Category Archives: Abbie’s column

Abbie’s newspaper columns

Learning to garden with shade – the woodland

Raised beds can be desirable, but not in tanalised timber

Raised beds can be desirable, but not in tanalised timber

When you start a new garden, especially on a blank canvas, it is hard to imagine dense shade and sheltered conditions. Fast forward some years and the picture changes dramatically. If you have planted trees and larger growing shrubs, your open, sunny conditions change gradually to the point where you realise the whole micro-climate has altered and the sun-lovers like roses and lavender are struggling. You either cut back or remove large plants to regain the earlier, open conditions or you change your style of gardening. Most larger, more mature gardens move naturally into woodland or shade gardening.

In their simplest form, woodlands are a natural occurrence – but not here. Our native forests are just that – forests. In their natural state, they can be near impenetrable and are more akin to cool climate jungles. I have seen the bluebell woods in flower in Scotland and they were enchanting. A carpet of blue, spread beneath comparatively small deciduous trees which were just breaking dormancy. I can’t recall what the trees were – chestnut, maybe, or sycamore, possibly oak – I was more charmed by the bulbs growing wild. I have only seen the flowering of the English snowdrops in photographs. A particularly memorable image showed a dense carpet of snowdrops beneath the graceful, slender trunks of the white barked birches. However, I can tell you that in general, British and European forests are quite open. You can walk through them without needing a slasher and tramping boots as you do in our forests. Robin Hood and his merry men could probably move through Sherwood Forest without having to keep to tracks. While there are conifers growing which are evergreen, the vast majority of other trees are deciduous. This means that light gets through in winter and early spring and that there is a seasonal carpet of leaf mulch below. In their predominantly dry summers, the shade inhibits the rampant growth we expect here.

But gardening is not about reproducing nature. It is about reinterpretation. Those natural woodlands, which are essentially a shade meadow garden full of wild flowers, peak for maybe two weeks of the year. We are not going to be happy with that in a home garden. England’s wonderful grand dame of gardening, Beth Chatto, has planted her woodland in a succession of spring flowering bulbs which extends the display but even so, by early summer, there was nothing left to see. I was still sufficiently inspired to return home and do the same in one small area. Here, I had to make sure there was no grass and the ground surface is bare soil and light leaf litter. And I can tell you that in a small triangular area about eight metres long and five metres at its widest, it took hundreds of bulbs – snowdrops (galanthus), Cyclamens coum and repandum, assorted dwarf narcissi, rhodohypoxis and lachenalias. The sheer volume of bulbs required rules it out for most gardeners.

The allure of the woodland garden path

The allure of the woodland garden path

Shade gardening is the option for extending display and keeping some definable form in a garden. With huge trees here, dating back to 1880, we have a lot of shade garden, usually referred to as woodland. The basic principles of gardening still apply – it is the variations in foliage, form, height and colour that give interest. Achieving it under a canopy of foliage is different to being out in the open. There are three obvious keys to remember.

Firstly, few plants are happy in dense shade. There is nothing else for it. You have to lift and limb – raise the canopy sufficiently high to allow filtered light below. The trunks of the trees are a feature in their own right and if you want to garden below, getting a four metre vertical clearance will allow space and light to give the plants a chance.

Secondly, there will be a great deal of root competition from established trees. In fact it can be damned difficult chiselling out a hole large enough to plant into and even then, there is little chance of many plants thriving when they are competing for space, nutrition and moisture. That is why many bulbs do so well – because they can cope with harsh conditions and little soil. Clivias, too, will foot it in this environment, as will some of the plectranthus, but many other shade plants such as hostas are never going to be happy and healthy. We get around this in some areas by building informal, raised beds and moving in soil and compost to get the plants established. Ponga lengths and fallen branches still look natural but spare me from the idea of tantalised timber. I don’t like the look of tantalised timber anywhere in a garden but it is even more incongruous in woodland. Casual and natural are the words to remember here.

Thirdly, woodlands are usually dry, a fact many people fail to realise. That is because when you have large trees, their massive root systems suck up the water, leaving little for smaller plants. Often the canopy of foliage and branches will deflect the rainfall away. You really do not want to be creating a garden where you have to water regularly so it is better to choose plants from the start which will take dry shade. Fortunately, the fact that they are growing in shade hugely reduces their water requirements (little evaporation from the sun) so even hostas, which are generally regarded as needing plenty of water, can thrive in dry shade once established.

