Hostas have been preoccupying me for the past fortnight. First up, Mark and I volunteered to take a workshop on the topic during our recent festival and were a little taken aback at how many people turned up to hear our pearls of wisdom on the topic. And secondly, I have spent this week dividing and repotting hostas in the nursery. I have reached the point where I even dream about them which may be a sad commentary on the state of my life at the moment. But there are probably worse subjects to dream about than hostas.

When we used to sell plants by mail order, we were often surprised by the number of people who fail to understand that hostas are deciduous – in other words they disappear underground in autumn to re-emerge in all their glory in spring. And it is all that fresh spring growth which is their greatest appeal. That and their endearing tolerance of shaded conditions, even dry shade.

The worst example of hosta ignorance came from a new customer in Auckland. We despatched her order by courier in late autumn and she faxed back to say that the carton had arrived and all the plants were in excellent order, bar the hostas. I can still recall her words: “It appears there has been a rabbit in the carton eating the hosta foliage. Or if the hostas are meant to be like this, then I don’t want them.” I can not remember how we resolved the situation but I am pretty certain we never sent her another plant list. Some customers, as Mark has been known to observe, put the cuss into the word customer.

As with most other plant genus, hosta aficionados like to search out the new or the different (and in the hosta world, new does not always equal visibly different) so a full hosta collection can become rather large. But we are tending the other way and weeding out varieties which have minor variations at best. In fact I find it impossible to tell the difference between Patriot (itself a sport of Francee) and Minute Man. All three varieties are green with a white edge and googling hostas throws up a host of other minor variations of the same original plant. Hostas are not all stable in type and some varieties tend to throw up what are known as sports – aberrations or variations. Occasionally it will be something worth having but that is rare… The flip side of the coin is that the variegated hostas can tend to revert to a plain colour and that reverted part of the clump will often be stronger growing so will take over in time. So if you have a fancy hosta with a plain section, it pays to cut out that reversion. As most of the newer varieties in this country have come in as tissue cultured plantlets (in other words they have not been divided from an established clump but have been increased in a laboratory from cell divisions and grown on agar), the problem of reversions is becoming more common. Tissue culture is not always stable and can throw up variations or reversions.

The most common mistake made by less experienced gardeners is to be seduced by all the wacky variegations and to plant them together – the green with white edging, the reverse variegation of white with a green edging, the blue and yellow both ways and the green and gold options. After all, who wants to buy a plain coloured hosta, especially if it is plain green or a low key blue toned one? My rule of thumb is that every variegated hosta needs at least two plain coloured ones to set it off. So a showy big blue hosta with a yellow edging is going to look a great deal more effective if it is grouped with a small plain yellow and a mid sized plain blue plant. It is the variation in size, leaf shape and some level of restraint in combining patterned leaves which makes a hosta patch pleasing to the eye.

If you can’t bring yourself to buy plainer hostas and nobody is offering you divisions, raise seed. No matter what parent plant you collect the seed from, the vast majority of offspring will return to plain colours, mostly green.

Hostas are predominantly for shady areas of your garden. They are tolerant of very dry shade under trees but equally they will be happy in damper areas with heavy soils. What they don’t like are light soils in full sun – their foliage will just burn and the plants will fail to thrive. You can get away with reasonable light levels on the margins of sunny areas but the paler variegations (the plants with white or pale yellows) will burn and crisp around the edges in direct sun.

The greatest problem with growing good hostas, as every gardener knows, is slugs and snails which feed voraciously on the leaves. I spoke to many garden visitors, particularly from Auckland and Hamilton, who talked about walking out at night and crunching their way across snails and I can remember seeing the phenomenon once in Palmerston North where it was like a horror movie (The Invasion of the Snails, perhaps, or Snails’ Revenge) with literally hundreds of them teaming across a concrete pathway. If you have a snail problem of this magnitude, forget growing anything that is snail fodder. But if you have only a moderate issue with these herbivores, a combination of good selection and good management can keep the problem within manageable bounds. Choose hostas with thicker, tougher leaves rather than the soft and wispy types. Slimy crawlers do not appear to like slithering over gritty surfaces so circling plants with sand, sawdust, baker’s bran or similar will often deflect them elsewhere. We have little problem under our rimu trees with the thick carpet of rimu needles. Yes you can use slug bait, but it is not very nice stuff and can poison dogs, hedgehogs and birds so be very sparing – one bait per plant is all that is required. If you head out with a torch on a misty or rainy night after a dry period, you will often find the hungry offenders on the move.

