Latest news with #BotanicGarden
RNZ News
17-05-2025
- General
- RNZ News
Grow your own 'Forage Garden' with Hannah Zwartz
Kōkihi, nasturtium and flatleaf parsley in a 'forage garden' Photo: Hannah Zwartz So, you like the idea of gardening but can't bring yourself to spend hours toiling away in the outdoors, making a self-sowing 'Forage Garden' might be the answer. With minimum effort you can utilise a wild corner of your patch, relinquishing control and letting the garden do the hard work for you. When done right it creates dense growth where you can go and forage for greens - so you've always got a salad or stirfry to hand. It comes down to two things - choosing the right plants that will self-seed, and giving them a good start. Gardening expert Hannah Zwartz shows us how, and will answer your listener questions. Hannah has over 30 years' experience gardening professionally, including looking after the herb and succulent gardens at Wellington Botanic Garden and running community market gardens in the Hutt Valley.
Perth Now
11-05-2025
- General
- Perth Now
How to bring a touch of Kings Spark to your garden
As a gardener I often use the phrase 'the right plant in the right spot.' It basically means that if you give a plant what it needs as far as sun, soil and water go, then the hard work is done and it will thrive. To celebrate its 60th year, Kings Park and Botanic Garden have released a list of their favourite fail-safe WA tried, tested, bred and grown plants and they are absolutely beauties. Buying plants that have been bred by Kings Park ensures you get ones grown for your garden. They will make your outdoor space look amazing and save you money, as you know they will be successful. The range of plants is wide and diverse, including grevilleas, hakeas and vibrant kangaroo paws. But it's the range of rare wonders that I really loved as they add a sense of the exotic to the garden and makes it feel like you're pushing the limits of gardening, when the truth is it couldn't be simpler. Buying plants that have been bred by Kings Park ensures you get ones grown for your garden. Credit: Adobe Stock / Maja - We all know banksia, but the new cultivar B. ashbyi 'dwarf' is a showstopper. It grows to a neat 1.5m–2m in all directions and its blue-green serrated leaves form a dense, rounded shape that you can't help but notice. It flowers from autumn all the way through to spring with fat 10cm wide and 15cm high orange flower spikes that are wonderful food for native bees and birds, including honey eaters. Growing this banksia couldn't be easier, as it thrives in the sun, tolerating some shade, prefers a sandy soil but can tolerate something loamy. Once established it won't need watering. The only thing that will kill this plant is too much love from overwatering and root rot. If you want to make this shrub even denser than its natural habit, pruning at a young age and the removal of spent flowers will help promote next year's growth, but are optional to its success. Growing banksia couldn't be easier, as it thrives in the sun, tolerating some shade, preferring sandy soil. Credit: Adobe Stock / Ariestia - Pimelea ferruginea, or Magenta Mist, is a vibrant, in-your-face magenta that will add a striking touch to your garden. The flowers — and there are a lot of them — come in spring where they will attract lots of beneficial insects and butterflies, which is great for the biodiversity of your garden. This smaller plant only gets to 1m and works well at the front of a garden bed or even in a pot. It has small, deep-green glossy leaves that set off its bright flowers. Tolerant of coastal conditions, this plant is very similar to the banksia, where it prefers full sun and free-draining soil. Maintenance is low, but you will get a bushier, denser plant if you remove the flowers once finished and fertilise with a native-specific fertiliser in late winter, ready for growth and blooms in spring. The Rosy rice flower (Latin name - Pimelea ferruginea). Credit: Nahhan / Getty Images/iStockphoto If you want an unusual ground cover, plant Goodenia varia. It's native to coastal communities from the Eucla to south-eastern South Australia, north-western Victoria and far south-western NSW. In WA, though, it is classified as a priority two species, which indicates it's only been recorded in a few locations, so if you start growing one you'll definitely be able to show off about it! It's quite a small plant, only growing to 40cm in length, making it perfect for cascading down a slope, softening rocky outcrops and adding another dimension to a native pot arrangement where it will spill over the edges. The leaves are almost round and toothed on the edges. The best part about this plant is it will flower almost all of the year and the blooms are a great way to attract native butterflies and insects. Grow Goodenia in full sun or part shade in a variety of soil types, as long as they are free-draining.
