News Digest

Chelsea Flower Show favourite UK designer Dan Pearson has started an online magazine called Dig Delve which will “feature stories about gardens, horticulture, plants, landscape, nature, food growing and eating, and will also look at inspirational growers, producers, farmers, makers, cooks, florists, artists and craftspeople”. Read the first issue here.

Didn’t make it to last month’s Melbourne Flower Show? Never mind, Catherine Stewart from Garden Drum was there as our eyes, ears and inquiring mind. Read her thoughts and see photos – Trends, Trophies & Tidbits and Avenue of Achievable Gardens by student landscapers.

Various plants in my garden have struggled with this summer’s extended humidity – and yes, some have died. Kate Wall at Garden Drum explains why growing in the subtropics isn’t just about the heat. Read her post here.

Just for garden tourists, The Guardian offers a list of 10 of the best gardens … that you’ve probably never heard of.

Don’t be alarmed myrtle rust has not arrived in New Zealand – yet. However, the Ministry of Primary Industries is asking gardeners to remain alert and have prepared a webpage showing what it looks like and what to do if you think you’ve spotted it. See it here.

Box tree moth (Cydalima perspectalis), a native of East Asia is spreading through England after first being spotted in 2008, while one Dutch grower reports that Switzerland is buying very little box now “due to the blight and the moth”. Read the full story here.

It’s a long and winding road, but the nub of the story about the latest “buzz band” is that its members are 40,000 bees, and their activity forms the basis of One, “a transcendental drone symphony between man and bee that is surely one of the year’s most beguiling offerings”. The “soundscape” was created especially for an art pavilion designed to represent a hive. Read the whole story here.

And while on the subject of bees: Newly published research shows that bees looking for nectar need to be able to spot flower petals and recognise which coloured flowers are full of food. Professor Beverley Glover, of Cambridge University’s Botanic Gardens and who is also Head of the Evolution and Development Group at the university’s Department of Plant Sciences, and Dr Heather Whitney from the University of Bristol found that iridescence – the shiny, colour-shifting effect seen on soap bubbles – makes flower petals more obvious to bees, but that too much iridescence confuses bees’ ability to distinguish colours. Read more here.

And just one more … while the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were in Bhutan last week they presented the Queen with a gift – a rose named for her. King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck and Queen Jetsun Pema founded the annual Royal Bhutan Flower Show last year and have created an English garden.

The Daily Mail reports: The red flower, named the Queen of Bhutan Rose, was developed as a special gesture for the King and his wife, who has been dubbed the ‘Kate Middleton of the Himalayas’. (Don’t you hope the last bit of that sentence has been made up? Maybe we should dub Kate the ‘Jetsun Pema of the Home Counties’.) Read the full report here.

News from around the world

British garden designer Dan Pearson has won this year’s top award at the Chelsea Garden Show – read some comments and see some photos here. The Daily Telegraph lists its Top 10 Trends from Chelsea, while the Guardian offers Six Things we Learned. See a gallery of photos from Chelsea here.

A New Zealand connection at Chelsea this year was the Cloudy Bay garden. “The garden echoes the terroir of the Marlborough region … with deep red and fresh white flowers representing Cloudy Bay’s signature wines, pinot noir and sauvignon blanc,” writes Rona Wheeldon on her blog (see some pictures of the garden too). “The two wines are also represented in the two different hard landscaping areas…the rusticness and earthyness of the oak reflecting the red wine and the clear crispness of the concrete reflecting the white.”

A virtual visit to Chelsea wouldn’t be complete without a read of Tim Richardson’s thoughts, always to the point and with plenty of insider gossip. I’m amazed he had nothing to say about the synchronised swimmers!

Britain seems captivated by the idea of ‘wild swimming’, the latest is a new public, outdoor swimming ‘pond’ at King’s Cross in London. Christopher Woodward has already taken the plunge. “Outdoor swimming makes you sensitive to the health of water, as I can testify, having swum from Oxford to London over eight days last September,” he writes. “At Clifton Hampden it’s as sweet smelling as a Georgian pastoral, but at Hampton Court it’s so dirty that for a fortnight I lost all sense of taste.”

