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.
Quinoa (keen-wah), like buckwheat, is a pseudocereal, an edible seed that isn’t classed as a grain because it doesn’t grow on a grass, and so is gluten free. Native to the Andean part of South America, quinoa is one of those foods that in recent years has been dubbed a ‘superfood’.
Not long after I saw a Country Calendar programme (video link) about a couple growing quinoa in the Taihape area, I came across a Kiwi Quinoa marketing stand in a supermarket so decided to support some young, innovative rural people and try something new. It’s also being grown in the South Island by Canterbury Quinoa.
Chenopodium quinoa. Photo: Wikipedia
Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) has been cultivated for millenia and the species is thought to have been independently domesticated multiple times some 3,000-5,000 years ago. Together with corn and potatoes, quinoa was a staple to, for example, the Incas. Although early Spanish explorers returned to Europe with maize and potatoes, they did not take quinoa, perhaps because they sampled it without first removing the saponins, the bitter chemicals in the seeds that protect them against being eaten.
Britannicia goes on to say: Compared with traditional cereals, quinoa contains all nine essential amino acids, making it one of the few plant sources of complete protein. The seeds are also high in fiber and oil and are a good source of iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, zinc, copper, Vitamin E and a number of antioxidants. Read more here.
Our favourite way of eating it is at this time of the year in a warm salad by Nadia Lim. Click on the link for the recipe for her Avocado, Pumpkin and Halloumi Salad. The Kiwi Quinoa site also has heaps of recipes, for both savoury and sweet dishes.
Life continues to roll over the top of me, hence the pause in posts. However, thought i’d try a few short ones for anyone still reading!
A couple of weeks ago when the temperatures and humidity were high, the Vege Grower was away (somewhere even more hot and humid) and I was getting lethargic and off-hand about food, but the Lawn Mower needs to eat well as he has a physically active job which, besides lifting and carrying, has him on his feet all day.
I remembered a story my friend Robyn told me about her years living in Japan and how hot and humid the summers are in Tokyo. Well, two stories. One was that summer is the season for public firework displays and that centuries ago the Sumida River in Tokyo was chosen as a site for a major display because of the reflections on the water – and the cooling night-time breezes that might be had there.
Buckwheat soba noodles. Photo: Wikipedia
The other story was that cold food becomes very popular and, as only the Japanese can, this has been refined in all sorts of ways. I dug up a recipe online for a cold soba noodle salad, which was easy to make – everything can be done ahead and put in the fridge – and surprisingly delicious. The buckwheat noodles and Tamari (a gluten-free soya sauce) were sourced from my local Asian supermarket. The only thing I didn’t do was use coriander as I can’t stand the taste of the fresh plant.
Buckwheat in flower. Photo: Wikipedia
Despite, the ‘wheat’ part of its name, buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) is what is known as a pseudocereal, a goup that also includes include quinoa and amaranth, eg, seeds are consumed as cereal grains but don’t grow on grasses.
My only other knowledge of buckwheat is that the flour is used to make galettes, the savoury crepes traditional in Brittany, France. See a recipe for making them at home in a regular frying pan.
Buckwheat is fast and easy to grow and in the garden is a good green manure crop that can be turned in or pulled and left to compost. It absorbs phosphorus and is able to return this to the soil in a more useable form, while its flowers attract a number of beneficial species including hoverflies and ladybirds.
On a quick visit to Rotorua last year I had time for a stroll in Government Gardens where a sign headlined ‘A Source of Wonder’ caught my eye: Among the few formal gardens in New Zealand at the time, ‘The Sulphur Gardens’, as they were known, were a source of wonder, defying predictions that nothing would grow in such ‘a howling wilderness’. Vegetable gardens and an orchard supplied produce for the Sanatorium, and a Maori whare, aviary and monkey house were built to satisfy the Victorian taste for exotica. Some of the trees you can see today, such as the Cryptomerias, are remnants of original plantings in the 1890s.The 100-year-old plane trees have been pollarded, a technique fashionable in the Edwardian era …
One of the pollarded plane trees at Government Gardens, a striking effect in winter. Rotorua Museum is in the distance. Photo: Sandra Simpson
But what of The Sulphur Gardens and Sanatorium? A pamphlet from the nearby Sulphur Lake Sculpture Trail said the first Sanatorium Hospital opened in 1886, between the lake, and the Bath House (the currently closed Rotorua Museum) and a Govenment Sanatorium opened in 1908. Both were used as part of an holistic treatment regime for soldiers returning from World War 1, combining physical and pyschological therapies.
In 1881, an agreement reached between Ngati Whakaue leaders, the judiciary, and Government agents, was legalised by the Thermal Springs District Act 1881. The town of Rotorua and, within that, an area of 50 acres containing many medicinal thermal springs was created, ‘Hei oranga mo nga iwi katoa o te Ao’ (for the benefit of the people of the world), this latter being the forerunner of the Rotorua Government Gardens. Read more about Maori connection to the land here.
An advertisement from the Hot Lakes Chronicle of July 8, 1896. Image: Papers Past
Government Gardens lie on the edge of one of the most active areas of Lake Rotorua, Sulphur Bay. This area was once deep under water and is part of a great crater formed during a huge volcanic eruption 220,000 years ago. Read more here.
One side of Forever Remembered by Rotorua sculptor Paul Bottomley. The holes on the right-hand side represent bullet holes. Photo: Sandra Simpsom
Today, the Sanatorium is no more and the elaborate Bath House Museum has been closed for coming up to 7 years for earthquake strengthening and restoration. However, Rotorua District Council last year vowed to keep on with the work and re-open the building.
But Sulphur Lake is still there and a short loop walk takes in a sculpture trail and small memorial bridge with a plaque that says for the convalescing soldiers of World War 1, Sulphur Lake was a place of tranquility, recreation and contemplation to assist in the healing process. It’s hard to know from online research, but it seems the sculptures may change every so often. Read more about the entire Rotorua Sculpture Trail here.
Sandra's Garden 