Los Angeles Times
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Barbra Streisand names new rose discovered in her garden. Here's how to get Barbra's Baby
A new and deliciously fragrant pink rose discovered in Barbra Streisand's Malibu garden is finally available for purchase this spring, five years after it was discovered. Only about 2,000 of the hybrid tea rose bushes, dubbed Barbra's Baby, are available so far. More should be available in years to come. But whether or not you can get your hands on one this spring, one has to wonder: Would a new pink rose with any other name create such a stir? Streisand politely declined to comment for this story, but Dan Bifano, a master rosarian and longtime gardener to Streisand, Oprah and other famous folk, believes a rose's name 'is always of utmost importance; it makes the rose salable or unsalable, and anytime a rose is connected to a celebrity, it's going to pick up the sales.' For instance, Barbra Streisand, a fragrant mauve rose bred by then-Weeks Roses hybridizer Tom Carruth, is still selling strong more than 20 years after it was introduced in 2001, Bifano said. So there's little question the singer-actor-director's connection will increase interest. Carruth agrees, but the storied rose breeder, who's now curator of the rose garden at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanic Garden, said Barbra's Baby has enough special qualities to make it stand out regardless of its name. For one, he said, it comes from a fragrant red rose known as Lasting Love, bred by French hybridizer Michel Adam. 'When it was introduced, every breeder jumped on it for its bloodlines because of its fragrance and foliage,' Carruth said. Streisand's huge rose collection includes about a dozen bushes of Lasting Love, Bifano said, including two outside the living room window of her main house. And that's where a luscious bubble-gum-pink flower was discovered on a bush that usually produces blooms so deep red they're nearly burgundy. In the rose world, these mutant flowers are known as 'sports.' Producing a sport is not uncommon, but usually the sport is not as interesting or vital as the mother plant, Carruth said, so there's little interest in nurturing the mutant into a separate plant. In another garden, Bifano discovered a Lasting Love bush that produced a pure white sport, but no one wanted to propagate a new white rose, since there are so many already available, Carruth said. But a vibrant pink rose with a tiny tinge of yellow at the base, with all the excellent qualities of her parent, including vigorous growth and disease resistance? That, Carruth said, was a rose worth pursuing. Like its parent Lasting Love, Barbra's Baby 'has an intense, wonderful fragrance,' Carruth said, and 'foliage so gorgeous [the plant] hardly needs flowers; [the leaves are] a kind of polished mahogany red that turns a brilliant green later.' Bifano said he called his longtime friend Carruth as soon as he and Streisand spotted the sport. Carruth advised them to watch the branch all summer to see if it had any new pink blooms. And when the particular branch rebloomed pink several times during the season, Carruth came in the fall and took a cutting so the rose could be propagated by a grower in Arizona. After that, it was a lot of wait and see — growing the cutting and creating more cuttings to see if the rose would consistently produce the same pink flowers, with the same lovely fragrance, foliage, disease resistance and vigor. The answer, to everyone's delight, was yes. 'We were pleased to see it was stable,' Carruth said, 'because a lot of sports want to go back to the parent color.' As the owner of the parent bush, Streisand gets credit for discovering the rose, and the right to name it. 'I told her, 'Barbra, you'll be listed as the inventor,' and that has her just stoked,' Carruth said. The biggest challenge now is getting the plants potted up for sale this spring. Only two nurseries are expected to sell it this year: April & Ashley, a new online nursery based in Arizona that propagated the plant, and Otto & Sons Nursery in Fillmore, one of the region's largest wholesale and retail nurseries selling fruit trees, perennials and more than 700 varieties of roses. Otto & Sons expects to have about 200 of Barbra's Baby rose bushes to sell in June, said customer service representative Montse Infante, for $58 a plant. The plants currently aren't listed on its website but will be come June, she said. April & Ashley has the bushes for sale now on its website, for $40 plus $18 shipping (shipping fees waived for three or more bushes). And if you really want a Streisand collection, you can pick up her namesake rose too. 'The Barbra Streisand rose still sells out nearly every year,' Bifano said. Most of Bifano's clientele are famous and/or very well-heeled, with large gardens in swanky communities such as Montecito, Malibu and Bel-Air. He oversees all of Streisand's gardens, including about 800 roses artfully distributed around her 3-acre property in Malibu. 'Color is probably No. 1 in importance to Barbra — color and fragrance — whereas I'm interested in vigor, growth habit, repeat blooms and disease resistance.' The meshing of those priorities created a lush landscape you can glimpse in Streisand's 2010 book 'My Passion for Design,' showcasing the homes and gardens she built and decorated on her ocean-facing property in Malibu. 'One of the things she taught me early on was to extend your interiors into the garden,' Bifano said; when you look out of Streisand's windows, the colors in the garden match the colors in the room, or the exterior of the structure. On this day Bifano was delivering the ingredients to his famous organic fertilizer 'cocktail' — one bag chicken manure, one bag earthworm castings and two bags Island Custom Landscape Mix (available only at Island Seed & Feed in Goleta) of alfalfa, kelp, soybean, fish and feather meals. Streisand's three-member garden crew will mix those ingredients on a large tarp to feed all the roses, about three cups per bush. Bifano also is overseeing the planting of more than 500 special coleus plants around the large red barn — aptly named the Barn — on Streisand's property. The building is trimmed with white, and its dark red paint has weathered to a near burgundy color. It's Bifano's job to find the flowers that will carry on that theme around the outside of the building. The coleus — Proven Winners' Colorblaze Rediculous — are chosen for their leaves, a deep red burgundy shade almost identical to the Barn's color. 'She likes a lot of colors — burgundy is her favorite — but you'll never see some colors, like orange,' Bifano said. Those color choices even extend to the large koi drifting in a large pond in front of the barn — some are cream-colored, one is black and sometimes there's a deep red one, but never any orange. No detail is too small for Streisand, 'and that's a good thing,' he said. 'She's very specific about how she wants things, and if it isn't right, you have to redo it. She is a perfectionist, and [perfection is] what we try to give her. We're not always successful, but we try very hard, which is probably why I've been around for 30 years. She's wonderful to work for — she makes you a perfectionist.' So who knows? The quest for perfection is omnipresent in Streisand's gardens; maybe her exacting attention to detail somehow rubbed off on the Lasting Love rose just outside her living room window, spurring the creation of an exemplary new bloom worthy of the name Barbra's Baby.
