Both Mark and I burst out laughing when we heard a quote from the late Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter fame, one of England’s premier gardens and gardeners. “People are always looking for low maintenance and easy care gardens,” he said. “Personally I am of the view that if you love what you are doing, higher maintenance is more interesting.” We could not agree more.

Topiary is a tradition which has not been greatly embraced in this country although it has a long and honourable history in Europe and Asia. It is neither instant nor low maintenance so maybe it has just never fitted the quick and easy tree and shrub style of gardening favoured here. It was Hollard Gardens in Kaponga which first aroused our interest in the use of the heavily clipped punctuation mark shrub to give form to an otherwise loose planting. Subsequently we have realised that this draws on overseas gardening traditions and that there is a place for heavy clipping and shaping without going overboard and thinking that an entire garden must be forced into clipped submission.

The traditional candidate for clipping in Britain is the yew. With its dense growth, tiny leaves, ability to regenerate quickly from bare wood and its longlived habit in their climate, it is perfect. There are reasons why we don’t see many yew trees here. They just do not like our heavy rainfalls and given ground which can stay wet for months the roots give up the ghost. Even quite mature trees can suddenly up and die on you. We recently lost a mature golden yew of some fifty years from our rockery. One month it was vigorous and healthy and next month it was clearly dying. It battled on a while longer, putting out new shoots from the base before it decided that it simply decided it no longer wished to inhabit this earth. It is dead and we won’t be replacing it with another yew tree. We do still have a surviving green one of a similar vintage. It must have developed a major lean in its early years and these days we clip it hard once or twice a year to accentuate the diagonal angle. It resembles a kiwi shape.

Buxus is the preferred clipping candidate in this country. It is pretty forgiving and if you pick the reasonably strong growing sempervirens form, you can get clipped balls, pompoms and shapes in a fairly short space of time. While we have a couple of clipped buxus hedges here and one large clipped buxus dome, we are not particularly enamoured of box and would not plant any more. It is a bit dull really.

The New Zealand yew equivalent is none other than our native totara. It too has tiny, dense foliage and will resprout from bare wood. If you have a spare decade or two and visualise yourself gardening long term, the totara will reward you. While it may be a forest giant when left to its own devices in the wild, it is easily contained in the garden situation by regular clipping. Miros and matais are other native trees which will take topiary or shaping and, to our eyes at least, are a great deal more interesting than buxus. I have a little series of matai balls on 120cm standards which are responding to clipping most rewardingly. I was given a form of dacrycarpus dacrydiodes from Paloma Garden in Wanganui. A witches broom of the magnificent kahikatea or white pine, it is very dense and slow growing and offers itself as another indigenous candidate for clipping.

If you have big, chunky camellias in your garden, you have the raw material for clipping in situ. It is not always easy to know what to do with a big blobby camellia but they can be splendid clipped. When starting from scratch, I would advocate a quick growing but small leafed variety such as tsaii, Fairy Blush or Cinnamon Cindy. But as the smaller foliaged types have only become popular in more recent years, established garden camellias are more likely to be larger leafed japonica types. These are a bit more problematic to shape but do not let the challenge put you off. If you get it wrong, they will grow again. In fact, if you cut them off at ground level, most will regenerate and keep growing. Not even Round Up kills them.

Working with a bigger leafed variety, leave the hedgeclippers to one side for as long as possible. Cut leaves look worse when they are large and twiggy stumps are more obvious. Start with trying to get the shape right from the middle, cutting off wayward branches flush to the trunk. Take out branches which cross or which are clearly growing in the wrong direction for the shape you plan. Prune back growths which are too long. Remove all dead wood. If you are careful with your cuts, it is possible to do this exercise without it being particularly obvious and it should not look like butchery. Then prune back the leafy stems with secateurs, again trying to cut flush with the stem so it is not obvious that you have been cutting it. The aim is to encourage dense foliage growth but in the shape you want. If you are twitching to use the hedge clippers, then restrict yourself to the time after flowering and before the new growth appears or when the soft new leaves are in full growth. At these times, the plant will soon cover the rigours of your assault on its foliage with the clippers.

