I’ve just returned home from Denver (and the annual edition of my Garden Bloggers’ Fling) with a severe case of ineedmore. There’s not really a cure for this, except to acknowledge that “I need more penstemons” is a real affliction, especially in June. Especially after being in Colorado, where so many penstemons are native. I felt it stirring at the High Plains Environmental Center in Fort Collins, where red-flowered scarlet bugler (P. barbatus) was consorting wtih purplish Rocky Mountain penstemon (Penstemon strictus) and native yellow columbines (Aquilegia chrysantha).
Pretty sure I saw gorgeous, pink Palmer’s penstemon (P. palmeri) at the doorway to the visitor centre there. I tried to grow that one from seed, but no dice.
I have a photo specialty of bumble bee (Bombus) images, and I was happy to collect a new species, Bombus nevadensis, the Nevada bumble bee, nectaring on Penstemon strictus at the High Plains Environmental Center.
Denver Botanic Garden‘s new Steppe Garden featured penstemons galore. I loved this little meadow with large-flowered penstemon (P. grandiflorus) in various colours.
This was an interesting combination at Denver Botanic: Penstemon grandiflorus in a bed of Fire Spinner ice plant (Delosperma cooperi).
I do grow P. grandiflorus at my cottage on Lake Muskoka, north of Toronto. A biennial, it makes a rosette of succulent, silvery-gray leaves the first year, then sends up this sturdy stem with gorgeous lilac-purple blooms the next year. It’s easy to grow from seed. This is what it looked like the first year I seeded it, up near my septic bed. (And yes, it is growing with the pernicious, invasive, lovable oxeye daisy, Leucanthemum vulgare…)
If I watch this penstemon carefully , I’ll see lots of native bees and hoverflies exploring the lilac-mauve flowers.
Desert penstemon (P. pseudospectabilis) was in flower at Denver Botanic Gardens, too.
We would see that pretty penstemon at The Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins, this time with a pink dianthus.
There were other penstemons at this developing garden. This sky-blue one had no label, but horticulturist Bryan Fischer is quite sure it’s Penstemon virgatus, the upright blue penstemon or one-sided penstemon.
Well-known designer/writer Lauren Springer Ogden is creating The Undaunted Garden (named after her iconic book) at The Gardens on Spring Creek. One of the plants she’s used is the stunning Penstemon heterophyllus ‘Electric Blue’, below.
Rocky mountain penstemon (Penstemon strictus), of course, is a common native beardtongue in Denver. This is P. strictus ‘Bandera’ at Denver Botanic Gardens.
At Denver Botanic Garden’s Chatfield Farm campus (where we enjoyed a buffet dinner and line-dancing lessons!) we saw Penstemon strictus growing with scarlet bugler (Penstemon barbatus ‘Coccineus’) and a bearded iris thrown in the mix.
And Penstemon strictus made a beautiful purple foil to native yellow blanket flowers (Gaillardia aristata) at Chatfield.
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This was an effective colour combination there: apricot mallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua) with Penstemon strictus.
Banana yucca (Yucca baccata) made a brilliant focal point in a sea of Penstemon strictus at Chatfield, below.
In Carol Shinn’s beautiful Fort Collin’s garden, I admired purple P. strictus and scarlet bugler (P. barbatus ‘Coccineus’) in a gritty bed beside her driveway. They were flowering with a native white erigeron, yellow eriogonum and tall yellow prince’s plume (Stanleya pinnata) in the background.
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Dan Johnson and Tony Miles’s lovely garden in Englewood, Pentemon strictus was consorting happily beside a little water feature with California poppies.
At radio personality Keith Funk’s garden in Centennial, below, a front yard alpine garden paired the compact red flowers of pineleaf penstemon (P. pinifolius) with yellow foxtail lily (Eremurus), right, and evening primrose (Oenothera), rear.
Well-known garden guru Panayoti Kelaidis, outreach director of the Denver Botanic Gardens, had lots of penstemons in his garden. I liked this colourful combination of cacti with desert penstemon (P. pseudospectabilis).
