It may only be mid August, but spring has sprung and the grass has riz. The tuis are back, attracted by the early flowering campanulata cherries. Many of the daffodils are in flower here already. The snowdrops, sadly, have finished their all too brief season. The early michelias are in full flower, as are most of the camellias and the magnolias are opening. Magnolia Lanarth is a rather large vision in purple in our park where the big leafed rhododendrons are also opening their flowers. Some of the calanthe and cymbidium orchids are open and the early lachenalias are at their peak.

Garden visitors have started to trickle in again and everywhere I look I see work which must be done soon. I just wish that such a lovely time of year did not coincide with that sense of panic of time running out yet again. There are so many tasks I really meant to have done by now.

I had a very interesting conversation this week with a prominent landscaper about spaces in garden design. We were contemplating a reasonably large area which Mark and I are planning for a garden extension (close to the last area we have to move in to, short of expanding into the neighbour’s property). As gardeners who grow plants for a living, we look at a new area and think about achieving the desired effect with plantings and design. As a landscaper who makes his living designing outdoor areas for other people, his approach was to talk about space and flow and focal points and the actual plants are more like the finishing effect of soft furnishings.

What I found really stimulating was his confident and assured assessment of space and its absolute importance to gaining any effect. Spaces in a garden are essentially the open areas, usually paved or in lawn though you can achieve a sense of space in open woodland if there is minimal under planting. If you are lucky enough to have a property with a large expanse of water, that too constitutes open space.

Gardeners by nature tend to fill in spaces, to paint and furnish with plants and said landscaper felt that too often gardens could simply be cluttered by failing to define and retain sufficient open space. I guess it could be argued that the more complex the plantings, the more important that there be corresponding space in the right places to give form and definition.

I was once accused by a very defensive self-proclaimed practitioner of being anti landscapers. In fact that is not a fair comment at all. I part company from many landscapers when it comes to plant selection and plant interest and I was objecting at the time to a trend whereby many landscapers claimed superiority based on job title alone.

But I will always show respect for good design. And a good landscaper, by definition, has high level skills in looking at an area and seeing the potential to define spaces and to make pleasing sense of the area while meeting the daily needs of the occupier.

Mark describes the happy median as a marriage of formality with informality. The easiest way to define space is by formality which tends to mean straight lines, circles and semi circles giving obvious and clear form, often with a repetition of shapes. The skill is in creating the spatial relationships and the right proportions within the design. In a completely formal garden, this geometric design is matched by uniform and geometric plantings which, as gardeners, we personally tend to regard as lacking in plant interest and simply dull. However, it is the easiest option for non gardeners.

Enter the great English practitioners of Sir Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll in the first decades of last century. It has taken us a long time to discover Lutyens and Jekyll here but we are inspired by their work. There is the perfect marriage of top design and creative plantsmanship.

Lutyens was a highly respected architect whose buildings certainly inspire with his gifted use of space, light and the intimacy of the arts and crafts movement. What would I not give to have a Lutyen’s house? And his garden designs are marked by a similarly gifted perception of space, proportion and formal design.

But it was Gertrude Jekyll who furnished those garden designs and she filled in his garden spaces with informal plantings which are soft and flowing by nature. Jekyll was the leading light of the great English herbaceous border and her skills with plant combinations still set the standards others aspire to. Jekyll softened the hard edged formality and gave a depth of plant interest, variety and quality which purely formal gardens lack.

I was interested talking to a keen Italian gardener recently and he much preferred the English style of gardening to the dull, repetitive formality of Italian and French gardening.

In Taranaki where we have luxuriant plant growth, rampant even, that combination of soft English planting of considerable complexity is a more natural style than the strict formality of gardens created in harsher climates with a very limited range of plants. But it does not have to be bereft of good design, formal design even.

And certainly my conversation with the landscaper focussed my thoughts on the importance of open space in a garden and its integral contribution to good design. In the end it is all about making an environment more pleasing to the eye and uplifting to the spirit. Why else would we bother gardening?

It is tough being a Taranaki icon in our household, or so Mark may tell you. Nobody accords you any respect at all and instead you become a target for endless jokes. Mind you, this is the man who, when I told him I wanted to be a sacred cow so that nobody would dare to write any more horrible letters to the editor about me, replied: “Well one out of two ain’t bad.” So I am milking the icon jokes for all they are worth, singing “I con see clearly now the rain has gone….” A friend contributed Ike on Tina Turner and I think we have several days worth yet to run but I will not inflict any more on readers.

