Summer solstice food

Seasonal baking - Christmas Cake, Christmas Tree Biscuits, our daily bread of sourdough wholemeal, and Psomi, a Greek form of baguette that will be used to make croutons for Caesar Salad.

The origins and reasons for the dating of Christmas are contested, although it seems that it was not entirely coincidental that the period of the northern hemisphere winter solstice was chosen over other possible dates. (Such as March 25 – in itself a 'natural' date because it is close to the northern spring equinox). Be that as it may, in this part of the world the festival falls at the summer solstice, and the foods of the season are very different from those in cold northern latitudes.

I think the summer solstice is worth celebrating in its own right, for this is a special time of the year, when the earth is closest to the sun, and the delicious first summer fruits of garden and orchard have returned again. So now when I think about 'Christmas' food, I think about whatever is best in this season, and making the most of it.

I make an exception for rich fruit cake and spicy biscuits, which are good any time of the year. So on December 23 I baked some Christmas Tree Biscuits (flavoured with ground cardamom and almond essence) and my usual Christmas cake. This is Alison Holst's Easy Mix Christmas Cake from her Christmas baking book, and it really is easy and quick. It has no creaming of butter and sugar, no spices or essences, and yet it is the best as well as the easiest Christmas cake I have ever made, rich, moist and full of flavour from the kilogram of dried fruit it contains, which is soaked in a mixture of rum and sherry for 1-2 days before making the cake. 

 A summer solstice dinner - light, fresh and tasty

My other solstice food is much more seasonal. Now is the time of year to revel in raspberries, strawberries, currants, cherries and other first summer fruits. It is not the time for stodgy northern food, and so once again I look to lands bordering the Mediterranean for inspiration on what it is good to eat that suits our climate and our bodies. Hence we had a light Christmas dinner which owed much more to Greece, Lebanon and Morocco than it did to England at any time of the year. There was a salad of asparagus and avocado dressed with a lemon juice and olive oil dressing flavoured with the Moroccan herb and spice mix za'atar, a pâté of butter beans, tzatziki (grated cucumber and chopped dill in thick yoghurt), olives and a delicious Neudorf sheep cheese. The pâté and tzatziki were scooped up with pita bread which was crisped in the oven.

Dessert was the remains of the raspberry trifle (made with the first picking from our raspberry canes) which was served to guests on Christmas Eve. I put thin layers of fresh raspberries and raspberry jam made from last year's crop between the thick layers of sponge cake that has been well sprinkled with sherry, make a thick custard to go on top of that, and top it all with with a layer of whipped cream decorated with fresh berries. It never fails to please! 

 Christmas Tree Biscuits are so-called because (if they are cut into suitable shapes and have a hole made in them before they are baked) they make good tree decorations. I iced some, sprinkled them with silver cashous,  and hung them on a branch of holly for a seasonal decoration.

 

Baking Belgium (or Belgian) biscuits

 Noelani is thrilled at baking her first batch of Belgium Biscuits

The only ingredient from the Eco Garden in this classic New Zealand biscuit recipe is the raspberries in the home-made raspberry jam filling. Mind you, that is well worth having if these biscuits are to taste their best.

After making them for the first time in ages, at the request of my young American friend Noelani (who conceived a passion for them when she first came to New Zealand to study earlier this year) I remembered how very good they are when home-made. They are also more work to make than most biscuits, so I am lucky that my mother took the time and trouble to make them for us when we were young. She also used the biscuit dough part of this recipe as the basis for the gingerbread people and animals that we used to make for fund-raising fairs. After they were baked to a crisp and shapely biscuit she would ice them with a white icing, and we kids would decorate them with eyes and noses made with currants, mouths of red glace cherry slices, and sprinkles of hundreds and thousands.