I first met Panayoti in June 2006 when he generously gave my husband and me a 90-minute tour of the botanic garden, of which he was (and is) so deservedly proud. We were on a driving trip from Denver to Edwards CO and we stopped in at DBG and also at the Betty Ford Alpine Garden in Vail. What a delight that little jewel of a garden is, especially for penstemons! So when I came back to Canada, I decided to sow some penstemon seed in my wild, sandy, hillside garden on Lake Muskoka, north of Toronto. As I wrote above, biennial large-flowered penstemon enjoyed the conditions and still comes up here and there. Not all the seeds took, but one luscious species, prairie penstemon (P. cobaea var. purpureus) found happiness with its roots seemingly tucked under rocks and graced me with just two plants that appear faithfully each June.
My most successful seed-sowing, however, was our native foxglove penstemon (P. digitalis), which loves my granite hillside, thrives in sandy, acidic gravel and shrugs off drought. It is a great self-seeder and enjoys the company of lanceleaf coreopsis (C. lanceolata), which likes the same mean conditions. They are always in bloom on Canada Day (July 1st).
Here it is with a foraging bumble bee. Hummingbirds love this penstemon, too (as they do all penstemons).
Penstemons are also called “beardtongue”, for the fuzzy staminode in the centre of the flower. You can see that below with a closeup of foxglove penstemon.
Penstemons flower mostly in June and early July. Depending on the species, they make beautiful garden companions for lots of late spring-early summer perennials: irises, peonies, lupines and more. One June (before the foxglove penstemon came into flower), I made a little bouquet from my country meadows here on Lake Muskoka. Along with the pale-lilac Penstemon grandiflorus I included native blue flag iris (I. versicolor), wild lupines (L. perennis) and weedy oxeye daisies and buttercups. This year our spring was cold and flowering was late, so I’m back at the lake in the first week of summer in time to enjoy all these flowers, and the ones that come later. And to daydream and write about the wonderful gardens we visited in Colorado, where penstemons rule supreme!
If you love penstemons (or if I’ve misidentified any), please leave a comment. I love hearing from you.
I popped by the Toronto Botanical Garden this morning for a quick look at what’s in bloom. It’s been such a long, cold winter and reluctant spring, an hour in the garden was just the therapy I needed. So what did I see? Well, in all the years I’ve been photographing at the TBG, I’ve never spied the cornelian cherry (Cornus mas) in the hedge cages in flower. With the ‘marcescent’ foliage (persisting through winter) of the beeches (Fagus sylvatica), it made a unique and lovely entrance to the George and Kathy Dembroski Centre for Horticulture, the main building.
There were loads of hellebores doing their thing. Helleborus ‘Red Lady’ is a long-time performer and has multiplied beautifully beside the stone wall of the building. I loved the sober backdrop it made for flamboyant Narcissus ‘Tiritomba’.
I found a nice assortment of hellebores under the ‘Merrill’ magnolia just opening. This is Helleborus x ericsmithii HGC Merlin (‘Coseh 810’). Isn’t it lovely?
Helleborusx ballardiae HGC Cinnamon Snow (‘Coseh 700’) was spicing things up.
And Helleborus x ballardiae HGC Ice Breaker Prelude (‘Coseh 830’) was meltingly gorgeous.
In a protected corner of the Westview Terrace, Magnolia x loebneri ‘Leonard Messel’ was in full flower.
I could photograph magnolias all day.
Containers of spring bulbs brought a welcome note of colour.
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On the bank where donkey tail spurge (Euphorbia myrsinites) scrambles, the variegated Tulipa praestans ‘Unicum’ was in flower.
Hyacinths (Hyacinthus orientalis) just need a little warmth to emit their perfume……
….. and even graced the path to the TBG’s big compost piles, along with daffodils.
Speaking of daffodils, I thought this one in the Entrance Courtyard was pretty spectacular. Meet Narcissus ‘British Gamble’.
The small bulbs were mostly finished, but glory-of-the-snow Scillia luciliae ‘Pink Giant’ (formerly Chionodoxa) was fading but still beautiful.
As I walked along the Piet Oudolf-designed entry border toward my car, I saw a favourite tulip, T. kaufmanniana ‘Ice Stick’ looking slender and lovely beside emerging perennials that will soon fill the garden with blossoms that will charm visitors until autumn. And I thought how wonderful each and every spring seems, to the winter-weary gardener.
