HORTICULTURE COMMERCIAL - Nursery · 2020. 7. 21. · 2 COMMERCIAL HORTICULTURE, JUNE/JULY 2020 I...

COMMERCIALCOMMERCIALHHORTICULTUREORTICULTURE

Growers – are Growers – are you using you using too much too much phosphorus?phosphorus?

GreenLinc GreenLinc – a very tidy – a very tidy operation in operation in

Rolleston Rolleston

MAGAZINE OF THE NURSERY INDUSTRY JUNE / JULY 2020

ON THE COVER

HORTICULTURECOMMERCIAL

MAGAZINE OF THE NZ NURSERY INDUSTRY

Plantsman Graeme Platt encountered this particularly

friendly Blyth’s hornbill, Rhyticeros plicatus,

complete with its massive bill and inquisitive eyes, at the Tufi Resort, which he visited during a 26-day

cruise around Papua New Guinea late last year.

Graeme reports on his “Voyage of Discovery” in this issue. See page 24

WHAT WE SAY

COMMERCIAL HORTICULTURE, JUNE/JULY 2020 1

CONTENTS JUNE / JULY 2020

Last issue in this space we were saying how good things were look-ing for the garden trade, how hectic Autumn trading would stretch into Winter and how Spring looked like being a boomer. Now we’re not so sure; dark clouds are gathering on the horizon. In this Comm Hort we talk to garden centres and nurseries about what they think might be in store and they seem to fall into two camps: those who think gardening will continue to boom, and those who think there will be a downturn, probably in September/October.

That’s because the wage subsidy will finish then and the full extent of how many businesses were depending on it to survive will soon be revealed. These are not necessarily businesses in the garden trade, but businesses generally who pay the wages of people who are garden industry customers. The first 12 weeks of the wage subsidy, which nearly 250,000 businesses took, pumped $11 billion into the NZ economy; the 8-week extension, which 230,000 took, another $3-4 billion. You can’t expect things to remain the same when huge inputs like that into the economy are suddenly stopped. On top of that, many companies have borrowed from the Government scheme and unknown numbers from their banks and will soon have to start paying those loans back while at the same time financing their day-to-day activities. The ASB alone, when asked why it had not re-opened many of its branches in Auckland said in June: “this is because our branch teams are currently dealing with the mammoth task of proactively contacting 14,000 customers who are depending on us for urgent advice and guidance, as their current support packages are due to come to an end.” That is only one bank but gives an inkling of the depth of financial fragility that could be common through NZ.

So what’s going to happen to the garden industry? It’s a good one to be in because the desire to return to gardening is not going to lessen – but maybe people’s ability to fund it will. They may concentrate more on the basics and essentials; price will become more important as they spend their discretionary dollars more carefully. So maybe look to your pricing and review your product ranges to match a new frugal-ity. Commercially, many infrastructure projects are nearing completion and there could be delays before new ones kick in. Have a contin-gency plan in place for this; look for waste in your business; trim overheads where possible. The sun may be shining today, but these are times for bad weather management. – Des Snell

Commercial Horticulture is published bi-monthly in February, April, June, August, October, December

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Publisher/EditorDes Snell

Subscriptions/Accounts/ Advertising

Marian KennellyContributing Writers:

Fiona EadieHayden FouldsGraeme Platt

Australia: Jennifer Stackhouse Ph 03 6492-3115 [email protected]

Brian Merrick

JULY 20Cultivate ’20 - Virtual11-14 Jul, Ohio, USAwww.americanhort.org

AUGUST 20North Island Trade Day 12 Aug (Wed), Claudelands Exhibition Ctr, Hamiltonwww.nursery.net.nz

Florall 25 Aug, Waregem, Belgiumwww.florall.be

SEPTEMBER 20Green Is Life, Flower Expo 3-5 Sep, Warsaw, Polandwww.aiph.org

Flowers Expo Russia 8-10 Sep, Moscowwww.flowers-expo.ru

FloriExpo 15-17 Sep, Florida, USAwww.floriexpo.com

Hortiflore Expo IPM 17-19 Sep, Beijingwww.hortiflorexpo-ipm.com

GrootGroenPlus Nursery Stock Trade Fair 30 Sep-2 Oct, Zundert, Netherlandswww.grootgroenplus.nl

OCTOBER 20GARDEX 2020 14-16 Oct, Japanwww.gardex.jp/en

GreenTech Trade Show 20-22 Oct, Amsterdam www.greentech.nl

Aus Garden History Soc Conf 23-25 Oct, Sydneywww.gardenhistorysociety.org.au

Taranaki Garden Festival 30 Oct-8 Nov, Taranakiwww.gardenfestnz.co.nz

NOVEMBER 20Intnl Floriculture Trade Fair 4-6 Nov, Vijfhuizen, Netherlandswww.hppexhibitions.com/iftf/

IPM Dubai, Intnl Plants Expo 10-12 Nov, www.ipm-dubai.net

JANUARY 2021MANTS6-8 Jan, Baltimore, USA www.mants.com

GrootGroenPlus Spring Fair 20-21 Jan, Zundert, Netherlandswww.grootgroenplus.nl

Tropical Plant Int Expo 20-22 Jan, Tampa, Floridawww.tpie.org/2021/

IPM Essen 26-29 Jan, Essen, Germanywww.ipm-essen.de/world-trade-fair/

IFEX 2021 27-29 Jan, Makuhari Messe, Chiba, Japanwww.ifex.jp/en/

FEBRUARY 21Salon du Vegetal 8-9 Feb, Angers, France www.salonduvegetal.comm

Coming Up . . .

NEWS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Meridian to plant 1.5 million trees – National Rose Show post-poned till 2021 – What’s ahead for the NZ nursery industry?– NZPPI begins consultations on GIA proposal – Record price for hoya – Four from horticulture in Queen’s Birthday Honours – Tomato red spider mite found in Auckland

AUSTRALIAN NEWS ROUND-UP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

UK & WORLD NEWS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14

IPPS TARANAKI FIELD TRIP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19A look in at nurseries and gardens of interest

FEATURE NURSERY – GREENLINC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22A very tidy operation at Rolleston near Christchurch

PAPUA NEW GUINEA - A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY . . . . . . . . . 24Part 1 of Graeme Platt’s 26-day tour

THE MYTH OF USING PHOSPHORUS FOR FLOWERING . . .30Two researchers say growers are using too much phosphorus

WHY PEOPLE ARE RETURNING TO GARDENING . . . . . . . . . . . 34There’s more to it than meets the eye says Jennifer Atkinson

LETTER FROM AUSTRALIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36Brian Merrick on Covid and keeping new customers

PLANT BASICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38Fiona Eadie looks at whether trees sleep at night

PRODUCTS/SERVICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40New testing method for pesticide residues

2 COMMERCIAL HORTICULTURE, JUNE/JULY 2020

I still talk to a lot of people who are still struggling to get out their front gate; they still feel in lockdown.

“So I don’t know where people are sell-ing all the stuff. You know, we’ve probably done more work than we would normally do in the middle of Spring. And really there was no reason for it. We missed Mothers Day and Easter so it wasn’t that either.”

Credit might be an issue

How did you cope in the lock-down?

“We did a lot of planning in our business and I think that has paid dividends. I think we have come out the other side pretty well, whereas I think some businesses around here who paid their staff 100%, now have got to get them to sign contracts where they are paying them a lot less.

“So I think the tough times are still ahead of us. I wouldn’t be at all surprised with retail, because they missed a lot of their income,

NEWS – NEWS – NEWS


Boom times for the nursery industry – but will they last?PRETTY MUCH right through the nursery industry,

the story is the same: things boomed just before the lockdown, closed down, then have been booming again ever since.

Billion Trees programme now the Billion Plants programme?CRITERIA FOR applying for funds under the Billion

Trees programme was expanded in May “to include suitable plants such as grasses and shrubs.”

NEWS – NEWS – NEWS

National Rose Show postponed until November next year

The wage subsidy and the right to service plants in nurseries and garden centres during lockdown kept businesses alive when they couldn’t trade and then unprec-edented demand when restric-tions eased and lifted saw most recover their lost ground.

Comm Hort contacted a cross-section of the trade to get a snap-shot of how things have been and what the predictions are going forward.

Grant Hayman of Headford Propagators in the Canterbury town of Waimate has contact with many horticulture businesses through his nursery and the trucking company he runs shift-ing their plants. Comm Hort asked him how he was finding the trade generally.

“It’s been stupid; unsustaina-

ble. Everybody is just waiting for it to stop,” he said in mid-June. “It’s got a wee bit of sanity back in it now but for a while there it was just ridiculous.”

Too much demand?“It just wasn’t sustainable. I

don’t know where all the stuff was going. That’s what I couldn’t understand.”

So it wasn’t just plants going to big projects?

“Well, we have been supplying some bigger jobs.

“We’ve had trucks on district council or regional council work and have been doing quite a few landscape jobs as well but the re-tail is what has really surprised me.

“There was that madness to get things stocked up again – and I thought that would be it. Because

Nurseries can join Meridian’s 1.5m tree project next year

Come to Trade Day 12 AugustNorth Island Spring Trade Day is on at the

Clandelands Event Centre, Brooklyn Rd, Claudelands on Wednesday 12 August

Free admission to all in the trade. See exhibitor list at www.nursery.net.nz

The auction for the plant drew more than 20,000 views and at-tracted 731 watchers.

The Hamilton lister described the plant as “established” and said it had “cream/yellow varie-gation on the inside of the leaf. Not commonly seen.”

TradeMe told Stuff there had been more than 37,000 hoya searches in the second week of June and the plant was one of the 50 most searched items on its site. The $6500 hoya topped the

The original criteria for the pro-gramme, as stated on the MPI website, was: “For the purpose of our tree count, we’re defining a tree as a woody perennial plant species that can grow to a height of at least 5 metres.”

The change came in a media release on 31 May from Agricul-ture Minister Damien O’Connor and Forestry Minister Shane Jones announcing a further $10 million for the One Billion Trees programme, mostly to support larger scale planting projects.

The media release said new more flexible funding criteria for applications “will help up to 10 catchment groups* plant land-scapes at a whole of catchment scale, enabling them to achieve the greatest environmental out-comes.”

The annual Rose Trial Awards and a small celebration of the an-niversary will still go ahead in November this year but at the Palmerston North Conference and Function Centre.

President of Roses Manawatū and convenor of the Rose Show organising committee, Hayden Foulds, said cancelling this year’s National Show was a hard call to make.

“With a challenging economic situation ahead, we felt it was very difficult to make the event the success it deserved to be.”

“There were a number of fac-tors behind the decision. One was that the international people could not come. Also, as many of the exhibitors in the rose show are over 70, we did wonder how many would travel.” The econom-ic fallout from the Covid-19 re-strictions would also make secur-ing sponsorship difficult, he said.

“2021 also marks 150 years of

Photos with horticultural themes did well in this year’s Sony World Photography Awards in June. Overall winner and Photographer of the Year was Pablo Albarenga for his pic of one of the leaders of the native Achuar, an Amazonian community in Ecuador fighting for the preservation of their rainforest. Third place winner in the Professional, Environment, category was ‘Siberia Lettuce’ by the Italian photographer Luca Locatelli, showing hydroponic lettuce cultivation at vegetable grower Siberia BV

in Maasbree, the Netherlands.

A HOYA CARNOSA compacta, the Hindu Rope Plant, set a Trade Me record in June when it sold for $6500.

THE 2020 National Rose Show and celebrations planned to mark the 50th anniversary of Rose Trials

in Palmerston North have been cancelled for this year and re-scheduled for 26-28 November 2021.

Horticultural themes take awardsCatchment groups will now

also be able to apply for funding for associated costs such as land preparation, labour and pest con-trol. Planting of areas of less than 1ha will also now qualify for funding to support planting along waterways and in wetlands.

As of 18 May 2020, 149.4 mil-lion trees have been planted un-der the Billion Trees programme, 17.9 million or 12% of them na-tives. The Government has di-rectly funded 83.1% of plantings to date.

*A catchment community group is defined as a gathering of people who identify with a geographical area, usually based on a river or lake catchment, or who connect so-cially within a farming district and work together for its environmental improvement.

The plantings, which will even-tually cover 1500ha of land throughout New Zealand, began late last year on one of its sites at Lake Manapouri in the lower South Island.

The company has earmarked 300ha of its land holdings for planting this year before moving on to private and Council sites.

Comm Hort asked Meridian whether nurseries could join the project and received this state-ment from their media contact, Tori Rose:

“Our native seedlings are all lo-cal tree varietals sourced from nurseries close by our planting sites.

“This year our sites are pre-dominantly around our hydro and wind sites but in the future we’ll be working with landowners on pockets of forever forests all around New Zealand.

“Seedling selections for each lo-cation will be made in partner-ship with landowners. We would welcome nurseries interested in supplying native trees to local plantings in 2021 and beyond to send us their details at [email protected].”

Meridian’s renewable develop-

ment programme manager, Mark Harris, said in a Press statement “a mixture of species will be grown, depending on what is right for the specific land being used.

“In most cases exotics will be planted first as a carbon ‘engine,’ followed by natives which are slower to get established. The idea is the exotics provide shelter for the natives, which later over-take and replace them – eventu-ally creating forests that are to-tally native.”

Long-term commitmentMark Harris said the plantings

are intended to be permanent.“There has to be an understand-

ing with any landowners we work with that these trees are forever trees; short-term plantings are not going to do the job. It has to be a commitment they’re going to be there for the long term to allow benefit for future generations.”

Local schools and community groups have been helping Meridian employees in the South Island plantings to date and after the trees are established it is expected there will be ongoing maintenance em-ployment opportunities for local communities.

MERIDIAN ENERGY has begun a programme to plant 1.5 million trees over the next five years as

part of a goal to halve its carbon footprint by 2030 and eliminate its need to buy overseas carbon credits

$6500 hoya sale sets Trade Me record

Schools and community groups have been helping Meridian with its early plantings, these around Lake Manapouri

Meridian’s plantings are expected to cover 1500ha

the City of Palmerston North, so it has worked out well to cele-brate the rose in an important year for the city that was once known as Rose City.”

A 50th-anniversary book on the International Rose Trials will now be published in 2021 and plants of the new rose, Pride of Palmy, will be sold at a later date.

The Auckland and Franklin Rose Societies will now host the 2022 National Rose Show and Convention in Auckland in No-vember 2022.

Rose ‘Pride of Palmy’

previous most expensive plant sold on TradeMe, a variegated monstera, which sold for $5000 in January.

The record-breaking hoya

whether they are going to be able to pay for their re-stocking for Spring.

“I think there are going to be hard times ahead. Be careful when you ex-tend credit I was told.”

Over on the South Is-land’s West Coast, John

Phillips of Greymouth Nurser-ies Garden Centre is a little more optimistic.

He too has been through the Covid roller-coaster but with the return to Level 1, he says, things have been busy, “very busy.

“We had a record-breaking April, on the wrong side of the journal, followed by a couple of record-breaking months on the other side of the journal So we lost on the roundabout and made up on the swings.

“All our customers seem to be in good spirits, they’re keen, they’re doing chores, gardening is taking a priority, so it is all very positive.”

Are you getting some new cus-tomers?

“We are seeing some new faces, definitely. Another factor is that

continued overleaf

John Phillips

4 COMMERCIAL HORTICULTURE, JUNE/JULY 2020

NEWS – NEWS – NEWS NEWS – NEWS – NEWS


Tidy covered outdoor display area at Aeroview Garden Centre where, above right, a new purpose-built landscape supply yard has recently been opened on adjacent land

You’re talking across all indus-tries are you? Not just the garden trade?

“I think in our line of work things are quite good at the mo-ment but I can see that crunching as well. I can see the top end be-ing crunched quite a bit. It hap-pened during the GFC.”

What do you mean by top end?“Those retailers who are buying

in plants and have got a pretty hefty mark-up on them won’t be able to clear them because people will be much more careful about what they will spend their discre-tionary dollar on.

“I think when the honeymoon period is over, when the work subsidy from the Government runs out, there is going to be a climb in unemployment and when that happens people are likely to spend less. They’re going to save more.

“That process has already start-ed. And they’ll try to down-pay debt. So the discretionary dollar shrinks and generally those re-tailers whose products are very pricey are going to get ham-mered.”

What sets Dave Ward’s Payless Plants Garden Centre apart from most others is that it is backed by a 1.5 acre nursery which supplies most of its stock.

Dave is a bit of a different op-erator too, because in his early days he studied economics at Waikato University and he has used the principles learnt then to guide his business through good times and bad.

Comm Hort asked whether growing your own stock for retail has proved to be a good business model over the years.

“Yes, that’s why we do it – be-cause we can produce a plant for 20% of what it would cost for us to buy it in wholesale and that’s how we make our money.”

Advice for others – keep overheads down

Looking forward, what would Dave’s advice be for garden cen-tres and nurseries?

“I think the most important thing at the moment is that they should look carefully at all their overhead costs and strip out whatever can be stripped as best they can.

“Think very carefully about whether they really have to re-place whatever needs replacing or whether they can go a while without it.

“If they’re leasing vehicles, do they really need to lease those vehicles? Can they re-negotiate their rent down. Because over-head costs are what will kill them.

“The cost of production of a plant is basically the same for all nurseries, in terms of the pot, potting mix etc. But what varies widely is the overhead costs of running the nursery. Excess over-heads kill.”

Trading has been buoyant in the North as well

Up in the North Island trading has been buoyant after the lock-down as well.

“Things have been good,” said Paul Green of his Aeroview Gar-den Centre in Thames.

“The garden centre has come out of it quite nicely. We have had a great run since the lockdown, even before the lockdown when we had a big rush.

“We’re selling a lot of citrus at the moment. We’re selling a lot of bedding plants obviously and getting through potted colour.

“There has been a big run on herbs. Fruit trees are starting to take off now but things like de-ciduous are a wee bit slow. Na-tives and hedging are going okay as well.”

Paul and Irene started Aero-view Garden Centre back in 1978 but sold it in 1989 after 11 suc-cessful years. The garden centre went into receivership in 2013, however, and the Greens decided to buy it back.

real estate is still turning over here because it is so affordable. I think the average price is still around the $240,000, something like that.”

And going forward? Do you think things will dip a little in the near future?

“Yes. There was all that pent-up enthusiasm and once that has worked out of the system, things could quieten down, but we will ride the wave of success while it is with us.

“I’m hoping there won’t be a downturn. We have kept all our staff on and I suppose the place has never looked so tidy.

“The roses have now arrived. They’re a month late but they’ve shown up and next thing we know it will be fruit trees. So I think we’ll be busy right through.”

