It is the Year of the Oversized Tomato and Onion here and I have felt myself doing an Alison Holst impersonation, obliged to deal with the abundance of this produce.

Last year was the Year of the Green Bean. A prolific harvest saw us eating fresh green beans for weeks on end as we valiantly munched our way through a series of well planned crops. Silly me anticipated eating lots of green beans again this year but we only had a mere handful of meals.

I confess that I have never grown a vegetable in my life. And the Husband who has taken on the role of gatherer and provider, if not hunter, feels a frequent failure. This is because he has been growing home veg for around 35 years now and he feels that he should have mastered the skills of consistent production so we do not have this feast or famine of crops. He does not feel at all a failure as far as the onions and tomatoes go, but the lack of green beans caused some angst.

But 2007 is also memorable for the melon harvest and Mark appears to have overlooked his success in this area. Every year he starts off melon plants (both rock and water melon types) in small pots and quite frequently other priorities take over and the melons either fail entirely to make the transition from small pot into the garden or this event takes place too late to enable the crop to mature before autumn. Not this year. He has been steadily bringing melons indoors for weeks.

My standing joke is that the quality of the vegetable garden is closely allied to his stress levels. When life gets too much for him, he retreats out to his vegetable garden. Displacement behaviour is the term, I understand. While the rest of the garden may be clamouring for attention, there are times when he can be found gently push hoeing amongst his carrots. It matters not a whit that you can buy an entire sack of Chinese onions at Moshims for a mere $5 whereas ours probably represent closer to $100 in terms of costs of production and labour. The Chinese onions can not compare with home produce.

I admit I live in fear of the prospect of the advent of the Year of the Broccoli (a vegetable I believe is best served creamed in soup with blue cheese), the Year of Cauliflower (passable only in sauce with walnuts) or the Year of the Cabbage (very few options to make this veg edible, in my opinion). But he is also talking of taking over the growing of herbs which would be useful as long as I can lead him to the understanding that herbs are ideally best grown within three metres of the kitchen door step. It is really handy if you can reach your herbs without having to put shoes on, I feel.

Do not get put off growing herbs by the intimidating traditions of herbalists and herb gardens. In the days before modern medicine, herbs had an importance which went way beyond mere food flavouring. If you want to re-create a medieval herb garden, or the suburban equivalent of it, there are many books which will show you traditional designs and give you all the information you may or may not need. Personally I could not be bothered with herb gardens which need to contain such plants as artemisia – commonly referred to as Wormwood and responsible for the raw ingredients for absinthe. And the problem with a designated herb garden is that herbs are not a single genus which all like the same conditions. Growing herbs in a modest and utilitarian way involves finding the right conditions for different herbs within the three metres of the back door. It is a myth that all herbs like poor, stony, freedraining and sunny conditions. Sure it is true of many of the Mediterranean ones, but others are more of your clumping perennial or shrub and like well cultivated, rich soil.

We do not pretend to be herb growing experts but the short list of what I could not live without as fresh herbs includes the following:

1. Marjoram and oregano – vital for tomato dishes, Italian flavours and quite amenable to being added to any dish really. Clumping perennials which like well cultivated, fertile soil.
2. Bay tree – just the common old culinary laurus nobilis. A tough shrub which does lend itself to shaping if you want a lollipop tree but certainly needs some restraining or it will get large. Can suffer from thrips so best in open conditions with good air movement. Beware of its suckers getting away too.
3. Parsley – you can never have too much parsley. Chopped parsley is just the most useful herb imaginable and can even atone for a lack of green vegetable in the rest of the meal. The flat leafed Italian parsley is highly rated but any fresh parsley is great. It is a biennial (goes to seed in its second year) and if you make sure that at least a plant or two can go to seed each year you can keep it coming.
4. Mint – lots of different mints are around but as far as I know all are fairly invasive and will thrive in moist conditions. It is often best to plant in a decent sized pot or planter bag sunk into the garden to stop mint’s runaway ambitions.
5. Sage – a small woody plant which likes decent drainage and will tolerate the dry.
6. Thyme – a gentle spreader which is happy alongside sage.
7. Rosemary – as for sage and thyme. Can get considerably larger, however. It is a woody shrub unless you get one of the prostrate forms.
8. Basil – I buy it in pots at the supermarket because the slugs beat me to it at home. It is a summer annual.
9. Lime leaves –ours is a Tahitian lime and the young leaves sure are a great boon to all aromatic dishes.
10. Fennel or dill – love them. You can buy a pot at the supermarket, use the leaves and then plant it out when it starts to look very sad and it will shoot again. Best treated as an annual though it is technically a perennial.

I would add tarragon to that list but we have not grown it successfully yet. No coriander which is altogether too reminiscent of those green vegetable stink bugs for us. At least if you have a basic repertoire of plants in your garden, it saves the endless pots of fresh herbs cluttering up the window sill and is cheaper than constantly buying new pots from the supermarket.