Don’t be too ambitious from the start. There is considerable skill in clipping spirals, chickens, peacocks, hunting scenes and the like and they are not usually achieved by working with a plant that is already mature. Keep to an obelisk, a mushroom shape, cones, pillars or big balls. Clouds may be achievable if you are confident. Be prepared for it to take a couple of seasons to get the shapes right because the plant may need to thicken to fill in some bare areas. But the reason for this train of thought is that the time for the first clipping of a camellia is straight after flowering with a tidy up in spring when it has put its new growth on. As many of the sasanqua camellias are now starting to pass, you may like to pause and look at them and ponder a little judicious pruning and shaping. It is more fun than weeding.

I have written before about the native falcon which wreaks havoc on Mark’s poor innocent pigeons. Four ring necked doves on about their third day of freedom was the worst incident recently. But Mark, in a desultory sort of way, has been encouraging the dog to take an interest in protecting the birds. When the dog unleashed an intense volley of barks the other morning, we both rushed out to see what was upsetting him. Sure enough, he was warning of the falcon perched in the silver birch tree, waiting for his breakfast to make an appearance. How is that? An ornithologically abled dog. I was impressed. Mark did admit that he doesn’t always get it right and that he will sometimes woof at the odd suspicious looking seagull flying over but for a skittery Sheltie to be able to identify a falcon with any degree of accuracy is fairly remarkable and in fact beats many humans.

But back to gardening. I have only ever been into a couple of private gardens without a house. Generally these happen because the owner is dead keen to get the garden established but is not yet ready or able to build the house. And there is an odd feeling of something missing, especially when the garden is quite well established. Private gardens are different to public gardens in part because somebody lives there. It was for this reason that we argued strongly that Tupare and Hollards needed a residential presence maintained even though the original owners have long since shuffled off their mortal coils. The residence gives a heart to a garden.

Noted English gardener and writer Rosemary Verey (she of Barnsley, as in Lavatera Barnsley, fame) was fond of saying that “the garden should curtsey to the house”. It does help to have a house that is worth curtseying to (naturally Mrs Verey had a splendid English manor house of considerable charm and stature). It is somewhat more problematic if what you have is a characterless box which comprises the majority of this country’s housing stock. But the principle of integrating house and garden remain. In modern parlance, it tends to be referred to as indoor outdoor flow but that only tells half the story. That ability to move freely and with convenience from the living areas and often the master bedroom through to outdoor living areas is pretty much the norm with modern house design and where renovations take place in older houses.

Having been raised in a succession of older character homes and now being a current resident of a house which was designed before the whole concept of indoor outdoor flow became mandatory, my experience of that flow has largely been going out the windows (fortunately the downstairs windows are quite low in the current house). And when I think about it, I can recall our children climbing in and out of windows too. It doesn’t always do the paintwork and the window latches much good but it sure beats trailing around to one of the distant doors at times.

But the constant joy of our home is how well set it is in the garden, and for this we give all the credit to Mark’s parents and their study of the English gardening traditions. All the rooms in this two storied house command wonderful garden views and no matter how long we live here, I am sure our eyes will always be drawn to the garden vistas out of every window.

In terms of drawing the eye outdoors, it doesn’t matter if you live in a colonial mansion or a modest Beazley. It is only looking back the other way (from the garden to the house) that you notice what the house looks like. And with winter here and the nasty cold, cutting wind of last weekend, it is not a bad time to take a few minutes to stand indoors at each window in turn to contemplate the outlook.

There is a tendency in New Zealand to keep vegetation and garden well clear of the house so that it stands in splendid isolation on an apron of seal and grass. By contrast, the English country tradition is to garden right up to the house which gives intimacy and charm and allows greater integration of house and garden. .