Hanging looseOver in Christchurch Kristo

Kukk, manager of Terra Viva Garden Centre believes staying flexible is what is needed right now.

“Things have been going great,” he said, “and its great to see that people who can’t go travelling overseas aren’t afraid to spend their money on their home and gardens instead.

“What happens in September/October – who knows? Can’t make any predictions in this world right now, have to be pre-pared for every situation, have to be agile and able to quickly change when necessary.”

It says this would “formalise our role in NZ’s biosecurity sys-tem by giving NZ Plant Producers a seat at the biosecurity decision-making table giving us greater certainty and control in times of crisis.

“If we don’t sign the GIA, we will remain vulnerable to deci-sions made by industries that have signed the Deed.”

Under GIA agreements signa-tories share the decision-making,

What happens when the wage subsidy ends?

Boom times for gardening

THE NZ Plant Producers industry organisation (NZP-PI) has begun consulting with its members on a pro-

posal to sign a Government Industry Agreement (GIA) on biosecurity.

DAVE WARD is one retailer who feels a downturn in the

economy and the nursery indus-try may be looming later this year.

Dave runs Payless Plants Gar-den Centre with wife Claire and son Matthew in Te Awamutu.

After the lockdown, business bounced back big-time, he told Comm Hort in mid-June. “The sales went berserk and have con-tinued since to be well ahead of last year.”

He does however, see clouds on the horizon.

A top-end crunch“I think we are in a bit of a hon-

eymoon period at the moment. I can see a bit of a crunch coming sort of late September, October. I think that is when the transition will start to happen but I think anything is possible.

“The whole building industry at the moment is on a bit of a roll but I think that will peter out in about three months – but I have been proved wrong in the past!”

“Yes. We’ve been here seven years now and it has taken a while for the garden centre to get over the stigma of going into receiver-ship,” says Paul.

“It was basically closed down and it has taken us most of those seven years to get it back on its feet and get rid of the negativity, from customers as well as suppli-ers. It was quite strange really. We thought it might happen for a year or two, but it’s been much longer than that.”

People re-introduced“With the lockdown though,

everybody else was closed so once we got back on to Level 3 people started more or less having to come back to us and I think they have seen the changes we have made and there has been a con-tinued flow-on. Everything is humming at the moment.”

Paul says he and Irene are try-ing to back off a little from the businesses. The garden centre is now being run by daughters Pau-lette and Lisa, while son Mike,

who has been running its land-scaping business, now runs a pur-pose-built landscape yard the family has opened adjacent to the garden centre. That has “really taken off as well,” says Paul.

How does he think things are going to pan out for business over the rest of the year?

“I’m always the optimist,” he says. “But I really can’t see any problems. I think money is going to be a little bit tight but I think that, as usual, the garden trade will come to the fore because peo-ple are looking for something to do and that includes spending a bit more time in the garden.”

Paul says the landscape arm of Aeroview is “booked out until the end of September and usually at that stage on the Coromandel Peninsular landscaping normally takes off so I can’t see any down-turn in gardening.

“I think some industries are go-ing to be hit but I’m optimistic for garden centres. I’m going to work along those lines anyway.”

continued from previous page

NZPPI begins consultation on GIA

BARRY LOWE of California Home and Garden in Lower

Hutt says he and his staff learnt quite a bit from the lockdown experience. It highlighted some weaknesses in their systems.

“All of us in businesses were in the same position in that there was no rulebook, no guidelines as to how the whole thing was go-ing to go and so we relied on the guidance of the Government.

“Probably the best things were the wage subsidy and the Asso-ciation (NZPPI) was very good in getting us that essential workers status so we could come in and look after our plants.

“Those were two very good things that were put down early in the lock-down and the next thing was

Barry Lowe – good things

happened early on

responsibilities and costs of pre-paring for and responding to biosecurity incursions.

The government contributes a minimum of 50% of readiness ac-tivity costs and MPI is responsible for meeting the public share of costs, when the public is the ben-eficiary.

The NZPPI is hosting a series of online meetings and presenta-tions on its proposal. Consultation will end on 29 July 2020.

Payless Plants sources most of its stock from its own nursery

Lockdown exposes some weaknesses

6 COMMERCIAL HORTICULTURE, JUNE/JULY 2020 COMMERCIAL HORTICULTURE, JUNE/JULY 2020 7

applications for RNZIH projects, including creating the Plant Col-lections Register in 2011 and dig-itising the Duncan and Davies Nursery Catalogue collection. He continues to produce the RNZIH newsletters and journals and has held voluntary administration roles since 2011.

He is a botanist with Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research and has developed interactive identification applications, in-cluding one to identify weeds.

He helped establish the NZ Gardens Trust in 2003. He joined iNaturalist NZ in 2012 and ac-tively contributes to their help desk. Mr Dawson was appointed Registrar of NZ native genera for the International Cultivar Regis-tration Authority in 2013.

Peter SmaleFor services to seniors, the community and horticulture

Mr Peter Smale has worked in the horticultural research sector and contributed to the Motueka community for more than 40 years.

Mr Smale has been a Director and Chairperson of Abbeyfield New Zealand, an affiliate of the United Kingdom-based Abbey-field Society, a housing charity that provides sheltered housing for the elderly and was a UK trus-tee for three years. He was in-volved in the establishment of 10 of the 14 New Zealand homes and played a key role in restructuring the management of two houses, enabling them to remain viable.

In 2018 he received the Royal Patron’s Award for his services to Abbeyfield and is a NZ Life Mem-ber. He served three terms as a Trustee on the Motueka High School Board.

During his career he made sig-nificant developments to new crop introductions as a horticul-tural researcher and advisor for several Government organisa-tions and State Owned Enterpris-es. Mr Smale is a past member of the Royal New Zealand Institute of Horticulture.

NEWS – NEWS – NEWS NEWS – NEWS – NEWS

Marie TaylorFor services to horticulture and native revegetation

Ms Marie Taylor has single-handedly developed a thriving native plant nursery that grows more than 150,000 native plants annually.

Ms Taylor owns and manages Plant Hawke’s Bay Ltd, a native plant nursery supplying the Hawke’s Bay revegetation market with eco-sourced, wholesale na-tive plants. She established the nursery in 2005 as a small part-time business and has overseen its steady growth. Her work has contributed to the survival of rare

This could be the rush before the crash . . .

FOUR HORTICULTURALISTS were recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in June.

Four from horticulture in Queen’s Birthday Honours

native species in the region. She is the founder and Chair of

the Hawke’s Bay Botanical Group and a Trustee of Puahanui, a large area of native bush in Central Hawke’s Bay. She was part of the Implementation Planning Group who wrote the Hawke’s Bay Bio-diversity Action Plan 2017-2020. She was a regional representative on the QEII National Trust from 1990 to 2005 and is a Board member of New Zealand Plant Producers Inc, the nursery indus-try body. Ms Taylor was named the Supreme Winner of the NZI Rural Women Business Awards in 2018.

Green walls – don’t turn off the tap

$27m boost for research into new crop protection methods

WHEN A staff member of an Auckland supermarket noticed a tap turned on during the dry spell earlier

this year – and promptly turned it off – there were some unfortunate consequences, specifically for the plants in the supermarket’s feature green wall.

News or Views?Tell Comm Hort today

Ph (09) 358-2749 email [email protected]

They were: Jo Dawkins, Murray Dawson and Peter Smale, who were made Members of the New Zealand Order of Merit; and Ma-rie Taylor who received the Queen’s Service Medal (QSM).

The following are the official citations accompanying the awards:

Pamela DawkinsFor services to horticulture

Mrs Jo Dawkins joined the New Zealand branch of the Interna-tional Plant Propagators Society (IPPS) in 1980, working in a va-riety of administrative and gov-ernance roles before becoming the New Zealand IPPS President in 1992.

Mrs Dawkins became NZ’s In-ternational Director of IPPS and later International President of the Society in 1994. She remained involved with IPPS until 2002. She co-founded the Te Puna Quarry Park in 1995.

The Park was transformed from an old quarry into a major horti-culture and floriculture tourism destination in the Western Bay of Plenty, which opened to the public in 1997. She has been on the Park’s committee for the past 25 years, including as President from 2001 to 2004. Mrs Dawkins continues her hands-on involve-ment with the Park three days a week, contributing to weeding, planting and other general main-tenance tasks.

Murray DawsonFor services to horticulture

Mr Murray Dawson joined the Royal New Zealand Institute of Horticulture (RNZIH) in 1996 and led the redevelopment of their website, which launched in 2000 and saw him join the Na-tional Executive on which he still serves.

Mr Dawson became principal editor of the New Zealand Garden Journal in 2005. He is webmaster for the Friends of the Christchurch Botanic Gardens and the New Zealand Botanical Society. He has led several successful funding

of reasons why. I think people over the lockdown period worked on their gardens. There was a big demand for vegetable seeds and plants and potting mix and all that. People were very much after the essentials.

“In the two or three days before the lockdown, when they knew they were going to be locked down, we had very strong sales; they emptied us out. And then when we went to click and collect there was again very strong de-mand for the essentials like pot-ting mix, fertiliser, vegetable plants and shrubs. And then with Level 1 they came pouring back again wanting everything.

“It was very interesting. I think also people continuing to work from home after the lockdown has benefited us in the suburbs

while hurting businesses in the CBD. We’re see-ing that in the café as well.”

Going forward – do you expect a s lowdown in September or Oc-tober?

“That’s a hard one. I think the greatest threat is if there is com-

munity transfer and, heaven for-bid, we have to go back into some sort of lockdown. That would be the worst scenario wouldn’t it?

“If we carry on as we are with strict border control and that sort of thing I still think in our indus-try things are going to stay okay.

“You hear a lot of talk about redundancies and that sort of thing but I still think there are a lot of people out there who, I’m not saying they’re rich, but they’re comfortable and garden-ing is still not a bad activity in tough times.”

Apart from the ‘essentials’ you said people were buying, were there any other things you’ve no-ticed going out?

“We sold a lot of homewares, but no, really since the Level 1 everything has pretty much re-turned to normal.

“There is still no guidebook or rule book on what to do so we are just going to take things day by day and make the best of every day.”

The project, called A Lighter Touch, is designed to shift the fo-cus from traditional crop protec-tion and integrate biological and ecological processes into food pro-duction in NZ.

Horticulture NZ ceo, Mike Chap-man, said the importance of bio-logical methods and increasing production was reflected in the level of investment from the differ-ent sectors.

“Our growers want to take great-er care of the environment but there are only a few viable options for pest and disease control cur-rently.

“This is why this project is so crit-ical. It will speed up development of agro-ecological crop protection techniques that are both environ-

the click and collect under Level 3. We have a pretty good website but I must admit we were not as strong in the greengoods and click and collect as we could have been.

“It made us realise as far as the whole online thing was con-cerned that we weren’t really set up completely. We import our own pots so we have always had a strong website and we know it is working because we get enquir-ies from all over the country.

“So it was working really well for us as an informa-tion bulletin, but when we had to do click and collect we realised what we had would have to evolve further and get the systems in place.

“It took us a few days to do that but once we got it going it was good and kept us busy, although we didn’t have anywhere near the turnover we would have got under normal trading.

“And then as soon as we went to Level 1 and opened the doors people have just come roaring back and we have done very good trade since then. The first two weeks were very, very strong, re-cord-breaking strong, and are still good now (end of June).

“To sum it up we have more than made up for the lockdown period. If you had said to me that that would happen I would have been astounded – to close down for that many weeks then have click and collect only, I would have been astounded that we would recover.”

What do you think caused the rush to gardening?

“I think there were a whole lot

“There is still no guidebook or rule book on

what to do so we are just going to take things day

by day and make the best of

every day.”

HOW’S BUSINESS? Comm Hort asked Lindsey Hatch of

Joy Plants in Pukekohe, South Auckland, in early July.

“Too damn busy,” said Lindsey. “I think most businesses out there that have survived are too damn busy. All the ones I’ve spo-ken to are anyway.”

And how long will it last do you think?

“I think it will last until after Winter and then it might slow right down again. I think we’re in the rush before the crash unfor-tunately.

“Not that I’m into doom and gloom but we are probably due for a crash. We haven’t had one for seven years at least.

“A lot of the (construction) pro-jects that have been happening around the country are coming to an end and if the developers want to have them ticked off by

The tap was supplying water through a control valve to that wall and it was a couple of weeks before someone noticed its plants were not looking too good and called the landscaper who in-stalled it.

Joy Plants had supplied many of the plants for the wall and were also called in to help sort things out. Joy’s Lindsey Hatch said what surprised him was how many of the plant species he thought would have succumbed, had actually survived.

“It was a couple of weeks before we could get in with some plants and the designer could get up there with a scissor lift, but it was amazing how much of the stuff came away again.

“That wall had agapanthus and arthropodiums and stuff like that that could handle the heat and you soon find out what’s tough and what’s not.

Lockdown exposes some weaknessescontinued from previous page

councils they have got to do the planting.

“That will happen within the next six months but if the overall economic situation doesn’t creep upwards quickly, all the land-scaping stops. You can’t do much about it; it is just the way this trade is. It has always gone up and down like a yoyo.”

So there will be a gap in de-mand?

“I think so. That’s the way I have always seen it, growing up i n t h e trade.

“ T h e r e just seems to be that c o n s t a n t wave of up down, up down and at the mo-ment we’re all on an up.

“But as I say, a lot of projects, especially what I can see around the Auckland area, are very much coming to an end.”

“Like, the agapanthus died back completely, there were no leaves on them; but then as soon as the water came on they all came away again, boom, into full leaf and into full flower, like they had just gone through an African desert time.

“It just showed that they’re not actually too bad a plant to put into a green wall if there are go-ing to be idiots around who turn the water off,” said Lindsey.

“But certain ferns coped with it as well. I couldn’t believe that the hen and chicks, situated lower down, they survived. And griselinia lucida, which was right on the top of the planting sur-vived. And some of the hebes looked like they hadn’t even missed a beat.

“Then there were other things which you would have thought, oh, they’re thick and leathery, they surely would survive. But no, they really crumpled.”

Lindsey Hatch – it’s just the way the

trade is

mentally sound and effective. We are excited by what this project will be able to deliver for the different sectors involved and New Zea-land’s economy.”

Foundation for Arable Re-search chief executive Alison Stewart said finding new effec-tive, efficient and sustainable weed, pest and disease manage-ment options was a priority for the arable industry.

“We’re very pleased to be part of this programme. We will be focus-ing on the development of new agro-ecological crop protection systems for key arable crops, with development of a fully integrated crop protection programme for wheat being the first cab off the rank.”

THE GOVERNMENT is contributing $10.8 million and the horticulture industry $16.2 million to a

7-year joint project to fund research into non-chemical alternatives to crop protection and into developing new growing methods to spur greater production.

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THREE RARE aquatic plants rescued 20 years ago from Lake Omapere in Northland have at last begun

to produce new plants.

Rare aquatic plants begin to multiply after 20 years

Cuttings coming from certified greenhouses would be subject to fewer inspections at the border so reach customers more quickly to decrease degradation of the cuttings and increase the success rate of rooting.

To participate, greenhouse fa-cilities would be visited and certi-fied by USDA officials and must meet its standards for construc-tion, security, production, sanita-tion, pest management, training and record keeping.

Contact for the scheme is Kare-lyn Cruz ([email protected]).

Comm Hort asked Paul Turner, whose Liner Plants nursery has been exporting plant material from NZ for many years, whether

tralia in 2013 but authorities there say that while they are a ‘significant pest,’ it is not techni-cally feasible or cost beneficial to eradicate them.

The South Australian Research and Development Institute sug-gests growers have best-practice biosecurity measures in place, in-cluding controlling or eliminating weeds of the nightshade family and other potential host plants

from their properties and surrounds.

“Nightshade weeds are a favoured non-crop host so thorough weed management may re-duce the pest risk par-ticularly as a source of survival between crop-ping rotations.”

Overseas the mites have built up immunity to many miticides and the SA Research and Development Institute says, along with weed

control, “an integrated pest man-agement approach will be need-ed” . . . with “the use of natural enemies such as Stethorus lady beetles. Biological control with predatory mites such as Phyto-seiulus persimilis and Neoseiulus californicusis is not likely to be as effective as for two spotted mite and bean red spider mite.”

US offers offshore certification for unrooted cutting growers

THE US Department of Agriculture has set up an Off-shore Greenhouse Certification Programme to

streamline the flow of clean, unrooted cuttings into the US and is inviting greenhouse operators outside the US to participate.

Membership will be free for two years to people studying either full or part-time, with one right of renewal for a further two years.

To qualify individuals must provide proof of enrolment in any NZQA approved study pro-

Taranaki farmers get behind planting programme

ALMOST 600,000 native plants were distributed to

farmers in Taranaki over five days at the start of June as part of the Regional Council’s Ripar-ian Management Programme, a record number for the scheme that is said to be having a huge impact on the region’s water quality and landscape.

The 40 species went to 1200 landowners, bringing to more than 6.2 million the number of plants distributed since the Council began the scheme 27 years ago.

Despite being voluntary, 99.5% of dairy farmers in the region have committed to getting a ri-parian plan, fencing off and planting the riverbanks on their properties.

The Council says it sources the plants from nurseries around the North Island and sells them on at cost.

Meanwhile in early July, the scheme got a $5 million boost from the Government under its new $62 million Jobs for Nature pro-gramme.

Taranaki Regional Council says this funding will allow it to distrib-ute one million native plants to consent holders next year enabling them to make the “final push to the finish line” to plant out the region’s remaining 650km of waterways.

Biosecurity NZ says it is “work-ing with the horticulture industry on assessing the risk this discov-ery poses. We’re also working on potential next steps.

“The tomato red spider mite feeds on a wide range of plants in the Solanaceae family. In large groups, they can mummify plants, wrapping them up in silk webbing. They will feed on the plant until it dies.

“When they start run-ning out of food, the mites gather at the top of a plant and make small balls of silk, containing many mites and eggs. These balls can drift some distance on light winds. The balls can also stick to animals and peo-ple.”

The mites, which are difficult to see without magnification, will also feed on potatoes, ku-mara, eggplants, and beans; ornamental plants (roses and orchids); and weeds (shep-herd’s purse, cleavers, and fat hen).

They are thought to have origi-nated in South America and have spread to many countries in Af-rica, Europe, Asia and North America including Hawaii.

They were first reported in Aus-

The plants, a rare species of the quillwort family and thought to be the only examples of their kind in existence, were retrieved by Hamilton-based NIWA freshwa-ter ecologists Paul Champion and Mary de Winton in the late 1990s when the Lake was invaded by oxygen weed and its ecosystem was on the verge of collapse.