Given that every discussion about hostas comes down to slug and snail control in the end, I leave you with the thought that most of the slugs in this country and all of our icky snails must have come in on plant material. What I do not understand is why, on those early boats bringing settlers to New Zealand along with all their trappings to remind them of home (blackbirds, thrushes, sparrows, trees and plants), they did not usefully employ themselves on the long sea voyage exercising digital control to ensure that not a single pesky slug or snail survived. It would have saved us a great deal of trouble in the garden.

The September issue of the NZ Gardener magazine had a profile of Palmerston North gardener, sculptor and retired florist, David Anyon. We have never met David that we know of, but several of our friends and colleagues speak highly of his skills so it was with interest that I read the article. The photos of his garden did not, we suspect, do it justice but it was his philosophy on pruning and shaping that particularly struck a chord.

To quote the article: “David emphasises that what he does isn’t pruning so much as shaping, to create mood and drama. He’s convinced that if more gardeners got stuck into a little clipping and shaping of their trees and shrubs from the outset, it would help to prevent mishmashed jungles.”

We first noticed this technique of picking out and shaping accent plants carried out to great effect a few years ago at Hollard Gardens in Kaponga. I can recall writing about it at the time. It acts like a punctuation mark in a garden, a feature which is a plant and not some placed object. It gives a degree of formality and a focus to what can otherwise become a melded mass of foliage and flowers.

Gardening conversations here can start as early as 6.30am with the pre breakfast cup of tea and for a while we mulled around the appeal of freshly planted young gardens. Owning and working in an old and very well established garden as we do, the appeal of a young garden is not part of our personal experience. But there is no doubt that there is something fresh and charming about newly planted gardens and Mark figured that it was because when you start with young, smallish and fresh plants, each one stands largely on its own, in its own clearly defined space and therefore has a distinct shape. As the plants grow and start to compete for more space, often intertwining and encroaching on their neighbours, the whole effect starts to meld into the mishmash referred to by David Anyon. A very different set of skills are needed to take the garden to its next level of maturity – lifting the skirts of larger plants to expose the trunks, creating layers, thinning, shaping, changing some of the underplanting to meet different conditions for starters. But New Zealanders tend to be great at creating young gardens and too often we have seen the response of trying to recreate the juvenile charm by either starting again and repeating a similar planting from scratch or by taking plants such as camellias and evergreen azaleas back to stump level so they will rejuvenate and look as if they are young and fresh again. Too few garden plants are ever allowed to reach maturity in this young country of ours.

David Anyon was articulating a different approach. And, as he pointed out, going against the prevailing ethos of the 1960s which still prevails to some extent today, where clipping is seen as fine for formal hedges but rather naff in other contexts. Personally I don’t want a garden where everything is clipped and restrained, which is just as well because we would need a small army of clipping minions to manage our seven acres. We saw too much of that in Italy where very little was ever allowed to grow naturally. But shaped and clipped accents have their place in gardens both large and small – probably even more in large gardens which can become jungle-like or rambling over time.

I spent Saturday afternoon pondering this as I was up and down the ladder cloud pruning Camellia Mine No Yuki. Even though Mine No Yuki is now in her third year of this treatment and I was just going over old ground, it still took me the better part of five hours to recover her allocated form. At the time I was wondering if devoting so much time to one plant was justified when we are feeling the dreaded weight of pressure to get the entire garden groomed up to the level we like for our upcoming festival. But when I had finished, I decided it was definitely worth it. It provides a key point, a feature to arrest the eye in what is otherwise a rather formless and featureless area of garden. The controlled formality makes the surrounds look natural by contrast, rather than unkempt.

