A few years ago. It is amazing how much the skyline of trees has changed since. My feet.
I have certainly been editing the plantings in the gardens around our swimming pool. It seemed a good summer occupation and on a few hot days this week, the flow between gardening and cooling off in the pool has been excellent.
The gardens were put in when we built the pool in the late 1990s and, in that clichéd way, we naturally opted for a sort of tropical feel. It was never thought out very well at the time. In the years since, I recall doing one relatively major rejig of the gardens but beyond that, they have only had the most perfunctory of care and minimal maintenance. This often included plugging gaps with whatever I had to hand. And it was showing that lack of attention.
I am a more thoughtful gardener than I used to be. I think that comes with experience. Knowing that we were unlikely maintain a pristine swimming pool, we had chosen from the start not to make it a key landscape feature but rather to site it discreetly where it is largely out of view. I am not keen on garish blue pools taking centre stage so ours is also a modest dark grey and we went with a black pool cover.
Curculigo, euphorbia and Ligularia reniformis, lush enough to pretend to be tropical and low maintenance
The upshot of this is that I figured we want a really low maintenance approach to the gardens around the pool and that it should be specifically targeted to the swimming season – which for us is mid to late December through to mid February. There is no point in putting in plants that flower outside that time because we won’t see them. Extreme editing was called for to eliminate my previous efforts to plug gaps and add seasonal interest with assorted perennials and bulbs.
I am quite happy with the earlier effort blocking up the Ligularia reniformis with Curculigo recurvata (nice foliage contrast and happily co-existing). We removed all but one of the damn dangerous euphorbia (E. mellifera, I think) which seeds far too freely and has disappointingly insignificant flowers but compensates with good form and foliage. Ligularia reniformis is getting to be a cliché in New Zealand gardens and I will restrict how widely we use it elsewhere in the garden, but it is very handsome and lush here, reaching well over a metre in height. However, the compact red dahlia hybrid will have to go. Not our style. Too suburban in our context.
Pachystegia insignis in the foreground, Xeronema callistemon behind and overhead a large Aloe bainseii
The Pachystegia insignis (Marlborough rock daisy) and Xeronema callistemon (Poor Knights lily) flower outside the summer season entirely but these native plants are not the easiest to grow in our environment and the plants are handsome and well established with good foliage contrast. Besides, it is not in our nature to edit our plantings down to a simplistic mass.
It is the next ten square metres or so where I have gone for a block planting. It was a mish-mash. No longer. I chose to use two common plants – the pretty but tough Dietes grandiflora and black taro. At least we know it as black taro but I am not sure if it is a colocasia (in which case it may be ‘Black Magic’) or an alocasia. It looks very new and raw at this stage, but I expect it to be a pleasing combination with plenty of pretty flowers next summer and good foliage interest. And low maintenance, without looking like a supermarket carpark.
Patience is a virtue. The freshly planted dietes and black taro.
I see some debate in garden media about whether digging and dividing perennials is necessary. Many folk seem to dread and shun digging – hence the no-dig craze for vegetable gardens. All I can say is that since I started doing a lot more digging and dividing, the garden looks hugely better for these efforts and the perennial plants thrive in more friable conditions with less soil compaction. It is also a learning experience as I experiment with plant combinations and think through the seasonal effects. It is a whole lot more interesting than mere garden maintenance and gives an opportunity to review and edit the plant selections. And it doesn’t even cost any money because I am working with plants already in the garden. There is nothing to fear from increasing the dig and divide regime.
And for those of you who don’t follow the garden Facebook page, I offer you my little study in dietes blooms. It makes no logical sense to float them in water, because they are not damp-loving plants at all. I just thought they would look charming, and they did – first in the swimming pool and then I gathered them all (slightly battered) to float them in the stream. Because I could.
The white Japanese anemones that flower in the long grass around the country corner where we live make me smile every autumn. Orange-red crocosmia – earlier referred to as montbretia – feature large around here. So too do red hot pokers, fennel, arum lilies and cannas while further north the ox-eye daises, yellow vetch and wild carrot feature more.
And agapanthus. There is a plant that is a great deal more revered overseas than here. It is controversial, actively discouraged and some forms banned in northern regions. Some folk hate it with a passion and it cannot be sprayed out with glyphosate. But truly, our roadsides round here would be the poorer without the summer display. In its defence, we have not seen this tough plant seed down any great distance from its parent in our conditions and it is also very good at stabilising clay banks.
