenta. Photo: Max Griss on Unsplash
There are two ways of serving polenta – soft (like a porridge) or let it set (when it can be cut into, for example, wedges).
I’ve had a delicious mealie (corn) bread made by a South African friend who refused to part with his recipe but worked out something using polenta and a tin of creamed corn that was good, and this recipe sounds even better.
Grits, the dish that is beloved in the southern USA, is another made from ground maize and pretty similar to polenta.
Sandra's Garden 