Prickly plant passion
January 20, 2012
PASSIONATE PAIR: Jurgen and Rosi Lenz in their cacti and succulent filled backyard where exuberant colour, limitless texture and wonderful shapes abound.
By GRANT MAYNARD
I CAN’T recall ever having met two more passionate people.
Jurgen and Rosi Lenz’s admiration for cacti, and succulents too for that matter, would be hard to better… and so too would be their passion for life.
Anyone who has attended Mildura’s flourishing Farmer’s Market will probably know them – they’re the accented couple with an enthusiasm for cacti that knows no bounds.
It is a love affair that started in their homeland as youngsters, and it has followed them around the globe and into their retirement.
So, how does a German couple end up in Australia, let alone Mildura?
“We were backpacking around Asia – India, Nepal, Tibet, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines in 1987/88,” Jurgen explains.
“And we ended up in Australia.
“We travelled around much of the country in a little Holden Gemini, and had a wonderful time.”
One of the places they visited was Robinvale.
“We got ‘stuck’ there for four months, picking grapes and onions, and packing carrots,” the couple recalls.
“We just fell in love with Australia.
“It was on our way home to Germany, via Hong Kong, that we realised we were homesick for Australia, and particularly Robinvale.”
So smitten were they that as soon as the Lenz’s got home, they applied to migrate to Australia. That process took 18 months but at last, in January 1991, they migrated to a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains.
Their feet had hardly touched the ground after arriving in Melbourne when they travelled to Robinvale and purchased a fruit block growing a mixture of dried and tablegrapes.
They worked that block until July 2009, opting during that time to develop it solely as a tablegrape enterprise before selling up and retiring to Mildura.
OK, so why succulents and cacti?
“Our love for cacti and succulent plants started in our childhood back in Germany,” the couple said.
“Every German household has a cactus or two on the window sill, despite the fact that the plants are native to the Americas.”
Indicative of that love is the fact that soon after arriving in Robinvale, the couple pulled out all the roses that surrounded their new home and replaced them many times over with their beloved cacti… and some succulents too.
“The climate in this part of the world is ideal because these plants survive on very little rain,” the pair said.
Many cacti species do not like frost, but the Lenzs’ were able to keep those susceptible to the cold somewhat protected and the plants flourished.
Other cacti, they informed me, don’t mind the cold, and actually need a good dose to flower. They are almost without exception the ones found at higher altitudes.
They are a mine of cacti lore and their passion is palpable.
After retiring to Mildura – there is no better place in the country they say – the couple had to start their cacti and succulent garden all over again… but they were well prepared.
Knowing that they were on the move, Jurgen and Rosi had potted many young specimens of their favourites, ready for the move to Mildura.
It is something they are used to.
“Rosi re-pots the young plants every year,” Jurgen says. “She has the patience for it.”
Another example of that patience become obvious when Rosi presented me with a wonderful little upright cactus, in a small pot, and no larger than my thumb.
“This one’s 15 years old,” she told me with an obvious fondness that reminds me of a mother and her child.
As I look around the garden, mentally counting the hundreds, no thousands, of young cacti in a range of pot sizes, I realise just what an enormous undertaking repotting all those plants would be.
Rosi shrugs it off. It is something that has to be done, she informs me, and retirement has gifted them with more time to indulge their passion.
They tell me that when they arrived in Mildura about three years ago, the city was still firmly in the grip of the decade-plus drought, and water was scarce.
The couple dumped truckloads of red loam on top of the dead lawn in their front and back yards, and set to planting the 700 plants they had transported from Robinvale.
“They were all different cacti and succulents…many of them the ones we had had growing on the block at Robinvale,” Rosi said.
“Plus about 2000 plants in pots,” Jurgen adds.
“Rosi has a green thumb and all the seeds she put in the ground do usually very well.
“I am more the lazy type, growing plants from cuttings,” he adds.
Every spring Rosi spends about six weeks repotting the plants that have outgrown the pot they have called home for the past 12 months.
The carefully constructed racks that house their potted specimens are literally groaning under the weight of hundreds of pots. Pots that come in a range of sizes, and feature an even greater range of cacti.
Then there is their carefully planned and attended garden beds, a riot of shapes and textures, and colours too as the summer flowering species put on a show.
The beds are heavily mulched with stone and watered, sparingly, by hidden drip irrigation.
To describe the different cacti shapes, their textures and their often spikey thorns would take a book. Suffice to say, if you can imagine a shape, or a texture, there is probably a cacti that exhibits those characteristics.
And if it is not a cactus, then the Lenz’s growing collection of succulents will fill in any gaps.
Jurgen and Rosi are keen members of the South Australian Cactus and Succulent Society, based in Adelaide, where they have won quite a few prizes with their plants over the years at the society’s annual show.
“Every year we travel to cacti and succulent conventions around the country and while we are there we are always on the look out for new, and unusual plants, Jurgen said.
Rosi has recently started to concentrate on growing Australian succulents. A range of plants she describes as “very exciting,” but also very frustrating.
They are exceptionally hard to propagate, and she is on a steep, but ultimately satisfying, learning curve.
Meanwhile, Jurgen has a special interest in succulent Bonsais and he has a growing collection of nice specimens.
While many of the cacti found in the Lenz garden are widely cultivated, the couple has quite a few rare specimens and even one that Jurgen bred, along with a lot of help Rosi adds, from Mother Nature.
“I have called it Himalayan Sunrise,” Jurgen tells me.
He says the pink exhibited in the predominantly white flowers just before they open reminds him of the colour of a Himalayan sunrise, something he witnessed while hiking in those mountains.
The pink fades as the flower opens fully to pure white, the colour of Himalayan snow.
The couple has an extensive library to guide their propagating and growing efforts, and both are keen photographers too, using that skill to catalogue their extensive collection… from a seedling or cutting right through to flowering.
That is a process that often requires a lot of patience. By and large, cacti are slow growers and many of them do not flower annual like other plants, some taking years to reach sufficient maturity.
They tell me that one of their most prized specimens took years to grow, then sent up a stalk more than five metres tall before it flowered. The plant dies soon after, a characteristic of the species, but not before ‘giving birth’ to a clutch of young plants at its base.
Now the Lenzs must wait for the process to repeat itself. That could take years, but they are used to that! They will wait patiently while enjoying the blooms, large and small, of the hundreds of other varieties they have growing.
FOOTNOTE: Jurgen and Rosi are regulars at the fortnightly Saturday Farmers’ Market on Mildura’s riverfront and are very happy to share their experiences about any aspect of their chosen hobby… or is that obsession? with the public.
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