Stuff Magazines

VANCE HOOPER’S MAGNOLIAS

– Chronicling a Taranaki plant breeder’s lifelong passion and dedication.

STORY: VIRGINIA WINDER • PHOTOS: DEREK HUGHES • PORTRAIT: SALLY TAGG

In midwinter, Magnolia Grove at Waitara begins to come alive with the namesake tree. Here, jigsaw puzzles, cold calculations and bull’s eyes are all part of Vance Hooper’s magnolia breeding story. He also talks of light therapy. “Since about 1980, magnolias have always captured my attention,” he says. “If you look around the garden, there are spots of colour popping up everywhere. There’s something deep in the psyche, it’s like light therapy, they provide a spark in a sterile time of year.”

In 2005, he and wife Kathryn started with a blank slate. They moved into the 1965 farm cottage on Mahoetahi Road and began designing and developing a garden good enough to show.

The first time they opened the garden was in 2009 for the Waitara Garden Trail and the following spring joined the annual celebration now known as the Centuria Taranaki Garden Festival.

The garden, measuring 8000 square metres, has been in the spring festival ever since and will be open for this year’s event, on from October 28 to November 6.

Vance started seriously breeding magnolias in 1987, while working at Taranaki plant company Duncan & Davies (now closed down).

In those early days, they used the layering method of propagating, because some magnolias would not grow from cuttings.

For layering, a grower would pull down a tree branch, lay it on the ground, pin it down and add compost to make fluffy soil filled with beneficial fungi and micro-flora. Rooting hormone was also used. “In the afternoon they would start creaking if the sap was moving and some would break. It’s like the difference between an old carrot and a new carrot – the fresh carrot will snap.”

Another method was aerial layering, which involved tying a plastic bag around a stem. “Which is easier if you get your timing right.”

But Vance believes field budding is the best option. “You cut one bud off a bud rod and put it on stock. It’s the quickest technique to bud stuff up.”

From one tree, he would take 10 buds to grow 10 trees, and the following year he’d take 10 buds off each new tree to grow a further 100 trees.

Then comes patience to see if those propagated plants turn out to be winners. “It takes five years to see how good a hybrid is.”

Vance likens magnolia breeding to a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, with a bit added here and a bit there.

“I was lucky enough to start breeding when you could lay out pieces and they were distinctive parts of the puzzle. Then you fill in the gaps.”

Some have been filled by New Zealand breeders and some by overseas breeders. “Now, a lot of the gaps are filled in.”

Vance says to be part of the puzzle picture, a magnolia must be outstanding.

Now, we’re on to bull’s eyes.

Looking at his top hybrids, Vance begins with Magnolia ‘Old Port’ (not to be confused with a port wine magnolia). “I can remember when Old Port’s buds started opening, they took ages, but I knew it was going to be good because of the rich, red wine colour.”

‘Old Port’ grows to about 3.5m in 10 years. “Right from the start I have been looking to grow smaller garden plants because that’s all the average gardener has space for.”

Magnolia ‘Margaret Helen’ is named after Vance’s mother, and grows 5 to 6m in 10 years. It has beautiful bright pink blooms and not surprisingly, “That’s really caught on well in the UK,” he says.

This year, Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society has chosen ‘Margaret Helen’ for a first-class award, and in 2020, Magnolia ‘Genie’ won a KVBC Gold Medal Award from the Netherlands.

Named for its magical qualities, ‘Genie’ has been a wish come true for Vance. “As soon as it opened its first flowers, I started grafting it.”

That was in 2001, and the first release was in 2006, which meant it only had a five-year turn around.

The columnar, rounded tree grows up to 4m in 10 years and produces an abundance of rich red cup-and-saucershaped blooms. “It’s not huge, but as a bang for your buck you will get flowers for two to three months (a year) and the colour is really intense and very consistent.”

In the beginning, Vance wasn’t quite so sure about the bestseller, which flowers twice a year. “I remember looking at it and it was a really intense colour but the first couple of flowers were lacking texture somehow. That’s improved over the years.”

It has enjoyed tremendous commercial success and in Vance’s mind, 10 to 15 years down the track, the rating for ‘Genie’ is still peaking. “It’s not the perfect plant, but still, she really, really does perform. You’ve got to do something really bad to the tree for it to disappoint you.” In 2021, about 60,000 ‘Genie’ plants were sold in Europe. Once, he had a woman phone from Edinburgh wondering what had happened to her ‘Genie’. “It took some time to work out the snails had eaten all the foliage. She didn’t realise she was on an international phone call,” he laughs. “It was quite funny.”

Snails can also live in magnolia flowers during the spring and the foliage in summer. “Magnolias have the same problems or benefits the world over.”

Another enchanting star is Magnolia ‘Summer Magic’, which produces bright, purplish pink flowers on an elegant, upright tree with willowy foliage of up to 4m in height and 1.5m wide in 10 years.

“The flowers show off magically in summer,” Vance says. The magnolia also puts on a good show in winter.

He sent a photo of ‘Summer Magic’ to a woman in China, who wondered if it was a michelia. “They have red michelias to match our red magnolias.”

The 6m-tall Magnolia ‘Ice Queen’, highly rated by Vance, produces pure white, cup and saucer-shaped flowers.

It was hybridised in 2006, planted out in 2008, flowered in 2013 and Vance started propagating it in 2014. “Five years down the track it was starting to show itself as a really good garden plant, with (flowers of) perfect form.”

When he did the original cross, only one plant came out anywhere near the target. But that’s all it took. “It’s like getting the bull’s eye when you are aiming with a shotgun.”

CONTENTS

en-nz

2022-08-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://stuffmagazines.pressreader.com/article/282617446494517

Stuff Limited