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.

There I was a mere two weeks ago thinking that summer had come to an abrupt end. Plummeting temperatures, grey days and rain had me thinking that a dreadful cold spring, followed by a less than memorable summer was about to end with an early descent into autumn. Maybe I should have guessed that it was merely some unkind anti-Taranaki power that wanted to convince thousands of out of towners who descended upon our city for Womad, along with hundreds of international performers, that we have a brilliant venue but weather that is less than kind. The fact that it was just as bad everywhere else will have escaped most visitors. Continue reading →