“We decided we needed to act. If we hadn’t rescued the plants then they would have been lost and it was important to get some material to propagate,” said Paul Champion in a NIWA Press re-lease.

Extinct in the wildThe plants have been nurtured

at a NIWA facility at Ruakura where they were planted in lake sediment covered with sand. Ge-netic studies showed they are dis-tinct from other populations of quillwort and regarded as extinct in the wild.

The plants were left to repro-duce on their own but just grew bigger and bigger without multi-plying, until now when they have finally begun to produce new plants. “You can see why they’re rare,” said Paul Champion.

He is keen to see the plants re-established in Lake Omapere but the introduction there of grass carp to help control oxygen weed makes this a problem. Other sites are being considered.

“There are a few places which may be suitable, but we need to investigate things like water level fluctuations and the presence of non-native plants.”

the new system had any relevance for growers here.

He emphasized that it was for unrooted cuttings and did not see other than a few of the bigger growers here fitting into it.

“Do not see that there is a mar-ket for our NZ product like corokias, griselinia, pittosporums in this way.

“Perhaps more of an opening for NZ nurseries is the moves USA is making towards allowing plants in approved potting media.

“This could allow us to send plugs of phormiums, corokias etc. However, most growers in US of NZ natives are self-sufficient with their own stock plants etc to get cuttings. Phormiums is still a

market but while still with washed, bare roots it is hard.”

Paul said the international trade in unrooted cuttings “is huge, generally central America up to the USA. Costa Rica, Gua-temala and Columbia in particu-lar.

“The product sent is generally perennials, flowering plants and indoor plants, begonias, petunias and the like. Many are high-health cuttings and protected va-rieties.

“I have heard of breeding in USA or Europe of the mother plants; these are then sent to the production sites in Costa Rica etc,

where strict hygiene is main-tained to keep out viruses like TMV.

“Workers wear PPE gear and dip tools between plants. Plants for cuttings are often grown on single stands to keep the high health.

“Very sophisticated packaging is used with ice or cooler packs to keep the cuttings fresh. Airfreight of course much of it into Miami.

“The unrooted cuttings are gen-erally sent to plug producers who get them rooted and sell them on as plugs. Finishers then plant several plugs in a pot and finish them in quick time.”

gramme along with details of a contact person from their educa-tion institution/training provider who is able to confirm their stu-dent status. Application forms for the free membership offer are on the IPPS website, ipps.org.nz

IPPS offers free student membership

THE INTERNATIONAL Plant Propagators Society NZ Region has introduced free student memberships

as a way of attracting younger members into its ranks.

TWO SMALL populations of the tomato red spider mite Tetranychus evansi were found in Auckland in

May, one near Auckland Airport and the other 20km away in Pakuranga.

Tomato red spider mite found in two Auckland sites

The quillwort plants have been nurtured at a NIWA facility at Ruakura where they were planted in lake sediment covered with sand

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AUSTRALIA COAST TO COAST with JENNIFER STACKHOUSE

granates while raspberries and currants lead the way among cane fruits.

“We’ve also noticed a trend for people wanting to preserve their harvests, particularly by drying fruit and figs seem to fit right into that,” he says.

The other big sellers are cider apple varieties along with perry pears. Rob forecasts an upcom-ing boom in boutique cider and perry production.

Orders for up to 2000 trees

“We tend to supply smaller quantities than some of the ma-jor fruit tree growers and also have the cider apple varieties,” he says.

“People are ordering 10-12 trees to try their hands at cider or perry making (pear cider) and then coming back with bigger or-ders of up to 2000 trees.”

The story of strong fruit tree sales is the same at PlantNet, which co-ordinates the growth and distribution of new fruit tree

AUSTRALIA COAST TO COAST

Above left: ‘Gardening Australia’ TV show presenter, Sophie Thomson, helps with distributing Balhannah’s fruit trees. Above and right: Madelyn Kelly and Kaylene Graham, Kangaroo Island residents, with their

donated fruit trees. The trees had personalised labels with the recipient’s name and a message “Thinking of you as you rebuild your lives! From all the team at Balhannah Nursery”

New website to help drive GC sales

New strategic plan for Victoria

A STRATEGIC PLAN has been announced for the Nurs-ery and Garden Industry Victoria covering the next

three years.

varieties both through retail gar-den centres and online.

Mark Dann from PlantNet says it has been interesting times. With more people restricted to home, the grow-your-own sector has grown significantly. PlantNet began sending out online orders for dwarf fruit trees in late June and says many wholesale nurser-ies quickly sold out of Winter bare root fruit tree stock.

Maintaining interest from new gardeners

“PlantNet wholesale nurs-ery partners across Australia have had high demand and therefore high sales of fruit trees,” says Mark.

“The challenge now for us is to maintain this renewed interest in growing edibles moving forward.

“Our Backyard Beauties range of dwarf fruit trees (which includes two dwarf blueberry varieties) has been

much sought after by retail nurs-eries and home gardeners. This range has grown to 80-plus prod-ucts.

“The biggest change over this period is the huge increase in our online shop sales of Winter bare root fruit trees and blueberries.

Sales have tripled compared to the same period last year.”

PlantNet’s latest new release, a-okay plum, (the name for this high anti-oxidant plum) has sold well in its first season.

“We know from nursery and garden industry research that out of all plants purchased in Aus-tralia, 20-25 per cent die in home gardens,” says Mark.

Lack of plant care information

“We believe a large percentage of plants die because in some cas-es plant care information is not readily available. PlantNet has always had a focus on making plant care information available to home gardeners and we have begun to ramp this up.”

Others also echo Mark’s con-cerns about the large numbers of new gardeners and how to keep them gardening successfully.

Rob Pelletier, who long hosted a top-rating gardening talkback

show on commercial radio in Melbourne, and now has a Satur-day morning gardening segment on ABC Local radio, says that fruit tree pruning and pest man-agement are always on gardeners’ minds. To help his customers he runs pruning workshops in his

Even though it was apparent in April that there was high demand for vegetable seeds and seedlings, Rob says he was initially hesitant about forecasting big sales for fruit trees.

“They’re more expensive, need a longer commitment and a bit more skill to manage,” Rob ex-plains. “Like a puppy, fruit trees are not just for Christmas.”

Despite his early doubts, sales of his trees have taken off and he reports that at just half way through the season are already ahead of last year’s entire sales.

Leading the charge is anything dwarf.

“We’ve had access to dwarf rootstock for apples and pears for some time but the availability of genuine dwarf rootstock for stone fruit has been a game changer,” he says.

“Among the traditional, dwarf cherries and apricots seem to be the most popular but anything that grows around the 2-3m mark is in demand.”

Also popular are figs and pome-

As Covid-19 lockdowns began to ease in Australia in June and State borders started gradually to re-open, gardeners were continuing to plant and grow edibles as gardening rode a wave of popularity. Jennifer Stackhouse reports . . .

Lockdown sparks a frenzy in fruit tree planting at home

It sets out the priorities for the Association and provides an over-view of the strategies and activi-ties that will help deliver three key strategic themes around membership, building better businesses for members and en-couraging a viable and sustain-able industry.

According to the plan, released in June, an important focus on achieving these outcomes is through increased education and

orchard and says these are always very popular.

“Managing a single fruit tree is a task for a gardener but knowing how to manage a mixed orchard of deciduous fruit trees is quite a job,” he says.

“In a talkback situation you can

only give very general advice but I’ve always said to gardeners that if you prune badly just hold off for a year.

“Codling moth could also be a problem but today there is a good range of organic options for home garden pest control which make it easier to garden safely.

“The access to self help online is also there,” he adds. “YouTube of-fers lots of how-to information but gardeners need to be able to dis-cern between bad advice and good advice and to do this they need to look at where the advice is coming from.”

He recommends advice from State departments of agriculture – particularly from the New South Wales Department of Primary In-dustries – and also from univer-sity agriculture extension services, particularly in the US, which are designed to support gardeners and small landholders, known as homesteaders.

HERITAGE FRUIT tree grower and supplier Rob Pel-letier from Heritage Fruit Trees in Victoria says fruit

tree sales have been strong.

Dwarf fruit trees like this new release, a-okay plum, are leading

fruit tree sales this Winter in Australia

In South Australia it is taking the form of donated plants. In mid-June more than 300 decidu-ous fruiting trees were loaded into a ute and trailer for the three and a half hour journey across to Kangaroo Island, which was hard hit by the summer’s fires.

The Island is home to nearly

5000 residents and covers 4400sq km, 13km off the coast of South Australia.

The aid to its gardeners is being promoted by Gardening Austral-ia presenter Sophie Thomson, who has been assisting with do-nations and replanting efforts.

The fruit trees, which were do-

nated by Balhannah Nurseries from Charleston in South Aus-tralia, have been passed on to 50 families who lost their gardens to fire but are now ready to replant.

Next Winter there will be a fur-ther 200 trees for those who are now rebuilding their homes but are not yet in a position to start their planting.

Despite losing 80 per cent of their own property to the Summer’s bushfires in the Adelaide Hills, Phil and Carolyn Hermann from

Balhannah Nurseries have donated 300 fruit trees to gardeners on Kangaroo Island off the SA coast

Nursery gifts trees to bushfire victims

WHILE COVID-19 halted bushfire recovery in sev-eral parts of Australia, work is now under way in

many regions. THE NURSERY industry re-ports that since the start of

the pandemic in Australia, web searches featuring gardening have increased by more than 150 per cent.

The industry is addressing the need for consumer gardening in-formation from reliable sources to support the rise in sales of ed-ible products with a new website

called Plant Pals (plantpals.com.au). Funded and co-ordinat-ed by peak nursery industry body, Greenlife Industry Australia, the site is designed to direct garden-ers back to garden centres to seek more advice as well as providing links to inspire gardeners. GIA members are also offered a plat-form to upload their own short how-to videos.

training opportunities for NGIV members and also building awareness of horticulture as an exciting career.

The NGIV is also keen to see businesses within the industry recognised as “Good Corporate Citizens” who are known for sus-tainability practices.

The plan was developed through workshops that brought together the NGIV Board and members in November 2019.

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AUSTRALIA COAST TO COAST AUSTRALIA COAST TO COAST with JENNIFER STACKHOUSE

Fall armyworm continues its march across Australia

More pathogen damage likely as temperatures warm

FOR MANY months, Australian Biosecurity officials have been tracking the invasion of fall armyworm

(Spodoptera frugiperda).

The Hydroponic Farmers Fed-eration’s conference which was to be held in July, is now sched-uled for November 17-19, 2020. It will be held at the Atura Hotel in Dandenong, Victoria and cel-ebrate 25 years of connection with the industry. For more in-formation see hffconference.org.au.

Researchers, led by the Global Centre for Land-Based Innova-tion at Western Sydney Univer-sity, sampled more than 235 loca-tions with ecosystems, from for-ests and croplands to deserts.

They found that as air and soil temperatures progressively rise, the types of fungi likely to dam-age food plant species are also projected to increase over the next three decades.

“Soil-borne plant pathogens al-ready cause hundreds of billions of dollars in crop losses each year,” said Professor Brajesh Sin-gh, a lead author of the research.

“Our study suggests that com-mon plant pathogens such as Fusarium spp. and Alternaria spp. will become more prevalent under projected global warming scenarios, which adds to the chal-lenges of maintaining world food

Eat well campaign builds on the trend to grow-your-own

production alongside other cli-mate change-driven crises and a burgeoning human population.”

The study used DNA sequenc-ing techniques to determine the response of plant pathogens to rising temperatures at a global scale. This has enabled the devel-opment of mapped regions that connect projected climate change to crop and ecosystem type to pinpoint where the greatest food security impacts are likely to oc-cur first.

“Combining multiple layers of data offers a very powerful means for pinpointing priority regions,” said Professor Singh.

“Since most soil-borne plant pathogenic fungi are difficult to control with chemicals, we can now focus our adaptation and re-silience efforts more precisely by targeting the most at-risk re-gions.”

COMMERCIAL FRUIT and vegetable growers are hoping that the interest in growing fresh foods at

home will translate into an increased interest in buy-ing and consuming more fresh produce.

Meanwhile, the first Nursery and Garden Industry of South Austral-ia State conference for many years, which was to be held in June and then postponed until November, has now also been rescheduled for June next year. The Board said this was to make sure all speakers can attend “and, hopefully, we are all well clear of any virus issues.”

ANITA CAMPBELL has been announced as the new CEO for the Nursery and Garden Industry Associa-

tion of NSW & ACT.

New CEO joins NSW/ACT nursery industry association

RESEARCH PUBLISHED in Nature Climate Change provides evidence that rising temperatures are like-

ly to increase crop losses as warmer soils favour the growth of pathogenic or damaging soil fungi species.

New dates set for many major events

She takes over from Ray Lee in July. Anita comes to the nursery industry from the National Fire In-dustry Association and has built her career work-ing in industry associa-tions including the Aus-tralian Housing Industry Association and the Caravan and Camping Industry Associa-tion. She is also a gardener.

“All associations have two things in common: advocacy and member services,” she explains, “and I bring experience in both those.”

Anita also brings a great deal of enthusiasm and a passion to fos-tering member engagement.

She is looking forward to work-ing with the nursery industry which she says has entered buoy-ant times as more people than ever have enjoyed the benefits of

These images are free for retailers to download and include in their social media posts. They are on the Eat Yourself to Health website

Unfortunately, this moth ar-rived in Australia in late February entering from Cape York. It has since been tracked across north Queensland into the Northern Territory and across to Western Australia. The pest was detected in March in the Kimberley region and also around Broome.

The larva of the fall armyworm moth feed on more than 350 plant species, including maize, cotton, rice, sorghum, sugarcane, wheat, and many vegetable, fruit and ornamental crops. The pest has caused significant economic losses overseas and may become a problem for protected cropping in Australia.

Eradication deemed not possible

In early March positive sight-ings were confirmed from traps at South Johnstone, Tolga and Lakeland. Entomologists at the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (DAF) confirmed the identification of the moths.

The national Consultative Com-mittee on Emergency Plant Pests has determined that it is not tech-nically feasible to eradicate fall armyworm from Australia.

Native to tropical and subtrop-ical regions of the Americas, it was identified in Africa in 2016 and soon invaded the Indian sub-continent, China and South East Asia before reaching Australia.

Adult moths range from 32-

40mm in length (wing to tip). They are highly mobile and can fly long distances. Reproduc-tion rates are high, with several generations per year.

Adult moths are nocturnal and are most active during warm, hu-mid evenings.

New website will help co-ordinate research

Meanwhile, the UK-based Cen-tre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI), a not-for-profit research organisation, has announced it has partnered with leading researchers and institu-tions around the world to launch a new portal to help co-ordinate global research into fall army-worm.

The free-to-access platform en-ables the sharing of research data, insights and outputs, and includes a range of key features such as posting research updates, identifying collaborators, and posting questions to the commu-nity. It will also encourage re-searchers to post preprints of their research.

CABI says the new site “will help reduce the duplication of re-search into fall armyworm pre-vention and management, pro-vide a route for the rapid sharing of results and highlight opportu-nities for collaboration – encour-aging rapid, iterative experimen-tation and global teamwork to address the spread and impact of fall armyworm.”

Alternaria fungus in apples Pic Flickr/Apple and Pear Australia

Fall armyworm on corn leaf. The pest is known to attack more than 350 plant species

gardening in the lockdown.

“There is no doubt that this in-dustry is strong and resilient.

“It has weathered a drought and harsh water restric-

tions admirably before living through some of the worst bush-fires that Australia has ever seen.

“None of us could have foreseen the next great threat, Covid-19, which is now a term that will be synonymous with the year 2020, but even through drought, bush-fires and a global pandemic the nursery and garden industry has persevered and come out victori-ous.

“My first steps will be to meet the members at work and learn about their businesses firsthand,” promises Anita.

Anita Campbell

A national campaign to encour-age better eating has been launched by industry body Grow-com. Titled ‘Eat Yourself to Health’, it encourages Australi-ans to “Eat Up and Branch Out.”

The timely campaign comes as people around the world turn to improving their diet in a bid to maintain a strong immune sys-tem in the face of coronavirus while also discovering new foods to enjoy in isolation.

Encouraging creativity in the kitchen

As part of the ‘Eat Yourself to Health’ campaign individual growers are challenging consum-ers to their own unique Covid Cooking Challenge, encouraging creativity in the kitchen with fresh produce while highlighting how the products’ nutrients and vitamins can boost one’s immune system.

A website, www.eatyourselfto-health.com.au, has been estab-lished with a variety of resources and information for consumers, including ready-made social me-dia graphics and ideas on how to boost health through increased intake of fruits, vegetables and nuts. The graphics can be down-loaded for free.

According to the website only four per cent of Australians meet the recommended daily intake of vegetables, just three in 10 people eat the recommended amount of fruit and only two per cent are

consuming the 30g per day target for nut consumption.

Adults are recommended to consume at least five serves of vegetables (75g per serve), two serves of fruit (150g per serve), and 30g of nuts per day.

To inspire variety, the cam-paign is also setting shoppers the challenge to buy fruit or vegeta-bles that are not normally in their shopping bag.

The campaign has a hashtag, #eatyourselftohealth, to allow anyone posting about fresh food on social media to get on board with the campaign.

The Growcom campaign is sup-ported by Health + Wellbeing Queensland and Ausveg.

Increase in imports is raising hackles

Despite urging consumers to grow their own and eat more lo-cally-grown fresh produce, an in-crease in imported products is raising hackles.

Concerns are being voiced by Australian potato growers about the threat of cheap imported po-tato chips finding their way on to the Australian market.

As a result of restaurant and takeaway food suppliers being closed around the world a lot of chips are not being eaten. It is these packaged products that may find their way into Australia and could damage local potato prices.

MAJOR EVENTS are continuing to be cancelled or postponed across Australia due to coronavirus re-

strictions.


UK NEWS

APPLE ‘TRINITY’ from the Frank P Matthews Nurs-ery was announced Best in Show at the UK Horti-

cultural Trades Association’s New Plant Awards, this year held as a virtual event in June.

UK NEWS

New apple takes the HTA’s Best in Show Award for 2020

New study reveals widespread use of antibiotics in crop management

ANTIBIOTICS COMMONLY used to treat diseases in humans and animals are now being increasingly used

to fight bacterial diseases in crop production.

THE ROYAL Horticultural Society in June selected two Plants of the Decade from winners over that pe-

riod of Plant of the Year Awards at the Chelsea Flower Show, which it runs each year.