PS – I will very soon get back to New Zealand… and the Argentina part of our wine tour. Promise! (Unless spring keeps beguiling me……..)
We spent 3 weeks of March cruising the valleys of Chile and Argentina drinking wine. A lot of wine. Mostly sipping and occasionally spitting, of course, as one does on a wine tasting tour, but always enjoying wine with dinner and often wine with lunch. And I discovered not only that these countries are producing a lot of excellent wines in the verdant valleys at the base of the Andes, but that ‘garden’ and ‘nature’ often intersect with ‘vineyard’ in a way the piqued my personal interest. This tour with Toronto’s Steve Thurlow, after all, was a bit of a balancing equation after 3 weeks touring gardens in New Zealand in 2018, aka “Janet’s tour”. Now we were celebrating Doug’s passion, wine-collecting, while escaping a slug of nasty Canadian winter in the southern hemisphere. So…. what did we see that might interest my blog readers? Have a look below. (And I promise to get back to the last few New Zealand gardens very soon.)
Approaching Chile – We flew overnight, a 10-1/2 hour flight from Toronto, and as dawn broke over the Andes as we neared Santiago, I looked down at the most unusual cloud formation over the Pacific Ocean. Later, as we listened to various winemakers talk about the effect of marine fog and the cold Humboldt Current on grape growing, I realized that what I had seen was not cloud, but a blanket of marine fog. The Humboldt Current originates in waters north of the Antarctic circle and flows along the coast of Chile to northern Peru. It is named for Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th century Prussian naturalist who explored South America and recorded the temperatures of the current in his 1846 book Cosmos.
Santiago, Chile – We spent a few days in Chile’s capital and took a hop-on-hop-off bus to gain a fast understanding of this city. With a population of 7-million (2017 figures) across its 37 municipalities (conurbation) in a nation of 18-million people, it is the seventh largest city in Latin America. In the residential areas under San Cristobal hill, where I made the photo below after arriving in a cable car, it also has a lovely green canopy.
Although I saw a lot of Chilean wine palms on our trip, this view of Santiago is framed by a Canary Island date palm (Phoenix canariensis). With its central Chile location, Santiago has a semi-arid Mediterranean climate.
That night, I had my first pisco sour cocktail at the rooftop bar of the Magnolia Hotel, where we stayed. Here we see containers of society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea), which we would see used prolifically in many more Chilean gardens.
Veramonte, Casablanca Valley, Chile – After driving out of Santiago via a tunnel through the coastal mountains, we visited our first winery. In the gardens here, I saw old favourites, goldenrod (Solidago sp.) and Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia). Like many vineyards, Veramonte subscribes to sustainable practices and encourages an ecological balance, which includes gardens…..
….. and ponds for birds that eat insects, and often…..
….. the inclusion of native Chilean plants like romerillo (Baccharis linearis), which we saw along the highways.
The mountains are never far away from Chilean vineyards, and often grapes are grown on steep slopes of the foothills.
There were also the brown bracts of artichokes…..
…. and of course, lots of luscious grapes, like these bunches of Syrah. If you go to Chile in March, you hit the middle of harvest time (the equivalent of our September), which begins with Sauvignon Blanc and ends with Carmenere.
Concón, Chile – After our lunch at Veramonte, we drove to the seashore near Concón, where our hotel for the next 3 nights, the Radisson Blu Acqua Hotel, featured crashing waves right below our window…..
…..and an amazing living wall over the parking lot.
Casas del Bosque, Casablanca Valley, Chile – This vineyard, which we visited the following morning, featured a pretty garden…..
….and a shrub/small tree we would see a lot in Chile, crape myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica).
Like New Zealand, we saw our fair share of agapanthus too.
Viña Emiliana, Casablanca Valley, Chile – Our luncheon tasting was at this organic, biodynamic vineyard which featured some principles like planting and pruning according to the moon phases, using interplantings of nitrogen-enriching legumes, etc. They had water gardens…..
…. and baby alpacas! That pretty plant in the photo below is Mexican sage (Salvia leucantha); we would see a lot of that in Chile and Argentina, too.
I bought my only wine here, a really lovely Rosé which I served last weekend for Easter dinner. (Plus I loved the wrapping!)