Monet’s garden in Giverny has probably given us the most recognisable garden bridges – gently arching in form and painted. While originally Japanese in inspiration, Monet gets all the credit these days.
Away from the domesticity of Monet-style, I photographed this handsome, apparently disused bridge at Castle Howard in Yorkshire. What a handsome landscape feature it is, though I failed to find out the story behind its construction.
We have a small stone bridge in our park, modest in scale though perfectly functional and gently permanent in its visual appeal. 
I have been meaning to stop and photograph this watsonia growing wild down the road. Mark tells me it is a species but I have yet to put a name on it. The dusky apricot colouring appeals to me. Some may call these weeds but oh, when I compare these roadside plants to the ugliness and environmental unfriendliness of scorched, sprayed earth, all I can say is give me these weeds which make a contribution to the eco-system. It is such folly to think that spraying roadsides is desirable. All it does is to create a vacuum where less desirable weeds will re-colonise the area and, in the interim, all the water flows away, washing residual spray and road residues into our waterways. My column in the January issue of NZ Gardener is on the topic of roadside plantings. We often talk about this as we drive and we despair at the ugliness and the willy nilly use of weed spray in this country of ours. Clean and green New Zealand? Not in reality.
More cheerfully, the so-called Australian frangipani (Hymenosporum flavum) growing by the road halfway to town has been delighting me for several weeks. Many flowering trees are glorious on their day – but you can count their flowering season in days, rather than weeks. Not so this hymenosporum. It is not even a close relative of the frangipani, though it is scented. It needs frost free conditions to get established and good drainage but is worth growing for its late spring, early summer blooming.
I don’t swear on this blog (though I admit I am not so restrained in real life) so you will just have to fill in the missing letters when I describe this as an example of f*** off utility urban design. Clearly nobody wants to even try and grow plants here (and conditions would certainly be difficult to get anything established, let alone looking good), but could nobody come up with a filler idea that was less hostile than this?
I much prefer the old concrete and stone wall, constructed a long time ago in my local town of Waitara. Someone took a lot of care over this.
Pohutukawa! Often called the New Zealand Christmas tree. What a wonderful sight they are at this time of the year. As I looked at all the trees coming into bloom along New Plymouth’s water front, a mere two short blocks down from the main street, I felt a pang at the loss of 28 (or was it 29 in the end?) mature trees beside our Waitara River. I even contemplated making Christmas cards for all our Taranaki Regional Council elected officials and senior staff who were responsible for the casual removal of the trees. I thought it could feature the flowers on the front with a message inside saying “Seasons Greetings from the 29 Waitara pohutukawa chainsawed down this year”. But it is a lot of effort to go to for something they would just throw in the bin. Better instead to admire the beauty of trees still standing.
The public amenity planting in New Plymouth can be delightful and appropriate. On the exposed west coast, there are limited plant options that will grow right beside the sea. That is why the sturdy pohutukawa is so important. But also our native flaxes. They are in flower and how lovely do the flower spikes look silhouetted against the big sky and the big sea we get here?
Finally, coming home, I stopped to record the effective trimming of this Cupressus leylandii down the road. It was just an ordinary shelter belt until the lower canopy was recently lifted, exposing the trunks. The fact the branches have been trimmed reasonably flush helps but it adds a whole new dimension, being able to look through. It has turned an unmemorable shelter belt into something much more graceful and distinctive.
And then there are the tricksy ones, few more so than the Japanese A. sikokianum with its phallic spadix and hooded spathe rising prominently above the foliage. It is a show stopper in spring, though definitely curious rather than beautiful. After many years of growing it, I can tell you that it is difficult. We have never seen it increase from the corm. Growing well, it will set seed but these need to be raised in controlled conditions because it will not seed down naturally here. Even then, the patches tend to get smaller with time, rather than larger. It was for this reason that Mark experimented with hybridising it, to try and get increased vigour. This is known as hybrid vigour, in a similar way that the controlled breeding of designer dogs can make the offspring a stronger genetic strain than the highly refined parentage of pure breds. It has worked for us. The offspring carry all the best characteristics of A. sikokianum but they grow more strongly and are reliable as garden plants. Few would pick the difference to the lead species, but we know they are actually hybrids.
First published in the December issue of NZ Gardener and reprinted here with their permission. 
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 