We have never gone as far as attempting to match the garden colours to the interior. Personally I think that is getting just a little bit precious. Besides, I am not a great fan of green, orange, scarlet, shocking pink or lemon yellow as indoor furnishing colours but I am quite happy to use them in the garden. By chance we have one room where the soft pink and blue interior tones are echoed in the pretty garden outside its windows but truly, it is not the colour continuity that establishes the flow and draws the eye outside but the design.

Where possible, the long vista does more to attract attention and draw the eyes to look beyond. And of course the aforementioned Mrs Verey, being an English country garden specialist, advocated those longer vistas to attract people out to explore. A path leading to a destination which is not immediately visible is an obvious example. Gardens need some elements of mystery and surprise where not all is visible at first glance.

On a typical town section, the long vista is not as easy to achieve unless you can borrow the view from your neighbour’s property or you adjoin a reserve. But this does not mean that you can’t achieve an interesting outlook in most situations. The bedroom window which looks out to a tall boundary fence two or three metres away is more problematic but with creativity, espalier and a focal point to attract the eye, even this can have a view of sorts. The focal point does not have to be an ornament or pot. It may be a clipped plant or a splash of colour.

All of this presupposes that most people do look out their windows. If you are of the net curtains or venetian blind persuasion, you may focus your attention indoors from preference. But if you enjoy looking outside, take the time to stand awhile and look from all the windows in the house. It is not so much a matter of the garden curtseying to the house perhaps, as the garden delivering views from all the windows. If you can achieve this, it is a daily delight and even more so in winter if you don’t like to be out in the cold.

In an earlier incarnation, or so it feels, I used to be a school teacher and I can recall the frequent complaint in the staff room that because everybody has been to school, there is a tendency for many to believe that they are experts in learning and teaching. I now realise that particular complaint is applicable to any range of occupations. A smidgeon of knowledge is at times a misleading thing. In the gardening world, this is best revealed in the letters to the gardening publications. I picked up one of the national magazines recently and I am still a little bemused at some of the letters.

Edward from Auckland decided to test out the claims of honey as a rooting hormone. He took two (yes, just two) cuttings and dipped one in honey. It grew whereas the untreated cutting did not. So excited was he by this exhaustive scientific research, that he felt it warranted a letter to the editor. Incontrovertible proof of the efficacy of honey.

Many gardeners follow the practice of putting stones or similar at the bottom of their plant containers in the hope of improving drainage. Millie from Dargaville advocates a whole new approach. Instead of stones or broken china, she suggests using aluminium cans. “They can be squashed, laid on their sides or left standing upright, depending on the size of the pot.” Personally I am deeply puzzled by this piece of advice. Not only do I fail to see what purpose the aluminium cans serve in the container, whether squashed or not, but I am totally mystified as to why anybody would even want to put aluminium cans in with their potting mix.

But Ashburton Anne takes the cake. After marvelling at the freakish sight of her rose which changes colour from yellow through to cream and pink and her hydrangea which has blue, pink and purple flowers all on the same bush, she goes on to tell of an even stranger thing that happened to her neighbour. He had apparently planted cucumbers in his tunnel house and even harvested a few when, in Anne’s own words: “ the plants went crazy – right up to the roof and out of the doors…. He followed along the stems from the cucumber plant and found pumpkins! Not from a graft on the stem, but just changed.” Sadly she goes on to say that he had to pull the plants out as they overshadowed his tomatoes. The world is apparently forever to be deprived of the truly remarkable discovery of the cucumber that could metamorphose into a pumpkin, henceforth to be knows as “cumpcins”, or should that be “pucumpers”? What can I say? What can anyone say? Second Daughter suggested in disbelief that the neighbour must have seen her coming and decided to have some fun at her expense.

