It is satisfying when a plan comes together and this particular border has been giving me pleasure this week. It is very pink and not necessarily a shade of pink that I love but the combination of the piped icing-like kalmia, Flower Carpet roses and pink candlewick flowers of the Justicia carnea  works.

When Mark’s parents built the house in 1950, they set about creating picture views from every window. Over the years, we have had to work hard on this particular view, despite the solid structure of the sunken garden being the central feature. It was once a froth of old roses. Mark’s mother loved old roses but in the time since the area was first planted, the huge rimu trees (Dacrydium cupressinum) along the back have doubled in size, their roots have reached out a similar distance and other trees have grown, meaning the area is no longer open and sunny.

Over the last 30 years, we have made many changes, including removing all the struggling borders bar one and removing all the old roses, bar one. I have wondered about removing this last side border because I don’t enjoy maintaining it and that is usually an indication that something is wrong with it. But it is the view from our sitting room (more like a ‘front parlour’ of old except it is not at the front but it is a room we use when we have guests, rather than every day). And, from upstairs, it is the view from our second daughter’s bedroom (no matter that she left home more than two decades ago – our children still have their own rooms here). As I go in each fine morning to open windows and again late afternoon to close them, I look out the windows. This week, I decided it could definitely stay because every time I looked, the combinations delighted me.

We only have a couple of kalmias in the garden and every year, their blooms are a fresh surprise. They look remarkably like skilled cake decorations from piped icing.

When it comes to roses, I tried hard to find roses that would grow in our climate without spraying. Our high humidity and sheltered conditions are difficult when it comes to roses and I expect more from a plant than just beautiful blooms. We have tucked a few into the Iolanthe Garden where the froth and volume of perennials masks their diseased foliage and defoliated branches. But in this border, I want better performance and trial and error narrowed them down to Flower Carpet Roses – Pink, Appleblossom and White, mostly grafted as standards which gives elevation and more air movement. They keep much better foliage and mass flower, even if they are perhaps more utilitarian than romantic. The bright pink and white forms repeat flower for us, on and off for months, the softer pink Appleblossom less so and it can ball in the wet but it is the prettiest of them so I forgive that. At least its foliage stays healthy.

It is not the shrubs in this border that trouble me so much as the under plantings. Conditions range from heavy and wet at one end – perfect for the thriving Primula denticulata in September but there is not much else that flowers for the other eleven months of the year – through various degrees of shade to sun but with considerable root competition from trees and shrubs, to bone dry, impoverished conditions at the far end nearest the rimu trees. I need to come up with better ground cover combinations than we have but 30 years of trying hasn’t yet solved that to my satisfaction. Maybe I am just being too picky, after all.