Behold our pleached rows of Fairy Magnolia White! I am delighted. A goal has been achieved. It has taken 10 years and that was starting with big plants. In retrospect,  I admit that it seems quite a long time but such is the way of gardening. It has looked fine and established for maybe 6 or 7 of those intervening years but finally, we have it how it was envisaged ..read more

Our mistake here has been to allow some into cultivated areas of the garden. Bluebells are best kept to wilder situations. I speak from experience. Bluebells are thugs; in well cultivated garden conditions, they are more than thuggish and can spread at a frankly alarming rate ..read more

It has been a difficult week, so all I have to entertain readers with this week is scenes from the spring woodland. We like highly detailed woodland. The key to woodland gardening here is to manage light levels. The charming scenes we see of European and British woodlands – the expanse of white birches underplanted ..read more

I called in yesterday to ask their permission to share the photos and, with their usual generous spirit, they said ‘any time. Our garden is your garden’.... She commented that she thought the magnolias were better this year than ever before and many people are admiring them. “I tell everybody they are Abbie’s magnolias.” We have had this conversation before. What you have to understand is that this row of magnolias is not far off being a complete collection of Jury magnolias. In vain, do I tell her that they are Felix and Mark’s plants. In Pat’s mind, they are mine ..read more

It is an experience shared by most gardeners. I will just get this (smallish) job done and then go on to something else. And that smallish job expands from a few hours to days or even weeks. So it is with trimming camellias, about which I wrote last week. I am still doing it ..read more

As we hurtle into the full flush of spring, after a remarkably calm and mild winter, not only is the weather breaking up but I can feel the old sense of rising panic. The weather is entirely to be expected. Mark calls it ‘the magnolia storms’ on account of them always hitting during magnolia season – the confluence of cold fronts from the South Pole and warm fronts from Australia and the Pacific Ocean, I believe. The sense of panic is more personal ..read more

Poor old Christchurch cathedral is back in the news. Badly damaged in the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, its future again hangs in the balance as money for the restoration has dried up, with substantial shortfall of $89 million – at current prices but likely to rise. Christchurch’s Anglican cathedral is a key building ..read more

What a delight are the dainty narcissi. I see I started photographing them in in mid July so we have had a month of pleasure so far and plenty more to come. When it comes to magnolia flowers, we lean to the bigger is better way of thinking but the narcissi are different. Small and dainty, thank you ..read more

The Magnoliafication – we made it up. A bit like The Rapture, perhaps, but with its roots firmly in the soil, showier and more socialist in concept so not, in fact, like The Rapture at all. It was the process by which we distributed our surplus nursery stock free of charge in our local town of Waitara ..read more

We are timid eaters of assorted mushrooms and fungi in this country, having been raised with a healthy fear of death cap mushrooms which look so innocent and edible. Generally we have a choice of brown Portobello mushrooms or white button mushrooms at the supermarket, so I leapt at the chance to try fresh oyster ..read more