In hunting out a recipe for the biscuits I went first to the Edmonds Cook Book, where they are called Belgium Biscuits, and then to Alexa Johnston's Ladies a Plate Traditional Home Baking, where they are called Belgian Biscuits. I knew that the name had been changed from German biscuits during World War I, in an outbreak of patriotic nominal lunacy, so hoping to find which was the original or correct name, I consulted David Veart's story of New Zealand cooking, First Catch Your Weka. On p. 225 he says that German biscuits became Belgium biscuits in honour of the 'brave little Belgium' of Allied propaganda. He then gives a recipe supplied by a Miss Baigent to the Town and Country Patriotic Women Workers Cookery Book, which was published in Palmerston North in 1917.

This recipe is not the same as the one which Johnston obtained from the 1945 edition of the Women's Institute Home Cookery Book, where it is called Belgian Biscuits. The change from noun to adjective may be more euphonious (and more in line with the original name, which was German not Germany biscuits) but now that I know what the original name was and why it was given I think I will stick with that one.

Baigent's 1917 recipe had ground rice as well as flour, a phenomenal amount of butter (1 and 1/4 lb), much less spice, no cocoa, and brown sugar is not specified for the sugar measure. The Women's Institute and Edmond's recipes have all the same ingredients, with the Women's Institute one having more butter and sugar. Noelani and I made that recipe, with the minor alteration of less cocoa, pure white icing, and a hundreds and thousands topping. 

These are very sociable biscuits to make, with lots of opportunities for working together rolling and cutting the dough, sandwiching the baked biscuits together with jam, and icing and decorating the tops. Good fun for friends, partners or parents and children to do together and keep this Kiwi classic going for another century.

Noelani cuts up butter and Christine adds the weighed measure

of brown sugar to the mixing bowl.

 BELGIUM BISCUITS

Ingredients
1. Biscuits
225g butter
225 g brown sugar
1 egg
2 cups flour
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
2. Filling
raspberry jam
3. Icing
2 cups icing sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice
red glace cherries; hundreds and thousands


Method


Cream the softened butter and the sugar until pale. Beat in the egg.
Add the sifted dry ingredients and mix to form a soft dough.
Cover the dough and chill it in the fridge for 2 hours, or overnight.
When ready to bake the biscuits, preheat the oven to 180 degrees C and grease two baking trays with butter.
Divide the dough in half, return one half to the fridge and knead the other half on a floured board until it is malleable enough to roll out.
Roll it out on a lightly-floured bench or board until it is 3 mm thick, and cut it into circles about 5 cm wide. (If you don't have a cutter this wide, use a glass or tea cup which is the right size.)
Repeat with the second measure of dough, putting the circles on the greased trays as you work, until all the dough is used up.
Bake the biscuits for 10-12 minutes, rotating the trays halfway through, until they are firm on top, a little brown underneath, and giving off a spicy baked smell.
Cool the biscuits on a wire rack while you make the icing by sifting the icing sugar into a bowl and mixing it with the lemon juice and a little hot water (add slowly) to make a spreadable mix. If you are topping the biscuits with glace cherries, cut them in half.
When the biscuits are cold, ice half of them and decorate them with cherries or a sprinkling of hundreds and thousands.
When then icing has set, spread the non-iced biscuits with raspberry jam, and sandwich pairs of biscuits together.

Australian wildflower walks

The Eco Gardener

in Molonglo Gorge, 

20 km from Canberra.

I'm back from Australia, where I had a wonderful time seeing friends, taking part in the Agri-Food Research Network conference, and (of course) spending lots of time looking at plants, both domestic and wild. It was a great time of year to be seeing wildflowers, and eastern Australia has been getting so much rain lately it was the greenest I have ever seen it. That was good for the flowers as well.

On December 4^th I was taken for a walk up a beautiful gorge near Canberra, the Molonglo Gorge. It is quite high up (for Australia) – nearly 600 metres above sea level – and I was surprised how many of the small herbaceous plants I saw were cousins to New Zealand plants growing at lower altitudes (and latitudes). 

 A view of Molonglo Gorge

These included the Wahlenbergia genus (one species of which is named the Australian bluebell and another the NZ bluebell, and they are indeed in the the same family – Campanulaceae – as the European bluebells, although their blue flowers are much more open and not bell-shaped), Dianella, Helichrysum, Craspedia, Mazus, Pratia and Cotula.