Plants of the Decade selected from Chelsea Flower shows

today’s indoor gardens.” The People’s Choice Winner is

Viburnum plicatum f. tomento-sum Kilimanjaro Sunrise.

Plant of the Year winner in 2015, this is described as “a mul-ti-stemmed, upright, compact, slow-growing shrub, exhibited by Burncoose Nurseries, with very pretty, white-flushed-pink lace-cap-like flowers appearing on its tiered branches in early Summer. In Autumn the leaves take on fiery colours before they fall, pro-viding another season of inter-est.”

It was bred by Jan Willem of Wezelenburg Nurseries in the Netherlands.

This is according to new re-search from the UK-based Centre

for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI), an interna-tional not-for-profit research or-ganisation.

The use of antibiotics to control plant diseases is not new, says CABI. They have been used for decades on crops like apples and pears, after being shown to be an effective means of controlling some bacterial diseases.

However, the extent of their use worldwide has been little studied and is largely unknown.

The new research was an anal-ysis of more than 436,000 re-cords from plant clinics in 32 countries between 2012-2018. It

Report shows forestry has a limited role in climate change

This came out of a survey by big UK tool distributor, Draper Tools, of 2000 customers with gardens.

Best liked products were bird feeders, vegetable gardens and water features. Planters resem-bling old shoes, fake bicycle planters, metal wall ornaments of birds, animals or butterflies, were all considered to be bad, along with artificial topiary balls, sonic animal repellers and patio heaters.

Surprisingly, decking featured in both lists, No 12 on the most-liked, No 24 on the most disliked.

Summer houses, herb gardens, living walls and outdoor kitchens were on the liked list, but buddha statues, trampolines, hot tubs and old tyres used as plant con-

COMMERCIAL FORESTRY may be of limited use in the

fight against climate change, ac-cording to a report commis-sioned by Britain’s Royal Soci-ety for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

The report found that while fast-growing conifers can sequester car-bon more quickly than slower-growing broadleaved trees, much of it is quickly released back into the atmosphere because more than half of the timber harvested from forests in the UK is used for prod-ucts with a lifespan of less than 15 years and a further quarter of it is burned.

Only a third goes to construction

Of the UK’s 2018 timber harvest, 23% was used for wood fuel. Of the 56% processed through sawmills only 33% was for construction, which would lock up its carbon for decades. Of the remainder, 36% was used for fencing with a service life of 15 years, 24% for packaging and pallets and 4% for paper pro-duction.

“There is no point growing a lot of fast-growing conifers with the logic that they sequester carbon quickly if they then go into a paper mill because all that carbon will be lost to the atmosphere within a few years,” said Thomas Lancaster, head of UK land policy at the RSPB.

“We should not be justifying non-native forestry on carbon grounds if it’s not being used as a long-term carbon store.”

The President’s Award Winner, selected by RHS President Sir Nicholas Bacon, is Streptocar-pus Harlequin Blue.

This was the Plant of the Year in 2010. Bred in the UK by Lynne Dibley of Dibley’s Nursery in Wales, it is described as the “first separately bi-coloured Strepto-carpus, yellow on the outer pet-als, contrasting with the blue up-per petals.

“This houseplant has certainly stood the test of time and contin-ues to have appeal. It can flower for up to eight months of the year, is compact and attractive, and likes to be on the dry side be-tween waterings, so is ideal for

ORNAMENTAL GROWERS in the UK lost nearly 60% of

sales due to stock losses on aver-age as a result of lockdowns and market closures forcing them to dispose of their crops, a new sur-vey by the Horticultural Trades Association shows.

The losses due to stock dispos-al are higher for cut flowers 86% and bedding plants 67%.

A third of businesses were un-sure if their business would sur-vive this year and 6% replied that they anticipate having to close by the end of the year.

HTA Chairman James Barnes said: “The losses suffered by the ornamental horticulture industry during the coronavirus pandem-ic are more extreme than in virtu-ally any other sector, due to the seasonality and perishability of ornamental plant stock.

“These latest survey results show that garden centre re-open-ings have had a positive short-term impact on industry sales, but the long-term future for many businesses is still far from cer-tain.”

Winner of the Virtual Visitor Vote was Anemone FP007 ‘Frilly Knickers’ from Fairweather’s Nursery.

Frank P Matthews also cleaned up in the Trees/Conifers Catego-ry, its Apple ‘Trinity’ taking Gold, its Malus ‘Scarlet Brandywine’ Silver and its Cercis ‘Golden Falls’ Bronze.

The Frank P Matthews Nursery was established in 1901 in rural Worcestershire.

It grows more than half a mil-lion fruit and ornamental trees

New survey shows UK growers hard hit by lockdown

GNOMES, FAKE grass and plastic ornaments topped the list of products people in Britain hate most in

gardening.

Viburnum ‘Kilimanjaro Sunrise’ Streptocarpus ‘Harlequin Blue’

revealed that antibiotics are be-ing recommended for use on over 100 crops.

The researchers called for more work to be done to uncover the full extent of the use of antibiotics in food production around the world, warning that it could re-sult in resistance build up by pathogens.

“It has been shown that when antibiotics are mixed with other agro chemicals, bacteria can de-velop resistance to the antibiotic up to 100,000 times faster.

“This coupled with the con-sumption of raw food may pro-vide an avenue for the production of resistant bacteria (in hu-mans).”



www.leafland.co.nz

1 Roberts Line, Palmerston NorthPh: 0800 LEAFLAND (0800 532 352)

Ph: 06 355 3235 Fax: 0508 532352 [email protected]

Email us for our FREE 200-page Catalogue!

Quality Specimen Trees

What Brits like and dislike most about gardening

Apple Trinity and Anemone FP007 ‘Frilly Knickers’

tainers were out of favour. Around a quarter of gardeners polled said they make a concert-ed effort to keep up to date with the latest trends in gardening. Thirty percent get most of their inspiration from garden centre visits, 26% from TV garden shows and 21% from family members.

Top most-liked in order of pref-erence were: bird feeders; vegeta-ble gardens; water features; lan-terns/outdoor lights; summer houses; hanging baskets; bird baths; herb gardens; solar light-ing; greenhouses.

Top most disliked: gnomes; fake grass; plastic ornaments; fake animal/bird statues; artifi-cial topiary balls; buddha statues; trampolines; hot tubs; old tyre plant containers; pubs in sheds.

per year, offering the widest range of trees in the UK with more than 200 varieties of apple and other unusual fruit trees, plus more than 400 varieties of ornamental trees, hedging and soft fruit.

Fairweather’s Nursery in Hampshire was established in 1961 to grow plants for its own garden centre but now also offers a wide range of wholesale peren-nials, shrubs and climbers.

Its specialties are lavender and agapanthus.

The ornamental horticultural industry is focusing on

recovering from the effect of the coronavirus pandemic. AIPH, in association with Flora Culture International (FCI), is bringing together leading global experts to provide their ideas and guidance for the future at the first global online virtual conference for the ornamental horticulture industry.

WHEN: 15 September 2020 starting at 08:00 CEST WHERE: Online using the most advanced 3D real-time software.

WHAT: Global industry leading experts will discuss critical topics • Handling crisis, business and investment implications • Impact on future mergers and acquisitions • Understanding the impact on consumers. • The cut flowers industry • Flower auction markets • Container ornamentals • Stimulating market demand

REGISTER: www.aiph.org/Conference-2020 Early bird rates until 20 July.

RECOVERY FROM CRISIS — THE FUTURE FOR ORNAMENTALS

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PRESENTS IN A VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT

AIPH Virtual Conference 2020 Commercial Horticulture AD Vertical.indd 1AIPH Virtual Conference 2020 Commercial Horticulture AD Vertical.indd 1 09/07/2020 09:21:0009/07/2020 09:21:00


THE INTERNATIONAL Association of Horticultural Producers (AIPH) has replaced what was to have

been its 72nd Annual Congress in Poland later this year, with an online event.

WORLD NEWS

AIPH conference to be online this year

advertise, show videos and meet up at virtual booths. The AIPH’s 2021 International Grower of the Year Awards have been cancelled.

A Dutch vegan restaurant which normally operates from a large purpose-built waterside greenhouse in Amsterdam, came up with a novel way of servicing customers during the lengthy Dutch lockdown –

housing them in individual mini-greenhouses. Mediamatic ETEN started by testing the concept on family and friends but soon began reporting a backlog of bookings from the public as well.

A new market for mini-greenhouses?

Called ‘Recovery from Crisis –the Future for Ornamentals’ it will be held on 15 September 2020 and is open to growers, breeders, traders, retailers, man-ufacturers, associations and me-dia around the world.

The conference will feature speakers making presentations on the impact of the corona virus on various sectors of the garden industry.

Topics will include handling crisis, business and investment implications, the impact on fu-ture mergers and acquisitions and understanding the impact on the end consumer.

It will also include an interna-tional panel debating ways of stimulating market demand and how to grow out of the crisis into a brighter future.

Delegates will be able to iden-tify and speak with other attend-ees and ask questions of present-ers, just as they would at a phys-ical conference.

Sponsors and exhibitors will also be able to reach participants,

IN THE first official survey to measure the economic impact

of Covid-19 in Europe, flower and nursery organisations in 17 European Union countries have reported losses in their cut flow-er, potted plant, bulb and nurs-ery sectors totalling more than NZ $8 billion for the months of March and April.

This represents close to 10% of the normal annual total EU mar-ket value across those sectors.

Losses for nursery stock were put at NZ $1.96 billion, potted plants NZ $3.22 billion, cut flow-ers NZ $1.85 billion, bulbs NZ $1.25 billion.

In calling for more government support in a June Press Release the organisations said:

“These losses will never be re-covered and will have to be ab-sorbed by the thousands of com-panies of the flower and live plants sector in the EU.

“Coupled with the lack of a uni-form and co-ordinated response so far by national governments across the EU, this further rein-forces the need for a more mean-ingful and direct EU financial support to the sector.”

Cologne trade fair off until May 2021

The world’s biggest garden and outdoor living trade show, spoga+gafa, has been cancelled for this year and re-scheduled for Cologne, Germany, 30 May to 1 June 2021.

As recently as June, it was still all set to proceed in September this year. Organisers said de-mand for space in the 250,000sq m show was strong and they were planning for 2,200 exhibitors from 60 countries. 95% of the available exhibition space had been booked.

The show was cancelled be-cause of the continuing spread of Covid through Europe.

For more information, visit www.spogagafa.com

Big losses reported from nursery sectors in Europe

The early-bird fee to attend the virtual conference is £55 ($NZ 105).

More details about the technol-ogy, speakers and programme and how to register are to be an-nounced.

See aiph.org for more details.



WORLD NEWS

Europe sets ambitious biodiversity goals for 2030

THE EUROPEAN Union at the end of May published its 27-

page Biodiversity Strategy for 2030.

Included among the far-reach-ing proposals is a plan to plant 3 billion trees and make 30 per cent of Europe’s land and surrounding seas protected areas by 2030.

There are also strict protections to be imposed for existing forests, ancient forests in particular. A quarter of all agricultural land will have to be farmed organi-cally, up from 8 per cent today, and the aim is to halve pesticide use by 2030.

The Strategy calls for “a truly coherent and resilient Trans-Eu-ropean Nature Network” by set-ting up “ecological corridors to prevent genetic isolation, allow for species migration, and main-tain and enhance healthy ecosys-tems.”

“To bring nature back to cities and reward community action, the Commission calls on Euro-pean cities of at least 20,000 in-habitants to develop ambitious Urban Greening Plans by the end of 2021.

“These should include meas-ures to create biodiverse and ac-cessible urban forests, parks and gardens; urban farms; green roofs and walls; tree-lined streets; urban meadows; and ur-ban hedges.

“They should also help improve connections between green spac-es, eliminate the use of pesticides, limit excessive mowing of urban green spaces and other biodiver-sity harmful practices.”

THE BAYER chemical compa-ny in June announced it is to

pay around US $10 billion to re-solve the majority of the 125,000 filed and unfiled product liabil-ity claims it is facing.

These relate mainly to the her-bicide Roundup of its Monsanto subsidiary. The lawsuits claim Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, causes some forms of cancer.

The resolution with plaintiff law firms also puts in place a mechanism to resolve potential future claims. This includes the establishment of an independent Class Science Panel which will determine whether Roundup can cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and if so, at what minimum ex-posure levels.

The findings of this Panel, which are expected to take sev-eral years, will be binding on both the company and those taking class action against it.

RUSSELL’S GARDEN Centre in Wayland in the US State of New England has been wowing customers

since it started back in 1876, is still in the same family, and one of its main attractions is its extensive range of wild bird products.

Covid creates a flower shortage

Cuts to flower imports because of Covid coupled with a reduction in domestic flower production have seen florists in Australia having to turn customers away because of lack of stock.

There was also a surge in de-mand from Australians in lock-down wanting to send flowers to family and friends in lieu of being able to visit them physically.

Wild bird products still a good earner for 144 year-old GC

Interest in attracting and feed-ing birds in home gardens has steadily been on the increase around the world over recent years but remains a minor cate-gory for most NZ and Australian garden centres. Perhaps it’s time to change?

Russell’s senior buyer, Suzanne Thatcher, has also been running its wild bird department for near-ly 30 years and says a desire by people to bring Nature back to their surroundings and relate more closely to it is one of the main drivers.

She told the US magazine Gar-den Center: “ . . . as lots of our serious perennials customers age, they find that they still want to be connected with nature and out-doors and their yards. I think a lot of them are focusing on the wild bird area for that reason.

“And then, on the other hand, there’s a lot of young families, first-time homeowners, younger couples moving to the area, and as they’re moving from areas where there’s not much space around, they want to connect their children and family with a yard. I think [bird watching] is one way of doing it.”

Customers find plenty to choose from in the wild bird product range

There are about 30 companies in The Netherlands producing tu-lip stems by the tens of millions, and a handful even exceeding 100 million per year.

Construction company, KG Greenhouses, says “there are no notable signs that this develop-ment will be slowing down. Al-

though they are decreasing in number, the big companies are getting bigger and they invest heavily.”

Another trend is an increase in the height of new greenhouses from the traditional 6 metres to 8 metres to accommodate more layers of production.

New tulip greenhouses in Holland are now going to 8m high

Billions to be paid in glyphosate settlement

Holland tulip growers continue to expand

THE DUTCH tulip industry is continuing to expand with several companies adding new high-tech green-

houses to their operations, some covering 6000 to 11,000sq m.

Put it in your diary

today

North Island Trade Day

Wednesday 12 August

Come along and see the latest and best

from the New Zealand nursery trade

Claudelands Event Centre,

28 Brooklyn RdHamilton

Wednesday 12 August 20208.30am - 3pm

Admission is freeOpen to anyone in or associated with the

garden industry. (Not open to the

general public)

WHERE

If you’d like to be an exhibitor, give us

a call today

Reference PublishingPh (09) 358-2749

[email protected]

WHEN

Visit www.nursery.net.nz to Register & see latest exhibitor bookings


TARANAKI FIELD TRIP

IT WAS an ominous sign the night before the field trip began when torrential rain fell and left many thinking

we would be spending a couple of very wet days in the Taranaki. But as it does, the weather came right for the rest of the trip.

well known seedling business, Phillips Native Seeds, around five years ago. This grows a range of native seedlings in trays, which are then dispatched to customers to prick out.

The first visit was to Natural Fare who produce living herbs for supermarkets throughout New Zealand.

Russel Johnson showed us around this operation where 750,000 pots are grown each year under 6,500sq metres of glass-house at Lepperton.

Most propagation is done by seed and some, like mint and rosemary, by cuttings.

The growing houses are com-puter controlled and more and more of the processes are being mechanised to save on costs. This includes moving benches which cut down how much is handled by staff.

An impressive operation and a credit to Russel and his staff.

Vince and Ann Naus welcomed us to their garden where morning tea was served.

Better known as owners of nearby Big Jims Garden Centre, Vince and Ann’s love of plants extends to their garden which

Late last year, members of the IPPS met for a field trip through the Taranaki. Hayden Foulds reports on the group’s visits to nurseries and some tourist favourites . . .

they started from scratch 16 years ago.

The garden is divided up into a number of areas including a cot-tage garden, rose garden and a formal area with New Zealand natives. It borders the Mangaora-ka Stream and there is a walk through native bush alongside it. The garden was a pleasure to vis-it.

250 varieties of hydrangeas

Woodleigh Nursery was the next stop. Janica Amoore spoke about the nursery, which she brought from Glyn Church and relocated to the current property in 2011.

Hydrangeas are a speciality of Woodleigh which must have the largest selection in New Zealand – 250 varieties and species, in-cluding close relatives like Di-chroa. Plants are sent all around New Zealand by courier, mostly to home gardeners and landscap-ers. Woodleigh also took over the

Lunch was at Tawa Glen Nursery, owned by Ian and Wendy Swan. This nursery spe-cialises in Japanese maples, rho-dodendrons, deciduous azaleas and a few other lines. Propaga-

Field trip takes in Taranaki’s horticultural highlights

Below left: the lush growth of New Zealand natives in the garden of Vince and Ann Naus of Big Jim’s Garden Centre. Below right: Some of the 250 varieties of hydrangeas produced by Woodleigh Nurseries

Above: some of the 750,000 herbs Natural Fare grows each year for supermarkets Below: Acers such as these high worked Acer viridis

are a main crop for Tawa Glen Nurseries


Pukekos and rabbits are among challenges faced – 500 rabbits were killed in the eight weeks pri-or to our visit.

The estate is certainly a credit to John and Mary and a number of our members were hoping for a win in the Powerball so they could buy one of the remaining sections!

Then it was on to Lowlands Nursery where Ian Fankhauser welcomed everyone in true IPPS style with morning tea before a tour of the very tidy nursery.

Ian produces 600,000 growing-on lines a year, mostly from cut-tings. Azaleas, rhododendrons and camellias are the main lines. Prior to our visit, the stockbeds had been pruned. This was to en-courage the new, vigorous growth that will be taken for the next batch of cuttings.

There is also an on-going pro-gramme to renew stockbeds with new plantings as the cutting strike rate declines.

A garden treasureThe final visit of the day was to

Tikorangi, the garden of Mark and Abbie Jury. Although closed to the public, it is occasionally opened for groups such as our-selves so it was a real privilege to see this garden and all its treas-ures including many plants bred by Mark and his late father Felix Jury.

Newer parts of the garden have been developed on the site of the old nursery area (closed 2007)

drons, was our host. Pukeiti has 440 of the 1125 rhododendron species grown around the world in its collection and as Andrew says “we don’t want to lose any of them.” Four metres of rain a year also adds challenges especially with managing pests and diseas-es in the gardens.