Nor am I going to write about magnolias this week despite their being the genus which is bringing the accolades to Mark. It is a little too early in the season yet as the buds are just starting to break on most of the early flowering varieties. Instead we are back to camellias which provide colour in the season before magnolias.

At this time of the year, I fall in love with camellias all over again. The love affair wanes somewhat as the season progresses. The flowers can turn to mush and they loose the freshness but in June and July, I look at them with delight.

A camellia hedge is a camellia hedge. It tends to be either a formal clipped affair of one single variety or an informal and usually unclipped row of mixed varieties. I can not pretend that a camellia hedge, clipped or unclipped, is ever going to get me too excited. Really, it is just a hedge.

No, it is the interesting feature camellias which get me inspired. For some years I have been nurturing a little collection in pots. Every year I have hosed off the old potting mix around their roots and repotted them in fresh mix for winter, pruned and shaped the tops and transported them out to chosen spots in the garden, only to bring them back into the nursery when the heat of summer hits.

I decided this year it was too much work. While I advocate plain terracotta pots, they are heavy and I always need to find someone to give me a hand hauling the bigger ones around the garden. And I think I had about twenty of them, which seemed excessive. What to do? I hadn’t spent up to ten years nurturing these treasures just to stick them in the garden where they were not likely to remain much a feature. Therein lies the problem. It is not easy to feature a single camellia plant in a garden. Big mature plants in the right place can be thinned out, shaped and titivated. But little character plants can get a bit lost. They tend to meld.

There is an open verdict here as to whether my experimental solution will work and we won’t really know for a few years. We had a simple border which looked great for two weeks of the year. Backed by a buxus hedge, I had planted yellow and red roses, underplanted with mainly yellow and blue perennials. Bright summer colour, I thought. Fortunately, the two weeks of the year when it looked really good with a carpet of red soldier poppies and blue cornflowers were the two weeks around Rhododendron Festival but it was all downhill from there and for most of the other fifty weeks of the year it looked pretty scruffy.

At the time Mark was coming up with his theory that what appeals to people about new gardens is the crisp shape of plants. When freshly planted, each specimen stands on its own whereas when the garden matures, it loses that fresh definition and the plants grow into each other and start to form more of a wall of foliage. I wondered if we could combine my little camellia collection and the permanent freshness of the newly planted garden.

We gutted the border of all roses and perennials and made sure the surface was level. Then, having repotted my camellias for what I hope is the last time, we sank the terracotta pots into the garden with just the rims sitting above the surface. Where plants were rather pot bound, we cut the bottom off the pot so the roots have somewhere to go. So each plant is individually contained and individually displayed. For ground cover, I have used that creeping orange berry plant, on whose name I have a mental block which is not surprising because I have just found out that it is apparently rubus pentalobus. It is a rampant ground cover in sunny conditions even though I have only ever met one person who has seen it fruiting in Taranaki. (It is meant to have delicious orange berries but i think it prefers it hotter and drier.) I am hoping the groundcover will form a simple carpet through which seasonal bulbs can add spots of colour.

So far so good. The plants are indeed featured individually and collectively they create a look of formal structure. They are easily groomed and they should not need watering in summer because the terracotta will absorb moisture from the soil. I will see how they endure through the next few years. If we don’t like it, at least it will be easy to disassemble.

If you looking for varieties suitable to shape into character plants, look at the miniatures and slow growers such as Baby Bear, Itty Bit and Baby Willow which tend to be natural bonsais. The small leafed species are fun to work with (minutiflora, microphylla and a number of the other obscure types). Otherwise, varieties with slightly unpredictable growth habits and wayward branches can lend themselves to turning into feature plants. Bonsai artists often prefer misshapen plants to start with. If you want to create a standard or lollipop, make sure the plant you start with has a good straight central leader.

Camellia petal blight has decimated the flowering impact of the plants in this country. While that is very discouraging, their use and beauty as individual, shaped feature plants or as hedging should not be ignored. They are all evergreen plants and most have a fairly robust constitution which means they will tolerate some pretty harsh treatment. If you hate the big, slushy, spent blooms, keep to the small flowered varieties and the single flowers. There is still a good place for camellias in gardening.

