There is a bit of the green-eyed monster in many of us who live in areas of the country where vineyards are rare or non existent. A visit to Marlborough had me thinking that the green-eyed monster may be wearing rose coloured spectacles with visions of the romance of Tuscany.

Vineyards in Marlborough are acre upon acre upon acre of green monoculture. And frankly there is not a lot that is aesthetically pleasing about endless expanses of tanalised posts, wires and alkathene piping. And while the vineyard cafes, for which many of us would also admit to feeling envy, are generally magnificent, architecturally designed buildings from the front, if you view them as a whole, the backs of the buildings are factories. Stainless steel vats are not great additions to the rural landscape.

Vast vineyards mean little bird life. Birds and grapes don’t go together and stringent efforts are made to kill or at least banish all birds. But worst must be the frost control in an area which has fairly frequent frosts. A local told me that there could be as many as 150 helicopters hovering in the air. I was a bit surprised that they could muster 150 helicopters but the vineyard acreage is huge now. I imagine Apocalypse Now has nothing on these areas and the prospect of long nights with the throbbing of helicopters ensuring the survival of the precious grape crop (while discharging vast quantities of exhaust fumes) would have me selling up and moving to somewhere less likely to be afflicted by deafening noise while I struggled to sleep.

So a recent weekend in Marlborough was a revelation in dispelling the myths of the glamour of living in a grape growing region. Good wine (and plenty of it), good food in vineyard cafes and lots of wealth but the environmental impact is not all great. And in Marlborough, which is dry as a bone, vineyards all need irrigation. With no ground water (so no springs, wells or bores) I was told it all derives from the one river. The current buzz word elsewhere of sustainability was not mentioned. Overall, I concluded, Tuscany it is not.

I was in the area for a weekend looking at gardens in the company of some of the country’s pre-eminent and up and coming gardeners. The first garden had me thinking about whether it was in fact a garden or a landscape but that is pedantic because it stands out as the most sensitive adaptation to the environment that I have seen. We were lucky to see it because it is not open to the public. The house was the initial unique feature – thick concrete poured in curves and completely nestled into a hillside so that it is nearly invisible. In fact, as we walked towards a windowed cupola which appeared to be a garden feature set on a grassy mound, it took a few moments to realise we were walking over the roof of the house. The glassed cupola was the light and ventilation shaft for the kitchen. Entering through a cutting in the hill flanked by ngaio trees, we walked into this curious, curved house where there was a wall of windows looking out to the landscape and the sea. It took your breath away. Living in a hobbit house which is half underground may not appeal to all but I have never seen such sensitive blending of architecture and landscape. It was all of a two minute stroll to the wild coastline and the environment is harsh and unforgiving but simply splendid. Gardening in a traditional style would be doomed to failure but the owner has maximised two view shafts while retaining some shelter from the existing dunes. Vegetation was entirely native and tough – including ngaios, cabbage trees, flaxes, tussocks and toetoe. It looked as if it was all a happy, natural occurrence and it wasn’t until I looked closely that I realised the owner had worked hard to achieve this impression. I figured the land had been re-contoured somewhat to achieve the view shafts (he confirmed that he had indeed bought a bob cat and owned diggers) and I could see where he was managing the native flora to keep a natural appearance without the scruffiness of the wild. But nothing looked contrived or artificial and it was simply remarkable.

Inland from Blenheim, we visited Barewood – Carolyn Ferraby’s garden which carries national significance ranking. Her place was very different with the prettiest garden in combinations of pastel perennials, annuals and shrubs surrounding a very old villa. A florist by profession, she has clearly shunned anything bright or garish and I certainly can’t recall seeing anything spiky. I think of it as an English-styled mixed border approach to gardening and it was the sort of place that my English mother (herself a very good gardener) set about creating in her many gardens but never stuck around long enough to see mature. Harmony is the key, and deceptive understatement. Nothing shouts look at me, look at me. Blending together to create a complete picture is the order of the day. The only mass plantings are the three avenues of matched trees which frame access ways but many of the border plants are repeated in different combinations. Considering we were viewing it at the very end of a dry summer when most gardens can look a little tired and stressed, the owner maintains a high standard with the help of irrigation. It was very pretty.

Southwards, near Kaikoura, we visited Winterhome, another Garden of National Significance. I have never been there before though I have seen it frequently on TV and in magazines where the rose gardens (massed planting of white Margaret Merrill in compartments surrounded by box hedging) and the canal garden feature heavily. Those simple forms photograph well but never inspired me so I was completely unprepared for the impact of this large and mature garden which went so far beyond those two areas. It is Italian in style with intersecting axis but on a fairly grand scale and a complexity of planting which goes beyond the modern formal style with its very limited palette of plants.

