When Australia-based daughter was home recently she kept commenting on how much colour there was in the garden and on the quantity of flowers.

At this time of the year there are no flowers and there is nothing pretty in Canberra. We take it for granted here and it takes an outside view to make me suddenly take notice afresh.

And the tuis are back. To be honest, it had never occurred to us that they abandoned us for some of the year until we had an ornithologist studying the feeding habits of the native birds last year. Mark was delighted to count no fewer than 90 tuis feeding off the banksias flowers last week. Admittedly we have more than one banksia, but he was pretty pleased to count so many. The early flowering cherries (the campanulatas or Taiwanese cherries) are also alive with tuis and will remain so for some time yet.

The first flowers on Magnolia Vulcan are open and it always looks its best at this early stage when the colour intensity is greatest. I haven’t been in town during the day recently but I would assume that the campbellii magnolias on Powderham St, beside the radio station, are also flowering. (They are – Ed.) These plants are our harbingers of spring.

Some of the delightful little English snowdrops we have in abundance are already past their peak. We have a large patch planted alongside black mondo grass set against a stone wall edging our driveway and it is a planting combination that never fails to please.

Many of the baby daffodils are in flower and these are always a joy. We don’t do much with the big daffies here but we have masses of miniature types. The one and only time the TV programme, Maggie’s Garden Show, filmed here, Ruud Kleinpaaste asked Mark’s father why he liked these little plants. Felix looked at him in surprise and answered simply, “Because they are small.” There spoke the plantsman.

Some of the yellow lachenalias are in bloom. The choice blue varieties flower later (and many are much touchier than their more robust yellow siblings). And the miniature cyclamen continue to flower, particularly coum, which flowers all winter for us.

Hellebores are delightfully understated, easy-care plants that quietly add interest to the midwinter garden. Ever since seeing the darkest of dark orientalis hellebores in England 10 years ago, Mark has been trying to get good dark strains here. He thinks that they prefer colder climates to get the colour intensity but he is well pleased with some of the results he is getting, particularly with plants in his coldest border.

Lifting my eyes up a level, there are vireya rhododendrons in flower. With their unpredictable habits, if you have a wide enough range of these sub tropical rhododendrons you can have flowers 52 weeks of the year. And the camellias are in flower. Petal blight be damned, they are still worth a place in the garden. Despite one bad frost that cut the flowering, the fragrant luculias are continuing to open those buds that escaped the freezing.

Alongside our driveway, I gain a great deal of pleasure from orange yellow combos. A big nandina domestica richmondii is a mass of bright orange berries that are satisfyingly long-lived. An edgeworthia papyrifera (commonly but inaccurately referred to as the yellow daphne) is nearby with yellow pompom flowers on the end of every stem.

The mandarin tree has deep, forest-green leaves contrasting in a most ornamental fashion with an abundance of bright orange fruit (more than we can ever eat). At its feet, a curve of compact orange-toned vireyas repeats the colour, and in the bottom layer, the orange and yellow lachenalias complete the picture.

The daphnes scent the air – both the common odora types and the Himalayan Daphne bholuas. In a large garden you can never have too many of these interspersed with other shrubs. The evergreen azaleas are coming into full flower and even the early michelias are opening.

It used to be the thing to claim that one gardened for form and foliage – flowers are such a transitory thing, darls, whereas the form is there all year. And a green garden is so restful. What a poser position. I can only think of one really good gardener who truly gardens for form and foliage and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that he is colour blind. At the other end of the scale, to garden for flowers alone tends to put you into the realms of annuals, a la the traffic island displays of bedding plants (and I have seen photographs of home gardens that look like those amenity plantings). Most of us love flowers and we garden for form, foliage and flowers, creating both big and little pictures in our gardens.

But not all of us garden for the seasons. Recent New Zealand landscape fashion has often been hellbent on defeating the seasons and creating static, contrived pictures that look the same all year round. So deciduous plants and flowers have no place. I think this is exterior design, not to be confused with gardening. I like the inside of my house to be orderly and static (not that I necessarily achieve this) but in the garden the changes are what interest me more.

One of the joys of the climate in most of New Zealand and on the west coast of the North Island in particular is that we can garden for all seasons, ringing the changes and having seasonal interest and flowering plants all year round.

Abbie and Mark Jury have a garden and nursery at Otaraoa Rd, Tikorangi.