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.

The news that another respected colleague of ours is phasing himself out of the plant industry was hardly a shock. Peter Cave of Cambridge has been flying the flag alone in the comprehensive plant mail order business in recent years. There used to be a whole cluster of us. Selling plants by mail order was in fact where Mark started in the plant business but we bailed out about five years ago.

Mail order plants used to be a major force in the market place. And it was the way keen gardeners sourced plants which were out of the ordinary. We too used to receive all the catalogues and place orders every year from Alouette (long gone), Bay Bloom (also long gone), Peak Perennials (now sales from their garden centre only), Top Trees (closed a few years ago), Parva Plants (closed last year), Woodleigh (now producing only hydrangeas), Kereru Bulbs (retired) and several other businesses operated by keen plantspeople who offered something different.

At some point the mail order plant business morphed without many of us noticing. It changed from supplying the rare, desirable and different and became mainstream, perceived by many customers as a means of getting cheaper plants delivered to the door than those on offer at garden centres. I must say we had noticed that the calibre of many of our mail order customers had declined, but it took a secret shopper survey by Consumer’s Institute to make us realise that the public perception had changed. We were deeply relieved to come out top equal in the Consumer survey but they rated only on service, quality and price. Nowhere did it take into account the range and type of plants being offered mail order. Consumer’s Institute only ordered what we call the dross – bread and butter lines that we all carried to a minor extent. They did not even acknowledge the existence of the new, the exciting, or the experimental plant lines which many of us built our businesses on. Nope, mail order had reached a stage where it was expected to compete on price and quality with stock garden centre lines.

At the same time, the face of plant retailing is changing dramatically. Nationally many garden centres and nurseries are closing or selling up their valuable real estate to cash in their assets. There is little evidence of a vibrant industry where new, younger colleagues are entering the plant production trade.

But the Big Box retailers are here in force. In our trade, there has been much railing against the impact of the plant sections of the Warehouse, Mitre 10, the supermarkets and Bunnings but one might as well be King Canute. Customers will often shop where they feel they are getting best value and if that is a Big Box retailer, most of whom offer no advice or personal service, then that is the tide of change.

Times change, dear Reader, and that is all it is. In the 1950s, keen gardeners had to source their choice plants from overseas. There was only a very limited range available in this country. I know this because we own a garden which was initially founded on extensive imports of plant material. Mark’s father Felix may have hidden the invoices from his wife (he did spend a lot of overseas funds on plants) but he didn’t destroy them and we still have the files showing what plants he brought in. Keen gardeners learned the basics of plant propagation because the first task was to try and ensure that there was a backup plant to the one original specimen. And material was swapped with other enthusiasts. Horticultural societies flourished and were a major source of interesting plant material. It was also the time when Sir Victor Davies was building Duncan and Davies to be the power house of horticulture in the southern hemisphere.

Garden centres are a relatively recent phenomenon, making their appearance around the seventies and it is even more recently that they have embraced the cafe, giftware lines and outdoor living accoutrements that we now regard as the norm. Reflecting, I guess, the increase in disposable income.

The nineties saw the emergence of landscapers as a real force in the gardening scene. Their popularity rests in part on the increasing value placed on good design in a garden (and a good landscaper is first and foremost a good designer) combined with disposable income. A switch, our trade mag asserts, from the “do it yourself” ethos that we embraced with a vengeance in this country to a “do it for me” line of thought. This probably a natural progression where each generation tends to be more cash rich but time poor than their parents.

Modern garden centres carry a remarkably wide range of plants (certainly compared to what was available a few decades ago). But there are two aspects which haven’t been replaced in these changing times. Plant imports have been stopped almost dead in their tracks by government policy on bio security so there is very little new material coming into the country. And with the demise of mail order plants, the connoisseur end of the market has almost completely disappeared. There are many plant lines which are simply not available any longer.

Along with it, some of us fear the loss of status of plantsmanship. I asked Mark to define plantsmanship because it is a term often bandied around. Off the top of his head, he trotted out a quick definition – “the ability to use different plants in creative ways in the right environment and to feature unusual plants”. We haven’t managed to improve on that impromptu definition. Plantsmanship (and I can’t find an acceptable gender neutral substitution) used to be highly valued in apprenticeships, in professional institutions and in amateur gardeners alike. Bernie Hollard was a fine example of a plantsman who built a garden founded on plantsmanship. Somewhere along the line, when we embraced the mantra of good design and mass plantings, we threw plantsmanship out with the bathwater.