This is a garden light on ornamentation (thank goodness) but heavy on structure and form. Lots of walls, loggias, pillars and structural framing but all integrated with planting. It is a garden which has surprises and mystery and where some of the long axis (very long, some of them, stretching hundreds of metres) entice you down to see what is at the end. The structure, or hard landscaping, has aged gracefully so it is not intrusive but gives it all shape and coherence.

I was forced to review my cynicism about the Italian look (all structure and form with no plant interest and usually clichéd structure at that). While I may feel a little sense of NABBH (more of that in a later column – it stands for Not Another Bloody Buxus Hedge), it was great to see gardeners carry off a grand vision with flair and hard work, albeit probably backed up by quite a bit of money.

Barewood and Winterhome are both open to the public but you have to know the right people to get entree to the coastal house and garden.

Over the years we have hosted many thousands of garden visitors and inevitably one develops a sort of patter. “You will notice our climate is very soft,” I say. “We never get that hot but we never get very cold either. High sunshine hours and regular rain twelve months of the year, including summer rain. If we get three weeks without rain, we start talking drought.” Hah! When did we last get a good, steady rain which soaked well into the ground? Considerably longer than three weeks ago. And we are talking fairly serious drought now.

Given that we earn our living from growing plants which require irrigation, we are at least lucky to have a reliable water supply. When we had a bore drilled well over twenty years ago, I recall it being one of the most stressful periods of my life. That was back in the olden days when it wasn’t easy to borrow money. You actually had to have some equity and be able to prove that you could meet the repayments and the then Rural Bank would not loan us the money to put in an irrigation system until we had found water. We had scraped together enough money to get the hole drilled but of course you pay wet or dry. In other words, if we had the site wrong and they drilled down but failed to find water, we were still going to have to hand over our hard earned $4500. It was a very long ten days and, as luck would have it (though we did have a somewhat more cynical take on it at the time) when Mark told the drillers we only had enough money for one more day, water magically appeared. Whatever, it is a supply that has stood us in very good stead in the decades since.

We have never irrigated the garden however, and I am strongly of the view that in these changing times, putting in ornamental gardens which rely on irrigation is unjustifiable and unsustainable. This year’s drought may be a one-off or it may be a taste of things to come. But the global shortage and increasing unpredictability of fresh water is hitting home at such a local level that gardeners should be considering where they and their passions fit in to the bigger picture.

We don’t expect to lose much at all in the garden and certainly no big trees or shrubs. The hydrangeas are wilting and other plants are visibly stressed. We are getting some early autumn colour as deciduous trees are deciding to shed some of their foliage early to reduce moisture loss. But this being Taranaki, we are confident that the autumn rains will come in due course and at least the cooler nights and increasing dew helps reduce overall moisture loss.

Vegetable gardeners will be continuing to water and the quick growth and high moisture content of many edible crops mean that if you don’t water, you won’t get a harvest. But short of ripping out your ornamental plants and putting in succulents and desert plants which are designed to withstand long dry periods, what can you do in the ornamental garden? The answer is pretty well nothing at the moment except to make plans for when the rains return.

Well cultivated soil holds water better in dry periods. In fact, tilling the vegetable garden to a fine tilth and letting it form a dry layer on top is a time honoured method of conserving water. We are pretty lucky in most of Taranaki and Wanganui that we do not have the nasty clay soils that afflict much of the country. Clay tends to be waterlogged in winter and to set like concrete is summer. Most of us have soils which are pretty easy to cultivate. So if your garden soils look compacted and you have developed the habit of chipping out a hole to place new plants, make a resolution to put more effort into cultivating the ground. Every good gardener knows that the state of the soil is the single most important ingredient to gardening. Even novice gardeners may have noticed that they buy a superb looking plant, bung it in the ground and it starts to go off in a most disappointing manner. The cause is usually bad planting technique.

So step one is to cultivate the soil well. Adding compost, humus or well rotted animal manure helps to add goodness and texture and is a great deal more sustainable and environmentally sound than adding artificial fertilisers. After all, humans have been gardening and growing crops that way for thousands of years, long before the merits of phosphates and nitrates were proven in the nineteenth century, triggering the rush from gardeners and farmers for old bones to crush for fertiliser.