 The Australian Bugle, 

Ajuga australis.

 An Australian hebe - no idea 

which one - please help!

 A manuka or Leptospermum

- possibly grandiflorum -

but I'm happy to corrected on that.

 A Dianella or flax lily -

probably D. revoluta

Flowering shrubs with NZ relations included Hebe and Leptospermum (the manuka genus). I also saw a wattle which displayed a habit which quite a few New Zealand shrubs have – radically different juvenile and adult foliage. 

A red-stemmed wattle 

displaying juvenile and 

mature foliage.

 Hibiscus trionum

Wandering near the coast at Thirroul on December 9^th I saw Hibiscus trionum growing wild at the beach, as it does in northern New Zealand. I always thought this was New Zealand's native hibiscus, so was surprised to see it there, but with a little research when I got home I discovered that the experts now think it is not native at all, although how it got to Aotearoa is unclear. As it is found in Europe, its Australian lineage may also be doubtful. A more authentically Down Under seaside plant is what is known as New Zealand spinach here and Warrigal Greens there. Either way its scientific name is Tetragonia tetragonioides and it makes good eating. 

NZ Spinach or 

Warrigal Greens

My coastal wildflower walk was crowned by finding a tall ground orchid flowering freely across a hill of spoil covering a long-abandoned mine site. The bush had grown back, and so had these beautiful little freckled flowers. New Zealand has ground orchids too, which grow in some challenging alpine places, but they are very tiny and obscure compared to the Hyacinth Orchid.

Dipodium punctatum, 

the Hyacinth Orchid.

The Eco Gardener in Oz

No space is wasted in this inner city Melbourne front garden.

Crops growing in the garden include tomatoes, beetroot, spring onions and herbs.









I went to Melbourne on Tuesday to catch up with friends I had not seen for ages before going on to Canberra for the Agri-Food Research Network conference which starts next Monday. In the inner city Melbourne suburb of Clifton Hill, just down the road from my friend Gitanjali's place, I found this well-planted little front garden which was looking very healthy and promising. Most houses in this part of town have very little land front or back, and as the front faces a busy road and is not suitable for relaxation - why not make it productive? This was not the only front garden I saw in the area which had some food plants growing. I can't say how recent this development is, or if it represents a major trend, but at least some Melburnians are now rejecting the 'ornamental front/useful back' approach to gardening which has been dominant in both New Zealand and Australia for decades.

Community gardening is a trend which has certainly grown rapidly in both countries in the past decade, wherever suitable sites can be found. I visited the Railway Park community garden in Queanbeyan this morning, and enjoyed a delicious orange and poppy seed muffin baked by my gardening friend Katrina for morning tea for her fellow gardeners, and for the expert on water-saving techniques who came to lead a workshop in the garden. The vacant land beside railway lines has been used for allotment style gardening in Northern Europe for over a century, and it is good to see this resource being utilised Down Under.

Four scenes from the Railway Park Community Garden.

Quake weed - Ranunculus sceleratus

The celery-leaved buttercup, Ranunculus sceleratus, on a quake site on 

Colombo St, Beckenham, Christchurch

When I was shopping at Opawaho Organics in Beckenham two weeks ago the proprietor Susan Turnbull mentioned that a weed she had never seen before had sprung up on the site of the row of old shops which had been demolished following the damage they suffered in the February 22 earthquake. Presumably the seed had been lying dormant under the buildings all those years.

She took me over the road so that I could see for myself, and it was one I had never seen before either. Susan had researched it and found it was the celery-leaved buttercup, Ranunculus sceleratus.

R. sceleratus is one of the more poisonous plants of North America and Eurasia, causing blisters is applied to the skin and inflammation of the tongue if chewed fresh. It does have some traditional medicinal uses in Europe and in America it was used as an arrow-tip poison.