So if you are one of the small group can not survive without a stewartia, you covet a deutzia collection or you have been searching for a trochodendron or an oxydendrum, you had better contact Peter Cave before he shuts the nursery gate next year. He is probably the last grower producing many of these rare and obscure plants and it may be a while before we see this type of material being offered again.

Sadly, dear Reader, there is no such thing as low maintenance gardening. There is extremely high maintenance gardening, moderately high maintenance gardening and some maintenance gardening. But low maintenance? I very much doubt it.

If you want a truly low maintenance outdoors you have three options that I can think of. The first is no maintenance at all. Ignore anything outside and let it become a wilderness. Your neighbours will hate you and talk about you lowering property values but you can let that wash around you. The second option is to have only grass and mow it occasionally. That is low maintenance but not to be confused with gardening. And do not expect to have lawn. Lawns take a surprising amount of work to keep looking good. You will have grass, invaded by weeds, with dead patches and rank areas where the mower doesn’t quite reach but it is generally easy care. Alternatively you could pave the entire area and get away with sweeping or using a blower vac from time to time. A solid sheet of paving (concrete or tar seal) is considerably less work than pavers or cobbles. Weeds will miraculously appear in all the gaps between the pavers.

Anything more in the gardening stakes requires maintenance to some degree. Plants grow. Leaves fall and accumulate. Weeds appear. Wind and rain spreads debris. Just as carpets do not vacuum themselves, showers fail to clean themselves and even self cleaning ovens still need attention, so too do gardens need regular maintenance if you want them to look good.

Were I a landscaper, I would despair at the number of people who request a low maintenance garden. The late nineties gave us the minimalist garden – a few strategically placed boulders, large pavers interplanted with mondo grass to soften the look, one expensive piece of sculpture, and a few spiky plants such as sanseveria with a pebble mulch below. It is minimalist in the use of plants, but not minimal maintenance. This stark look relies on pristine grooming and very tight maintenance. Weeds will still appear and leaves will blow in from further afield and it all rather spoils the look.

This train of thought came about because I spent last weekend reworking a border immediately by the house. This one was about 40cm wide and 9 metres long. It is very hard to know what to do with an area which is only 40cm wide and bounded on one side by a path that is used constantly and on the other by the house. I am sure that the idea behind such house borders is to soften the hard lines but conditions tend to be tricky. In this case the garden is under the eaves, rarely gets any direct rain and bakes in all the morning sun. Over the years the level of the soil had built up so it was higher than the path and retained by assorted rocks which narrowed the border even further. Referred to as “the veltheimia border”, its main inhabitants were two patches of these very large South African bulbs which are coming into growth now. The veltheimia, for those of you that don’t know it, resembles a lachenalia on steroids. The common form (capensis) is pink but we also had a goodly patch of the prized rosalba form which is predominantly pale yellow. But the problem with the velthemias is that while the foliage looks wonderful when it first comes up in autumn, the slugs and snails, which I am sure hibernate in the dry under the house, also appreciate the foliage and move out in force to munch it. When the flowers appear in late winter, this border has a second coming and is much admired. For the rest of the year, it looks tatty and bitsy as we have tried to add more interest by planting other random plants.

I gutted the whole area and lowered the level. Now if you do your maths, 40cm by 9 metres gives a total area of 3.6 square metres which is not much at all. But it took me the better part of the entire weekend.

I had contemplated going in with a row of the popular burgundy black aeonium Schwarzkopf underplanted with a green or blue grey succulent. They would have been quite happy in the conditions and it would have given a two tiered display and all year round foliage and colour. What is more, I had the plants available. But we are not into mass planting of any description really. And I can’t get excited about succulents. In fact, as I dug out the sempervivens which I had planted in there a few years ago, I decided they must possibly be the most boring plant I know.

No. We seem to subscribe to the school of super high maintenance gardening in a number of areas and that is why it took me all weekend to renovate three and a half square metres of a seven acre garden here. I did a quick count and I ended up using around 27 different plant varieties to try and restructure this border to give year round interest and to showcase some interesting plants. I couldn’t believe how many it took to give manageable layers of height and variation in foliage and flowers appropriate to a confined space. I could have done it in two hours flat if I had stuck with the aeonium idea. But then where would I have put the veltheimias?

The rule of thumb in planning a large garden for manageable maintenance is to think in terms of radiating circles. The circle immediately near the house is the intensively gardened and closely maintained area. The next circle out should be manageable on a seasonal circuit – cleaned up and tended to around four times a year. The outer areas will still need your attention once or preferably twice a year. It seems wonderfully self evident when you think about it.