On the gardening front, we are a bit disconcerted by the bravado currently being shown by our resident rabbits. Possums we live with on a nightly basis and we have a dog who is a wonderful possum hunter. He chases them up trees and then calls for Mark in the early hours of the morning to come and deal with them. Mark claims to shoot around 75 to 100 a year but as I slumber through many of these night time forays, I can’t vouch for his figures. But the rabbits are a new intrusion. I can’t believe that despite a resident dog and cat, these unwelcome visitors have been permitted to take up residence in the house gardens. I have looked the cat in the eye and asked her how she can pretend to have any self respect at all when Flopsy, Mopsy and the rest of the gang are getting ever braver but the cat merely looked disdainful and went back to sleep. All this because it was bad enough to find the rabbits had repeatedly chewed off all the young foliage of a delightful late winter bulb called onyxottis, to the extent that we have had to lay wire netting over that patch, but I was simply outraged to find that they had been digging in the border which bounds the house. Right outside the window which is the cat’s main exit, in fact, and a mere five metres from where the dog sleeps. It is too much.

The early settlers have a great deal to answer for, introducing rabbits and possums. But I guess we should be grateful that we don’t have bears, foxes or kangaroos and that the naturalised deer keep themselves confined to forested areas. Given the damage a family of small bunnies can inflict, the mind boggles at what could be done by larger mammals.

I am threatening to get another fox terrier. Our departed foxie was a splendid rabbiter although he preferred to sleep at night when the possums were active. At the entrance to our property we have a large gum tree, planted around 1880 by the first Jury who settled here. A couple of years ago, the Peter Rabbit family built a condominium beneath it. With a girth of around 12 metres, there was plenty of room below for dry quarters. Alas Merlot the foxie had never read Watership Downs and he saw nothing wrong with following them into their quarters. Unfortunately he failed to emerge for some time and the sight of his little face peering out from the exposed roots on the other side of the tree from where he entered caused considerable angst amongst our staff at the time. In fact I saw one of them out there with a spade, contemplating digging him out. Fearing for the future of the tree, I suggested we just leave him for a while. I am not sure that I could have followed the English hunting tradition of leaving him there for a few days until he had lost enough weight to be able to fit back out but it didn’t come to that. Left to his own devices below ground where the rabbit family had presumably long scarpered, he soon felt the call of dinner and found his own way out.

I really wouldn’t have minded if the rabbit family had kept to their gum tree condo. They are quite cute sitting around our carpark in the late evening. But venturing in the garden gate is not the most diplomatic move they have made.

It is the Year of the Oversized Tomato and Onion here and I have felt myself doing an Alison Holst impersonation, obliged to deal with the abundance of this produce.

Last year was the Year of the Green Bean. A prolific harvest saw us eating fresh green beans for weeks on end as we valiantly munched our way through a series of well planned crops. Silly me anticipated eating lots of green beans again this year but we only had a mere handful of meals.

I confess that I have never grown a vegetable in my life. And the Husband who has taken on the role of gatherer and provider, if not hunter, feels a frequent failure. This is because he has been growing home veg for around 35 years now and he feels that he should have mastered the skills of consistent production so we do not have this feast or famine of crops. He does not feel at all a failure as far as the onions and tomatoes go, but the lack of green beans caused some angst.

But 2007 is also memorable for the melon harvest and Mark appears to have overlooked his success in this area. Every year he starts off melon plants (both rock and water melon types) in small pots and quite frequently other priorities take over and the melons either fail entirely to make the transition from small pot into the garden or this event takes place too late to enable the crop to mature before autumn. Not this year. He has been steadily bringing melons indoors for weeks.

My standing joke is that the quality of the vegetable garden is closely allied to his stress levels. When life gets too much for him, he retreats out to his vegetable garden. Displacement behaviour is the term, I understand. While the rest of the garden may be clamouring for attention, there are times when he can be found gently push hoeing amongst his carrots. It matters not a whit that you can buy an entire sack of Chinese onions at Moshims for a mere $5 whereas ours probably represent closer to $100 in terms of costs of production and labour. The Chinese onions can not compare with home produce.

I admit I live in fear of the prospect of the advent of the Year of the Broccoli (a vegetable I believe is best served creamed in soup with blue cheese), the Year of Cauliflower (passable only in sauce with walnuts) or the Year of the Cabbage (very few options to make this veg edible, in my opinion). But he is also talking of taking over the growing of herbs which would be useful as long as I can lead him to the understanding that herbs are ideally best grown within three metres of the kitchen door step. It is really handy if you can reach your herbs without having to put shoes on, I feel.