I stopped to look at a quake site some 2 km away from Beckenham and saw the weed growing there as well. If anyone reading this lives in Christchurch and has or knows children who might be playing on quake sites, please warn them not to touch this weed.

Spring says forget me not

 The Chatham Islands forget-me-not surrounded by 

self-sown blue and white field forget-me-nots.

I was weeding the flowerbeds yesterday, and the sticky seed capsules of the common field forget-me-not, Mysotis arvensis, kept attaching themselves to the backs of my gardening gloves and the tail of my T-shirt. I am very partial to forget-me-nots because they make a very pretty groundcover in spring, one which does not need to be planted as they sow themselves freely. If they sow themselves where they are not wanted they are very easily weeded out, even when fully grown. The seeding plants can then be left to rot down wherever you want forget-me-nots next year. If only all plants were so obliging!

The standard forget-me-not colour of light blue blends with everything, and the white version makes a lovely frothy neutral base from which bright daffodils or tulips can emerge. Myosotis species belong to the Boraginaceae family, which has lots of other lovely forget-me-not like flowers, including the perennials Brunnera macrophylla (aka Siberian bugloss) and Omphalodes cappadocica (aka navel wort or navel seed). These dainty plants are happy in semi-shade (under deciduous trees is good). Both like a reasonably moist soil, but Omphalodes can tolerate more dryness than Brunnera. In favourable conditions they will naturalise and spread by themselves. Gardeners can help this happen by dividing the clumping plants and replanting the divisions where required.

Omphalodes cappadocica

'Starry Eyes'

 Brunnera macrophylla

'Jack Frost', and lily-of-the-valley.

These northern hemisphere forget-me-nots are lovely but modest plants, whereas the Chatham Island forget-me-not, Myosotidium hortensia, is a big, bold plant of an intense blue which adds some drama to the spring garden. It likes a mild, moist climate. It is found near the beach in nature, and loves seaweed-based fertilisers. It has big, shiny leaves, which look attractive when the plant is not flowering. I think a combination of this forget-me-not and the field forget-me-nots is a winner – but you look at the picture above and be the judge.

Spring Garden Workshop in the Eco Garden November 19

 

The 'classroom' and 'dining room' for the Spring Garden Workshop, in October.

From 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. on Saturday November 19 I will be running my first ever garden workshop in the Eco Garden. As it is spring time the emphasis will be on successful seed raising and caring for young plants, but there will also be lots of time for learning by looking at what I am growing, and asking questions about it.

After three hours of experiential learning we will consolidate what has been learned over an organic vegetarian lunch. All for only $30! For more details on the workshop go to the Spring Garden Workshop page here - and please spread the word to your Canterbury friends who might be interested.

Tomato planting time

An Orange Cherry tomato plant, grown from seed sown on 12 August, and already flowering and busting to be planted out on October 26.

My patch of mostly Roma tomatoes, grown from seed sown on August 13 and planted out on October 29.

Have you planted your tomato plants yet? Labour Weekend/late October is the traditonal time for putting frost-sensitive veges into the open ground in New Zealand, but although I had my home-grown plants ready to go in on Labour Day I delayed planting until after the big southerly blow we had on October 25. Cold winds aren't as bad as frost for tomatoes, but they sure don't get them off to a good start.

Tomatoes are no longer considered exotic plants in New Zealand, so it is interesting to look at their remarkable back history, which starts with the wild ancestors on the west coast of South America, moves on to breeding up to the modern form in Mexico, and from there to the rest of the world from the sixteenth century onwards.

With tomatoes now available all year round in supermarkets, why bother growing your own? There are lots of reasons, but the three that make most sense to me are that the supermarket ones are flavourless (a result of being bred for colour and size, not flavour, and then picked too soon), they are covered in pesticides (especially the imported ones), and they are boring to look at, being all a uniform size and red.

