Room with a view - of a Cabbage Tree
As I write this blog I have a new view. A slight shuffling of rooms means my desk now looks directly at a New Zealand Cabbage tree. However a confession - I wouldn’t have been able to write that sentence a couple of years ago.
We moved to this house almost 30 years ago and there are photographs of a spindly tree at the end of the small garden. It’s maybe 6 or 7 feet tall. If I tell you that my desk is in a room 3 floors up and the top of the tree is now in my direct eyeline, you’ll understand that it has grown… a lot.
New Zealand cabbage trees at the end of my garden and by the roadside in New Zealand
I think I just took this tree for granted as something someone else had once planted in the garden, part of design concept perhaps lost over time. That was until we went to New Zealand a couple of years ago and suddenly I was seeing these trees everywhere. We stopped the car so I could get out and take this photograph of one just on the roadside. There is something very exciting about seeing a plant in its native setting, realising that what is described here in the UK as ‘architectural, low maintenance, coastal’ is just part of New Zealand’s native flora and fauna, like brits seeing an oak tree in a forest.
That’s when I learned this name but why is it called a cabbage tree? I have looked at a few explanations but the most detailed is this. We know from our Monkey Puzzle tree experience (and thank goodness the previous owner did not plant one of those at the end of the garden) that names and facts can get confused over time. However in short it appears that sailors and merchant seaman called all palm trees cabbage trees and the term stuck. There is also the Maori name Ti Kouta and the Latin name Cordyline australis. Apparently the roots, steamed in a hangi earth oven, were a traditional Maori food, though the fleshy part of the leaves were also eaten by Maori and early explorers, as a kind of vegetable.
Currently my Cabbage tree has large panicles of apparently fragrant cream flowers. I say apparently because this tree is now so tall that there is no way I can verify for you that the flowers are fragrant! However I can verify that they are loved by birds. This past week, I’ve been watching plump pigeons landing and swaying precariously on the panicles of flowers only to be chased off by other plump pigeons. It is also beloved by the blue tits and robins.
The interesting thing is, and bear with me because there is a link to the new episode of the podcast which will come out on Tuesday; if you stand in the garden you don’t see any of this. All you really see is a tree trunk. But 3 floors up there is a totally different perspective, a whole other world of activity going on.
This month in the podcast we are talking about urban sky gardens or highlines, built on abandoned train lines and viaducts, taking us up in the air, above the city so we can get a whole new perspective. The first episode takes us to the Castlefield Viaduct in Manchester. The second will reveal the route of a planned Highline in London. Researching and making the episodes, I’ve realised how much I love the new perspective offered by these sky gardens. I hope you will enjoy the episodes.
Have a lovely weekend.
Sally
ps I did hear a lovely Monkey Puzzle story today. A gardener, who as a student, acquired from her agricultural college a small Monkey Puzzle tree which she transported home on her moped! She gave the small tree, still in a pot, to her parents as a gift. Her father nutured it in the pot for a couple of years and then they planted it right in the middle of their garden. It is now 20 feet tall and she described it as the perfect Monkey Puzzle shape - retaining all its lower branches….a Dropmore in the making.