Step two is to plan for planting trees and shrubs in autumn, rather than spring. Most of us get inspired by pretty spring plants but it really is better to get them into the ground in autumn so they can establish and get their roots out before the threat of summer dry. But don’t be tempted this year to start planting until we get rain. The calendar may tell us it is autumn but the conditions are not yet singing to the same tune.

Step three is to mulch. And mulch. And then mulch some more. It is too late to mulch when the soil is already dry because the mulch will act as a barrier to water entering the soil as well as to slowing evaporation. You need to mulch when the moisture levels are already high, in winter or early spring. We mulch with compost and since the advent of our prized chipper, we now have the shredded waste from that too. You can mulch with pea straw (an expensive option here because we don’t grow peas locally), pine needles, granulated bark, calf shed wood shavings or any similar material. You want it pretty sterile so you are not introducing weed seeds. The mulch retains moisture in the soil, adds texture to it and some mulches will add nutrients. It also makes a garden look a great deal better than bare soil. The birds tend to find it appealing but rather than moaning about them scattering the mulch, look upon it as beneficial all round. Not only does it keep bird life active in the garden, but they are digging in the mulch because it is rich in natural insect life.

Step four is my new hobby horse. Plant trees. If you are worried about the sun, plant deciduous trees which will give shade in summer but not block the precious winter sun. I used to think that if everybody planted one good tree in their lifetime in a spot where it would have every chance of growing to maturity, the world would be a better place. Now I think that planting many trees is a better way to go. If you drive to work, or insist on driving a gas guzzling large car or urban tractor, enjoy motor sports (there is an oxymoron for you), fly internally or overseas or (horrors), all of the preceding, then you should be planting many more trees to compensate for your excessive carbon hoofprint.