Our next visit was to Tapuae Estate, a lifestyle subdivision less than 10 minutes from New Plymouth where John and Mary Washer were on hand to show us around.

The 30 sections are surrounded by farmland and native bush which also includes 44km of walkways and private access to a beach. Some 225,000 plants have been planted around the prop-erty, mostly supplied by an on-site nursery.

A visit to the world famous Pukeiti Rhododendron Gar-

dens kicked off the second day of our trip. Now under the management of the Taranaki Regional Council, $6.5 million dollars has been in-vested into the gar-dens and more devel-opments are planned in the coming years.

Andrew Booker, previously Curator but now in a new role preserving and prop-agating rhododen-

tion is all done on site. Maples are grown open ground and other lines in containers.

Staff were busy grafting maples when we visited. The nursery is very tidy and a credit to Ian and Wendy.

Legendary plant propagator Jim Rumbal, formerly of Dun-can and Davies, then welcomed everyone to his garden outside New Plymouth. This is full of treasures and Jim took great de-light in pointing many out as he showed us around. One was his collection of dwarf conifers.

For something a bit different, the next stop was the newly opened Hillsborough Holden Mu-seum which houses the car col-lection of Steve Fabish, a local Holden enthusiast. A café and

TARANAKI FIELD TRIPTARANAKI FIELD TRIP

mini golf course with a Bathurst theme will make this a must vis-it attraction for the Taranaki.

The final visit of the day was to Slaters Orchids where Don Slat-er welcomed us. With 9,500 square metres under production, this was an impressive sight with the orchids in bloom, although it was nearly towards the end of the season.

Eighty percent of the orchid blooms grown here are exported, half of them to Japan with the other 20% sold locally including through an on-site shop.

Four colours are grown – white, green, pink and yellow with prop-agation done via an on-site tissue culture lab. A hybridising pro-gramme has recently been start-ed to develop new varieties.

including an interesting grass garden.

As I missed the last day, Ian Swan reports on the two visits made.

About 16 fit and able members of our group got up for a 9am Sunday start to a 150m pretty much vertical climb to the top of Paritutu.

This rock and the surrounding islands are the remains of an ex-tinct volcano from 1.75 million years ago. Paritutu is thought to be a lava plug.

The weather was stunning with no wind and views from Kawhia to the north and a stunning view of Mt Taranaki/Egmont to the south and out over Port Taranaki and New Plymouth City.

The climbers then made it to Pukekura Park to team up with the rest of the members. Ken Davey took us into the park where we were greeted by Donna the fernery co-ordinator.

The fernery opened in 1926. It was formed by three swimming pool sized holes dug into Tarana-ki clay soils and then connected by tunnels.

The original glasshouses have been replaced by modern taller and temperature controlled structures. Many other plants have been added for interest in-cluding displays of orchids, be-

gonia, maples and many other stunners. In 2012-13 the nursery area was redeveloped with new propagating facilities added. One of its major problems is shading from the original trees planted

behind the fernery area in 1876.Thank you to the organisers for

another great IPPS field trip and also to those who opened their businesses and gardens for us to visit.

Part of Jim Rumbal’s collection of dwarf conifers and, right, the legendary propagator welcomes the field trip members to his garden Field trip members enjoy the displays inside the fernery at Pukekura Park Above right: some of the redevelopment work at Pukeiti

Trimmed stockbeds at Lowlands - trimming helps with the production of new, vigorous growth

Although it was near the end of the season, there were plenty of orchid blooms on show at Slaters Orchids

The nursery at Tapuae Country Estate has supplied most of the

225,000 plants used to revegetate the estate

A new grass garden going in at Mark and Abbie Jury’s Tikorangi


GREENLINCFEATURE NURSERY

They were showing off a range of hardy plants from the nursery they had set up the previous year on a hectare of orchard land at Lincoln, 20 minutes out of Christchurch.

They had started the nursery so they could grow ‘bread and but-ter’ lines like akeake, carex, hebe, flax and pittosporum – “these are

plants we use a lot ourselves and they’re also what other landscap-ers use,” Thomas told Comm Hort’s Kerry Johnstone at the time.

“We’re really keen to provide quality plants because in this tough environment, quality is the only way to exist. If you let some-one down, you soon get a bad

name. We aim more at the land-scape contractors – low price, high quality, no fancy colour label or hard pots. It keeps the costs down for them.”

Back then a tin shed and a ship-ping container were the nursery’s main facilities.

Fast forward to today and while the aims of the company remain the same, the GreenLinc opera-tion is a whole lot different, as can be seen from the pictures on these pages.

The company was back at Trade Day in March this year and Comm Hort caught up with some of the staff on their stand.

“The problem where we were at Lincoln was that it was very wet ground, was only leased, not ide-al for growing plants or suitable for what we wanted to do,” said Thomas.

“So that’s when we approached Barrie Coleman, who had a block on which he was running a small operation, called Alpine View Nurseries, at Rolleston, the pre-sent site, mainly with just himself and one staff.

“We got in contact with him and said ‘we are looking for a place to set up a nursery, invest a bit of money and get some prop-er infrastructure in place.’

“On the other hand, I don’t know how many people will have lost their jobs in tourism and hos-pitality and things like that, and I don’t think the borders will be open for a long time, so only time will tell.”

An unexpected casualty of the sudden lockdown for GreenLinc was the cancellation of the Au-tumn edition of its big twice-year-ly sales. With discounts of up to 50 percent on some lines these events are understandably very popular with both its commercial and public customers.

The Autumn sale was set to open on 27 March and run for three weeks, as it had in every year since the nursery opened but, unfortunately, as we went to Press, it was still on hold.

in the soil it would have got peo-ple keen to plant and get things in before Winter,” said Thomas.

“And all our specimen trees are putting on their nice Autumn col-our – but we can’t show it off!”

Like everyone else, Thomas was unsure how people might react after the lockdown comes off.

“I don’t know if consumer con-fidence will be dented. But there will be people who had overseas holidays booked and can’t do that and I think the easiest thing to change on your property is your garden.

“You don’t need to involve the Council for a lot of things like that. So if people get their confi-dence back and get over their Winter depression, Spring might be pretty big.

seed or cuttings, but as we’ve got bigger we have had to buy some liners in as well.

“But we try to do our own thing because a lot of our people want stock sourced from Canterbury or North Canterbury.

“Most of what we grow goes out to our own landscaping jobs or to Councils. We do sell a little bit to retailers as well and of course we have our own retail outlet at the nursery.”

Growing for specific contracts

The nursery also grows on con-tract for specific projects. “We’re doing some now for a client where we got the job last Novem-ber and they want plants deliv-ered at the end of April.”

Another big project over the past year has been supplying plants and landscaping at a large residential property in the Clear-water Resort in Christchurch.

Trade Day over, Comm Hort talked to Thomas van Zijll de Jong at the beginning of April, a week and a half into the lock-down. This would normally be a very busy time for a nursery like GreenLinc, with rain on the ho-rizon and people keen to start their planting projects.

“Yes, and we’ve had some good drops of rain over the weekend just gone so with moisture back

“We came to an agreement, Barrie closed what he was doing and we set up the GreenLinc Nursery which he has been run-ning ever since, while we con-tinue doing the landscape side of things.”

The nursery now typically has around four staff, and the land-scape side eight, plus Thomas and Philip.

“We peaked at around 12 per-manent landscape staff during the earthquake re-build but have scaled back a little since so the nursery has scaled back a bit too,” said Thomas.

Even so, it does still extend over 4 acres of meticulously well-kept growing beds.

“We are very proud of our nurs-ery,” Barrie Coleman told Comm Hort. “Yes, it is very tidy. We are very fussy.”

Barrie came down to Canter-bury from Pukekohe, looking for a quieter lifestyle, but now finds himself running a sizeable pro-ductive enterprise.

“We grow all sorts and grades,” he says, “including hedging and a lot of natives for landscaping.”

The plants grow with minimum protection from shelter, making them particularly hardy.

“Probably 90 percent of the stock we grow ourselves from

Stock was looking good for Greenlinc’s 3-week annual sale in March, but the sale became a cancellation victim of Covid

Plants at GreenLinc grow with minimum protection from shelter, making them particularly hardy

“We are very proud of our nursery,” Barrie Coleman told Comm Hort. “Yes, it is very tidy. We are very fussy.”

GreenLinc – from a tin shed to a very tidy operationBACK IN 2009 landscaper Thomas van Zijll de Jong

and his landscaper brother Philip were first-time exhibitors at Christchurch Trade Day.


nic and cultural diversity of the people and their inherited com-petence that allows them to live reasonable harmony within their natural environment. The second thing was the enormous diver-sity of life forms that abound in PNG. There are more than 2,000 species of ferns and 2,000 or-chids before you even start count-ing the trees, shrubs, grasses,

that developed under the favour-able luxuriance of ancient, wet, closed-canopy forests on tropical and subtropical islands.

A comprehensive and irrefuta-bly precise record of the entire evolutionary development of life on earth remains alive and well in those wet, closed-canopy for-ests clothing the islands of the Southern Hemisphere – and it is a vastly different record from what is stated in the literature and quoted at educational insti-tutions.

This record can be observed in infinite detail if a broad line is followed from the equator at 00.00 degrees north, running due south through Papua New Guin-ea, across the Solomon Islands, the Vanuatu Archipelago, includ-ing the narrow strip of wet, closed-canopy, broad-leaved coastal forests of North Eastern Queensland, through New Cale-donia, New Zealand, and to the Antarctic circle and the South Pole at 90.00 degrees south.

Continents are places of fluctu-ating climatic extremes where much of the ancient Palaeozoic and Mesozoic life forms have ei-ther been totally eliminated, highly modified or relegated into dysfunctional refugia by frigid ice ages or the subsequent periods of sun-scorched aridity that created

My trip had begun at Cairns in Northern Queensland, went north-east through the Coral Sea before heading west along the northern coastline of Papua New Guinea, into Indonesian administered West Papua, the Raja Ampat is-lands, then a visit to the Spice Is-lands before terminating back at Darwin.

The two things that impressed me most were first, the huge eth-

A FEW DAYS after returning from a 26-day cruise around Papua New Guinea and surrounding regions,

I received a phone call from a colleague employed in the mining industry there and he asked me “what im-pressed you most about PNG?”

Papua New Guinea – a voyage of discovery

herbs, monocotyledons, reptiles, mammals, birds, invertebrates, crustaceans, coral, molluscs, fish etc.

A long history of favourable conditions

The inescapable explanation for this abundance and genetic diversity is that PNG is located in a region that has sustained fa-vourable climatic conditions for the evolutionary development and maintenance of life forms throughout the entire history of terrestrial life on Planet Earth.

The evidence for this is conclu-sively provided by the fact that the huge assortment of tree and plant species existing in the re-gion’s biota today had their basic evolutionary development in ei-ther the Palaeozoic, Mesozoic or Cainozoic eras.*

A comparison of the natural biota (plants and animals) of PNG with the modern Cainozoic biotas of arid central Australia or the frigid tundra of northern Can-ada, highlights the divergence that has come about between the life forms that have developed under the extreme climatic ad-versity of continents and those

26 days in a different world

parched deserts, whereas ocean-ic islands with their wet, closed-canopy forests are places where climatic extremes have been and continue to be moderated by the stabilising influence of surround-ing oceans.

Australia’s Wollemi Pine Wol-lemia nobilis is a perfect example of a once prolific early Mesozoic tree species that has been rele-gated into a dysfunctional refu-gium by the modern Cainozoic

climatic conditions that have turned most of Australia’s once luxuriant continent into a sun-scorched arid plain where the ex-istence of this tree in the natural world is hanging on by only a tenuous thread.

It is of interest to note that the great minds of the Northern Hemisphere who first put in place the intellectual foundations for the discovery and enlightenment of the theory of evolution did so

after first visiting the equatorial regions and travelling down into the Southern Hemisphere.

Alfred Russel Wallace was the greatest mind of them all; he had the good sense to spend a few years sweating it out with the mosquitoes in the leach-infested forests of Malaysia.

Darwin only ever made one journey into the equatorial re-gions and farther south into the Southern Hemisphere and his observations and confidence to publish were enormously en-hanced by Wallace’s supporting conclusions based on his years of practical field work.

Continental originsThe large island that we know

today as Papua New Guinea and Indonesian administered West Papua was once attached to con-tinental Australia to form a single landmass. The two became per-manently separated due to sea levels rising as a result of glacial ice melting on land all around the world and the released water pouring into the sea after the last ice age.

While Papua New Guinea and West Papua are located within the tropics, 50 of their highest mountain peaks that periodically attract snowfalls are the highest in Oceania. New Zealand’s 3,724 metre Mt Cook is the 51st highest.

The majority of PNG’s popula-tion live in the highlands where the combination of latitude and altitude provides a unique per-mutation of climatological and physiological conditions.

These unique conditions have greatly enhanced the natural ge-netic diversity of trees and plants

and are favourable for the culti-vation of a very large range of crops for the people. Tropical species are cultivated on the coastal shelf and lowlands and temperate species in the cooler mountainous highlands.

Our visits to the formal Madang and Wewak markets, seeing such a comprehensive array of both tropical and temperate fruit and vegetables that had all been pro-duced in relatively short distances from each other, being marketed together in the sweltering lowland environment, were eye-opening experiences.

The Cairns-based Coral Ad-venturer is a small cruise ship compared to most modern-day cruise liners. Its length is only 93.4 metres and its pas-senger capacity is just 120 people.

The voyage in which I was a participant began in Cairns on 25 November and terminated in Darwin on 20 December 2019. On board were 48 pas-sengers from eclectic back-grounds and with diverse in-terests. The small size of the ship allowed it to visit places inaccessible to large cruise liners. Furthermore, the small

*Palaeozoic - Ancient. Era of the first life on land, algae, mosses, liverworts hornworts, ferns, tree-ferns, equisetum, 540-250 million years ago. Mesozoic - Middle. The era of giant reptiles, trees, conifers, kauri, podocarps, ginkgo, sequoia, cycads, 250-65 million years ago. Cainozoic – Modern. The era of seasonality, brooding birds, mammals, flowering trees, herbs, bulbs, grasses, and the development of arid land species, 65 million years ago to the present

Plantsman Graeme Platt takes us on a trip around this often misunderstood country – sharing time with its people, its trees, its

plants and their ecology

Left: the pristine Stage Six closed-canopy broad leaved hardwood forest in the background of this image and the modified ecology embellished with cultivated trees and plants in the vicinity of the village in the foreground, demonstrate the limited impact the culture practised by the residents of PNG’s autonomous self-reliant communities have on their environment Right: this image could have been recorded at any

one of a thousand locations during our cruise

isolated rural communities we visited would not have been able to cope with a couple of thousand people pouring into their midst.

My prime objective for join-ing the cruise was to familiar-ise myself with the essence of PNG to facilitate the putting in place of a plan for a return journey that I intend to take.

This will be to travel over-land from the coastal shelf to above the treeline, to pass through as much natural for-est cover as possible to ob-serve the altitudinal sequence of tree and plant distribution.

A troop of performers practicing their Sing Sing routine for a National competition that was being held in the Madang sports ground. Right: thatched garden huts imparted a rustic appearance wherever they were encountered. Palm frond thatch doesn’t instantly turn into a

heap of compost due to employing the correct overlapping technique to ensure all of the rainwater runs off the roof quickly to maintain it in a dry airy condition

Geologically PNG is a very dynamic place constantly being subject to change by the combined forces of nature. The freshly eroded crests of the ridge lines running down between the water courses on this

mountainside were caused by a recent earthquake

The elaborate ceremonial regalia worn by the inhabitants of remote

villages during festivities may consist of bird’s feathers, sea

shells and pig’s tusks, however these items are treasured

heirlooms representing a bond with the village’s culture and its

historic past. The fact that ceremonial regalia is so

meticulously maintained is an indication of its strong cultural and spiritual value to its owners

continued overleaf


the impression it had been all but totally modified by humanity over a very extended period.

While I consider myself ex-tremely fortunate to not have in-herited the compulsive consumer gene, there is no more irresistible places on earth to visit than ex-otic fruit and produce markets. Markets are hives of activity where people arrange displays of their produce and craftwork they passionately desire to convert into cash.

Samarai Island had a popula-tion quoted as being about 460 people in 2014. Its market was a modest version of a number that we visited during the cruise. Fruit, produce, betel nut, wood-work and weaving, tapa cloth, garments, seashells and adorn-ments crafted from them were the dominant items on offer.

An expatriate Aussie was dis-playing quality cultured pearls that he was farming in the waters off the Island. The pearls varied in colour from traditional white to those with a light yellowy gold-en sheen. These were produced by a species of oyster Pinctada maxima that possesses the same golden hue on the inside of its shell.

Normanby IslandAfter departing Samarai we

called into Sewa Bay located on Normanby Island where we were welcomed with an enthusiasti-cally presented Sing Sing by the staff and children of Pwanapwa-na primary school with fervent drum beating and energetic foot work.

The school grounds bordering the beach were surrounded by many broad-leaved tree species including teak Tectona grandis.

Palms included sago palms Me-troxylon sagu, Coconut palms Cocos nucifera along with betel nut palms Areca catechu, and a number of pandanus species that were the most massive I had ever encountered.

The grass playing fields had been regularly mown and the whole place was well laid out and neatly groomed. I would go so far as to say the school grounds were among the most appealing that I have ever encountered. Not a hint of asphalt, chainmesh fencing,

sea level so it didn’t require an excessive amount of energy to walk around it, regardless of the repressive humidity.

All of the ornamental and crop-ping trees and plants scattered about the island were pantropical species that can be seen on just about every inhabited island throughout the tropics, due to having been translocated by hu-manity. A number of the trees were among the largest I have ever encountered of their particu-lar species anywhere, especially mango Mangifera indica, tropi-cal almond Terminalia catappa and the coastal She-oak Casua-rina equisetifolia.

I began rambling around the island on my own until a teen-ager enquired if I would like him to show me around. I readily agreed to his hospitable offer. Due to my total lack of linguistic proficiency it’s fortunate that English is one of the four official languages of PNG.

The other three are Hiri Motu and the at times entertaining Tok

PAPUA NEW GUINEA

coming Sing Sings honouring our presence.

Samarai IslandSamarai Island was our first

port of call on the cruise. It is lo-cated at the eastern end of Milne Bay and was previously the ad-ministrative capital of New Guin-ea during colonial times.

PNG’s national capital was transferred from 29-hectare Sa-marai to Port Moresby during 1968. While the derelict corru-gated iron infrastructure impart-ed a somewhat jaded appearance, if you didn’t focus on that it was a very pleasant place.

