By ABBIE JURY

The Christmas New Year statutory holidays see a whole lot of sitting around talking here. Without young children (we are in that hiatus of our own children being adult but no grandchildren showing yet even on distant horizons), this period is more about having unaccustomed leisure.

There is little talk about gardening – the family and friends around us at this time are not gardeners. Just lots of memories and reminiscences and gossip and laughs. And frivolous conversation.
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By ABBIE JURY

I have been thinking about giving plants space to grow. In part, this has come because of the mothers’ gardening diaries which I wrote about in my last column and differing views therein on the matter.

In our garden we have an area we refer to as The Park. It is about four acres, planted out in various trees, both flowering and evergreen, many rhododendrons and assorted other woody plants with mown grass beneath and a meandering stream and ponds. It is very colourful in springtime and restful and green at other times. It has been a deliberate decision by Mark not to plant the stream edge densely but to work on the natural English look and have just occasional drifts of bog plants. This, I might say, only works in our eyes if one is willing to weedeat the grass which goes down to the water edge. A swathe of brown edging caused by using weedkiller instead is definitely not the look we are after.
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By ABBIE JURY

I have been thinking about giving plants space to grow. In part, this has come because of the mothers’ gardening diaries which I wrote about in my last column and differing views therein on the matter.

In our garden we have an area we refer to as The Park. It is about four acres, planted out in various trees, both flowering and evergreen, many rhododendrons and assorted other woody plants with mown grass beneath and a meandering stream and ponds. It is very colourful in springtime and restful and green at other times. It has been a deliberate decision by Mark not to plant the stream edge densely but to work on the natural English look and have just occasional drifts of bog plants. This, I might say, only works in our eyes if one is willing to weedeat the grass which goes down to the water edge. A swathe of brown edging caused by using weedkiller instead is definitely not the look we are after.
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By ABBIE JURY

In our Taranaki Rhododendron Festival over the past eighteen years, we have often heard talk of small gardens and how much people like to see them because they can relate to them. To be honest, we have felt a little defensive about this because our own garden is anything but small.

We open around six or seven acres of garden and are working on a further couple of acres of garden to open in a year or two. I stayed polite when faced by the garden visitor last week who said that some of the gardens were “so large they are parks, not gardens”. I had not thought to define a park or garden by size alone. I had always thought that gardens had areas which are intensively planted and gardened, while parks are essentially lots of trees and larger shrubs without the same level of detail.
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By ABBIE JURY

I try to be very selective about issues on which I express an opinion publicly beyond my gardening columns, but I was sorely tempted when I read a letter to the August issue of the New Zealand Gardener magazine. Written by New Plymouth’s foremost member of the Gnome Garden Brigade, the writer claimed that the heavily ornamented gardens being promoted in the Fringe Festival now on here were “unique to Taranaki” and that they provided a “cultural experience”.

My pen itched to reply. All I wanted to say was: “I hope not. How embarrassing.”

The Fringe Festival (dubbed the Cringe Festival here) is running alongside our well established Garden and Rhododendron Festival which finishes tomorrow. It grew out of gardens which were declined by the established event and tended to attract those who favour ornaments over plants. In the case of the letter to the Gardener, discretion ruled and I kept silent (until now). But it did spawn many running gags here. We were a bit concerned about the rumours of the conversion to radical Islam and the establishment of sleeper cells of gnomes waiting to be activated by Al Qaeda. Foreign Affairs, we hypothesized, might put out a warning to garden visitors asking them to be their eyes and ears this year. But should any visitor encounter gnomes wearing backpacks or heavy anoraks, they were under no circumstances to approach either the gnome or the garden owner. The advice would surely be to exit immediately and call the counter terrorism unit.
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