Viña Casa Marin, San Antonio Valley, Chile – It was a thrill to visit this winery and meet Maria Luz Marin, aka Marilu, Chile’s first female oenologist. There I am in green raising a glass of a very nice Sauvignon Blanc.
Valparaiso, Chile – An evening visit to Valparaiso saw us touring part of this historic city on foot, and using the 1893 Artillería ascensor or funicular railway to negotiate one of the many hillsides.
Valparaiso was the main port of Latin America for goods from Europe until the construction of the Panama Canal, after which its fortunes declined. It is still a major port and we looked out on the view of the harbour…
…. which was very busy with containers being loaded.
Walking up and down city streets, the decline is still evident through the city, though it is now enjoying a renaissance as a cultural centre. It is also a UNESCO heritage site.
Sweet little gardens adorned brightly painted houses.
Street art is a big thing in parts of Valparaiso. I loved this staircase leading to one of the more famous mural lanes. It says Tu no puedes comprar al sol – “You cannot buy the sun.”
This painting “Young Girl’ by France’s Mr Papillon for Hostel Voyage is famous in street art circles.
And how about these little pop bottle windowboxes?
Viña Chocalán, San Antonia Valley, Chile – We enjoyed our morning tasting at the Malvilla vineyard of the Toro family winery Chocalán…
…..one of two vineyards owned by the Toros, who began 60 years ago as wine bottle producers.
We sipped whites and rosés in the shade of a grape-laden pergola…….
…. followed by a winery tour with Aida Toro, who encouraged us to taste the Sauvignon Blanc grapes. While ripe wine grapes usually taste sweet and delicious, it’s the complex development of tannins and other factors that separate the wine from the grape.
We had a second Chocalan tasting indoors, in a room with a wonderful view of the mountains.
We finished with a lovely lunch at a long family table out in the vineyards where we enjoyed a delicious barbecue and more wine.
Cono Sur Vineyards and Winery, Colchagua Valley, Chile – This big operation, owned by Concha Y Toro, was our first winery in the Colchagua Valley. It was a hit with our group, not just for the lovely 19th century guest house that serves as the reception area…….
….. but for the bicycles they offered to let guests cycle out to the distant vineyards, just as the grape pickers still do today.
Two decades ago, Cono Sur (named for the ‘southern cone’ of Chile) switched to sustainable agriculture practices, featuring integrated vineyard management and carbon footprint reduction. They use sheep to curtail weeds and geese to eat a beetle that harms spring grapes. The geese are kept caged at night at night in spring against foxes and later in the season because they love the taste of ripe grapes.
Cono Sur also uses native species as companion plants to introduce an ecological balance to the vineyard, much like the natural hedgerows of British farm fields. Shown here are salvia roja (Salvia microphylla) and the Chilean pepper tree (Schinus molle). Nearby was sweet-scented lemon verbena (Aloysia virgata).
We were fortunate to see some of the manual and mechanical wine-sorting at Cono Sur during our visit. Leaves, rachis (the main bunch stem) and individual grape stems are composted outdoors over the Chilean winter and the compost is then used to feed the grapevines.
Here’s a look at some of the Cono Sur winery harvest action, and the tasting remarks of one of the winery’s winemakers, Carol Koch.
Yes, we tasted each one of these wines…..
…..followed by a delicious lunch featuring an unusual, beautiful and delicious avocado-frosted savoury torte.
Viña Ventisquero, Colchagua Valley, Chile – We were told to wear comfortable shoes for our late afternoon visit to this hillside winery……
….. and as I walked up the switchback dirt road in my sparkly flip-flops, I kicked myself for leaving the hiking shoes at the hotel.
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Note that many of the vines here are single staked, rather than trained laterally. This is common on steep hillsides.
Ventisquero means an exposed, windy place on the mountains and this lovely vineyard aerie gave us a spectacular view of the surrounding valley.
Thanks to tour member Kathy who captured me photographing the vineyard.
Our evening ended with a stunning sunset.
Viña MontGras, Colchagua Valley, Chile – This winery stop was such fun because their own guide, Marcelo, was a born entertainer. He quizzed us constantly.
Out in the vineyard, he taught us the shapes of the various varietal leaves.
In the winery, he gave us a ‘tasting’ quiz (including ungainly photo of the blogger, below) and asked us to guess. It was easy: ‘Sauvignon Blanc’.