Over the years I have grown green, yellow, pink, orange, purple and striped tomatoes, as well as red ones. I have grown tomatoes shaped like pears, cherries, ribbed pumpkins, and cylinders. Every year I try to grow one or two new varieties, to see if they do better for me than previous choices. I am easily seduced by names like Black from Tula, Brandywine Pink, Cherokee Purple, Riesentraube, San Marzano and Tigerella. This year I am trialling Scotland Yellow and Orange Cherry. I have by no means exhausted the huge variety of this wonderful plant, and every year I have to sit on my hands rather than order too many packets of seed, because I can't grow them all.

I grow most of my tomatoes in the open ground, but I have had a 'Sweet 100' and 'Kakanui Girl' in planter bags in the glasshouse since late August. They are flowering well already, and we will be eating fresh tomatoes from them in November. With any luck the cherry tomatoes in the open ground will be pickable in December, while the main crop will start in January and go through to March. Most of my open ground tomatoes are the Italian bottling and paste varieties Roma and San Marzano, as I like to bottle my own tomato puree with herbs for use in cooking the rest of the year.

Growing tomatoes is pretty easy. They dislike heavy, soggy soils and moisture on their foliage generally, so plant them in a well-drained, sunny spot and water their root area, not their leaves. Each one needs a tall stout stake or other form of support, and you need to keep tying up the plant and pinching out the laterals (those little leaves between a big leaf and the main steam, which will make another stalk if you let them) as often as needed. Seaweed-based fertilisers and any others rich in potassium are good once fruit starts to set, but tomatoes do not need heavy feeding.

Eating everything from the garden - a recipe

 Vegetable Slice with silverbeet, asparagus, leek and onion

In spring time there are often only small amounts of any particular vegetable in the garden – not enough to create a whole dish from any one of them. So recipes that use a variable medley of whatever is available are great to have. I went hunting for such a recipe when I surveyed my vege options last night – a leek, some silverbeet, a few spears of asparagus, an onion – and decided on a vegetable slice.

I adapted a recipe from the New Zealand Vegetable Book (published by Horticulture New Zealand) so that it was totally vegetarian, and had herbs as well as veges. It was very quick to make, from start to finish about 45 minutes. It is baked in the oven, so to make good use of the oven I roasted potatoes with rosemary to go with it, and we also had a salad of rocket and curly endive (from the garden) enlived with orange and avocado slices. The recipe made enough for dinner for two, plus leftovers for lunch today. It is equally nice hot, warm or cold, and would be a great picnic dish.

VEGETABLE SLICE

Ingredients

3 C vegetables, grated or finely chopped -

1 coarsely grated onion

plus any of

grated carrot, courgette, pumpkin

and/or

lightly-steamed asparagus, green beans, leeks, silverbeet, broccoli florets

and/or

lightly-fried mushrooms, courgette, capsicum

and/or

finely chopped tomato, capsicum

1 C grated cheese (tasty cheddar)

4 eggs

¾ C milk

1 t salt

freshly ground black pepper

fresh chopped herbs to taste e.g. parsley, sage, thyme, oregano

½ C flour

½ t baking powder

Method

Heat the oven to 200 degrees C.

Grease a large baking dish well.

Put the vegetables and cheese in the dish, and mix them together.

Whisk the eggs and milk together in a large bowl.

Add the salt, pepper and herbs.

Sift in the flour and baking powder, and whisk the mixture well, so there are no lumps.

Pour the mixture over the vegetables and smooth.

Bake for 30-35 minutes (until golden brown).

Serve hot or cold.

A successful crop cover experiment

The small potato plants in the front of the picture were covered with straw; the much larger ones at the back  (planted on the same day) were covered with microclima cloth.

The 'spud gap' has opened up in the Eco Garden (and kitchen). We ran out of home-grown spuds about a month ago, while in the ground the two rows of 'Liseta' potatoes I planted on 29 August have only been up for three weeks. In one row the plants are almost twice as large as in the other one, and the difference is that they were covered with microclima cloth from the day they were planted until the leaves started pushing against the cloth. The other row was covered with straw. When I pulled back the straw I found that soil in that row was wetter – and cooler. I removed the microclima cloth ten days ago, and although the weather since then has not been very warm, the bare soil around these spuds was much warmer than the soil under straw. The cloth-covered spuds also came up over a week earlier than the straw-covered ones, and have definitely got a head start.
 