Do not get put off growing herbs by the intimidating traditions of herbalists and herb gardens. In the days before modern medicine, herbs had an importance which went way beyond mere food flavouring. If you want to re-create a medieval herb garden, or the suburban equivalent of it, there are many books which will show you traditional designs and give you all the information you may or may not need. Personally I could not be bothered with herb gardens which need to contain such plants as artemisia – commonly referred to as Wormwood and responsible for the raw ingredients for absinthe. And the problem with a designated herb garden is that herbs are not a single genus which all like the same conditions. Growing herbs in a modest and utilitarian way involves finding the right conditions for different herbs within the three metres of the back door. It is a myth that all herbs like poor, stony, freedraining and sunny conditions. Sure it is true of many of the Mediterranean ones, but others are more of your clumping perennial or shrub and like well cultivated, rich soil.

We do not pretend to be herb growing experts but the short list of what I could not live without as fresh herbs includes the following:

1. Marjoram and oregano – vital for tomato dishes, Italian flavours and quite amenable to being added to any dish really. Clumping perennials which like well cultivated, fertile soil.
2. Bay tree – just the common old culinary laurus nobilis. A tough shrub which does lend itself to shaping if you want a lollipop tree but certainly needs some restraining or it will get large. Can suffer from thrips so best in open conditions with good air movement. Beware of its suckers getting away too.
3. Parsley – you can never have too much parsley. Chopped parsley is just the most useful herb imaginable and can even atone for a lack of green vegetable in the rest of the meal. The flat leafed Italian parsley is highly rated but any fresh parsley is great. It is a biennial (goes to seed in its second year) and if you make sure that at least a plant or two can go to seed each year you can keep it coming.
4. Mint – lots of different mints are around but as far as I know all are fairly invasive and will thrive in moist conditions. It is often best to plant in a decent sized pot or planter bag sunk into the garden to stop mint’s runaway ambitions.
5. Sage – a small woody plant which likes decent drainage and will tolerate the dry.
6. Thyme – a gentle spreader which is happy alongside sage.
7. Rosemary – as for sage and thyme. Can get considerably larger, however. It is a woody shrub unless you get one of the prostrate forms.
8. Basil – I buy it in pots at the supermarket because the slugs beat me to it at home. It is a summer annual.
9. Lime leaves –ours is a Tahitian lime and the young leaves sure are a great boon to all aromatic dishes.
10. Fennel or dill – love them. You can buy a pot at the supermarket, use the leaves and then plant it out when it starts to look very sad and it will shoot again. Best treated as an annual though it is technically a perennial.

I would add tarragon to that list but we have not grown it successfully yet. No coriander which is altogether too reminiscent of those green vegetable stink bugs for us. At least if you have a basic repertoire of plants in your garden, it saves the endless pots of fresh herbs cluttering up the window sill and is cheaper than constantly buying new pots from the supermarket.

When is a mass planting not a mass planting? When it is a drift, of course. I recall writing a few weeks ago that we did not go in for mass plantings here (such a sweeping statement on my part) so when The Husband spent several days last week planting out his bluebells, I had to think about why it never occurred to me that these might be a massed planting.

The bluebell planting was a bit of triumph for Mark. He had been gently nurturing a patch in the vegetable garden to build numbers and came up with about 2000 this year. Now 2000 bluebells may sound a large amount to most people but his mission, he explained, was to try and get that 2000 to look more like 20 000. It takes a huge number to have much impact in a large area.

Readers who have been to England in the springtime may have seen the bluebell woods in flower. It is a genuinely charming sight. English woodlands tend to be very open, spindly even at times and deciduous, allowing sufficient light for these unfussy bulbs to spring up and flower just at the point when the trees are about to break into leaf. Where the woodlands contain many of the native white trunked birches, the effect is even more delightful.