In that Gardener article, David Anyon also refers to what he calls ‘defuzzing’ – removing little twiggy bits and dead bits from branches of larger plants. He sees it as making for cleaner, more attractive trunks and framing small spaces and vistas in the garden. I couldn’t agree more. This defuzzing is, I decided a while ago, one of the most satisfying and fun aspects of gardening. You can’t defuzz in young, juvenile gardens- there is not enough to defuzz. But it has a most rewarding impact in an older garden.

I am thinking of requesting a new ladder for Christmas. Our ladders are OSH hazards and need care. But we do at least have decent tools here. There is nothing more off putting than blunt or stiff hedge clippers, secateurs that won’t keep an edge, pruning saws that are blunt and bent or loppers that no longer lop cleanly. Mark is adamant that he won’t teach me how to use a chainsaw and they terrify me anyway, but I have learned that I can achieve a great deal with a good pruning saw. Gardeners with small hands or arthritis may like to treat themselves to grape snips as well. They are pretty cheap, as I recall, and pleasant to use as well as being light enough to carry easily in a pocket. I tend to wreck them by trying to cut through wood that is too thick but we bought a dozen pairs a couple of years ago and I still have a couple of brand new sets waiting hidden in my drawer. Mark favours a lightweight and small set of secateurs which were very expensive to buy but much easier to use than heavier and cheaper brands. If you are a serious gardener, buy quality.

The sky is the limit when it comes to pruning, shaping and tidying individual plants in a large and mature garden but I am really looking forward to having more time to indulge in this aspect of gardening. I certainly would not claim to be in David Anyon’s league (taking everyday plants and turning them into unique works of art, according to the writer of the article) but I would certainly like to get there. It is a great deal more creative than weeding.

Mark groaned when he read the letter to the editor last week from a correspondent hoping that the newly formed Friends of the Te Henui Walkway would not be removing the flowering plants – such as the flowering onion weed. Dear oh dear. There is a world of difference between wildflowers and noxious weeds and onion weed falls fairly and squarely into the second category. The correspondent would be better occupied gathering up bulbs of the snowflake (leucojum) which naturalises well, has a long flowering season and is never going to invade the area rather than trying to preserve colonising thugs. Or white bluebells could be an acceptable alternative.

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Readers who have their own asparagus patch or who enjoy this seasonal treat may like to try a recipe I saw on TV in Britain from the inimitable Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall. HFW seems to be something of a darling of mainstream TV crossing freely between lifestyle, gardening and cooking programmes while embodying much of that which is charming about British eccentrics. Pitted in some cook-off competition against a professional chef, HFW watched him fiddling about making the usual Hollandaise Sauce and then proceeded to whip up his own version. Cook the asparagus spears lightly. Soft boil a three minute egg then cut its top off, pierce the yolk, place a small knob of butter on the egg and add a squeeze of lemon juice. Dip the asparagus spears in the egg mix and eat. Voila! Instant Hollandaise Sauce without the artery hardening properties of large quantities of butter, let alone the problems of curdling.

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Keen gardeners generally know how to grow plants from seed and if you are of this ilk, you will want to have a look at Kings Seeds catalogue. I can honestly say that Mark has had hours of wholesome fun browsing this substantial listing and will have many more hours of fun when his thirty seven packets of seed turn up. It was actually meant to be forty five packets of seed but they seemed to be out of eight that he wanted. Considering I can blow $100 easily on a trip to town, his investment of $103.30 (plus the cost of the catalogue which I think was $7.50) is likely to be of much longer duration with more rewarding outcomes.

The beauty of Kings Seeds is that they don’t just offer the mainstream flower and vegetable selections (though they are here and at prices somewhat less than you will pay buying them off the shelf), there is a large range of less common selections – annuals, perennials, herbs and vegetable – and a growing selection of heirloom varieties. There are seven different types of zucchini, for example, and I counted fifty one different types of tomatoes.