The same goes for carrot seeds sown in a three-covers experiment. The ones covered with microclima got their first true leaves a week before those without any cover at all. The same goes for the straw-covered row. Even worse, the seed leaves there were long, pale and skinny (etiolated I believe is the technical term) because of being forced to come up through the straw.  So I have now proven for myself two things I had to take on trust before. Firstly, microclima cloth is worth the expense (and it is not that expensive) in terms of giving open ground plants a head start. We will be eating baby new potatoes at least a week earlier than we would have otherwise. Secondly, what I have read about not mulching the ground in spring because it keeps it cooler is true. So I'll be saving the straw mulch for summer time, when I want the ground to be wetter, and not too hot.

The carrot seedlings in these rows are a bit too small to photograph yet, but trust me - the ones under the cloth (draped behind) got their true leaves a week earlier than the ones sown in bare soil (in the front).

Kakabeak – the parrot plant of springtime

 The distinctive parrot beak flower of the kakabeak

The kowhai ngutu-kaka or kakabeak (Clianthus puniceus) is one of New Zealand's brightest native flowers. A bush covered in flowers, as mine is at this time of year, really glows. (It also buzzes with bee visitors). Like the pohutukawa the kakabeak has bright red flowers and is native only to the northern parts of New Zealand, but there the similarities end. The kakabeak can tolerate much colder weather than the pohutakawa. One of the few wild populations left in New Zealand is on the hills above Lake Waikaremoana, where it snows most winters.

Despite being cold-hardy and able to grow in infertile soils the kakabeak is now almost extinct in the wild. This is because it is very palatable to browsing animals, which had almost cleaned it out by the end of the nineteenth century. Luckily, although the plant itself is shortlived (15-20 years), its seeds are very long lived. Even more luckily, it is such an attractive plant that humans have been propagating it and planting it near their houses for at least three centuries, if not longer.

As this plant is endemic to New Zealand it would be sad to see it die out in the wild. The Department of Conservation therefore has a programme of protecting the few known sites where there are good wild populations left by fencing them off. (Find out all about this and more about the kakabeak on DoC's webpage on the plant.)

The kakabeak, as its name suggests, has a flower shaped like the beak of one of our native parrots, the kaka. It is a member of the legume or pea family, and it has a close cousin in the floral emblem of South Australia, Sturt's Desert Pea, which looks just like a kakabeak except for a little black 'cap' on top of the red beak. The kakabeak bush in my garden, which has been there about ten years, is now well over two metres tall and the same wide. It starts flowering in August, keeps it up for at least two months, and draws lots of compliments from visitors impressed at its vigour and its gorgeous red flowers. There are also white and pink versions of the kakabeak, which are equally lovely. There are very few native plants which are more easily or better conserved in the home garden than the wild – how fortunate for us as well as the kakabeak that it fits this bill.

 Kakabeak bush in flower in the Eco Garden

Making soil

 The blue lupin green manure crop just before I pulled it out - almost too pretty to pull.

The pile of twitch covered with weedmat for a year turned into good soil plus dry roots.

Around this time last year I laboriously extended the vege garden by another few square metres, hauling out twitch and removing hundreds of stones, large and small. Wilby the terrieriste supervised me. He especially enjoyed snoozing on top of the big pile of soft, warm twitch that I dug out. But I spoiled his bed when I covered the pile with sheets of weed-mat, weighted down with rocks and boards.

I planted corn and pumpkins in the cleared patch in October, and while they grew the twitch started rotting down under its cover. After harvesting the vegetables (which are greedy feeders) in March I sowed blue lupins as a green manure crop where they had been. Two weeks ago I pulled up the lupins, and I also took the plastic off the twitch. Underneath I found a mixture of old dry dead roots and good new soil, made from the rotted leaves of the twitch and the soil left on its roots when it was pulled out. I raked away the old roots and put them in the compost heap (which was badly in need of carbon, so that was good).