You can manage flowers and colours for most of the year in a woodland garden - a tricyrtis or toad lily

You can manage flowers and colours for most of the year in a woodland garden - a tricyrtis or toad lily

I will return at a later date to plant options for shade or woodland gardening but here, we are strongly of the view that mass planting of herbaceous material in a shade garden is even duller than mass planting in a formal garden (where the structure and straight lines give form). Give us variety and mixed plantings. The aforementioned clivias are fantastic plants but you only want so much of their strappy foliage and predominantly orange flowers. Combine them with filmy ferns and the extravagance of the massive, split leaves of Monstera deliciosa (the fruit salad plant) and you have a combination with some zing.

It is possible to garden with flowers in woodland and to have colour for most of the year. And, a huge bonus for most, weed growth slows in the shade so you don’t have to be so vigilant on the weeding front. The invitation of a winding path into the woodland can be so much more mysterious and full of promise than the open, sunny section, but, like all forms of gardening, it does not just occur of its own accord.

You have to make it happen.

Summer meadow gardens (and why they don't work here)

Enchanted by the native orchids growing wild at The Garden House in Devon

Enchanted by the native orchids growing wild at The Garden House in Devon

Surely the two most romantic sounding gardening styles are meadow gardens and woodland gardening. Woodlands will have to wait because summer is for meadow gardens, though not without difficulty in our climate.

Meadow gardens are based on the attempt to re-create and manage the wildflower meadows and we don’t have these in abundance in this country. Generally, one seems to go to Western Australia to catch the blooming of the wildflowers and that, I am told, can be a hit and miss affair. Timing is critical and some seasons are much better than others. In New Zealand we have natural alpine meadows (the Mount Cook lily, gentians and the like) but in such difficult, inaccessible and vulnerable environments that they do not lend themselves to garden tourism. Countries with naturally occurring wildflower meadows share several things in common – a much harsher, drier climate, and a lack of intensive, pastoral farming. Intensive dairying and wildflower meadows are an oxymoron. And most such areas will have an abundance of annual native flowers which leap into growth en masse, usually triggered by seasonal rains. Our native flora is unique and fascinating but not rich in pretty flowers of the field. So, by definition, wildflowers in this country tend to be invasive weeds. The lupins of Central Otago and the perennial sweet peas of Marlborough are a case in point. As indeed are gorse, broom, Kelly thistles and ragwort, all of which can have a blooming season which is showy. Not for us, thank you, and more than one New Zealander has been shocked to see gorse used as a garden plant in the UK.

Simple flowers like this white cosmos look best in meadow-style gardening

Simple flowers like this white cosmos look best in meadow-style gardening

All our garden plants, of course, originated somewhere so plants such as the species cyclamen, the deciduous ground orchids like dactylorhiza and anacamptis, even the Black-eyed Susans, echinacea and cosmos are native wildflowers somewhere. Just not here. I have never seen the North American prairie gardens, nor the wildflowers of South Africa but it was exciting (believe it or not) to see the ground orchids that we treasure as choice garden plants growing wild in England and in Italy.

Having decided that naturalised wildflowers in this country are more often noxious weeds, how about the controlled alternative of the managed meadow garden? Bad news. All the characteristics which make Taranaki prime dairy country mitigate against meadow gardens. Our grasses grow too well, our soils are too fertile, on top of that we fertilise too heavily, our rains come too readily all year round and our temperatures are too even. The grasses will swamp out all but the most aggressive of the wildflowers. Gardeners right on the coast in the north and in the drier south in the Hawera to Waverley stretch may have more success because their conditions are a little harsher. But it is not just conditions that one needs to get right. Meadow gardens require a bit of an attitude shift, we now realise, and it is a theme that we keep returning to in discussions here. Weeds. Meadow gardens require a high tolerance level for weeds and that is a problem for most New Zealanders. We have an ingrained antipathy to them. The worst crime an open garden can commit is to have weeds. Whether this is a reflection of our farming background, of the DOC position (our weeds are all introduced plants) backed up by our local councils, our high tolerance level for the use of chemicals in gardening and agriculture (and indeed in conservation), or an innate value placed on tidy suburbia, we do not like weeds. Because meadow gardens rely on letting plants grow naturally, you can’t control weeds. Once you start intensive control and management, your meadow garden becomes a cottage garden, and that is a different kettle of fish altogether.