You can find Kings Seeds on line at www.kingsseeds.co.nz or if you are the more old fashioned type who prefers to hold a catalogue in your hands, Mark obtained his copy from a local garden centre. Even if you have never tried growing seeds before, you may be inspired to start. There is quite a bit of information in the catalogue but my advice to absolute beginners is not to be too ambitious to start with. Five packets of different seeds are probably enough to cope with… You will need seed trays. We still use our polystyrene mushroom trays here which used to be widely available but are harder to source now. Ours are almost vintage. We puncture many holes in the base before filling with seed raising mix. Once you have sown your seeds, it does pay to keep the trays off the ground if you can, to afford some protection from marauding slugs and snails which can demolish all the tender shoots overnight. If you resort to using your outdoor dining table to hold the seed trays, cover it with plastic first to give some protection to the table. The rest of the seed raising process you can learn by trial and error and it is a wonderful activity to do with children.

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I don’t usually review garden books as part of this column, but a reprint of a 1936 classic has had me chuckling this week. 100 Garden Games certainly harks back to an earlier era when people were more willing to participate in organised activities. Chapter one has twenty five games for one or two players. I worried a bit about whether Slippity was a form of jelly wrestling, but apparently not. But the one which took my fancy was Toe Ball. This is an amusing little game, we are told, which involves quite considerable energy. Briefly, it involves lying flat on your back on the ground. A large ball of a fair weight has a cord tied around it, secured at the other end to your toe. You then fling your leg upwards with as much force as possible so the ball flies upwards and backwards over your head, while the loop slips off your toe. What I particularly liked was the quote at the end: “This is an excellent little stunt for the lawn when you are sun-bathing in swim suits.” The mind boggles.

Going into games for small groups and larger parties, the instructions and equipment can become somewhat more complex, along with the scoring rules. Tether Tennis did not, as I initially feared, involve tying up your playing partner so that he or she could not escape. Neither did Human Croquet use shrunken heads, although some players are required to take on the role of being hoops while others are balls. Human croquet is more a case of Blind Man’s Buff meets croquet.

But it was the Games For Children chapter which made me think that times had changed considerably. It is difficult to imagine that the modern child would be encouraged to make their own blowpipes (the instructions on how to construct a blowpipe are very detailed) complete with darts from thin splinters of bamboo. Given that bullrush has fallen into disfavour, a number of the rough and tumble games, such as Tyre Wrestling, are likely to be deemed unsafe.

However Whip Sport is certainly attention grabbing in the games for children. The section opens with: “Plenty of fun can be had from a long-thonged whip.” This is followed by instructions on how to make a long thronged whip, even something resembling a cat-o’-nine-tails if you so wish. After making your whip, this handy little reference book tells you how to master using it and suggests various targets. Maybe children in 1936 were better mannered and kinder, as well as being tougher. The prospect of lining up a group of children of the new millennium armed with long thonged whips and expecting them to play harmoniously and co-operatively might be altogether too optimistic.

If you feel you need this nostalgic little book in your collection, it is by Sidney G Hedges, published by Hamlyn (ISBN 978 0 600 61840 9). It may generate lots of wholesome fun in your garden this summer, if you avoid the games which ACC would like to make illegal.

In Sorrento (the south of Italy) earlier this year, Daughter and I were very taken with the use of fruiting oranges for street trees. It seemed impossibly romantic and I wondered whether it was a feasible option for Waitara, which has a climate eminently suitable to growing citrus.

As we walked along, we discussed whether it was appropriate to pick the fruit but the dilemma was solved when we ended up staying in accommodation set in an orange grove with an unlimited supply of free fruit. But even as we admired the orange trees (what a wonderful fragrance there must be at flowering time), the cynical side of me thought that such plantings were unlikely to survive long back home and the trees were more likely to either vandalised or stolen soon after planting out.