By the end of summer, many gardens can be looking rather green and sometimes a little tired. This is especially true where gardeners depend on woody trees and shrubs for seasonal flowers. There are not many woody plants that peak flower in late summer to early autumn. I guess we should be grateful that our climate is such that we manage to stay green throughout summer, even in a year of relative drought. But if you are keen on flowers, it can seem a little flat.
In times gone by, annuals were more popular and many gardeners raised their own seed to enable them to continue flowering plants throughout the seasons. Potted colour has taken this place but can be an expensive option. Mark’s father used to raise African marigolds every year to plant out for late summer interest in the rockery. This was a tradition I gladly dispensed with, having something of a hate relationship with marigolds. Definitely not up my list of desirable flowers.
But I went for a walk around the nursery and garden to see what is bravely putting up fresh flowers at this time of the year. Somewhat unfairly, I ignored the hardworking plants which just go on and on flowering – the hydrangeas, pansies, dahlias, begonias, crinum, Rose Flower Carpet Coral and a few of the other roses, and impatiens. They do a splendid job but they can lack the oomph of fresh, seasonal flowers in full flight.
In the nursery, I found three species camellias which flower every year well before the autumn sasanquas. Sinensis, the green tea camellia (yes you can brew your own fresh green tea if you wish) is a March flowerer. It has little flowers which resemble clusters of stamens in either pink or white and is certainly not showy but quite charming in an understated way. Even less known is Camellia puniceiflora which most readers will probably have never heard of. Its flowers are the size of a thumbnail at best and resemble perfect, tiny, pink daisies with a yellow centre. Fortunately the bush is small leafed and pendulous in growth so it does show its flowers off but you need to look reasonably closely at this little gem. More showy is Camellia microphylla, another small leafed species but with masses of white flowers starting now. It is one I have debated about using as a neat hedge because it has such bushy and compact growth.
The Australian lemon myrtle, Backhousia citriodora, is in flower. It makes a large shrub to small tree with rather nice velvety red new growth in spring but it is the masses of fluffy, white flowers in late summer and its wonderfully aromatic foliage which make it worth growing. Apparently the oil is extracted commercially and when you rub a leaf between your fingers or sniff the flowers you can understand why. It is deliciously lemon scented.
There are always vireya rhododendrons in flower in the garden. They can be frustrating because they don’t have a predictable flowering season. The urge to flower is not triggered by day length or temperature as is the case with most flowering shrubs. They come from the tropics where day length and temperature are pretty consistent all year round. But if you have enough of these plants in your garden, you can almost guarantee that some will have fresh flowers for nigh on twelve months of the year.
There were not many more woody plants that chose to flower in early autumn. In the climbing group, the lapagerias, or Chilean bellflowers, have started their flowering season and will continue for many months to come. These can take a while to get established in the garden, but once they have stopped sulking and put up strong growths, it is hard to think of another evergreen climber which is so easy and obliging without being a threat to the spouting or the chimney. The commonest colour is a deep pinky red (rosea), but they can also be found in pure white and a whole range of pink shades in between.
In the perennial and annual line, the sedums, angelica, amaranthus and asters are the standout performers this week. I get a bit sniffy about sedums, not being a fan of succulent-y type plants, but they do put up a very good late summer display. The angelica that is looking particularly striking as a border plant is not the common shiny one but a taller, purple flowered species which I think is probably gigas from northern Asia. I am fond of asters (michaelmas daisies), most of which flower in autumn and we have a very fetching lilac blue form which justifies its place in the garden at this time every year. And the amaranthus, or love-lies-bleeding, self seed in the rockery – dangerously so if I don’t deadhead most of them early enough – but then add some height and drama as summer drifts into autumn.
But the bottom line is that yet again it is the bulbs that are the drop dead gorgeous seasonal interest. From bare earth, a carpet of blooms can appear miraculously quickly. Sure, some like the autumn crocus or colchicums have a short season but that season is so spectacular and welcome that we don’t mind. The colchicums are not even related to crocus (which are spring flowering) but being triggered by autumn rains, they suddenly spring into a carpet of lilac pink blooms before any foliage appears. They will be all finished in a few weeks, except for the foliage which will make a green carpet in winter, but while in flower they are show stoppers.
The African blood lily (sometimes called elephant’s ears but properly referred to as Haemanthus coccineus) also has a fairly short flowering season with completely surprising large red paintbrushes appearing from bare soil but the flowers are followed by enormous fleshy leaves which lie flat to the soil, resembling the ears of the elephant in fact, and are every bit as startling as the flowers throughout winter.
The nerines are just starting to bloom. These have a place in floristry because the blooms are relatively long lived but we generally just leave ours in congested clumps half in and half out of the soil where they are a mainstay of our autumn garden year in and year out. I get irritated by their somewhat scruffy foliage come spring time but forgive them again when they light up the garden at this time of the year. They are somewhat classier and more refined (and have a much greater range in flower colour and size) but like similar growing conditions to their larger, distant cousins the belladonna lilies or amaryllis. We tend to regard the common belladonnas as roadside plants where they can flaunt their nakedness to all the passers by.
The charming autumn form of the peacock iris, moraea polystachya, is flowering and will continue to do so for quite some time as it opens down its stems. I am a bit of a sucker for that pretty shade of lilac blue and the simplicity of the three petalled form with a yellow centre is infinitely charming. This is a bulb which gently seeds down in the rockery without ever becoming invasive.
And how could I bypass the delightful miniature cyclamen? Hederifolium (sometimes referred to as neapolitana) is mass flowering wherever it can. The prettiest of pink or white flowers with not a single leaf visible yet. They are a mainstay of our autumn garden.
Some of the pretty oxalis are invasive and need to be treated with care as garden plants but do not let the horrors of the common weedy ones put you off a genus of plants which offers a large range of autumn flowering delights. As long as they do not stage a takeover bid by seeding too prolifically, bulbs with aspirations to world domination can be kept permanently confined to pots. And by no means all oxalis are invasive. We would not be without our collection of about 25 different forms which come in sequence from now until mid winter.
You may have to search a bit harder to find the autumn performers for the garden but it is worth it to celebrate the progression of the gardening year.

I feel a prediction coming on.

While the seventies brought us the phenomenon of the conifer garden (an era perhaps best forgotten now), the eighties can be remembered for bringing us the cottage garden with a riot of flowers and colours. The nineties saw a reaction to the ill discipline and high maintenance of the cottage garden and it was the stark and often pretentious minimalist garden (five rocks and three plants one of which had to be sansevieria or aloe bainsei) which became the height of sophisticated fashion. Few of us mourned the quick decline in popularity of the minimalist look. But the prediction from the House of Jury is that the new fashion is going to prove to be the simple formal garden.

A colleague sent me an aerial photograph of a garden without comment and I wasn’t quite sure what my reaction was meant to be. It was a large formal garden and there is no doubt at all that the seductive simplicity of the formal garden makes for very good photography because the form and design is dominant. My response was not what was sought and we had a fairly tetchy exchange of emails because I was not prepared to admire at face value. What I saw was a large area sharply defined by tightly clipped hedges built around the mandatory central axis which Mark is fond of describing as the airport runway look. I saw the substantial (but impressive) hedges sucking all the nutrient out of the surrounding ground so there were bare patches in the lawns beside them. I saw trees planted in matched formation. One grid had a substantial number of trees and I enquired what the owner had used. As far as I was concerned, if you are going to plant a large number of matched trees in a grid, it mattered hugely what tree was chosen to feature so prominently.

