Here’s a garden-theme chance to support a good cause.
Abbeyfield is a not-for-profit, non-denominational, registered charity, working to build an Abbeyfield House in Katikati, providing affordable, respectful community living for independent older folk in a supportive, safe, thriving and caring environment.
I enjoy discovering public artworks so thought I’d share some of the figurative works I’ve come across around New Zealand, some of them celebrating the famous and some of them marking lesser-known but important people, and some of them just for fun!
The bronze pou (right) represents Rakeiao, a Te Arawa Maori figure who had power over insects, hence the rather lovely dragonfly on his hip. The statue of King George V in Rotorua’s Government Gardens is surrounded at the base by eight of these figures, cast in 2018 from the original wooden carvings that stood there (or photos of the two that had been stolen). The eight figures represent the eight children of Te Arawa chief Rangitihi, and each statue has a story associated with it. The original carvings were made by the eight tribes of Te Arawa.
A young Ernest Rutherford is forever running to school from the site of the cottage at Brightwater, near Nelson, where he was born in 1871. He left New Zealand at the age of 23, and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908. He has been described as ‘the father of nuclear physics’ for his many experiments with radioactivity and atoms. He died in 1937. The Rutherford Memorial at Brightwater, which opened in 1991, includes much information about his life and is well worth a stop. The statue is by Paul Walshe of Monaco.
Anna Elizabeth Jerome Spencer (right, 1872-1955) strides out on the streets of Napier. A qualified teacher, Bessie, as she was known, was the founder of the Women’s Institute movement in New Zealand, after having come across it in England. The Rissington WI was founded in 1921, New Zealand’s first, and by 1925 there were six WI clubs in Hawkes Bay and the country’s first provincial union was formed. She also started a Townswoman’s Guild in Napier in 1932. The NZ Federation of Women’s Institutes gifted the statue, made by Gerard McCabe, in 2021.
The colder months are truffle season, when this unusual – and expensive – fungus is located and dug up on the more than 300 truffières around New Zealand, including the one in the Western Bay of Plenty that I had the chance to visit recently.
Te Puke Truffles is in the process of changing owners, but the season will go ahead as usual and the truffière (farm) is hosting weekends that include lunch in Tauranga until the end of July.
Maureen and Colin Binns began their truffle journey in 2008 after finding a pamphlet about Plant & Food Research that the previous owner of the property had left behind. With 3.5ha of pasture land available, they decided to try something different.
However, like all those going into the business they had no way of knowing whether their trees would ever bear a crop. They grow the Périgord black truffle (Tuber melanosporum), the second-most expensive truffle in the world after the Italian white truffle (Tuber magnatum) which is still only wild harvested. The couple waited patiently for 7 years to see if their 212 oak and hazelnut trees, which had been especially ‘inoculated’ with fungus spores, would bear a crop – and most of them did. “We’ve noticed that the row of trees nearest the road have produced very few and sometimes none at all,” Colin said.
Truffles growing around the shallow-rooted hazelnut trees can often be seen as they explode gently through the soil, but the couple have two dogs, Sam (in training) and Jed, who sniff out the delicacies and indicate them. Pigs have long been used in Europe to seek out truffles, but like to eat them when they find them and are harder to manage generally being bigger and heavier, whereas dogs generally don’t eat truffles – and can be taught to seek and then sit.
The prized fungus begin growing underground on the roots of its host tree in December and stop growing in mid-April, waiting for colder weather to ripen. Harvest is June-July. “When you have a wet summer like we did in 2022-23, then you don’t have a crop,” Maureen said. “They were flooded just as they were starting to grow. We supply restuarants with our product so it was terrible to have to say that we couldn’t manage their orders last year.”
The truffle industry in France has traditionally been a secretive one, something that worked against it after World War 1 when truffles were still exclusively hunted in the wild with many of the men who had the knowledge of where to look, when, did not return from the battlefields. Truffles develop a symbiotic mycorrhizal relationship with the roots of several kinds of trees – as well as oak and hazelnut, these include hornbeam, birch and European beech – and can’t survive without their plant hosts.
That wall of “truffle silence” was invoked when New Zealand scientist Ian Hall went to France in the 1980s to investigate whether it might be a viable crop here. “He went for 3 weeks and came back knowing nothing because no one would talk to him,” Colin said, “but he persevered, worked it out and we got there in the end.
“They love growing in limestone country so the best place in New Zealand is the Waipara area in north Canterbury. Someone down there is planning to plant 34,000 trees – but there’s no guarantee they will prdouce. It’s all in the hands of the truffle gods. Some people have had their trees for 24 years and never had a truffle.”
But when the gamble pays off, it does so well. A 200g truffle can sell for between $700 and $800. Maureen has served visiting groups teas that include finely grated truffle in butter, cream, honey, ice-cream and shortbread, while Colin talks about Te Puke Truffles being used by Kererū Brewing in Wellington to create the Truffle Hound Belgian Quad Ale. Maureen flavours eggs by putting the uncooked eggs in a glass jar with truffle slices, sealing and leaving overnight. The aroma works itself right through into the yolk, she says, to make truffle scrambled eggs with a grating of truffle also added at the last minute.
The Binns, members of the NZ Truffle Association, intend to stay involved with the industry in some way, although not as growers, after they move to Levin and are helping the new owners of their property into the business.
Dimitre Ghica Park on Sinaia is one of the oldest public parks in Romania, having been established in 1881 under the guidance of a Belgian landscape architect and named for the Prince, and Romanian prime minister, who owned the land. The town, meanwhile, is named for the Sinaia Monastery, founded in 1695 which itself was inspired by and named for St Catherine’s Monastery on Mt Sinai in the Egyptian desert.
The town, an alpine resort in winter and a popular hiking base in summer, looked glorious on a sunny spring day and the park was busy with people enjoying the sunshine, living up to its nick-name of The Pearl of the Carpathians.
Facing the Caraiman Hotel across the park is the Palace Hotel, dating from 1911 and built on the site of the old Hydrotherapy Baths that opened in 1880 and were destroyed by fire in 1911. The baths’ season was from June 1-September 15 and treatments were as devised by Professor Wilhelm Winternitz of Vienna, at the time referred to as ‘the father of scientific hydrotherapy’. The new hotel’s brochure noted: ‘A telephone in each room, restaurant, bar, dancing rooms; it’s a European health resort placed on the train route Orient-Express …’ Ah, the Orient Express – did you know that once again you can (for a price) make the full Istanbul-Paris journey? Lotto win needed for that one, but we can dream, can’t we?
The Casino also rose from the ashes of the 1911 fire, on the site of Prince Dimitre Ghica’s palace. One website I’ve found said that up to 800 people a day would make the 90km journey from Bucharest to the casino on special trains. “News of the inauguration of the luxurious casino in the summer residence of the Royal House of Romania [nearby Peles Castle] spread rapidly throughout Europe. Two days after the inauguration, the Loebel brothers committed suicide after losing their entire fortune. This news increased the fame of the casino.” The building is now used for conferences and other events.
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.
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”.
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.
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?
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.
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’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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
This 2022 story from Kiwi Gardener details the banana interests of Hugh Rose, head of the Tropical Fruit Growers of New Zealand, a group of commercial and back-yard growers.
Sandra's Garden 