As soon as time allows I will give the new patch of garden soil that formed under the twitch pile its first digging over (which will be easy with no twitch to pull out). Meanwhile I have broken the lupin plants up a bit, put them back on the soil they came from, and covered them loosely with some overly-wet and nitrogenous compost (the remains of a cold winter heap). The worms will now get to work on this lovely tucker, and by the time I am ready to plant main crop potatoes at the end of October there will be some enriched soil to do it in.

Improving the soil and making more of it is the foundation of eco-gardening. It's not that difficult since nature does most of the work. All the gardener does is nudge things along faster than they would otherwise go in the process of soil formation, by growing green manure crops and adding suitable materials from other sources. Soil is basically Minerals (rock particles which can be as coarse as sand or as fine as clay) plus dead Animals and Vegetables (once living things made up mainly of nitrogen and carbon which are processed by organisms living in the soil into humus or fine organic matter). We can't make more minerals for our soils and in any case we don't need to – the humus is the good stuff for making more plants grow, and that we can make without much trouble. 

 The broken-up lupins spread on the ground, with the first load of compost on top of them.

 Two weeks later the lupins are starting to rot down, and I have sowed beans in the fine soil created by previous soil-making efforts. The boards are to for standing on when working the beds, to prevent compaction of the soft, airy soil around the roots of growing plants.

A soil rich in humus will also be full of earthworms. It will be fine, loose and soft, and can usually be made ready for the next crop just by forking it over to remove weeds - no other digging required. It feels good that parts of my garden are already this in this satisfactory state, and the rest is on the way. It is well worth the initial effort I put in, and I can't thank the worms enough for their contribution.

Kate Sheppard in September Snow

 'Kate Sheppard' camellias in a vase of 'September Snow' rhododendron flowers

Today is Women's Suffrage Day. It's 118 years since New Zealand women won the right to vote in national elections – the first women in the world to gain this right. The floral emblem of the New Zealand suffrage movement is the white camellia. September is peak camellia time and white camellias were the choice of the suffragists who went to Parliament to give a floral thank you to the MPs who voted for female suffrage. 

 'Kate Sheppard' close up

One hundred years later a white camellia bush was bred especially for the Suffrage Centennial (can anyone tell me who bred it?), and named Kate Sheppard after the Christchurch feminist who was a prominent leader of the suffrage movement. I bought a 'Kate Sheppard' camellia bush in 1993, planted it first in my Diamond Harbour garden, and then moved it to Port Levy in 2002. She didn't seem to mind the move. She starts blooming in early September, and is in full flush by Suffrage Day. 

 Rhododendron 'September Snow' and a white spiraea bush in the Eco Garden

Another white flower bred in New Zealand which is out right now is Rhododendron `September Snow'. According to a curator at the Dunedin Botanic Gardens it was bred by a local garden enthusiast, Bruce Campbell, who crossed R. leucaspis with R. edgeworthii. It is an attractive small bush, and the flowers have a delicious nutmeg scent.

Both in the garden and in the vase, these are gorgeous flowers from shapely shrubs, and well worth a place in the Kiwi spring garden.

Happy Birthday Blog Cake

Banks Peninsula Walnut Cake with birthday candle

This blog was one year old yesterday, so I baked it a cake - which just happens to be one of the favourites of the Eco Forester. Its main ingredient is walnuts which come from our huge old tree, although the flavour is surely enhanced by the rum, raisins, treacle and the pinch of cloves which are also in it. The original recipe was one created by Lois Daish for a woman from Wairewa (aka Little River) on Banks Peninsula, just over the (big) hill from me, so it seems appropriate to call my slightly modified version Banks Peninsula Walnut Cake.