We may need to reconsider our antipathy to weeds. Mark recalls the late Peter Winter, one of our leading environmentalists locally, commenting that the riparian plantings being fostered so actively by our regional council and indeed by Fonterra, are a positive move but that we will have to accept that a certain amount of weed growth is inevitable. The riparian plantings are the ribbons of mixed plants being established along all waterways, fenced off from stock. Done properly, they will filter run-off from farm land and reduce the amount of nutrient being washed into waterways. But they are not going to be a healthy environment if farmers expect to keep them weed free which, for the vast majority, will mean the repeated use of chemical weed killers.

A field of flowers in its first season

A field of flowers in its first season

But back to meadow gardens. It is the very simplicity of the meadow garden that lends it so much charm but it takes a little more skill than just standing and broadcasting a meadow mix of seeds in early spring. Amongst other things, the birds will pick off a fair portion of the seed and the germinating plants unless you take precautions. Then there are strategies for managing a succession of flowers through the seasons from spring to autumn and to ensuring that the garden lasts for more than one year. If you are willing to kill out all the grasses and competing plants before you sow a very generous amount of seed, you can manage a field of flowers in the first year. By the second year, the grasses will have crept back and the weeds will also be germinating and seeding. Weaker performers in the mix will have been beaten out by the competition. It will be more akin to the wildflower environment and it will have rank and unkempt times of the year.

If you want to try a meadow, pick an area which is in full sun and with poor soil. Don’t feed it at all. You want the plants to flower and seed, not to make a lot of leafy growth so they need to be on the stressed side. At the end of the season, you mow the meadow (one man went to mow, went to mow the meadow…) and leave it all lying on the ground for two weeks to allow the seed to fall out. Then you rake it all up because you don’t want to fertilise the ground by letting the clippings rot down. And you live with the weeds which will also be colonizing the area. The meadow should come back into growth when triggered by seasonal change. That is the theory of it, more or less.

We would love to grow a meadow garden but each time we look at it again, we figure the climate and conditions which make it possible for us to grow lush and verdant gardens mitigate against the meadow concept. It is why we continue to work on naturalising selected plants in designated areas instead. It is not at all the same thing, but it is what we can manage here.

Wildlife in the garden – New Zealand style

Spot the gecko - a rare sight in New Zealand

Spot the gecko - a rare sight in New Zealand

As we sat outside having our morning coffee last Sunday, Mark commented that he had counted five native wood pigeons in the gum tree. Now there is nothing unusual about one or two kereru around here but five is close to a crowd for these birds who do not make a practice of hanging out together. As we watched, another two or three flew in to join them, followed by more, and then some. And but wait there were still more. We ended up with fifteen of these large and cumbersome but beautiful birds in our gum tree. A convention, we decided. They must be having a convention of local kereru. These are not birds renowned for having great brains and clearly their concentration spans are of short duration because they soon decided that it was time to break for morning tea. They flew over, more or less as a flock, to sample the offerings on the karaka tree. A quick snack and it was time for a field trip to a nearby pine tree from where they gradually dispersed. It made for a memorable coffee break.

Our native wood pigeon or kereru in the Ficus antiarus

Our native wood pigeon or kereru in the Ficus antiarus

As far as we know, our kereru stick around the area all year. Give them enough to eat and there is not a lot of point in them moving on. If you do a search for plants to grow for kereru, most sites list native plants including puriri and miro and only give exotic or introduced plants as an afterthought. But, like most of our native birds, kereru are untroubled by political correctness and they browse widely. They are gloriously untroubled by whether the food is nasty privet berries or nikau seeds. All that matters is that they are herbivores so they eat berries, seeds, fruit, flowers and leaves. In late autumn they come in close to eat the apple leaves just before leaf drop at a time when the sugars are concentrated. They are very partial to guavas and, apparently, to plums. Mark has watched them eating the kawakawa (pepper tree) berries, they raid the karaka tree, the flowering cherries, kowhai blossom and a host of other food sources. Being large birds which tend to crash land rather than being light of wing and foot, they feed from trees and shrubs which can hold their weight. You don’t see these birds on the ground, so they are not going to feed from annuals or perennials.

The delight for Mark this week was to find his first ever live gecko in the garden. In fact he has only ever seen one dead one before and that was in his glasshouse. In the lizard family, New Zealand only has skinks and geckos – the former are relatively common but the latter are rarely sighted. This particular gecko was presumably trying to warm itself on the trunk of a very old pine tree. Now that we have our eye in for this extraordinarily well camouflaged creature, we have found it out sunbathing in the same spot each day since so it is presumably resident. It now has to get accustomed to Mark bringing every visitor to stare at this rare sight and to make admiring noises even if they can’t tell it apart from the pine bark.