With our heavy use of evergreen trees and shrubs in this county, finding suitable spots for bluebell drifts is more problematic and Mark would tell you that it took him longer to decide where to place his bulbs than to actually plant them. They need reasonable light levels but also areas where the grass growth is not so strong that it will choke them out. And they needed to be on the margins where we weedeat, rather than the grassy areas where we mow.

We had thought that the common English and Spanish bluebells belonged to the scilla family but “Bulbs for New Zealand Gardens” by Terry Hatch and Jack Hobbs tells us that they have been moved out of the scilla family and are now members of the hyacinth family (hyacinthoides for those of you who may want to know). This moving of plants through botanical families is based on scientific research but can be trying for gardeners who don’t always keep up with reclassifications. Just keep thinking of them as bluebells, maybe. Non-scripta is the English bluebell, hispanica the stronger growing Spanish form but they cross freely so many of us will have ones which are in fact Spanglish hybrids.

The difference, I figured, between a mass planting and a drift is that the latter is designed to complement other plants already present and to create a natural look of self sown plants drifting through an area. A mass planting is a mass – filling an area by block planting in a single plant selection or a very limited range of plants.

It is not that long ago (a decade or so) that mass planting was pretty well unheard of in a domestic garden. Sure there have always been avenues of matched trees (Tupare’s cherry walk, for example) or hedges comprised of a single plant variety but the idea of filling a garden with a very restrained plant palette was not the common practice it is now. It is probably true to say that the value was instead placed on having as wide a range of different plants as possible. Bulk or mass plantings tended to be confined to the public domain of parks. The transition in the home garden came first with the idea that plants should be in groups of uneven numbers but that rarely exceeded groups of three or possibly five in larger gardens. I don’t know where this edict originated but it certainly caught on. And I can see why. It takes a high level of skill to put together a very wide range of plants and to achieve an effect which is pleasing to the eye, as opposed to messy or random. Starting with plants in groups is more likely to give a sense of order which appeals to many people. A block of three white rhododendrons with five red camellias, under planted with an attractive green hosta and surrounded by tidy box hedging is going to look effective from the start, even in the hands of a novice gardener. No matter that the camellias will almost certainly not flower at the same time as the rhododendrons. It is a great deal more difficult to put together a collection of forty different plants well.

In a discussion on the merits or otherwise of mass plantings, Mark recalled hearing the Queen’s head gardener speak a number of years ago. On the huge royal estates, there was a certain amount of call for some massed plantings but John Bond said that rather than a bed of massed red rhododendrons of all the same variety, he much preferred the idea of raising seedlings from a selected species or hybrid and planting those. The sister seedlings will give subtle variations without being discordant and he felt was of much more interest than identical plants. Alas you have to be able to raise your own plants to achieve this effect. It is not as if you can go and buy sister seedlings off the shelf at your local garden centre. But as a compromise position, it has a great deal of appeal.

I have promoted the gardening programmes on the Living Channel before but at the moment there is a most interesting young(ish) English landscaper with two series running. On “Urban Outsiders” you can see Matt James working on small urban wastelands in USA – mostly New York and Los Angeles – and by wastelands, I mean the most unappealing and inauspicious back yards. In “The City Gardener”, he does the same on tiny English yards. These are more than the usual garden makeovers and even those of us who measure our gardens in acres rather than 30 square metres can learn a great deal. He is very good at what he does. His designs are individual, creative and practical and closely tailored to the needs of the client. He is passionate about good design, about different plants and about inspiring the clients to take ownership of their new gardens by involving them in the execution of the design. This is not “do it for me” gardening. It is “do it together” and Matt gives out a great deal of information in the process.

Interestingly, even working hard to give some cohesion to small spaces which are owned by people with no background in gardening at all, there is no evidence of mass plantings or a heavy use of utility plants or formulaic combinations. He works hard to chose appropriate easy care plants but with variety and seasonal interest. He is worth watching to see a practitioner who brings together excellent design, plantsmanship and an engaging enthusiasm.