The island’s highest point is not a great number of metres above

Pisin (Pigeon) along with PNG sign language, these are the lin-gua franca that connect the di-verse people of PNG together into a cohesive nation.

My young guide’s interest in plants and their ecology was ab-solutely zero, however he confi-dently led me through people’s gardens as if they were all his own personal property while at the same time informing me in infi-nite detail about the heroics per-formed by a multitude of star spangled football heroes that he passionately idolised.

When wandering about in a for-eign land with an entirely unfa-miliar flora it is very sobering to not always be able to define what you are looking at and know whether it’s a revered native tree or plant species or an invasive exotic weed. Also, a number of the cultivated tree and plant spe-cies that I was familiar with ap-peared to be different in varying degrees to those I had previously encounted elsewhere. The whole ecology of the island left me with

Cultural diversityOne of the most remarkable

features of PNG is that it is able to exist at all as a cohesive sover-eign nation. With a few novel hic-cups of its own the country is a friendly, co-operative, function-ing parliamentary democracy.

The ethnic diversity of its peo-ple and their multiplicity of unique cultures is enormous. Former Premier Sir Michael So-mare is quoted as saying that at least 832 languages are spoken throughout the country and each is spoken at a different location by people possessing their own unique culture.

No two places we visited had the same design of traditional buildings or canoes. The people in every village presented them-selves in entirely different cere-monial regalia during their wel-

carparks; it was an inspiring en-vironment intimately surrounded by nature, the sort of environ-ment in which every child de-serves to be raised.

After a short speech of welcome by the school’s principal, and the student’s cultural groups pas-sionately presented entertaining Sing Sing routines, we were pro-vided with a lavish spread of re-freshments that included fresh fruit and freshly baked cookies.

Any apprehension that I may have harboured regarding pos-sible deficiencies with PNG’s vil-lage hygiene instantly vanished at the sight of the attractive and nutritious offerings.

During the entire cruise I never had cause to open my kit of med-ical supplies as I never experi-enced so much as a hint of Mon-tezuma’s revenge, Delhi belly, or any infected lesions caused by mad dogs or ravenous blood sucking insects.

After the welcomes and refresh-ments a group of ladies presented an enlightening demonstration of traditional food preparation and cooking over an open fire.

All of the starchy tuberous food crops the people depend on as a source of carbohydrate including kaukau (kumara) Ipomea bata-tas, cassava Manihot esculenta, yam Dioscorea species, sago Me-troxylon sagu, potato ,need to be cooked to render them palatable and digestible. Cassava, being a member of the Euphorbiaceae or spurge family, is toxic prior to being cooked.

Spending a lifetime bending over smoky open fires contained within a few rocks on the ground is a health hazed causing life-threatening lung damage equally as debilitating as that caused by cigarette smoking and is some-thing the women of PNG have to endure.

Our ship made a presentation of exercise books for the school classrooms, along with some foot and basket balls for the sports field and supplies for the medical clinic.

A couple of the school’s senior girls were allocated the task of guiding me around the village gardens but unfortunately I had to cut this foray short as our time at Pwanapwana was up and we

had to return to the ship for our departure for the next day’s adventure on Fergus-son Island.

Slash and burn gardening

Passing along the coast-line on our way to Fergus-son Island, slash and burn gardening and horticultural activity and its effects on the environment could be read-ily seen on the hillsides.

The longstanding practice of slash and burn gardening and horticulture by isolated self-reli-ant communities rarely if ever attracts a favorable Press but it very clearly is the most sustain-able horticultural method prac-ticed anywhere on the planet.

A small gauge of natural forest is felled, left to dry and burnt; crops are grown in the fertile soil within the gauge for a number of years. After it loses its fertility to a point that is unacceptable to the gardeners, a new gauge of forest is selected and the process re-peated.

The abandoned gauge is left to nature and the natural sequence of forest succession/progression begins afresh, in the correct or-der, naturally replenishing the organic fertility of the gauge to its original state.

The elephant in the room threatening the viability of this long-standing fully sustainable horticultural practice around the world is the ever-increasing tsu-

nami of humanity that is sweep-ing over the face of the planet.

The natural resources required for the sustenance of the human race worldwide are currently be-ing grossly over-exploited at a horrendous cost to both the en-vironment and the very future of humanity’s existence

Fergusson IslandFergusson Island is the largest

in the D’entrecasteaux group. Our first view of it was dominat-ed by a valley of mist gently drift-ing skyward into the first rays of dawn light. The mist was in fact steam rising from the Dei Dei ge-othermal hot springs.

Our arrival at Budoya village was celebrated with the yet an-other formal welcoming and pas-sionately presented Sing Sing.

The ladies of Budoya had obvi-ously acquired a few fashion hints out of National Geographic Mag-azine. I vividly remember Prince Philip, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, providing some advice to mankind when encountering somewhat reveal-

Above: any view of paradise would have to include images of a sublime environment equivalent to this – a gentle flowing river with

tree lined banks along with a few adequately spaced dwellings scattered amongst the palms, and a man taking his favourite wife for a

slow carefree paddle amongst the beauty

Right: quality cultured pearls were being farmed and marketed

on Samarai Island by an Aussie expatriate Kim Harvey

The psychoactive drug betel nut is obtained from the seed of the

Areca catechu palm being marketed in the formal market place on Samarai Island by this

lady. Betel nut was readily available at every place we

visited

Left: due to the county’s tropical temperatures dwellings are constructed to create shelter from the heat and heavy rain. Right: the garden surrounding this house on Samarai Island consisted of a collection of pan-tropical trees, shrubs and plants that are cultivated throughout the

entire Pacific. Native PNG trees and plants didn’t feature strongly in amenity plantings

Betel nut palms make an attractive contribution to the

landscape. These wispy stemmed palms are capable

of reaching up to 20m

The effects of much maligned slash and burn horticulture can readily be seen on this hillside. After the land lost its fertility it was abandoned

and the forest is being allowed to recover in the hands of nature


Biodiversity underwater

Snorkeling and scu-ba diving were the major focus of interest

for the majority of participants on our cruise and a keen group visited a coral reef off Dobu Is-land.

It was very interesting listening to the enthusiastic discussions of the snorkelers and divers about the profusion of coral biodiver-sity they had observed under the water.

These discussions were enough to convince me that studying a single component of the natural world in isolation to all others doesn’t provide significant en-lightenment – because every as-pect of life on earth and the envi-ronment is inextricably inter-re-lated with every other. That is why the profuse biodiversity of lifeforms in the waters of PNG is equally matched by profuse bio-diversity on the land.

James Ephraim Lovelock’s ‘Gaia Theory’ which asserts that all elements of the living universe of the planet earth are constitu-ents of a single self-regulating en-tity possess only one glaring error – it is such an obvious truth that it cannot with any stretch of the imagination be referred to as a

‘theory.’

Trobriand IslandsDawn on 29 Novem-

ber saw our ship stand-ing off Kuiawa Island in the Trobriand Group.

After landing and being hon-oured with another welcoming reception complete with formal speeches and a passionately pre-sented Sing Sing, we had an op-portunity to walk through the vil-lage and have a look at both the architecture and gardens.

Due to the tropical climate, the prime housing need of the people is keeping cool, having protection from the blazing sun and staying dry during heavy wet season rain dumps.

While tropical countries peri-odically experience severe storms, the incessant winds that sweep into New Zealand are not a feature of the weather patterns where we were. This allows for the construction of thatched dwellings that wouldn’t cope with the winds we experience in NZ, nor would anyone cope trying to live in them!

Readily accessible food supply

Due to Kuiawa Island being rel-atively flat the gardens on which the people depend for their food supply were readily accessible. I wandered along a track through them.

While at first glance some of the plantings appeared to be rather haphazardly organised, this was not the case. Each crop was plant-ed in patches rather than straight rows and these patches were in locations that best matched their cultural needs.

Taro and banana Musa para-disiaca were planted in the dampest locations and crops like watermelon Citrullus lanatus and kaukau were in locations ex-posed to full sun. Other crops in-cluded a diverse range of pump-kin, maize, peanuts, pineapple, sugar cane, cassava, yams, pa-paya, coconut, and mango.

Not all the plantings were food producing species; they included betel nut Areca catechu, the widely chewed psychoactive

groves of pandanus growing in swampy ground, before we en-tered an open woodland of an unidentified species of melaleuca on low hills surrounding the geo-thermal field.

While I fully expected to en-counter some plants that evolved in the same era as those growing in and around New Zealand’s central North Island geothermal fumaroles, what I didn’t expect to find were plants from exactly the same genera and more likely than not the very same species.

Both Lycopodium and Gleichenia were among the range of mosses and fern species grow-ing within the Dei Dei geothermal field.

On our return walk to the vil-lage we encountered a couple of men and a child resting beside the track; they were heading out to their garden with heavy bas-kets of yams for planting.

A number of yam species are widely cultivated in PNG’s tropi-cal lowlands as a source of edible carbohydrate.

ing situations of this nature. He said, “just look them square in the eye and keep focused on what you are doing,” or words to that effect. I diligently followed this sound advice to the best of my ability.

The truth of the matter is that after a very short period of time the women’s historical mode of attire acquired a complete nor-mality.

What I will never forget is the enormous effort these hospitable people expended to honour our visit and make us feel so genu-inely welcome. At a number of the villages we visited, temporary thatched shelters complete with seating had been constructed so that we had a place of refuge from the blazing sun during the speeches of welcome and Sing Sings.

After the formalities at Budoya, we took a short walk through part of the village before heading off along a well-formed track for about half an hour to the Dei Dei Hot Springs.

The track passed through

PAPUA NEW GUINEA

drug, and pandanus, grown for their leaves which are woven into many essential items.

Under the customary commu-nal land tenure system, every-thing is owned by someone no matter how remotely located or unattended it may appear to be.

The temptation to acquire a ripe juicy mango as you pass a fruiting tree should be avoided so as not to create offence. More im-portantly, the owners’ lives are exclusively dependent on their crops.

A machete-carrying character offered me a coconut drink. I chose the tallest palm in the vi-cinity and asked him to demon-strate how coconuts were har-vested off these old and extreme-ly tall palms.

Once he got himself prepared he climbed to the top in a few ef-fortless seconds and with a deft twist of his wrist two coconuts hurtled to the ground.

After he was back on earth, with a few practiced swipes of his ma-chete I was presented with a par-ticularly refreshing drink. It is very clear the people of PNG are inordinately skilled at all the tasks required for a self-reliant life in the remotest of locations.

Tufi fjordsThe Tufi fjords penetrate into

Cape Nelson Peninsula on the north coast of Papua New Guinea and are where the remnants of ancient volcanic eruptions and flooded valleys have created a number of steep-sided navigable waterways.

But the so called Tufi fjords are not actually fjords at all but ria’s. A fjord is a flooded valley cut out

by historic glacial ice flows and leading into the sea, whereas a ria is a flooded valley cut out by a river and leading into the sea.

As the ship dropped anchor the now familiar cluster of canoes quickly gathered around the stern, each carrying a load of fresh fruit for sale to its catering staff. While the ship did purchase some from the locals it was but a fraction of what was constantly being offered at every remote port of call.

Once ashore I took the oppor-tunity to utilise one of the ship’s complementary kayaks and with a fellow passenger as a paddling partner travelled a short distance into the fjord to observe the cor-al formations in shallow water close to the shoreline half a metre to a metre below the surface.

It was astonishing to see the complexity and beauty of the multiplicity of coral formations that countless trillions of tiny pol-yps had created with their calci-um carbonate skeletal remains.

Some of us later climbed from the wharf up a short steep vehicle road to the Tufi Resort, a place eminently suitable for a family holiday.

A glass of cold beer while sitting in a comfortable chair in the gen-tle sea breeze flowing over the resort’s balcony overlooking the fjord was a life-supporting event due to the respite it provided from the sweltering heat-gener-ated humidity.

The resort’s free-ranging pet life consisted of a particularly friendly Blyth’s hornbill Rhyt-iceros plicatus with a massive bill and an inquisitive set of eyes, a bright red king parrot Alisterus

chloropterus and a creamy-white marsupial Cuscus Spilocuscus maculatus.

We encountered pet cuscuses at a number of locations. These hairy-legged creatures resemble a possum and have contributed to the diet of the people for a mul-tiple of millennia. The people of PNG enthusiastically subscribe to the long-standing traditional

belief that if God hadn’t wanted people to eat animals he wouldn’t have made them out of meat.

Large shade-forming trees are an essential element in tropical landscaping. While the air tem-perature was a bearable 27-3Odeg C throughout hottest part of most days, wandering about out in blazing sunlight dramati-cally increased the level of dis-comfort.

I was excited to see a bright-red flowering tree, thinking I was about to encounter something I had never seen before, but it proved to be a Madagascan Roy-al poinciana Delonix regia, one of the most regularly utilised flowering trees encountered throughout the human occupied tropics.

This particular specimen at the Tufi Resort further demonstrated the point that trees and plants cultivated in different environ-ments often take on novel physi-cal characteristics as they adapt to the unique permutation of cli-matic and physiological condi-tions around them.

It is the unique permutation en-vironmental conditions that exist at diverse locations across the face of the planet that forces a genus of plant or animal life forms to endlessly speciate.

• We’ll continue Graeme Platt’s travels around Papua

New Guinea next issue

Right: Fergusson Island’s Dei Dei hot springs; the planet earth remains hissing and steaming at every corner with residual heat inherited from the nuclear event that was responsible for the formation of the solar system 4.54 billion years ago. Above: Tufi Fjord is in reality a Ria, one of

many flooded steep-sided river valleys radiating out into the sea from the centre of Cape Nelson, a peninsular created by ancient volcanic activity, whereas a fjord is a flooded valley running into the sea historically cut out by glacial ice flows

The choreography of Sing Sings, including this one at Budoya village, are in reality action plays based on a broad spectrum of historic events, including, legends, elements of nature, ancestors, personalities, religious and spiritual beliefs, that bond the people into a community

Left: gardens on Kuiawa Island produce starchy tuberous crops of Yam seen here climbing the stakes, Taro with the large broad leaves, and Cassava. By the time edible Cassava or Manioc starch reaches our shops and supermarkets it’s labelled Tapioca

Left: this guy volunteered to pick me a fresh coconut for a drink. I selected a frighteningly tall palm for him to demonstrate his climbing skills. He very confidently and proficiently reached the top and sent a couple of coconuts hurtling to the ground in a very short time

Far left: Cauliflory is the formal botanical description for trees that flower and seed directly from their trunks and branches. This heavily seeding Ficus at Tufi Resort is a good example of this widespread phenomenon in tropical broad-leaved, hardwood tree species

The massive number of seeds distributed among the accumulation of flotsam along the high tide line of this Kuiawa Island beach demonstrates one method that plant species are distributed from place to place. The large square-cornered seeds are produced by Barringtonia asiatica; the golf ball sized round ones are produced by a species of mangrove. Coconuts were often encountered in abundance


sary to send soil and leaf tissue samples to an analytical labora-tory.

You can ensure adequate P in container crops by providing a moderate fertilizer level and sub-strate-pH.

Phosphorus deficiency may re-sult from lack of fertilizer. When growing in container substrates, P will remain available if the sub-strate pH is less than 6.5. Insolu-ble calcium phosphate can form at high pH (above 6.5) in both field soil or container substrates.

Phosphorus can also be tied up in acidic field soils, because high levels of iron and aluminum in mineral soils reduce P solubility at low pH.

Excess P fertilizer can have neg-ative environmental impacts. Be-cause the soluble, plant-available form of P (phosphate, PO43–) has a negative charge in the sub-strate solution, it can easily drain from the substrate (just like ni-trate, NO3-) and subsequently leach into groundwater or runoff to nearby streams and lakes.

Around 40 to 70% of P ferti-lizer typically leaches from nurs-ery containers. This is a wasted expense, which is important be-cause the cost of P fertilizer is

Phosphorus is the ‘P’ in NPK fertilizers (along with nitrogen, N, and potassium, K). The tradi-tional way to write fertilizer phos-phate is P2O5, and K2O is com-monly called potash.

Depending on your location and supplier, blended fertilizers are often expressed in two ways. Fertilizer labels can list N–P2O5–K2O (which we will use in this article), or as elemental NPK.

This can cause challenges when interpreting fertilizer recommen-dations:

• Nitrogen (N) is always de-scribed on a fertilizer label as el-emental N.

• Elemental phosphorus (P) = P2O5 × 0.4364; P2O5 = elemen-tal P × 2.2915.

• Elemental potassium (K) = K2O (potash) × 0.8301; K2O (potash) = elemental K × 1.2047.

Purpling can have several causes

A common symptom of P defi-ciency is purple or red leaves (Figure 2).

However, avoid diagnosing P deficiency based on physical ap-pearance alone. As shown in Fig-ure 3, purpling can result from several other causes, such as cold temperature, nitrogen deficiency, excess light level, and pesticide phytotoxicity.

Some species show other P de-ficiency symptoms, such as tip burn in azalea or decreased growth (Figure 4). To confirm a P deficiency, it is therefore neces-

NURSERY MANAGEMENTNURSERY MANAGEMENT

DO YOU use a high-phosphorus fertilizer such as 10-10-10 or 14-14-14 to promote roots or flowers?

raw material from which it was first derived, its chemical symbol is P.

Phosphorus is one of 12 essen-tial fertilizer nutrients (Figure 1). The ability of P to add and drop electrons leads to a major role in plant metabolism as the plant’s battery, allowing energy from photosynthesis (the sun) to be used for many processes in the plant.

Like other essential plant ele-ments and environmental condi-tions, lack of P can limit plant growth and flowering. However, it is not specifically a root- or flower-promoting nutrient.

The myth of using extra phosphorus for flowering

is adequate for most flowering and foliage annuals. Additional P did not increase blooms or growth.

Another research team from North Caro-lina State University (Kraus et al., 2011) re-ported similar findings for herbaceous peren-

The authors of this article, Paul Fisher from the University of Florida and Jacob Shreckhise from the US Dept of Agriculture, Agriculture Research

Service, say many growers in the nursery industry are using way too much phosphorus.

Cut back, they say, and save both money and the environment

Figure 3. Red or purple coloration can be caused by several factors, not just P deficiencyFigure 2. Purpling of leaves from phosphorus deficiency in verbena

(left) and kale (right)

Figure 5. Phosphorus is easily leached from

container substrates and causes

eutrophication of water resources

Figure 4. Evergreen azaleas show tip burn (top) and hydrangea ‘Limelight’ has decreased growth (bottom) in response to phosphorus deficiency. Research by Virginia Tech University

If so, you are following an out-dated recipe for nursery produc-tion and landscape management.

