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.