We did a bit of a Google search on NZ geckos which appear to be devilishly difficult to research and photograph, complicated by the fact we have a large number of different species. Ours was indubitably a brown one and on the larger side, something similar to Hoplodactylus duvaucelii. But it is just as likely to have been one of the other 38 or so different types already recorded.

We are by no means alone in our dedication to assisting the procreation of monarch butterflies

We are by no means alone in our dedication to assisting the procreation of monarch butterflies

Monarch butterflies we have in abundance here. Judging by the search terms which bring people to our websites at this time of the year, others are equally enthralled by these ephemeral beauties. I keep seeing questions typed in to Google like: how many monarch caterpillars can a swan plant support (depends entirely on the size of your swan plant…) and how long does a caterpillar take to grow (about three weeks). Can a caterpillar chrysalis on something other than a swan plant was another much searched question. The answer to that is yes, definitely, and it pays to encourage them to do so by poking in some bushy twigs by the plant. Having them chrysalis on the swan plant itself can be a real problem if their very hungry younger siblings munch right down the bare stems and the defenceless chrysalis then falls off. At this time of the year, earlier generations have often hammered the swan plants for food and newer caterpillars are running short. You can finish growing caterpillars on sliced pumpkin but it is not a complete food so it is unsuitable for getting very little ones through their weeks of growing.

Swan plants grow readily from fresh seed and if you are even halfway serious about wanting monarchs in abundance next summer, sowing a row in your vegetable garden in very early spring is a good means of getting the plants to a well established grade for later season egg-laying butterflies. Swan plants are generally biennial (so last two years) but they don’t like heavy frosts. This year’s plants can recover to support the first of next season’s caterpillars with the early spring sowing as a back up for later generations in the season. However, you do have to keep the young plants netted to stop them being stripped while very small. Letting some annual flowers seed down in spots of the vegetable garden can also provide food for the butterflies.

Food for the butterflies - a rather garish cosmos

Food for the butterflies - a rather garish cosmos

They need single flowers with visible stamens such as cosmos, marigolds, zinnias, daisies and poppies. A visitor stood in one of Mark’s vegetable gardens recently and suggested that it was not so much a veg patch as a mixed cottage garden.

The final word on the monarchs this season comes from one of our neighbours with whom we have had a running joke over time about stealing our monarch butterflies. Send them home, we have said. All the monarchs in this area are ours. Added Mark recently: please stop taking pot shots at our wandering monarchs. Ah, said neighbour riposted, those are the very rare and highly prized lacewing or whistling monarchs – the sound of the wind blowing through the holes in their wings. What more could we say?

Agapanthus -the blue (and white) stars of our summer roadsides

Our summer roadsides would be the poorer without agapanthus

Our summer roadsides would be the poorer without agapanthus

We have a bit of a love-hate relationship with agapanthus here in Taranaki and in warmer areas of this country. But as you drive around the countryside at this time of the year, most would agree that our roadsides would be the poorer if they were gone. They resemble giant blue harebells growing, well, growing pretty well everywhere if we are honest.

Agapanthus all come from South Africa and from relatively limited areas of that country. Don’t be misled by the common international name, the Lily of the Nile. They are neither a member of the lily family, nor do they grow anywhere near the Nile. Nor does Agapanthus orientalis come from the Orient. That descriptor merely means eastern, so the natural habitat of A. orientalis (probably more correctly known as A. praecox ssp orientalis) should be on the eastern side of South Africa, assuming the original plant collections and recording was done accurately.

The name comes from Greek. Agape is love and anthos is flower but whether this means the flower of love or lovely flower is unclear.

So are they a weed? These matters are rarely as black and white as they appear. On the debit side:
• Most agapanthus set seed freely and the seed germinates readily.
• Agapanthus grow well in a wide range of situations including inhospitable clay banks and shaded areas. They form a dense cover which prevents other plants from germinating – particularly desirable native regeneration. They have the potential to colonise bush reserves, national parks and native bush.
• The common agapanthus are resistant to the world’s handiest weedkiller, glyphosate (formerly known by its original brand name: Round Up). While you can take them out with stronger brush killer sprays, most of these require you to hold a spray licence.
• Digging out well established clumps takes quite some physical strength and determination because the plants cling on for grim death and the clumps can be formidable. Because they have roots which are rhizomes, if you don’t get the whole plant out, what is left behind in the soil will re-grow.
• There is no way this plant would ever be permitted into the country now. Mind you, the same thing could be said about kiwifruit.