The surprise delight from our vegetable garden in the last few months has been the Florence fennel. I have never seen these bulbs for sale in the fruit and veg section of the supermarket in New Zealand. Indeed the first time we ate them was, appropriately enough, in Italy a couple of years ago though I think they are commonly available across the counter in other European countries too.

It took me a long time (decades, even) to convince Mark of the merits of fennel. Having had a rural Taranaki upbringing, he found the aniseed flavour and scent just reminded him of the roadside weeds and he was not that keen on aniseed. I weakened his resistance by the use of dill which Larousse tells me is also known as false anise or bastard fennel. I had thought it was a step up from fennel myself, but apparently not. Whatever, I had a nice but fiddly recipe which stuffed schnitzel with smidgeons of many vegetables and flavoured it with dill. Dill is still the favoured taste in North Africa and Scandinavia, but most of Europe uses fennel which is a native Mediterranean plant.

Fennel leaves or seeds are frequently used as flavouring, particularly for fish and it appears that you can use the common roadside weed for this purpose though the pots of living herbs you pay $3 for in the supermarket may look more appealing. There aren’t too many confusing forms of fennel really – common fennel (foeniculum vulgare) where you use the leaves and seeds, the bronze fennel which is sometimes used as an ornamental in the herbaceous border (named the same as the common stuff but with purpureum added) and which is equally edible and Florence fennel or finocchio (same name but with var. azoricum added). It is the Florence fennel that is worth searching out. It produces a fleshy, bulbous sort of swollen base to the stems which is the delicious bit. Technically it is a pseudo bulb (false bulb) but usually they are referred to as bulbs. We got our seeds from Kings Seeds or local garden centres can order them in for you.

Why are we so hooked on Florence fennel? It is a useful vegetable cooked or raw. It is different to other staple vegetables we use. And it is easy to grow. Eaten raw, it makes an excellent substitute for celery. Mark, who is the vegetable gardener here, has never had a lot of success with growing celery. It tends to get stringy, infested with slugs, dirty and does not yield much edible volume. Or it all matures at the same time and doesn’t hold. It requires constant spraying to keep leaf disease at bay. But Florence fennel is easy peasy, stays clean and doesn’t need spraying. It can be harvested as required over many months. It can be grated or finely sliced raw into salads where it gives a faint aniseed flavour and a good texture. It can be braised, added to soups or roasted. When cooked it loses almost all the aniseed taste and scent. It is not always easy to get too excited about vegetables so the discovery of a new option which is tasty, different and practical for the home gardener (but which the Europeans have known about for centuries) is worth some attention.

We have found next to no information on growing finocchio in New Zealand. Overseas books talk about planting one season and harvesting the next, although we have also found references to keeping the bed going as a perennial crop to be renewed every three years. So Mark has been floundering a little finding the best way to grow it. Kings Seeds advocate direct sowing the seed into the garden in early spring. As the plants grow, they form the bulbs and you can treat it as an annual and start harvesting around Christmas. Or, keep cutting the seed heads off over summer and restrict the number of shoots to each plant and you can harvest a succession of bulbs next autumn and winter. If anybody has more experience, Mark would love you to call him. By the way, finnochio leaves lack the pungency of ordinary fennel so if you are after it as a fresh herb too, you may need to grow both forms.

Just to confuse matters further, the so called fennel flower has nothing whatever to do with fennel itself. This is in fact nigella (presumably the well bred English chef was named after the pretty flower). Some readers may know it better as Love in the Mist, (botanically nigella damascens). I have it seeding down as a well behaved and very pretty annual in a cottage garden but I hadn’t realised what I was missing out on by not using the seeds scattered over bread and cakes. Nigella sativa is a different Mediterranean wildflower species from the same family which is not quite as ornamental though pretty enough in its way. It has a single flower. As it is also referred to in folklore and cooking parlance as Black Cumin, Roman Coriander or Nutmeg Flower and can be used in place of black peppercorns, it is clearly a near complete spice garden in one plant. Indeed, Mohammed is alleged to have said of nigella sativa, “In it is a cure for everything except death.” How can the versatility of fennel flower have escaped me up until this point?

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.