My colleague did not see it as I did. He took it at face value and felt I was being pedantic and picky enquiring what tree had been used. It was the overall look that mattered. And that is the nub of the simple formal garden. It is the overall look that matters. Not the detail. And certainly not the botanical interest. Best guess here is that the tree that had been used was the predictable hornbeam or English beech.

f I was doing up a property for sale, I would put in a formal garden. It has immediate appeal and does not require great gardening skill to maintain. Most of the population is not committed to intensive and detailed gardening. In fact what most people want is an attractive outdoors which is not going to take every moment of their spare time to maintain. A formal garden can deliver just that.

There is of course a great difference between a good formal garden and a very average or poor example. But the difference does not rely on gardening skills. It lies in proportions and spaces and there is no reason why an architect, mathematician or a trained artist could not achieve a very good formal garden by applying set principles. Or a hairdresser. In my experience, good hairdressers have well developed skills in fashion, colour, shape and proportion as well as being highly skilled in accurate, freeform cutting which would stand them in very good stead when it comes to clipping the plants later.

But planning a garden on graph paper by creating a central and intersecting axis and placing plants in geometric formation should not be confused with being creative and original. Frankly it has all been done before and it will be done many times again.

Once the design has been drawn (formal gardens work best from scratch on a blank canvas, in other words a bare section, preferably flat) the plant selection is a minor detail. The key is to be restrained and to keep to a very limited range. It doesn’t matter if your lollipop trees are camellias, bays, michelias or robinia Moptops, as long as they are all identical. Simplicity, shape and space are the key ingredients.

A formal garden is the quickest way I know to achieve maximum impact. Bigger is better, of course. To create a formal garden across several acres is more impressive than a tiny town section but the principles remain the same. And formal gardens are traditionally associated with wealth and class so we can annex a little of that status for ourselves in the democratising of the modern formal garden.

Arguably formal gardens are the easiest to care for as well. You don’t need gardening skills to maintain them. Many people have a cleaner for the inside of their house. Generally somebody of a similar skill level can maintain a simple formal garden outside so you can hire in help. If I was of that persuasion, I would be looking for a moonlighting hairdresser.

Yes. I think we are going to see many formal gardens appear over the next few years. Quick impact, impressive, easy to maintain and appealing in their simplicity and form. Were we staying in the wholesale plant business, I would be redirecting some of our production to meet this anticipated demand.

But, and herein lies the crunch, I have never known a keen plantsperson or gardener who would want a formal garden of this type. The plant interest is close to zero. The flexibility is zero. The place for ongoing creativity is zero. There is no room for genuine originality in design because proportions are mathematically determined. Golden means and vanishing perspectives and all that. Keen gardeners I know all like to look at little pictures as well as big pictures. They like to try out combinations and to change aspects of their garden to see if they can get it all to work better. It is likely that the minimalists of the nineties will become the formalists of the new millennium.

What will set apart the really good formal garden over time will be the marriage of design and plantsmanship. The precedent is there (as it usually is in gardening – difficult to be truly original when it has mostly all been done before). At the turn of last century, gifted English architect Edwin Lutyens designed beautiful formal gardens (as well as some truly lovely houses). He had a wonderful sense of space and proportion which has stood the test of time. But did he then furnish these spaces with a very limited range of plants in the simple formal style? No. He handed them over to that great English gardener Gertrude Jekyll who set about filling the spaces and softening the hard edges with riot of foliage and flowers. These Lutyens-Jekyll joint ventures were not low maintenance but they were lovely gardens. It was English gardening at its best and an example of what set the English ahead of their European counterparts – the French parterres notable for tightly clipped buxus and colour toned annuals or the Italian formality marked by magnificent stone work and a very limited range of plants heavily clipped to within an inch of their lives.

Good formal gardens will stand the test of time and formal gardens certainly have their place. But the flurry of DIY lookalikes are probably destined to take their place in history alongside the conifer gardens and the minimalist gardens.

I have, as we say here, been Doing the Bulbs. This used to be an event which took place at this time each year with every pot or tray being repotted on a two yearly cycle but it was a practice which somehow dropped down the priority list until it fell off the bottom and I don’t think anybody has Done the Bulbs since I last tackled them six or seven years ago. It is rather a case of survival of the fittest and some of the thugs have taken control.