I wish I could share a slice with all of the thousands of people who have looked at The Eco Gardener in the past year (there have been 9,320 page views to date) but it obviously wouldn't stretch that far. Nor would I be able to get it to the nine countries (after NZ) which feature in my top ten readers' list over the past year, which in the order from most to least number of page views goes the USA, Australia, the UK, Canada, Germany, India, Russia, Malaysia, the Netherlands.

I am mystified and curious about what Malaysians and Indians find of interest in my blog (although I suspect that the latter was mainly my small friends the Mathias twins following the Adventures of Wilby from their school in Mussoorie). I am equally mystified about why the most popular post of the year (with 60 more views than the next most popular) was the one on gherkins. The # 2 slot was taken by Zucchini Relish, so maybe there is a thirst for knowledge on what to do with cucurbits out there. But since #3 was the post on Roasted Blackboy Peach Chutney, maybe it is preserves that are of interest.

It's all a mystery to me, but it's not at all mysterious why lots of people, all over the world, enjoy home gardening and home-made food as much as I do. So, dear readers - if I can't give you a slice of cake, at least I can give you the whole recipe. Enjoy!

BANKS PENINSULA WALNUT CAKE

Ingredients

1 ½ C walnuts, roughly chopped

200 g butter

100g brown sugar

2 T treacle

2 large eggs

150 g flour

1 t baking powder

pinch baking soda

pinch ground cloves

3 T milk

3 T dark rum

½ C raisins

Method

Grease and flour a 20 cm round cake baking tin.

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees C.

Cream the butter, sugar and treacle.

Add the eggs one at a time, beating in well.

Sift in the dry ingredients one third at a time, alternating with adding the milk and the rum.

Add the walnuts and raisins and mix well.

Bake for c. 50 minutes. 

This cake is fine served plain, or dusted with icing sugar, or (as in the picture) iced with lemon butter icing and decorated with walnut halves.

Where's Wilby?

Wilby looks across the Tank Farm towards Diamond Harbour on 

February 18, 2011. It's still too dangerous to be on that hill now.

I visit my Border Terrier friend Wilby in Lyttelton as often as I can, and we take strolls together around what is left of the town. We no longer go up the Stan Helms track, which is closed for fear of falling boulders, but stick to the lower streets where things are safer, if not exactly normal. As we were out walking last Friday afternoon we reminisced about his adventures this time last year, when he was staying with me and the first Big Shaking occurred. I will let him go on with the story...

Adventures of Wilby, Terrieriste -  Part the Sixteenth

Is it really a year since I was sent into exile? The Eco Gardener tells me so, and apparently has some arcane way of knowing, so I will take her word for it. I seem to recall that I thought things would be very dull in the country, for an urban creature like myself, and yet of course they were not.

Uncomfortable, yes – dull, no. I would have much preferred to have been snoozing on the end of the Master of Good Hope's bed in the early morning of September 4 one year ago rather than in that drafty shed in the garden, exposed to a hail of small plastic pots when the floor began rumbling and shaking.

Luckily that was the worst of it for me, and has been so far, although I shiver when I think of the dangerous places I have been since, such as the higher tracks above Lyttelton. I am also amazed every time I take a walk and see how much damage has been done quite close to home.

I am glad I was not sunning myself on this neighbourhood verandah when the shaking started on February 22nd.

There are a great many holes in the pavements these days - I have to proceed carefully.

I am keen to go back to the Eco Garden, and see how it is growing, but it seems there is a problem. My rightful place there has been taken for the nonce by one of those unspeakable creatures which some humans unaccountably favour above decent canines. I am told that she is a refugee from Lyttelton, and has required a lot of care, and must not leave the Eco Garden until her regular home is ready for her again. To which I say – pshaw! 

 Oh happy days (and nights) spent on the hearth rug.

 The usurper Jezebella hogs the hearth. What a smug looking beast!

Apparently she caught a mouse and a rat, and was praised for it. Beginners luck, I say. Despite my long vigils by the compost heap I was unable to succeed at rodent hunting, and was mocked for it. Nevertheless, I long to go back and smell the flowers again, and to take the Eco Forester for a walk up the road. If only the place would stop shaking...