There is a credit side and a degree of resigned acceptance by the authorities in this country which sees agapanthus treated as a surveillance pest plant rather than the hard line decision to ban it outright.
• While it seeds freely, the seeds are not dispersed by birds at all so in most cases, the seedlings pop up close to the parent plants. The big problem comes with plants beside waterways because the water can do a very efficient job of spreading them much further.
• They are a significant plant for cut flower producers and there are dwarf and sterile forms available for home gardeners which pose no threat at all. There is a large international market and agapanthus occupy an established niche in our nursery industry. Many of the named hybrids have parentage which includes one or more of the species other than praecox and this reduces the weed problems.
• They make a significant contribution to our summer landscape as a flowering plant and will tolerate harsh, roadside conditions so are favoured for amenity plantings.
• They are evergreen, tidy and suitable for using to stabilise slip-prone areas.

Basically Biosecurity and most northern regional councils would love to ban it outright but pragmatism triumphs so the aggie lives on to flower another day. Auckland has banned the larger growing forms of A.praecox (the common form), still allowing the production and sale of dwarf forms as a compromise position. The sensible position for the home gardener who lives adjacent to native forest or to waterways, would be to remove them entirely. As a back-up position, being industrious and thorough about dead heading would reduce the problem. For the rest of us, it probably doesn’t matter and they make a huge contribution to our summer gardens and landscape.

Agapanthus Tinkerbell - no weed potential here

Agapanthus Tinkerbell - no weed potential here

By no means are all agapanthus thugs. Little Tinkerbell is common in gardens though probably more noted for its very clean white and sage green variegated foliage than its flowers. It is distinctly shy on flowering, as a rule. It also has a significantly large root system for a plant without a great deal on top but it is a useful addition in the garden border. Other named hybrids are often more amenable than thuggish and have their place in the garden setting.

This is a plant family which is a great deal more highly prized overseas than here. In harsher climates, stronger growing plants are valued for their ability to survive the conditions and most of Europe and the US have much harder conditions than we have. Toughies that stay in leaf as well as put on a lovely summer flowering display are harder to come by, especially in blue. Because they don’t tolerate extremely cold conditions, additional measures are often required to get the common agapanthus through winter.

But in this country, you can’t even give away common agapanthus. Which is why we were genuinely shocked by a section in “A Green Granny’s Garden”, by Fionna Hill. I reviewed this before Christmas and I have to admit I did not read it cover to cover or that review might have been a little tougher had I come across the following paragraph referencing her attendance at a Hollard Gardens’ workshop here in Taranaki:
“Workshop participants have been invited to bring seed and other plant material to share. We pulled lots of agapanthus plants from Maggie’s New Plymouth garden that day and (we thought) cheekily we’d take the opportunity to leave a wheelbarrowful. We give the barrow to some helpful children to wheel back to the meeting shed, while we speed off down the road. I think it might not have been welcome, at that time, believing them to be a pest.” (sic). The page of self justification that follows does not mitigate the action for anybody except the author, who concludes: “I shouldn’t feel so guilty about that wheelbarrowful that Maggie and I have left as a contribution – at UK rates, the barrowful was worth about 300 pounds.” I don’t think so, dear. What you did was to furtively leave your friend’s weeds for Hollards’ staff to dispose of. You should be feeling guilty and embarrassed.

The New Zealand Garden – is there such a thing?

The D.I.Y. Lutyens-style sunken garden

The D.I.Y. Lutyens-style sunken garden

We have been talking about the New Zealand garden. This conversation has been given new impetus by the lack of any analysis of the nature of the New Zealand garden in the lavish new book on the topic by Kristin Lammerting, which is essentially a parade of gardens that she liked, including her own, (or maybe gardens that had been recommended to her) written up in glowing terms with fabulous photographs but zilch insight into the context. We will probably continue discussing this until we die, it being a topic of never-ending interest because it is a reflection of who we are in this long, thin country of the southerly latitudes. In the main, we are a nation of gardeners. Most residential properties and indeed commercial businesses make some attempt, however meagre, to beautify their frontages. Some do better than others but there is a shared value in beautifying our immediate environment.

So I offer up the following thoughts on defining our place in the world of international gardening, with the rider that this is by no means a definitive list.