Chile suffered a devastating earthquake in 2010. (In fact, Chile is the site of the most powerful earthquake ever recorded, the May 22, 1960 Valdivia 9.5 Mw earthquake, which left 2 million people homeless.) At our lunch after our tasting in the courtyard, our attention was drawn to the earthquake-mitigating beam joints in MontGras’s building construction.
Viña Montes, Colchagua Valley, Chile – Our last visit in the Colchagua Valley was to Aurelio Montes’s elegant winery.
We walked across a large ornamental pool that is used to circulate water in the winery, including a fountain in the reception area, according to Feng Shui principles.
And if you like that, you might enjoy listening to the Gregorian Chant that Montes plays constaly for the wines aging in the barrel rooms.
Montes features a multi-floor gravity flow for its winemaking, eliminating the need for pumps. You can see the orange-wrapped chutes leading to the fermentation tanks in their modern facility. Following our tour, we were bused up the hillside to an al fresco barbecue dinner.
Viña Santa Ema, Maipo Valley, Chile – Architecture was front and centre at this family vineyard…..
….. where our wine tasting included some very nice nibbles before a lunch.
Casa Real Hotel – Santa Rita, Maipo Valley, Chile – By the time we got to this venerable old hotel owned by Santa Rita wines – including its historic, 40-hectare estate garden – I was a bit wiped out. Given that we were spending two nights at this luxurious 16-room hotel, and this was our guest room….
…. including a delightful sitting room, I decided to play hooky from the next day’s tour stop, Santa Carolina wines and just hang out and investigate the property.
This is the front of the hotel, and though it was almost out of bloom, the bougainvillea draped over the cypress is reputed to be the biggest in Chile. Viña Santa Rita was founded in 1880 by the businessman Don Domingo Fernández Concha. As well as establishing his adjacent vineyards, he hired the German architect Teodoro Burchard to design this building, his summer home….
….as well as the adjoining neo-Gothic chapel….
…. especially for his daughter’s wedding.
I loved this loggia.
We toured the estate before and after our wine tasting – the smell of jasmine was intoxicating.
The garden was designed for Don Domingo Fernández Concha in 1882-85 by the French-born landscape designer Guillermo Renner (1843-1924), who was also the Director of Gardens of Santiago and the Municipal Plant Breeder and is considered to be the “father of landscaping in Chile”. It mixes elements of Italian, French and English styles.
In a spacious pond, we found a pair of black-necked songs who seemed to be singing plaintively for their supper.
Amidst the abundant orchards and citrus groves…..
…. and arboretum-like plantings of trees from around the world, like these ghost gums (Eucalyptus)….
….. was a very modern swimming pool.
A surprising feature of the Casa Real estate was a beautiful, modern museum, Musee Andino, featuring an amazing collection of pre-Columbian artifacts…
…. including pottery, textiles, sculpture, tools and a roomful of gold antiquities.
On my walk outside the estate, I looked longingly beyond a fence onto a nearby hillside where the native flora included the Chilean cactus Echinopsis chilensis. That splash of scarlet on the side of some of the cacti is not flowers but a parasitic cactus mistletoe (Tristerix aphylla). Oh how I would have loved to climb that hill!
Viña Perez Cruz, Maipo Valley, Chile – With the Casa Real as our base, we visited this nearby winery/almond plantation with the most spectacular architecture, designed by José Cruz Ovalle, who used curved laminated wood to create optimal air movement within the building….
…. and built Inca-inspired pirca stone walls everywhere!
Viña Errázuriz, Aconcagua Valley, Chile – My favourite winery was also our last one in Chile. Beautiful Errázuriz took the honours for landscape design with dramatic entrance gardens and reflecting pools leading to the original 1870 bodega and winery constructed by founder Don Maximiano Errázuriz over 15 years. The Errázuriz name is very familiar to Chileans, since four men in the family ultimately became president of the nation. The terraced hillside of the Aconcagua Valley behind is actually the base of one of the foothills of the Andes, which we would cross the next morning.
Scalloped garden beds flanked the vineyards and drew the eye towards the modern Don Maximiano Iconic Winery, built in 2010 and designed to look like a ship sailing through a sea of vines.
