A garden’s need is balancing of colours

Press, 30 November 1978, Page 13

A garden’s need is balancing of colours

Home & People

GARDENER’S DIARY

By Derrick Rooney

When I look at other people’s free - flowering roses or dahlias, and worry that mine are too late or too shy blooming, I console myself with the thought that flowers are not always a necessary part of a colour scheme. Sometimes they are a positive intrusion. What would be a very pretty comer of my own garden, with rhododendrons and lilac in the reddishpurple range, peonies, and the glorious springflowering rose “Fruhlingsgold” with its gracefully arching stems and huge,

nearly single, primrose and cream flowers, is spoilt just now because the variegated weigela has started to flower. The leaves of this shrub, which are pale apple green edged with creamy shades, are a delightful foil for the cool tones of the rose and the lilac, and for the coppery - chocolate and feather-light foliage of the fennel, “Wisley Bronze,” that I have planted underneath. But the flowers! These are a washy lilac pink, not actually offensive, but decidedly a misplaced comma.

Later in the season, when the lilac and the rose have finished (“Fruhlingsgold,” though without peer in the spring, is a oncer), the picture will improve. The rhododendrons will provide a severe green backdrop, and the weigela, back to leaves only, will once again provide a luminous accent among the other frontrankers, which include purple cistus and a repeat of the fennel, which will be cut down in late December to prevent it from flowering.

AU these are near the gate, and as one walks to the house past a bed of roses and perennials the purple and gold theme is repeated. A purple-leaved maple, “Suminagashi,” small and elegant, backed with neutral greenery, draws the eye around the corner to a bush of the well - named golden phebalium, “Illumination.” To one side is a big old buddleia that showers purple on the gold in high summer, and against the fence is more light foliage, supplied bv a

young bush of Pittosporuni “Argenteum,” one of the oldest native foliage plants, and still one of the best. Next winter, when it is time to replace the old lacebark tree that shades our new terrace, I will take the lightness up another story by planting the beautiful variegated Norway maple, Acer platanoides “Drumr.'.ondi.” The lacebark, beautiful in its day. has never really recovered from having been defoliated in the 1975 nor’wester, has been disfigured bv gall disease, and is

suffering badly this year from wet feet.

It really must go, and “Drummondi” in its place will also offer the upperstorey combination of lime and white that makes the lacebark so handsome at flowering time. And it will do it for seven or eight months, instead of one.

Another lightener is climbing up through the buddleia. This is a young plant, cutting grown, of the grand old rose “Alberic Barbier,” now in its third season and reaching 10ft. despite drought and opossums. “Alberic Barbier” has lovely, loose flowers in. pale," creamy yellow, sweetly scented; never a great mass of Towers like some .once-only climbers, but a constant stream of them from midsummer on. Eventually it will outgrow its host, and probably its available space, and some gritty pruning may be necessary to keep it in bounds. But I am not troubled by this. If I have to dig out a rose bush or two in 10 years and start again, what does it matter? I will have had 10 years of enjoyment from them. A garden in which nothing will outgrow its allotted space for 15 or 20 years is a dull and prissy garden. Nature is in a perpetual state of abundance and renewal, and gardeners should take leaves from the same book. Abundance carries its own penalties, of course, and sometimes a garden has to be rescued from itself. With some help from the local dump — in the form of a discarded post that once did some duty on a farm — I have just saved one group of perennials from a fate worse than death. They were being smothered by that excessively vigorous old climbing rose, “Polyantha Grandiflora.”

When I brought the rose .home from Temuka last year no fence room was available for it, and it went in at the back of a border that once grew’ cabbages and tomatoes, was turned into a temporary home for plants moved from Christchurch, and seems to have become a permanent bed of roses, irises, and clumps of unsual perennials.

Tn a season the thorny tentacles of the rose surrounded its neighbours, and this spring it threatened to take .over the whole bed. But with the post from the dump, a handful of staples, and some wire, I now have it on a pillar. Bft high. In a year or two or three it will have outgrown this host, too, and 1 will have to look for a nearby tree to accommodate it.

Old trees are the classic hosts f.or climbing roses. The results of the pairing can be unexpected. When I planted a smallflowered, apple-scented climbing rose and a Clematis montana under a worn-out old apple tree. I expected the tree to die, and the climbers to help it go out gracefully. The climbers have

reached the top, in short order, but instead of dying the tree has taken on a new lease. This year it had more flowers than ever before. This may be a response to the fertiliser J heaped around it. rather than to the company. Unhappily, the rose itself is spoiling the picture just now by displaying a prominent case of mildew. It is a tough old rose, having been growing for 90 years or more in a hedgerow at the site of a longdemolished house; it gets mildew every year, but apart from dropping a few flower buds seems to take no harm. This year, in a wet sea-

son when T expected less mildew than usual, the rose has been attacked more severely, and much earlier, than ever before. I wonder If we are in for a repeat of last year’s spring, which was prolonged and cold, lasting until mid-November, when the weather suddenly turned hot and dry. and the great drought began. This year has been even wetter, and the rainfall on our village is hovering uncomfortably close to the 50in mark. Though the winter was mild, the spring has been cold, and in the last month or so there have been several crippling frosts. So far the combination has killed nine trees in our garden, some of them 40 or more years old, some planted in the last two or three years. Eight have died in the ground, one of them an uncommon weeping laburnum. The ninth rotted at the base, and a nor’-wester flattened it. Lettuces, even the hardy bronze-leaved ones, were shivering in their boots

until last week, and the rhubarb was dying of wet feet. Now they are halfcooked. Only my wife’s broad beans are holding their own. They are amazing. In winter they were under water three times, and for months the ground all round them was too boggy to stand on. But they are taller and lusher than any we have had before, and already are carrying a huge crop. If the dwarf beans my wife has just sown, and the runner beans I will grow among the young wistaria and clematis on the side fence, do half as well it will be a vintage year for beans.