So it was saddening to read this week of the destruction wrought on the children’s gardens at Moturoa School. I am sure I was not alone in being absolutely delighted by this newspaper’s coverage of children’s gardening activities. It is just so positive and wholesome and makes one smile to see this type of initiative which enriches the life of everyone it touches. Nobody could fault the projects which teach children how to tend the soil, produce home grown fruit and vegetables and to develop a taste for fresh food – all of which will stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives. Some of us are envious that it didn’t happen when we were at school.

It just seems incomprehensible that anybody, adult or child, would want to destroy such projects – not once but twice in the same day. Even worse than ripping out the plants and snapping the trees is the message the children have been given about the unpredictable and vicious nature of some people. This was not a lesson that eight year olds needed to learn. How do you explain to young children that some people are so warped and bent that they derive satisfaction from destroying something positive and cooperative and good? Yes there will be positive outcomes. People will be kind and generous and supportive and the children will replant but they have still been taught a nasty lesson too early in life.

Good on Moturoa School for planning to replant. I am sure that the vast majority of people (and certainly every single person who reads this column) wish them every success and hope that the low-lifes have finished their fun in destroying children’s efforts.

Parents or grandparents who want to encourage young children to garden at home need to remember that successful results are the most important driver. Children need the best and most prominent spot in the garden, not to be hidden away out of sight around the back or in a waste area. They need a position in full view, in full sun and with some shelter from wind. In our experience, they like a defined area of their own with clear boundaries. It does not want to be too large and it doesn’t need expensive edgings or to be a raised bed unless you want a permanent installation. But defining the area with an edging of river stones, pieces of board or stray pavers gives a sense of containment. Being within reach of a hose or a tap is helpful. Preparing the soil in advance gives young children a head start too. Littlies can not be expected to turn over soil effectively and double dig. They will lose heart and be defeated very quickly. But if they can move straight into a well prepared bed and start incorporating compost and planting, the probability of success increases greatly. It is a simple gift to give to children.

I have also been reading about the moves by the South Taranaki District Council to use fruiting trees in public plantings and to supply apple trees to local residents this year. While I would be reluctant to see only fruit trees used (there is a place for splendid ornamental trees as well), there is something very charming about this sort of use of productive planting. I am sure that a community which feels a sense of ownership will take better care and be more vigilant in protecting plantings.

Walnut trees and chestnut trees in public locations are a splendid idea. When we were students at Massey, Mark used to harvest walnuts from an avenue at Acacia Birch and he had an annual race with the local Chinese to beat them to the chestnuts at Awapuni Racecourse. Some years ago, he collected ripe olives from in front of the New Plymouth Courthouse but it was an action tinged with feelings of guilt. At least in South Taranaki, the locals will know that it is fine to harvest nature’s bounty from their trees.

I had an all too brief chat to John Sargeant, the man driving the South Taranaki plantings. He tells me that the aim is to plant 1000 trees in the district in the next 5 years, of which about 10% will be edible. He talked about the role trees play in making memories and that in fifty years time locals should still be harvesting chestnuts, long after the planting of the trees has been forgotten. I was inspired by his passion for the project and the practical way in which he is using trees to add value to the lives of local residents. Mr Sargeant is not scared to experiment. The fig trees in Opunake have been less than successful and he has to be philosophical about thefts of feijoas and lemon trees. At least when theft occurs, the plants are still growing somewhere, whereas straight out vandalism is harder to take. Given that most people only want one lemon tree, one hopes that replanted trees may stand a better chance of remaining. The more South Taranaki residents realise that something quite special and innovative is happening in their district, the more protective they may become of their trees.

Go South Taranaki, I say, and may this set a trend for more mixed plantings in other local body areas of Taranaki. It would be a great project for community councils in the north to pick up and run with. Maybe we could yet see citrus trees, feijoas and nut trees growing throughout Waitara. In fact, Waitara could go one better than most other areas and even use bananas. How about those for defining a desirable climatic identity?