I loved the way the line of reflecting pools seems to extend up into the linear grape plantings. Bubblers come on intermittently to keep these pools clear.
We saw South African native society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea) in many gardens in Chile.
Designed by architect Samuel Claro out of bleached concrete, the Don Maximiano Iconic Winery was built to bring Errazuriz wines into the 21st century, using cutting edge winemaking technologies, environmental sustainability and solar and geothermal energy. It is used exclusively for Errazuriz’s high-end red labels.
Grasses and low shrubs frame the view of the vineyards from the entrance.
Inside, the process of fermentation and aging features gravity movement of fruit and liquids from the top floor to the tanks and barrels on the two floors below. All three floors can be seen in the image below.
For our Errazuriz wine-tasting, we moved to the old winery where bricks were mortared together almost a century-and-a-half ago with a mixture of egg whites and sand. The cellar rooms alone took 5 years to complete.
Casks in the old cellar are made of raulí beech (Nothofagus alpina), a native Chilean tree.
After the tasting, we moved to the outdoor restaurant where we were treated to delicious appetizers….
….. and a lovely lunch.
It seemed like a fitting place to say goodbye to Chile with a vacation snapshot of Doug and me. (And this is officially my longest blog ever…..)
In my last few blogs on our 2018 American Horticultural Society tour of the beautiful designed landscapes and natural areas of New Zealand, I wrote about the gardens of the Marlborough region on the South Island. With just a few days left on the tour, we were ready to sail back to the North Island where we had begun more than two weeks earlier. As we waited for the Interislander Ferry to load, we wandered around and window-shopped in the small, picturesque town of Picton. You can see the previous ferry heading out into the Marlborough Sounds.
On board, we sailed out through the tops of green hills which form the fingers of land and islands that are the Marlborough Sounds. If you read my blog on our spectacular overnight stay in Doubtful Sound at the southeast tip of the South Island, you’ll see the difference between these hillsides, which are often cloaked in invasive conifers referred to as ‘wilding pines’, and those on Doubtful Sound, which were cloaked in a variety of native tree ferns and evergreen trees and shrubs.
The Marlborough Sounds are known in geology as drowned river valleys. Eighty-five million years ago, New Zealand broke away from the supercontinent Gondwana, which also included Africa, India, South America, Antarctica and Australia. This drifting body of land about the size of half of Australia, called Zealandia, subsided almost entirely into the Pacific Ocean. Thirty-five million years ago, Zealandia was less than one-third the size of modern New Zealand and occurred as an archipelago of islands, then was uplifted by volcanic activity at the junction of the Pacific and Australian plates. These collisions raised up the hills on the east side of the north island and the mountainous backbone of most of the south island, i.e. the Southern Alps including Mount Cook, which we had hiked under four days prior. New Zealand’s oldest rocks, from Gondwana, are sedimentary in nature and dated at 510-360 million years old. Its Greenland Group rocks are similar to those found in eastern Australia and Antarctica.
Looking down from space over the Space Shuttle Challenger you can see the Marlborough Sounds and the cloud-shrouded Cook Strait, on the shores of which lay the wonderful Paripuma garden we’d visited hours earlier. Cook Strait connects the Tasman Sea on the east in the upper left and the Pacific Ocean to the west.
Our route this afternoon and early evening would take us down Queen Charlotte Sound and into Cook Strait…..
…..then into the protected harbour at the bottom of the North Island where the city of Wellington lies.
We passed a variety of holiday houses clinging to the slopes of Queen Charlotte Sound…..
…… and of course all the wilding pines. I wrote about New Zealand’s effort to eradicate these trees in my earlier blog on Queenstown.
Courtesy of our knowledgeable, New Zealand-born tour host Richard Lyons, I enjoyed a Speight’s beer as the ferry sailed down the sound. The wind was constant and in places buffeted so much that others went inside, but I decided it was too beautiful to leave.
I used my zoom lens to check out details on the shore of Queen Charlotte Sound, like these mussel lines.
The Picton-bound Interislander passed us on starboard.
As Cook Strait came into view, the wind became relentless.
I photographed some of my tour pals being blown about as they compared images. Though Cook Strait is renowned for its rough waters…..