Mark’s late father was very keen on bulbs and built up a good selection in the garden. In turn, Mark bought or acquired every different bulb he could lay his hands on over a period of years but he held them in the nursery while he built them up and assessed them. Many never got out of the nursery because finding the right position in the garden hasn’t happened yet so we had developed this area that we would walk past with eyes averted so we couldn’t see the weed infestation. We are talking several hundred trays and pots so it is not a little task that can be done quickly. After a week’s work, I am about half way through.

Over the years, Mark has removed the really special bulbs to his covered house so what I am dealing with are the survivors of benign neglect.

When bulbs are mentioned, most people tend to think of daffodils, tulips (which prefer areas with cold winters), anemones and ranunculus (those shrivelled up little brown packages of promise you buy are technically tubers), maybe dahlia tubers, freesias, snowdrops and a few others. Taranaki gardeners have adopted rhodohypoxis (or roxypoxies as one garden visitor called them) as our own emblem because they obligingly flower year in year out in the week of our Rhododendron Festival. But bulbs go well beyond go well beyond these common types.

Technically bulbs, tubers, corms and rhizomes are all geophytes which are characterised by their fleshy underground structure where nutrients and moisture are stored making it possible for the plant to survive periods of drought or cold. The greatest threat to bulbs in our climate is that they can be too wet and rot out, especially those which have a dormant period (not every bulb goes dormant). In their native habitats, growth periods coincide with optimal growing conditions which, in the case of the large majority of our successful garden bulbs from South Africa, mean that they are triggered by autumn rains. Of course here we don’t just have autumn rain. We have winter rains, spring rain and, thank goodness this week, summer rain, so we can struggle with bulbs which require long dry periods. So good drainage, better drainage and excellent drainage are the three most critical elements to growing them in the garden.

The advantage of holding the bulbs in the nursery has also been to sort out which are invasive. Our worst weed in the rockery came in as a garden bulb – a geissorhiza with a pretty blue flower in spring which then seeded everywhere and put off multiple, tiny off shoots all of which seem to survive and to reproduce. It is a menace. The most common menace bulb which many gardeners suffer from is one of the oxalis family but over the past week I have uncovered others. Not all lapeirousia or moraeas are worth cherishing. Some just look dangerous. And while we are quite happy to naturalise some bulbs in our garden, those which are attempting to naturalise themselves with no assistance from us at all are inviting an encounter with Round Up. They are not all precious.

Doing a quick flick around the garden, I see there are a number of summer bulbs in flower. It is peak time for the completely OTT auratum lilies (of Japanese origin) which are a mainstay of our summer garden. The scadoxus katherinae (from South Africa and Zimbabwe) are in full flower, as are the glorious gloriosas from the same part of the world. The pretty cyclamen hederafolium from Southern Europe and Turkey have started. The zephyranthes, sometimes referred to as rain lilies, hailing from the Americas are putting up intermittent neat little copper coloured flowers alongside our driveway. It is a veritable United Nations flowering and the beauty of an extensive bulb collection is that you can pretty well guarantee that there will be some with fresh flowers for every month of the year. They add a wonderful seasonal interest and detail to a garden.

So back to sorting out our packages of promise here, many of which will remain a mystery until they grow because while some bulbs at least survived a prolonged period of neglect, the same can not be said for their accompanying labels. Those which the birds did not scatter have tended to fade beyond deciphering stage. By the by, writing on plastic labels with a soft pencil is preferable to felt pen – pencil lasts much longer (a trick we have learned over the years in the nursery). While I can recognise a fritillaria bulb from a scilla or a lachenalia, when we started with a collection of around 15 different frits, even more lachenalias and goodness knows how many different scillas it has become more problematic. It may take a season or two to re-establish the identities.

Postscripts to my last column. Mark was absolutely delighted to lay his hands on a Planet Junior from a reader and has been carefully oiling the handle and wondering where he might find some of the additional attachments which were originally available as extras. In case you are wondering what a Planet Junior is, think of it as the manual pre-cursor to the rotary hoe.

And the Monarch Trust secretary in Northland was delighted to read my last column on the topic. She has been sending information through, along with two packets of seed for red and yellow flowered forms of swan plant (we do have a blue flowered form here too). I think she has recruited Mark to join the band of taggers (those who put tiny stickers on monarch butterflies which are wintering over). If you want to contact the Trust, they have a wonderful email address: members@monarch.org.nz (nothing to do with the Royal Family). She tells me monarchs arrived here naturally around 1840 so they are technically native to our country. I did not know that.