Hopefully this article will con-vince you to avoid that practice. In the process, you might save on fertilizer costs, protect natural water resources, and avoid an en-vironmental damage lawsuit!

Phosphorus: a key plant element

Phosphorus is an essential plant nutrient with an interesting mythical origin.

This 13th element in the peri-odic table was discovered by the alchemist Hennig Brand in Ger-many in 1669 in his quest for the Philosopher’s Stone which would turn other metals into gold.

Hennig experimented with thousands of liters of human urine, figuring that it had a prom-ising golden color. He discovered an interesting residue which would not turn lead into gold, but did burn and glow in the presence of oxygen (hence its modern use in match heads).

The element was named phos-phorus, meaning “bearer of light.” Appropriately, given the

Fertilizer

N-P2O5-K2O

ppm of elemental phosphorus (P)At 100 ppm N At 200 ppm N

10-54-10 236 47220-20-20 43 8620-10-20 22 4315-5-15 11 2213-2-13 4 915-0-15 0 0

nials, citing that growth and flow-ering of rudbeckia and hibiscus fertilised with 3 ppm P were sim-ilar to those given 50 ppm P.

In fact, 100 ppm P (with 100 ppm N) severely decreased growth of ‘Luna Blush’ hibiscus.

This is just another reason why it’s better to “aim low” when se-lecting your P fertilizer levels.

Table 1 will help you calculate how much P is in a WSF. The con-centration of blended WSF is usually described in terms of ppm of N.

Typical constant WSF concen-tration for annuals is based on 100 ppm N or up to 200 ppm N

for heavy-feeding crops such as roses.

With different N-P2O5-K2O ra-tios, this means the ppm of P in-creases if the overall fertilizer concentration is increased, or if we choose a fertilizer with a high P2O5 content relative to N.

If we used the Bloom Plus fer-tilizer, even at a low N level (100 ppm N), we would be applying 236 ppm P (which is 20 times the amount that a plant would need for flowering). Instead we could apply a fertilizer such as 15-5-15 at 100 ppm N, and not waste all that P fertilizer.

Flowering shrubsPerhaps you grow flowering

shrubs and therefore think your plants are different and need higher P.

In fact, research has found that

rising quickly and profit margins are often tight for horticulture businesses.

Phosphorus and N contamina-tion are the main algae-promot-ing nutrients in natural water-ways, and a very low concentra-tion (0.1 ppm P) can be enough to trigger eutrophication.

Mining P from calcium phos-phate in the ground can also cause a significant waste issue, which has been experienced in phosphate mines in Florida, US. As the ‘green industry’ we want to both stay out of the spotlight and be good stewards of the en-vironment.

Do high P fertilizers promote flowering?

Blooming annuals Many fertilizers sold to con-

sumers as flowering fertilizers contain high levels of P. For ex-ample, the N-P2O5-K2O ratio of one retail “Bloom Plus” product is 10-54-10.

However, how much P from a water-soluble fertilizer (WSF) do plants need to flower?

Henry and Whipker (2015) from North Carolina State Uni-versity showed that 5 to 10 parts per million (ppm) of P provided with each irrigation using a WSF

Figure 1. Phosphorus is one of the essential requirements for

plant growth

Table 1. The concentration of elemental P in a water-soluble fertilizer with different N-P2O5-K2O ratios when applied at two nitrogen

concentrations (ppm N). Levels in bold italics are close to recommended 6 to 13 ppm of P for maximum flowering (for example,

100 ppm N from 15-5-15 provides 11 ppm P).Looking for a specific plant or plants?Then come to Trade Lists On-Line – you’ll find a

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NURSERY MANAGEMENTNURSERY MANAGEMENT

contained up to twice the P level (Figure 6).

Table 3 shows examples of the P contribution from three com-mon CRF products. A high-P fer-tilizer (14-14-14) greatly over-ap-plies P if it is top-dressed at a high rate of 24gm of fertilizer per con-tainer.

Landscapes – take a soil test first

Are you still not convinced? Perhaps your business is in

landscape maintenance. Many landscapes where manures, com-posts, and general fertilizers have been applied in the past are al-ready high in P.

You might be able to save mon-ey without decreasing plant per-formance by not applying any P fertilier.

Best management practices for P fertilisation in landscapes is to take a soil test first (this is actu-ally a requirement in some areas of the US). If the soil analysis shows high P, no fertilizer is needed (or even permitted in some areas).

Mandatory restrictions on P application

For example, Florida has po-rous sandy soils, high rainfall, a high water table, and a subtropi-cal climate, and is therefore very sensitive to algal blooms. Land-scapers in Florida are required to have BMP training and follow several guidelines, such as:

• No more than 0.25 kg P2O5/100 m2 per year may be applied to urban turf without a soil test. A one-time application of up to 0.50 kg P2O5/100 m2 is permitted for the establishment of new turf.

Research at Virginia Tech found that 0.3 to 0.6gm P per 1-gallon (3.8L) pot provided max-imum growth of holly and hy-drangea.

To achieve that level of P de-pends on how much fertilizer you apply to a container and the N–P2O5–K2O ratio.

For example, plants grown with 18-3-12 or 18-4-12 CRF applied at the medium recommended la-bel rate had as much growth and flowering as a 15-6-12 CRF that

only 5 to 10 ppm P on a constant feed basis (similar levels to an-nual plants) is needed for maxi-mum growth and flowering.

Best management practices (BMPs) adopted around the US for nursery growers to provide healthy growth (and to avoid en-vironmental lawsuits) is to only use 5 to 15 ppm P when applying constant WSF.

You may use controlled release fertilizer (CRF) and it is hard to relate these WSF concentrations to your nursery.

Table 2. Research showing the minimum ppm P in constant water-soluble fertilizer required to maintain maximal growth in flowering shrubs

Figure 6. Growth and flowering response of hydrangea and holly to several CRF products. Research by Virginia Tech University

Study Plant Taxa ppm PGraca and Hamilton, 1981 Cotoneaster divaricatus 5Yeager and Wright, 1982;

Wright and Niemiera, 1985

Ilex crenata ‘Helleri’ 5

Havis and Baker, 1985 Rhododendron ‘Victor’ 2.5Havis and Baker, 1985 Cotoneaster adpressus var. praecox 10Shreckhise, Owen & Niemiera, 2018 Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’ 5Shreckhise, Owen & Niemiera, 2018 Ilex crenata ‘Helleri’ 1Shreckhise, Owen & Niemiera, 2018 Azalea hybrid ‘Karen’ 3

• Annual landscape rates for es-tablished Florida garden beds (kg per 100m2 per year) are up to 1.0 kg N, 0.5 kg P2O5 = 0.2 kg P, and 1 kg K2O = 0.8kg K, using slow-release fertilizer or compost in or-der to reduce rapid leaching.

Recommended rates vary de-pending on the plant, soil, and lo-cation, but we recommend review-ing BMP documents provided by university extension services.

Free fact sheets are available from University of Florida IFAS Extension (see https://ffl.ifas.ufl.edu). Note that when interpreting US units, 1 lb/1000 sq ft = 0.5 kg/100sq m.

Do high P fertilizers promote rooting?

Here is the kind of misinforma-tion that permeates the internet: “If you want a fertilizer that sup-ports root growth, ensure the sec-ond and third numbers are larger than the first.

“For example, a 3-20-20 ferti-lizer that contains 3 percent nitro-gen, 20 percent phosphorus and 20 percent potassium encourages roots to grow strong and healthy.”

It is true that high levels of ni-trogen encourage excess shoot growth. Therefore, do not over-apply nitrogen. However, does high P increase rooting? No.

The billions of commercial transplants grown each year pro-vide evidence for avoiding high P.

A policy of deliberate P deficiency

Seedling plug growers often purposely create a slight P defi-ciency by limiting phosphorus fer-tilizer supply in order to produce transplants with compact shoot growth, strong roots, and dark green leaves.

That is why a low P fertilizer (13-2-13 N-P2O5-K2O) is widely used in seedling plug production in the US.

Increasing P does not increase root/shoot ratio, and these grow-ers limit both P and N (especially ammonium-N, favouring instead nitrate-N) to avoid leggy shoot growth.

As an essential element, P is of course required by plants to grow. That is true of growing both roots and shoots. However, P is not a

root-promoting nutrient. Research at Virginia Tech

found that increasing ppm P when fertilizing hydrangea and holly had a big effect on increas-ing shoot growth, but had less effect on increasing root growth.

In other words, as P was in-creased from 0.5 to 6 ppm P, there was less allocation by the plant to growth of roots relative to the growth of shoots (the “root-to-shoot ratio” decreased). Phos-phorus does not specifically tar-get root growth.

In conclusion – it is a myth that persists

Phosphorus has mythical ori-gins. Unfortunately, our industry also hangs on to a persistent myth about the need for high P ferti-lizer.

This negatively affects both our wallet and our environment. Why is it so hard to change our beliefs, and for the nursery and land-scape industry to reduce P appli-cation?

We can put it down to the psy-chology of bloody-mindedness:

• We would rather deny new, uncomfortable information than reshape our worldview

• When doubts do creep in, we dig in our heels.

• There is a grief process to

change: denial - anger - bargain-ing - depression - acceptance.

• We love myths! Don’t just take our word for it, but look at the research that this article is based on and take the following steps:

• Run a soil test in the land-scape to see if any P fertilizer is needed. Remember that N, not P, is the most common production and landscape deficiency.

• Use a tissue analysis to diag-nose a P deficiency (not just red or purple leaves).

• Use slow release forms, in-cluding CRF or compost in the landscape.

• Provide nutrients in the ratio that plants can use: A 4-1-4 N-P2O5-K2O is always adequate for vegetative and flowering growth.

• See for yourself by running trials.

Using best management prac-tices can help improve plant qual-ity, reduce production cost, and is our responsibility as stewards of the environment.

Literature CitedHavis, J.R., Baker, J.H., 1985. Phosphorus requirement of Rhododendron ‘Victor’ and Cotoneaster adpressa praecox grown in a perlite-peat medium. J. Environ. Hort. 3:63–64.

Henry, J. and B.E. Whipker. 2015. Revising Your Phosphorus Fertilization Strategy. E-Gro Research Update 2015.10, http://e-

gro.org/pdf/2015-06%20NCSU%20PGR%20Research.pdf accessed April 2020.

Kraus, H.T., S.L. Warren, G.J. Bjorkquist, A.W. Lowder, C.M. Tchir, and K.N. Walton. 2011. Nitrogen:phosphorus:potassium ratios affect production of two herbaceous perennials. HortScience 46:776–783.

Shreckhise, J., J. Owen and A. Niemiera. 2018. http://magazine.nurserymag.com/article/july-2018/understanding-phosphorus-for-containerized-nursery-crops.aspx accessed April 2020.

Wright, R.D. and A.X. Niemiera. 1985. Influence of N, P and K fertilizer interactions on growth of Ilex crenata Thunb. ‘Helleri’. J. Environ. Hort. 3:8–10.

Yeager, T.H., Wright, R.D., 1982b. Phosphorus requirement of Ilex crenata thunb. Cv. Helleri grown in a pine bark medium. J. Amer. Soc. Hort. Sci. 107:558–562. Acknowledgements The authors thank USDA-ARS Floriculture and Nursery Research Initiative #58-3607-8-725, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, USDA “Clean WateR3 - Reduce, Remediate, Recycle”, #2014-51181-22372, Horticultural Research Institute, Virginia Agricultural Council, Virginia Nursery and Landscape Association, and industry partners of the Floriculture Research Alliance at the University of Florida (floriculturealliance.org) for supporting this research.

Note: Paul Fisher presented this article as a paper to members of the IPPS during their tour through Singapore last year

Table 3. The grams of elemental P from controlled release fertilizers with different N-P2O5-K2O ratios when top-dressed at two weights of total fertilizer per container. Levels in bold italics are close to

recommended 0.3 to 0.6 grams of P for maximum growth (for example, 12 grams of fertilizer per 3.8L container from 15-9-12 provides 0.5 grams P).

Fertilizer N-P2O5-K2O ratio

Grams of elemental phosphorus (P) per

1 gallon (3.8 liter) nursery containerTop-dress 12 grams

fertilizer per container

Top-dress 24 grams

fertilizer per container14-14-14 0.7 1.515-9-12 0.5 0.913-3-13 0.2 0.3

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THE CORONAVIRUS pandemic has set off a global gardening boom.

Why people want to go gardening when times get tough

able jobs, gardening offered the chance to reshape a small piece of the world in, as Walker put it, one’s “personal image of Beauty.”

This isn’t to say that food is al-ways a secondary factor in gar-dening passions. Convenience cuisine in the 1950s spawned its own generation of home-growers and back-to-the-land movements rebelling against a mid-century diet now infamous for Jell-O mold salads, canned-food casse-roles, TV dinner and Tang.

For millennial-era growers, gardens have responded to long-ings for community and inclu-sion, especially among marginal-ised groups. Immigrants and in-ner-city residents lacking access to green space and fresh produce have taken up “guerrilla garden-ing” in vacant lots to revitalise their communities.

Gangsta gardener on the streets

In 2011, Ron Finley – a resident of South Central Los Angeles and self-identified “gangsta gardener” – was even threatened with arrest for installing vegetable plots along sidewalks.

Such appropriations of public space for community use are of-ten seen as threats to existing power structures. Moreover, many people can’t wrap their heads around the idea that some-one would spend time cultivating a garden but not reap all of the rewards.

When reporters asked Finley if he were concerned that people would steal the food, he replied, “Hell no I ain’t afraid they’re gon-na steal it, that’s why it’s on the street!”

Gardening in the age of screens

Since the lockdown began, I’ve watched my sister Amanda Fritzsche transform her neglect-ed backyard in Cayucos, Califor-nia, into a blooming sanctuary. She has also gotten into Zoom workouts, binged on Netflix and joined online happy hours. But as the weeks stretch into months, she seems to have less energy for those virtual encounters.

Gardening, on the other hand, has overtaken her life. Plantings that started out back have ex-panded around the side of the

NURSERY MANAGEMENT

In the early days of lockdown, seed suppliers were depleted of inventory and reported “unprec-edented” demand. Within the US, the trend has been compared to World War II victory gardening, when Americans grew food at home to support the war effort and feed their families.

The analogy is surely conveni-ent. But it reveals only one piece in a much bigger story about why people garden in hard times. Americans have long turned to the soil in moments of upheaval to manage anxieties and imagine alternatives.

My research has even led me to see gardening as a hidden land-scape of desire for belonging and connection; for contact with na-

ture; and for creative expression and improved health.

These motives have varied across time as growers respond to different historical circum-stances. Today, what drives peo-ple to garden may not be the fear of hunger so much as hunger for physical contact, hope for na-ture’s resilience and a longing to engage in work that is real.

Prior to industrialisation, most Americans were farmers and would have considered it odd to grow food as a leisure activity. But as they moved into cities and suburbs to take factory and office jobs, coming home to putter around in one’s potato beds took on a kind of novelty. Gardening also appealed to nostalgia for the

passing of traditional farm life. For black Americans denied the

opportunity to abandon subsist-ence work, Jim Crow-era garden-ing reflected a different set of de-sires.**

In her essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Alice Walker recalls her mother tending an ex-travagant flower garden late at night after finishing brutal days of field labour. As a child, she wondered why anyone would vol-untarily add one more task to such a difficult life. Later, Walker understood that gardening wasn’t just another form of labour; it was an act of artistic expression.

Particularly for black women relegated to society’s least desir-

house, and gardening sessions have stretched later into the evening, when she sometimes works by headlamp.

When I asked about her new obsession, Amanda kept return-ing to her unease with screen time. She told me that virtual ses-sions gave a momentary boost, but “there’s always something missing … an empty feeling when you log off.”

Missing the contact with others

Many can probably sense what’s missing. It’s the physical presence of others, and the op-portunity to use our bodies in ways that matter. It’s the same longing for community that fills coffee shops with fellow gig work-ers and yoga studios with the heat of other bodies. It’s the electric-ity of the crowd at a concert, the students whispering behind you in class.

And so if the novel coronavirus underscores an age of distancing, gardening arises as an antidote, extending the promise of contact with something real. My sister talked about this, too: how gar-dening appealed to the whole body, naming sensory pleasures like “hearing song birds and in-sects, tasting herbs, the smell of dirt and flowers, the warm sun and satisfying ache.” While the virtual world may have its own ability to absorb attention, it is not immersive in the way garden-ing can be.

Gardeners are never without a purpose

But this season, gardening is about more than physical activ-ity for the sake of activity. Robin Wallace, owner of a photo pro-duction business in Camarillo, California, noted how the lock-down made her professional identity “suddenly irrelevant” as a “non-essential” worker. She went on to point out a key benefit of her garden: “The gardener is never without a purpose, a sched-ule, a mission.”

As automation and better algo-rithms make more forms of work obsolete, that longing for purpose gains special urgency. Gardens are a reminder that there are lim-its to what can be done without physical presence. As with hand-

shakes and hugs, one cannot gar-den through a screen.

You might pick up skills from YouTube, but, as gardening icon Russell Page once wrote, real ex-pertise comes from directly han-dling plants, “getting to know their likes and dislikes by smell and touch. ‘Book learning’ gave me information,” he explained, “but only physical contact can give any real … understanding of a live organism.”

Page’s observation suggests a final reason why the coronavirus pandemic has ignited such a flur-ry of gardening. Our era is one of profound loneliness, and the pro-liferation of digital devices is only one of the causes. That emptiness also proceeds from the staggering retreat of nature, a process under-way well before screen addiction.

The people coming of age dur-ing the COVID-19 pandemic have already witnessed oceans die and glaciers disappear, watched Aus-tralia and the Amazon burn and mourned the astonishing loss of global wildlife.

Perhaps this explains why sto-ries of nature’s “comeback” are continually popping up alongside those gardening headlines. We cheer at images of animals re-claiming abandoned spaces and birds filling skies cleared of pol-lution.

Some of these accounts are credible, others dubious. What matters, I think, is that they offer a glimpse of the world as we wish it could be: In a time of immense suffering and climate breakdown, we are desperate for signs of life’s resilience.

My final conversation with Wal-lace offered a clue as to how this desire is also fuelling today’s gar-dening craze. She marvelled at how life in the garden continues to “spring forth in our absence, or even because of our absence.”