…… it was not terribly rough on this day, and before long we were sailing towards the sunset over the North Island.
Finally, the lights of Wellington came into view.
Not long after docking, we were comfortably ensconced in the Copthorne Hotel Oriental Bay, looking out over the boats moored in the harbour.
The next morning, the view across the bay was much brighter……
…. and we headed out for our Wellington tour. Our first stop was Government House, the home of New Zealand’s Governor-General. Because of the nature of our tour, we were taken around the gardens, which have been named one of the Gardens of National Significance.
In 1990, they redesigned the grounds to focus on native plants like New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax) and fierce lancewood (Pseudopanax ferox) with their Dr. Seuss-like shapes.
Borders featured native grasses like toetoe (Cortaderia richardsonii) mixed with ornamentals such as hydrangea….
….. and a reflecting pool created a beautiful focal point.
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At the rear was a vast lawn for use in official ceremonies. It had a colourful border where…..
…. monarch butterflies were foraging on single dahlias. (New Zealand’s monarch butterfly population does not migrate.)
We walked down the hillside behind Government House where a magnificent collection of colourful conifers was arrayed like a tapestry.
Our tour continued inside the building where we heard the history of the British colonial role in New Zealand, which is an independent constitutional monarchy.
I loved these official dining chairs, which featured the crests – and often the plants – of the country’s various regions.
Then it was time to head to lunch at an appropriately-named restaurant on Lyall Bay.
Afterwards, I walked across the road to get a closer look at the brand-new Lyall Bay Surf Life Saving Club, which replaced the old 1950s club.
Then we were dropped off at the stunning Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand on the edge of Lambton Harbour, fairly close to our hotel.
Our first stop was a tour of the native garden behind the museum, where various nature programs occur.
I could have spent a long time photographing in this garden, but……
…… there was so much to see inside the museum!
I loved the ecology displays, naturally.
And I could have used this display in a lot of places in the previous few weeks.
If you read my post called Bay of Islands – Māoris, Kauris and Kia Ora, you might remember the magnificent protected Kauri forest we visited. This is a piece of fossilized kauri gum (Agathis australis) with a trapped insect.
When we left to head back to our hotel, we walked between the museum and the harbour where there was a very cool native landscape…..
…. that was designed by the firm Boffa Miskell.
After walking along the ocean for a while, we came to a pretty view of Oriental Bay and our hotel at the base of the hill. At the top is St. Gerard’s Church and Monastery.
We finally arrived back at our hotel. On our last day, we’d have time to walk down Oriental Parade, the road flanking the bay. The beach here is extremely popular with fit, active Wellingtonians, including these participants in a swim race.
Putting our feet up at the hotel, we sampled a glass of the wine from the renowned vineyard that Doug did not get to visit in Marlborough…..
….. then headed out to Whitebait Restaurant on the pier across the road. It was exquisite. This was just one dish: smoked Mount Cook alpine salmon cured in sauvignon blanc, dill and oyster cream with dilled carrots.
Then it was time to head to bed. Tomorrow we had three gardens to visit in Wellington!
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I will complete the last few entries in my NZ trip journal as soon as I return from Chile and Argentina in late March. Ciao!
As we pulled into Christchurch in late afternoon a few hours after our delightful lunch and garden tour at Akaunui Homestead and Farm, a few of us decided to leave the hotel and walk to the Christchurch Botanic Gardens less than a mile away. After the disastrous 2011 earthquake here, the city has been rebuilding for years, especially structures that were not earthquake-proof, like this old building en route.
The botanic gardens are open to the public from 7 am to 6:30 pm (conservatories 10:15 am – 4 pm) daily, except Christmas Day. Like all the botanic gardens we saw in New Zealand, there is no charge to visit. Covering 21 hectares (52 acres), they were opened in 1863, occupying a pretty site along the Avon River. There is an excellent printed .pdf guide online.
We started in the Kitchen Garden adjacent to the former Curator’s House, which is now a restaurant (we would eat dinner there later). I thought this was one of the finest edible gardens I’d visited…..
….with its focus on design…..
….and diversity of edibles…..
….and education.
We walked along the Avon River with its scrim of beech trees….
….past early evening picnickers.
With so little time until dark, we bypassed the lawn and adjacent heather garden.