Kathleen Inman has a collection of British double-flowered plants – including double-flowered gorse! In New Zealand gorse is a pest plant so we sometimes forget that elsewhere it’s a prized plant. A parks officer once told me that gorse was a perfect ‘nursery plant’ for natives as it protects them while they’re small, while beekeepers like gorse because it has such strong pollen and flowers through the winter when there isn’t much else around in the way of food plants. The website of Plant Heritage National Collections (UK).

America’s Association of Professional Landscape Designers (APLD) has announced its award winners for 2015, and Garden Drum’s Catherine Stewart profiles three of the Gold winners in this post. “APLD’s award winning designers each year feature gardens and landscapes that are simply stunning, filled with clever problem solving, beautiful planting, well-chosen hardscape elements and both sustainable and decorative ideas that you can use in your own garden,” Catherine says.

Adrian Gray had a cameo role recently on the new series of Grand Designs showing on TV3 (Thursdays) – a couple building a flash, but small, place on an eroding cliff on the Welsh coast. Adrian was creating a lawn sculpture for them, by balancing one rock on another on the tiniest of contact points. If you didn’t see it, pop on over to his website and have a look (there are short videos too). The one he did for Grand Designs was bolted because of the wind on the top of the cliff, but generally they are simply balanced.

Pesky pests I

Funny how one thing leads to another …

I posted a comment on the Garden Dum website (based in Australia) to the effect that the yellow and black ladybirds (Illeis galbula) we find on cucurbit leaves and that are thought to control powdery mildew, actually spread it, don’t they?

The article author, Jennifer Stackhouse, politely queried where I might have got such an odd notion from, so I linked to this Royal New Zealand Institute of Horticulture article about powdery mildew by Jane Wrigglesworth that says: “But if you think these beetles will help control powdery mildew, think again. They actually carry spores of the disease under their wings from plant to plant.”

I also quoted from the 2005 book, Backyard Battlefield (Random House), by entomologist Ruud Kleinpaste who says, “Sadly, observing these elegant creatures in my veggie garden I think I have gathered enough evidence to accuse them of spreading the fungus from leaf to leaf and plant to plant.”

Illeis galbula on a courgette leaf. Photo: Sandra Simpson

So far, so good. Jennifer double-checked my information against that available in Australia and came back with information from Denis Crawford, an insect photographer and garden writer.

“I have heard this story before,” Denis says, “but it is not supported by any scientific literature I can find.” He quotes an excerpt from a paper (one of the few, he says) which examines the biology and behaviour of the fungus-eating ladybird Illeis galbula:

“Feeding behaviour is remarkably uniform, both larvae and adults graze fungal spores and hyphae from surfaces of leaves. When Oidium sp. is dense, they feed on a front and visibly clear large areas of the leaf’s white fungal covering; if infestation is light, both larvae and adults search leaf surfaces at random and if nothing is found, adults fly off.”

Denis suggests it may be possible that the beetles spread the fungus as would any other insect which walks over the spores and moves to another leaf, as would water drops, wind, etc. “The ladybirds almost certainly do more good than harm.”

So I contacted Murray Dawson, RNZIH webmaster, to share this information and wonder if he knew any more … and Murray was kind enough to let me know that Denis who, it turns out, is writing a book on garden insects had also been in touch seeking clarification.

I wonder if it’s one of those things that has been said often enough that people now accept that the ladybirds spread the fungus, and repeat it as a truth to other gardeners. If any readers have any ideas or knowledge, I’d be pleased to hear them. Just click on the “reply” tag underneath this post.

PS (May 5): In the latest edition of the weekly Get Growing email newsletter I find Lynda Hallinan also repeating the story that the ladybirds are pests.