Then she closed with an insight at once “liberating” and “humili-ating” that touches on hopes reaching far beyond the nation’s backyards: “No matter what we do, or how the conference call goes, the garden will carry on, with or without us.”*The Conversation is a website (www.theconversation.com) carrying news

and views sourced from the academic and research community

Around the world, when Covid lockdowns set in, people wanted to go gardening. Were they just looking to fill in time? Or were they perhaps responding to some sort of repressed yearning coming from deep within the human psyche . . .?As normality returns, it makes sense for the garden trade, retailers especially, to pause a moment and consider these questions, because knowing the underlying motivations of their customers, especially the new ones, will make it easier to know how to satisfy them.Jennifer Atkinson is a Senior Lecturer in environmental studies at the

University of Washington and also author of “Gardenland: Nature, Fantasy and Everyday Practice,” a book that explores the hidden desires behind gardening throughout American history. She shared her ideas on the return-to-gardening phenomenon on The Conversation* in May

**Jim Crow refers to an era of racial disharmony following the American

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noise, all this garden activity is a positive sign for our industry. People in lockdown were turning to gardening. Growing vegetables and initiating landscape projects was high on their lists.

Covid-19 has found a lot of so-cial welfare and economic sys-tems wanting - while also high-lighting the resourcefulness of a population.

While walking the dog around the local streets I also noticed an-other virus lockdown activity – clipping and trimming.

Hedges were receiving more than their usual amount of atten-tion while small trees and shrubs were being fashioned into an ar-ray of geometric shapes.

Plants that had been left to ex-press their natural growth were being manicured into balls, dia-monds and pyramids and the sound of aircraft and road traffic had been replaced by the whine and blurt of motorised trimmers and clippers.

But, aside from the associated

Not long ago we in the garden industry were wondering where we were going to find new cus-tomers. It was generally thought that true gardeners were an old and dying breed and that the fol-lowing younger generation were not going to become “gardeners” in the traditional sense and fill the gap left as those traditional gardeners popped their clogs.

What the lockdown has done is expose the latent connection we all have to the en-vironment and also helped define the na-ture of the garden centre shopper of the future.

The first reaction to the lockdown for many people was to become self-suffi-cient by planting herbs and vegeta-bles. Whether or not this translates to a long-term gain of new gardeners, though, is up to us.

One of the other big trends to come through over the past cou-ple of years is with indoor plants. This trend is profound and sig-nificant. Houseplant sales have been steadily growing and show no sign of slowing. But where in-door plant sales have in the past been motivated by decor and style, they are now being powered by the rise of the ‘plant parent.’

Plant parents get love and joy from their plants and are excited about the challenge of their care. They delight in discovering infor-

mation and facts about their leafy friends. They love creating collec-tions and will go out of their way to acquire rare and unusual plants.

Price is not the focus; pride of possession far outweighs cost. Just consider the outrageous prices that have been recently paid for various variegated and rare philodendrons.

But while they will research and sometimes pur-chase online, these new gardeners still long for the one-on-one instore shopping experi-ence. They are pre-d o m i n a n t l y younger and often first-time garden centre shoppers and the opportuni-ties that they pre-sent to us are im-mense. We have

the chance to convert them into lifetime customers – transform a current trend into long-term sales that will remain long after Covid-19 ends.

The challenge is to take control and drive the dialogue. You as a garden centre are ideally posi-tioned to be the first port of call for advice and purchases but don’t make the mistake of think-ing you will be automatically se-lected as such. You will have to work at it.

There is a lot of research sug-gesting that younger customers care about social issues, have a

global mindset, appreciate diver-sity and engage on a personal and emotional level.

They like to shop with business-es that have strong vision and in-tegrity. They welcome friendly staff who are helpful and focused on their needs. When it comes to merchandising – logical layout that is easy to shop is key, as is appreciation for loyalty.

Quality is also high on the agen-da. Mostly the new gardeners know what they want – they just need to be able to find it and have staff available to assist with in-formation.

Recent research shows that these new customers are tech-savvy and fluent with online shopping yet 80% of the time they still value the instore experi-ence.

Overall, they want their shop-ping experience to be convenient and integrated with their use of technology. This puts garden cen-tres in the box seat as plants are the ultimate in-person sale.

As lockdown restrictions are eased, preparing your store for the “new normal” is paramount.

Communicate your safety poli-cies via your website and social media. Building a strong social media that you use to show new and exciting stock is now a must.

Garden centres will continue to make most of their sales in per-son, in store, but some have also been highly creative in the ways they have found to distribute product to their customers.

Click and collect, carpark pick-up and door-to-door delivery have become the norm. In the future more customers will want to shop this way.

To accommodate these changes in behaviour, it is vital to provide convenient shopping and delivery services. They are fast becoming an essential part of business.

Lockdown has exposed new customers to the joy of gardening and plant ownership. It has de-livered a once in a generation op-portunity to convert a generation into lifetime gardeners, plant parents and customers.

Anyway, I think the cinnamon scrolls smell ready. Must be time to fix myself a Quarantini cocktail and settle down to a bit of lock-down bingeing . . .

Don’t overlook those young ones – they can be important

Covid lockdown delivers us a load of new customersIF THE sales of baking ingredients and alcohol over

the period of lockdown are anything to go by, Aus-tralia is at risk of becoming a nation of alcoholic cake-eaters – and maybe this explains why supermarkets have been constantly running out of toilet paper.

RECENTLY I stood on my side of the counter with six wide, curious eyes staring at me.

MANAGEMENT

During lockdown in Sydney plants that had been left to express their natural growth were being manicured into balls, diamonds and pyramids

These eyes peered at me with such amazement and awe, it made something in my business mind click. At that very moment, I realized that this was an area that I’ve been neglecting all along.

These small sets of eyes have no viable source of income, these small sets of eyes have no flower fashion sense or a large SUV to haul plants and assorted garden centre items away in, but they have parents that do.

Children are often overlooked as business goldmines. Not only do children commonly accom-pany their parents on shopping excursions that involve house-hold purchases, they also influ-ence what is purchased in the end.

Kid friendlyBy making your store kid

friendly, you not only keep the kids entertained, but you make the parents more at ease while shopping.

Being kid friendly doesn’t have to include a bounce house and a clown every weekend. Small steps can be made to make your store kid friendly such as:

Create areas that are at “nose level.”

Make sure shelving units in your gift area are full of items that would attract kids such as ani-mal-themed statues or neon-col-oured pots.

Have something unique, such as an animal that is a resident at

Lockdown has delivered a

once in a generation

opportunity to convert a

generation into lifetime

gardeners, plant parents

and customers

By Brian Merrick

Retail Business Consultant

brianmerrickmentor @bigpond.com

your garden centre. Kids will re-member this and ask to go to “the place that has the chicken, cat, dog,” etc.

Have brightly coloured wagons with cushions for parents to haul kids around in; parents will get frustrated if trying to juggle a kid

and a cart at the same time.Promotional days go a long way

– not only do you instil an interest in the children, the parents will ap-preciate that you include them as valued customers (think pony rides and ice cream cones).

Even though catering to kids won’t pay off immediately, it will in the long run. If you’re able to create a special store for kids to remember as they grow up, as they come of age and need flowers, they’ll remember you and your store as that special place from their childhood.

Nikki Weed manages a garden centre in Greenville, population around 70,000, in South Carolina USA. She is also an occasional contributor to US Garden Center Magazine and one of her recent pieces highlighted the importance of children to garden centres, something often overlooked by their operators

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a nervous system, muscles and eyes. They do have a ‘body’ but whether or not they have a con-sciousness, I reckon, is still up for debate. So, if we view sleep with the Oxford Dictionary meaning, the answer as to whether plants sleep would have to be “No!”

Their processes do change throughout the day though. Sto-mata, the tiny holes under their leaves open only when there is

the researchers chose calm nights with no wind and no condensa-tion, so the branches could not be drooping because of moisture on them or their leaves.

I just think this is sooo cool, but then I am an advocate for plants. Just ‘cos they aren’t like us does not mean they are not incredible living organisms.

Finally, as we get back to ‘nor-mal’ now is the time to support one another, support our own businesses (stop buying on line from overseas), support our own tourist destinations, see our own country. Go out and have a beer or a glass of wine. Dine at a local restaurant. Utilise public trans-port. Support our own and help in the recovery.

We do incredibly well for a tiny population so look at the amazing place you reside in and the great people around you.

Ref 1: www.sciencedaily.com/releases /2016/05/160517083552.htm

words, but sounds good.

The researchers said the changes weren’t huge, but I beg to differ. Those branches drooped by up to 10cm on trees of around 5m in height. The leaves also drooped, of course – wouldn’t you if your branches

were ‘asleep’? They drooped slowly with the maximum droop point being a couple of hours be-fore sunrise and took a couple of hours to get back to their original position after sunrise – maybe a ‘tree coffee’ would speed this up!

As of yet the researchers do not know “whether they were ‘woken up’ by the sun or by their own ‘internal rhythm.’ (1)

For those of you who are scep-tical and say that it could all be due to environmental conditions,

PLANT BASICS PLANT BASICS

lockdown. She had been losing about a branch a year for the past 10 years so we knew she was on her last legs but we did not expect her last major loss to be so spec-tacular.

It required a large crane and some big saws to undertake the ‘euthanisation’ – quite something to watch. It is amazing how quickly one’s brain adjusts to a change in one’s environment.

The space left by her absence is huge; new vistas have opened up, the sun now comes into areas in Winter that never used to see it and the chilly nor’easter has found a new path to funnel through.

Our old Atlantic cedar will not be forgotten. There are images of her that live on and new plants will grow in her spot. The cycle of life and death will continue as it does in nature.

UK is 66.6 million, Italy has 60.36 million while little old NZ has just passed the five million mark.

Our tax revenue is tiny by com-parison so our roading is amazing if we really think about it, our health system incredible consid-ering the humungous number of tiny communities it needs to sup-port; equally our education sys-tem.

Anyway, moving right along . .

A death at the CastleI just have to let you know

about a Covid-related death at our Larnach Castle where I work. A dear old Atlantic cedar planted by Mr William Larnach himself decided that her life was over.

Well, technically, we decided the latter; more technically, we euthanised her. A huge section of her blew out in the third week of

How many of us realise that our population is the size of a small-to-medium sized city on the glob-al scale (two ‘sizes’ there sorry guys).

The taxes from this small pop-ulation have to somehow main-tain a country with a land area similar to that of the UK at 243,600sq km.

Our land area is 268,838sq km and Italy is comparable at 300,000. The population of the

We were all getting a tad com-placent and worrying about things that, really, were often mi-nor in the big scheme of things. Everyone will know someone who has been impacted upon by this tiny Covid ‘thing’ (I refuse to give it the name of organism) wreak-ing havoc upon our blue planet and our day-to-day lives.

I so often think that, what bet-ter place to be in than NZ at this point in time? The bottom of the South Pacific is looking like a lit-tle slice of paradise – actually, it always was, we just became a tad smug. We may complain about our roading, transport systems, health and education, but what country doesn’t?

light for photosynthesis. There are exceptions of course, because these are living organisms.

The exceptions are plants that reside in very hot, arid areas. They open their stomata at night when it is cool and store carbon dioxide to use the following day when the sun is up – they have got it sorted. Really, though, this is just an example of plants react-ing to their environment in the best way possible.

Sunflowers totally react to day and night conditions. They slight-ly close their floral bracts (flower leaves) at night and when the sun rises in the morning face their heads to the sun, following it around through the day until it sets – quite cool!

The plants of many flowers close up at night, protecting their

A brand new ‘new’ – and are your trees snoozing off?

reproductive or-gans from the foi-bles of night-time conditions and only open again when their pollinators are on the wing or out and about. Those that use noc-turnal pollinators do the exact opposite – they use shift workers, those that like being active at night, not me!

Also some plants activate chemicals to protect themselves only when their primary preda-tors are active, like cabbages with cabbage looper caterpillars. If they are forced out of cycle by screwed up daylight hours they get munched. These are all still reactions, though, not really to do with sleeping.

But there is more.A study undertaken by scien-

tists from Austria, Hungary and Finland has shown something pretty amazing. Using infrared laser scanners they monitored thousands of points on a tree in Finland and one in Austria watching how the form of these trees changed during the night. The use of infrared meant they did not interfere with the trees’ natural light receptors.

So what happened? You will not believe it. The branches of the trees drooped, yes drooped. They ‘relaxed’; not quite the scientists’

Fiona Eadie is head gardener at Larnach Castle, Dunedin, and teaches students for Hort Training NZ. [email protected]

WELL, WE are well into the new ‘new’, something we have never experienced. Life will not be the same

again but is that such a bad thing?

Do plants really go to sleep?

Left: the dismantling of our humungous 150-year-old cedar required a crane and lots of grunty machinery. The final two trunks weighed a massive 3.7 tonnes each. The guys did amazingly well and managed the dismantle in a day

AS WE promised last issue, we are this issue going to address the question of whether plants actually do

go to sleep.

Above left: our Atlas cedar, Cedrus atlantica, (the one on the right) covered in snow in the Winter of 2015. She was beautiful. Planted by William Larnach 150 years ago, she ended up a Covid-related death at Larnach Castle in that half of a main branch blew out in the third week of

lockdown. One could say it was timely – no buses, no people and it occurred at night; she was considerate

NZ vs Europe – sometimes we need to remind ourselves that we don’t do too badly for such a small, spread-out population Pic Wikimedia Commons

According the Oxford Diction-ary the definition of sleep is: “A condition of body and mind which typically recurs for several hours every night, in which the nervous system is inactive, the eyes closed, the postural muscles relaxed, and consciousness prac-tically suspended.”

Now, if we think about this quite deeply we realise that plants are missing a few things here; like

Sunflowers are amazing in how they follow the sun. They do not really ‘sleep’ as such; they just respond to the light of day, but they do know where the sun will rise!

(From: NPR “The mystery of why sunflowers follow the sun – solved.” August 2016. Merrit Kennedy)

You will not believe it – the branches and leaves of trees were shown to droop during the night . . .

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The user speaks into the device to record the message or sends a message from his/her smart-phone through WhatsApp or Messenger to a florist for down-load.

In both cases the person receiv-ing the roses presses a button on the heart-shaped device to hear the message.

“Previously when you bought a bouquet of roses for your loved one, you had to write your mes-sage on a card,” says Cooltec. “Now you can record and person-alise your message on a smart-phone even if you are 1,000 miles away from your loved one.”

The Talking Roses device is

selling in the US for around $NZ20. See www.talking-roses.com for more information

Experienced rose budder re-quired for budding our rose crop this coming season. Must be able to bud 3500 per day with a 95% strike rate. Please contact Glenn Wright, South Pacific Roses.Email:[email protected]

or Ph 03 3496458.

A HONG KONG based maker of electronic gadgets and electronic toys for kids, Cooltec Electronics, has come

up with a small recording device that can be clipped to bouquets of roses and carry a 20 second message from sender to recipient.

Talking roses come with their own built-in messages IRRIGATION SUPPLIES

Deadline for ads in next Comm Hort, August/September 2020 issue, is 1 August. Ph (09) 358-2749.

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youtube.com and search for ‘Four Key Concepts of Lighting.’

The video is one of the training materials in the Florida Univer-sity’s Greenhouse Training On-line courses which include Green-house 101 and Hydroponic Veg-etable Production. More videos are set to be released in the com-ing weeks.

For more information email [email protected]

New daily light integral app

Meanwhile, if you are already familiar with the technicalities of lighting, you will be interested in a new app Florida University has released to calculate the light in-tensity and photoperiod required to achieve a certain daily light integral for plant growth for an electric light source, such as LEDs.

In the app, you enter any two of the three items to calculate the third unknown value.

For example, enter light inten-sity and photoperiod to calculate daily light integral. The app was designed by Paul Fisher and Bruce MacKay of Thomas Baine Ltd. You can access it at back-pocketgrower.org/constantlight-levels.asp.

“Growers often do these light-ing calculations if they use sup-plemental lighting in a green-house or have sole-source LED lighting in an indoor facility,” says Paul.

He explains how to use the apps in videos at the Greenhouse Training Online YouTube chan-nel tinyurl.com/UFGTO

“Our industry advisory group in the Floriculture Research Alli-ance identified the need for this app,” he says.

Online nutrient management course

Florida University is also offer-ing another of its online advanced courses on plant nutrition man-agement starting 31 August and running through to 25 Septem-ber.

This course is designed for ex-perienced growers and topics in-clude pH management, how to formulate your own fertilisers from individual salts, diagnosing and correcting nutritional prob-lems.

There are streaming video les-sons, readings and assignments (about 3-4 hours total commit-ment per week), which can be ac-cessed at any time of day and paced at the participant’s con-venience.

Cost is $US 199 per participant and registrations can be made at www.hort.ifas.ufl.edu/training

THE CHINESE Academy of Agricultural Sciences an-

nounced in June the launch of a test kit it says can detect multiple chemical pesticide residues on fresh produce like fruit and veg-etables and provide results in five minutes.

Such testing is normally done by laboratories and usually takes one to two days, the Academy said.

Its system involves the use of colloidal gold detection strips which can test for pesticides such as imidacloprid, carbofuran, tebuconazole, acetamiprid, pro-cymidone, chlorpyrifos, carben-dazim.

The user applies the strip then photographs it with their mobile phone connected to the WeChat mini-program, which relays the results back.

The Academy says its test kits are low cost and suitable for use by official inspectors, self-checks by producers and by consumers for home use.

Contact email for the Academy is [email protected]

With the rapid adoption of LED lighting by the horticulture in-dustry, the University says there is increasing need for growers to understand the technical aspects of lighting.

This can help them purchase the correct type of lighting prod-uct and manage light levels for optimum growth.

Expat Kiwi, Dr Paul Fisher, fronts the video. He says “light units can be confusing for plant growers, because we describe light in terms of colour and visi-bility to the human eye, and en-ergy that heats up the green-house, as well as photosynthesis.

“Just using foot-candles and lux does not cut it anymore. If you understand lighting terms, you can make better decisions about purchasing and managing lights and can effectively use the new research coming out of universi-ties and industry.”

To view the new video go to

THE UNIVERSITY of Florida has released a new vid-eo to help greenhouse growers understand the mod-

ern concepts and language of lighting, such as light spectrum, intensity, photoperiod, and daily light inte-gral.

New videos explain the basics of greenhouse lighting

Clip from the new lighting video – understanding lighting terms allows better decisions on purchasing and managing lights

Smartphones used to detect pesticide residues

The device clips around a rose stem and plays its message at

the press of a button

Test strips are photographed by cellphone through WeChat mini

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HORTICULTURE COMMERCIAL - Nursery · 2020. 7. 21. · 2 COMMERCIAL HORTICULTURE, JUNE/JULY 2020 I...

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