The large Rock Garden seemed to need a little more TLC in the weeding and editing department……
….. but had clearly been an ambitious design with significant scale.
I liked seeing a new ornamental onion, Allium carinatum subsp. pulchellum, so happy here…..
…. and keeping the bees happy, too.
I had never seen Francoa sonchifolia in a garden, so was delighted to find it here along with its foraging honey bees…..
I walked slowly through the New Zealand Gardens….
….full of indigenous plants which in this country seem to be so understatedly…..
…. green that the overwhelming perception is unremarkable.
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But it takes time and local understanding to appreciate each of these plants, the smallest and the large, like the iconic totara tree (Podocarpus totara), below….
….and how they relate to wildlife, including this insect chorus on a Christchurch evening in mid-summer. Listen…..
Adjacent to the Native Plant Garden is the Cocayne Memorial Garden, designed in 1938 to honour Leonard Cocayne (1855-1934), New Zealand’s pioneering botanist and ecologist and author of The Vegetation of New Zealand (1921).
Given our limited time, we hurried through a cactus garden….
….. with some interesting large succulents that I later discovered were Furcraeaparmentieri. A monocarpic Mexican species, these plants will grow until they achieve flowering, after which they will die.
A female paradise shelduck hovered at the water’s edge with her duckling nearby.
There were pretty, South African Crinum x powellii at the water’s edge here, showing why its common name is “swamp lily”.
Time was fleeting so we turned back toward the entrance past this lovely stand of fragrant lilies.
Nearby was a giant redwood (Sequoidendron giganteum), below, one of seven grown from seed that was ordered from California in 1873 (just 21 years after William Lobb first collected seed of the newly discovered trees in Calaveras Grove in the Sierra Nevadas for Veitch’s Nursery in England), making them 145 years old. Interestingly, though North Americans call this species “Sierra redwood” or “giant redwood” or “big tree” (since it is often confused with the smaller Coast redwood, Sequoia sempervirens). New Zealanders and the British call it “Wellingtonia”, a name that recalls England’s race to be the first to name it. After Lobb returned to England with seed, seedlings and herbarium specimens, taxonomist John Lindley named the species Wellingtonia gigantea to honour the recently deceased Duke of Wellington (1769-1852). Meanwhile, as tourists poured into Calaveras Grove, botanist Albert Kellogg was working to sort out his big tree specimens in his herbarium at the brand-new California Academy of Natural Sciences in San Francisco, intending to call the species Washingtonia. In 1854, the Duke of Wellington would lose his “official” taxonomic honour when French botanist Joseph Decaisne placed the tree in the genus Sequoia as S. gigantea (Sequoiadendron came later), but the common name Wellingtonia stuck for giant redwoods grown in the Commonwealth.
We peeked in to the lovely Rose Garden with its 104 beds, but kept walking.
Two more trees caught my eye. The Madeiran lily-of-the-valley tree (Clethra arborea) was attracting bees to its pendant blossoms……
….. and I was happy to see a young kauri (Agathis australis) growing here, having loved walking under towering kauris in their protected forest at Bay of Islands.
At the southeast fringe of the Rose Garden was the extensive Dahlia Garden, with 90 percent of the collection sourced from New Zealand breeders.
This is ‘Velvet Night’, a 1985 introduction from Dr. Keith Hammett, one of the dahlia world’s icons and New Zealand’s leading breeder of ornamental plants.
We walked past an old Kashmir cypress (Cupressus cashmeriana), with its elegant pendulous branchlets.
Sadly because of the lateness of the day, we missed seeing the large water garden and the far reaches of Christchurch Botanic Gardens including Hagley Park. And the six conservatories had closed a few hours earlier: Cunningham House (tropical rainforest), Townend House (cool greenhouse), Garrick House (desert), Gilpin House (orchids, bromeliads, carnivorous plants), Fern House and Fowraker House (indigenous and exotic alpines). And somehow we missed the herbaceous border. But it was time to head back to the entrance, past our riverside picnickers who had now been joined by friends and a few waterfowl, in order to enjoy our own alfresco dinner at the Curator’s House Restaurant before walking back to the hotel and hitting the sack. For tomorrow would be one of the best days on our tour, starring three stunning and very different New Zealand gardens.