· Size. We do big gardens here. Even our small, urban gardens are actually quite large by international standards. Our traditional quarter acre section is huge as an allocation of space for an individual family. Our major private gardens are usually several acres. Space is not a luxury confined to the wealthy in this country. It is perfectly realistic for the average home gardener to own a substantial patch of dirt.

· Despite our inclination towards large gardens, we usually do all our own gardening. Hired help is not common. Skilled and qualified hired help is positively rare. Overseas visitors are frequently astounded at how much New Zealanders routinely achieve in large gardens without assistance.

· It must be something in our egalitarian heritage which has many New Zealanders taking the ideas of the large, historic gardens – especially in Britain though sometimes from wider Europe – and attempting to re-create something similar here. We seem to be oblivious to the fact that the vast majority of the great gardens of Europe and Britain were established and maintained by the wealthy and the powerful who could afford to pay gardeners to actually do the work. So we go for high maintenance gardening styles (clipped hedges, a touch of topiary, sweeping lawns, mixed borders, buxus enclosures around statuary) – all the trappings of the gentry and the nobility which our forbears were so keen to leave behind.

· Grand designs, maybe, but on a very low budget so the D.I.Y. ethos rules supreme. In many circles, getting somebody else to design your garden for you or others to maintain it is somewhat frowned upon – a sign that you are not a true gardener. If you have wealth, you shouldn’t be flaunting it. Because very few of our gardens have a lot of money behind them, we tend to be very light on permanent structures and surfaces. It is a bit like our attitude to housing. We would not expect our wooden bungalows to be around in 300 years and the same goes for our gardens. So we don’t use a lot of stone or brickwork, leaning more to the rather short term pongas, timber (sometimes tanalised) and the utility concrete block or paver. We tend to favour grass over cobbled surfaces, keeping sealed areas for driveways and a path immediately around the house.

· What we lack in hard landscaping, we make up for in plants. Plants are cheap in this country, ridiculously cheap by international standards. Our equable climate means they grow quickly and gardening is pretty easy. We love a wide range of them, especially something new or different. We love them even more if we can multiply them ourselves and get some for nothing. So we use plants for structure, as well as soft furnishings – plants are often used instead of walls, fences and edgings. This passion for plants is quite possibly part of the British settler heritage. Most of the world’s great plant hunters (including Joseph Banks) hailed from there and even today, a curiosity for plants and a desire to stretch the boundaries of what one can grow is a characteristic of gardeners in that country. It is just easier here – we have better soils, a more obliging climate and cheaper plants.

· We did not, however, inherit a love for big trees. No danger of us taking up the champion trees scheme (where the largest specimens are identified, measured, monitored and even revered). We are more likely to chainsaw them down. Maybe it is a gut response to the somewhat intimidating nature of our native forests. I think it more likely that our houses are often cold in winter and our climate is not quite as hot as we would like so we just don’t want shade. Landscape views are common but highly prized, certainly above trees. We garden more with shrubs than trees.

· The frequent lack of a strong design element defined by permanent structure, a heavy dependence on plants for form and a dislike of big trees, all allied to a mobile population who move house frequently, means that our gardens tend to be quite ephemeral. They grow quickly. It only takes 10 years to create a very pretty tree and shrub garden here. Many gardeners regard trees of 15 to 20 years of age as mature. Never go back is the mantra of gardeners who have moved house. Odds on, the new owners will have ripped out your garden and replaced it. We don’t expect our gardens to survive past us, and very few do.

· Native plants. All our native plants in this country are evergreen and some are strongly sculptural (the cabbage tree, pohutukawa, nikau, tree ferns, even the pachystegia and tussocks). We have a huge array of indigenous flora which we generally take for granted but the integration of many of these plants into the ornamental garden is another defining feature.

· In our easy climate, most of the country gardens all year round. We don’t put our gardens to bed for winter while we retire indoors. We have flowers and foliage all the time so we don’t need to depend on hard landscaping to give winter form.

· Our reverence for immaculate lawns and the priority placed on kerb appeal are values taken more from American suburbia than Europe.

We are still magpies here – we borrow ideas from here and from there and try them out. Our settler history is still very recent. When we moved in to Mark’s parents’ house, we found the books which they used to give them ideas when planning the garden that we now own and the end result was a typically large country garden strongly modelled on the English landscape traditions, right down to the D.I.Y. Lutyens-style sunken garden pond. In the sixty years since, the form remains English but the range of plants and the way we use them are very different. It is likely that the sheer lushness of plant growth in this country will continue to define our gardening style far more than any slavish copying or reinterpretation of overseas genres.