Southland
For the gardener who likes to grow by sowing seeds, a wild garden provides an unexpected advantage: it does it for you!
Sowing seeds? Let the garden do it for you, says Robert Guyton.
Seedlings pop up in an ungroomed, unsprayed garden where leaves are left to lie, soil is undisturbed by rake, fork or rotary hoe, and seedheads and pods, fruits and berries are allowed to ripen and fall where they will.
The wild garden doubles as a nursery and much of the work is done by nature. No trays filled with seed-raising mix are required for starting seeds off, nor is there a need for watering regimes or providing protection from seedling-munching slugs or slaters when the vast numbers of naturally raised seedlings mean losses don’t matter.
Seedlings that grow in the same soil as their parents enjoy the benefits of a balanced biome.
All that’s required of the gardener then, is to collect the healthy seedlings at the point when they are crowded or needing more light, and transfer them to soil-filled pots and a place in the sun and grow them up till they’re big enough to go back into the open ground at home or abroad.
In my garden, I grow many trees this way: members of the Cornus family, especially the Himalayan strawberry tree; the two most fruitful Aristotelia family
(our own native makomako and the similar-but-not-the-same Chilean wineberry); viburnums that seed freely such as the wonderful guelder rose; the surprisingly prolific bay whose seedlings appear far from the parent tree, thanks to the birds and their liking for the bay’s small fruits; poroporo; hebe; ko¯whai; cabbage tree… the list is a long one.
Along with all of those, many of the fruit trees growing here produce seedlings, usually beneath their spreading boughs. Plum stones left once the flesh has been pecked clean or dissolved away by the elements strike easily, especially those of the ‘George Wilson’ and the mysterious ‘Southland plum’ we rescued from a soon-to-be-felled orchard years ago. Sweet chestnut seedlings are common enough underneath the two adult trees, despite their relatively tender age. The awkwardly named ‘Blackboy’ peaches that get knocked to the ground by birds and overwinter in the peach leaf litter sprout in spring with no help at all from me, and the plentiful supply of Japonica apples, once turned squishy by the rain and frost, set their seeds growing in the mulch into which the fruit has fallen.
Potting up these young fruit trees is a pleasure and a saving in energy compared with the traditional path I used to follow, requiring lots of washing, slicing, drying and storing. I’ve handed those processes over to my garden and it’s working well for both of us.
During a visit from a fern fancier and grower, I learned that ferns too, can be grown in this way. Although I do see some ferns growing spontaneously in the damper areas of my garden, there are not enough to supply a nursery and they don’t produce seeds that I can keep an eye on. They make spores, and those are mysterious things, ephemeral and difficult to collect. But I don’t have to try, I learned from my ferny visitor – I need only set out a small platform of old red bricks amongst
the established ferns, and tiny fern-lets will soon appear, as if by magic, on the moist surfaces of the bricks. Once they are big enough, I was told, they too can be potted up and grown on. I plan to establish such a brick base under a ponga growing beside the spring; tree ferns are much sought after and if I can get those cycling through my nursery, I’ll make a lot of people happy.
Fungi are also spore producers though that’s not their only form of reproduction.
Edible mushrooms such as oysters and velvet shanks need a little help from the grower, but need little more than a nudge to take up residence and grow in a garden with suitable conditions. Shaking spores from a mature mushroom over the tree stump or log can sometimes get the process started and from then on it’s just a matter of providing more food for them, in the form of stump or log – easily done in a garden that’s ungroomed and undisturbed.
One of the unseen and largely unappreciated benefits of growing plants for sale this way – as opposed to using sterile seed-raising mixes and heatprepared composts as the medium for propagating all manner of garden plants – is that the young plants will take with them all the supportive elements they need when leaving home and resettling in foreign gardens, where the soil organisms will be different and perhaps not so friendly.
It’s a system I’m adopting from here on in and one that makes me feel better about selling or giving away plants from my forest garden.