When is a mass planting not a mass planting? When it is a drift, of course. I recall writing a few weeks ago that we did not go in for mass plantings here (such a sweeping statement on my part) so when The Husband spent several days last week planting out his bluebells, I had to think about why it never occurred to me that these might be a massed planting.

The bluebell planting was a bit of triumph for Mark. He had been gently nurturing a patch in the vegetable garden to build numbers and came up with about 2000 this year. Now 2000 bluebells may sound a large amount to most people but his mission, he explained, was to try and get that 2000 to look more like 20 000. It takes a huge number to have much impact in a large area.

Readers who have been to England in the springtime may have seen the bluebell woods in flower. It is a genuinely charming sight. English woodlands tend to be very open, spindly even at times and deciduous, allowing sufficient light for these unfussy bulbs to spring up and flower just at the point when the trees are about to break into leaf. Where the woodlands contain many of the native white trunked birches, the effect is even more delightful.

With our heavy use of evergreen trees and shrubs in this county, finding suitable spots for bluebell drifts is more problematic and Mark would tell you that it took him longer to decide where to place his bulbs than to actually plant them. They need reasonable light levels but also areas where the grass growth is not so strong that it will choke them out. And they needed to be on the margins where we weedeat, rather than the grassy areas where we mow.

We had thought that the common English and Spanish bluebells belonged to the scilla family but “Bulbs for New Zealand Gardens” by Terry Hatch and Jack Hobbs tells us that they have been moved out of the scilla family and are now members of the hyacinth family (hyacinthoides for those of you who may want to know). This moving of plants through botanical families is based on scientific research but can be trying for gardeners who don’t always keep up with reclassifications. Just keep thinking of them as bluebells, maybe. Non-scripta is the English bluebell, hispanica the stronger growing Spanish form but they cross freely so many of us will have ones which are in fact Spanglish hybrids.

The difference, I figured, between a mass planting and a drift is that the latter is designed to complement other plants already present and to create a natural look of self sown plants drifting through an area. A mass planting is a mass – filling an area by block planting in a single plant selection or a very limited range of plants.

It is not that long ago (a decade or so) that mass planting was pretty well unheard of in a domestic garden. Sure there have always been avenues of matched trees (Tupare’s cherry walk, for example) or hedges comprised of a single plant variety but the idea of filling a garden with a very restrained plant palette was not the common practice it is now. It is probably true to say that the value was instead placed on having as wide a range of different plants as possible. Bulk or mass plantings tended to be confined to the public domain of parks. The transition in the home garden came first with the idea that plants should be in groups of uneven numbers but that rarely exceeded groups of three or possibly five in larger gardens. I don’t know where this edict originated but it certainly caught on. And I can see why. It takes a high level of skill to put together a very wide range of plants and to achieve an effect which is pleasing to the eye, as opposed to messy or random. Starting with plants in groups is more likely to give a sense of order which appeals to many people. A block of three white rhododendrons with five red camellias, under planted with an attractive green hosta and surrounded by tidy box hedging is going to look effective from the start, even in the hands of a novice gardener. No matter that the camellias will almost certainly not flower at the same time as the rhododendrons. It is a great deal more difficult to put together a collection of forty different plants well.

In a discussion on the merits or otherwise of mass plantings, Mark recalled hearing the Queen’s head gardener speak a number of years ago. On the huge royal estates, there was a certain amount of call for some massed plantings but John Bond said that rather than a bed of massed red rhododendrons of all the same variety, he much preferred the idea of raising seedlings from a selected species or hybrid and planting those. The sister seedlings will give subtle variations without being discordant and he felt was of much more interest than identical plants. Alas you have to be able to raise your own plants to achieve this effect. It is not as if you can go and buy sister seedlings off the shelf at your local garden centre. But as a compromise position, it has a great deal of appeal.

I have promoted the gardening programmes on the Living Channel before but at the moment there is a most interesting young(ish) English landscaper with two series running. On “Urban Outsiders” you can see Matt James working on small urban wastelands in USA – mostly New York and Los Angeles – and by wastelands, I mean the most unappealing and inauspicious back yards. In “The City Gardener”, he does the same on tiny English yards. These are more than the usual garden makeovers and even those of us who measure our gardens in acres rather than 30 square metres can learn a great deal. He is very good at what he does. His designs are individual, creative and practical and closely tailored to the needs of the client. He is passionate about good design, about different plants and about inspiring the clients to take ownership of their new gardens by involving them in the execution of the design. This is not “do it for me” gardening. It is “do it together” and Matt gives out a great deal of information in the process.

Interestingly, even working hard to give some cohesion to small spaces which are owned by people with no background in gardening at all, there is no evidence of mass plantings or a heavy use of utility plants or formulaic combinations. He works hard to chose appropriate easy care plants but with variety and seasonal interest. He is worth watching to see a practitioner who brings together excellent design, plantsmanship and an engaging enthusiasm.