I feel a prediction coming on.

While the seventies brought us the phenomenon of the conifer garden (an era perhaps best forgotten now), the eighties can be remembered for bringing us the cottage garden with a riot of flowers and colours. The nineties saw a reaction to the ill discipline and high maintenance of the cottage garden and it was the stark and often pretentious minimalist garden (five rocks and three plants one of which had to be sansevieria or aloe bainsei) which became the height of sophisticated fashion. Few of us mourned the quick decline in popularity of the minimalist look. But the prediction from the House of Jury is that the new fashion is going to prove to be the simple formal garden.

A colleague sent me an aerial photograph of a garden without comment and I wasn’t quite sure what my reaction was meant to be. It was a large formal garden and there is no doubt at all that the seductive simplicity of the formal garden makes for very good photography because the form and design is dominant. My response was not what was sought and we had a fairly tetchy exchange of emails because I was not prepared to admire at face value. What I saw was a large area sharply defined by tightly clipped hedges built around the mandatory central axis which Mark is fond of describing as the airport runway look. I saw the substantial (but impressive) hedges sucking all the nutrient out of the surrounding ground so there were bare patches in the lawns beside them. I saw trees planted in matched formation. One grid had a substantial number of trees and I enquired what the owner had used. As far as I was concerned, if you are going to plant a large number of matched trees in a grid, it mattered hugely what tree was chosen to feature so prominently.

My colleague did not see it as I did. He took it at face value and felt I was being pedantic and picky enquiring what tree had been used. It was the overall look that mattered. And that is the nub of the simple formal garden. It is the overall look that matters. Not the detail. And certainly not the botanical interest. Best guess here is that the tree that had been used was the predictable hornbeam or English beech.

f I was doing up a property for sale, I would put in a formal garden. It has immediate appeal and does not require great gardening skill to maintain. Most of the population is not committed to intensive and detailed gardening. In fact what most people want is an attractive outdoors which is not going to take every moment of their spare time to maintain. A formal garden can deliver just that.

There is of course a great difference between a good formal garden and a very average or poor example. But the difference does not rely on gardening skills. It lies in proportions and spaces and there is no reason why an architect, mathematician or a trained artist could not achieve a very good formal garden by applying set principles. Or a hairdresser. In my experience, good hairdressers have well developed skills in fashion, colour, shape and proportion as well as being highly skilled in accurate, freeform cutting which would stand them in very good stead when it comes to clipping the plants later.

But planning a garden on graph paper by creating a central and intersecting axis and placing plants in geometric formation should not be confused with being creative and original. Frankly it has all been done before and it will be done many times again.

Once the design has been drawn (formal gardens work best from scratch on a blank canvas, in other words a bare section, preferably flat) the plant selection is a minor detail. The key is to be restrained and to keep to a very limited range. It doesn’t matter if your lollipop trees are camellias, bays, michelias or robinia Moptops, as long as they are all identical. Simplicity, shape and space are the key ingredients.

A formal garden is the quickest way I know to achieve maximum impact. Bigger is better, of course. To create a formal garden across several acres is more impressive than a tiny town section but the principles remain the same. And formal gardens are traditionally associated with wealth and class so we can annex a little of that status for ourselves in the democratising of the modern formal garden.

Arguably formal gardens are the easiest to care for as well. You don’t need gardening skills to maintain them. Many people have a cleaner for the inside of their house. Generally somebody of a similar skill level can maintain a simple formal garden outside so you can hire in help. If I was of that persuasion, I would be looking for a moonlighting hairdresser.

Yes. I think we are going to see many formal gardens appear over the next few years. Quick impact, impressive, easy to maintain and appealing in their simplicity and form. Were we staying in the wholesale plant business, I would be redirecting some of our production to meet this anticipated demand.

But, and herein lies the crunch, I have never known a keen plantsperson or gardener who would want a formal garden of this type. The plant interest is close to zero. The flexibility is zero. The place for ongoing creativity is zero. There is no room for genuine originality in design because proportions are mathematically determined. Golden means and vanishing perspectives and all that. Keen gardeners I know all like to look at little pictures as well as big pictures. They like to try out combinations and to change aspects of their garden to see if they can get it all to work better. It is likely that the minimalists of the nineties will become the formalists of the new millennium.

What will set apart the really good formal garden over time will be the marriage of design and plantsmanship. The precedent is there (as it usually is in gardening – difficult to be truly original when it has mostly all been done before). At the turn of last century, gifted English architect Edwin Lutyens designed beautiful formal gardens (as well as some truly lovely houses). He had a wonderful sense of space and proportion which has stood the test of time. But did he then furnish these spaces with a very limited range of plants in the simple formal style? No. He handed them over to that great English gardener Gertrude Jekyll who set about filling the spaces and softening the hard edges with riot of foliage and flowers. These Lutyens-Jekyll joint ventures were not low maintenance but they were lovely gardens. It was English gardening at its best and an example of what set the English ahead of their European counterparts – the French parterres notable for tightly clipped buxus and colour toned annuals or the Italian formality marked by magnificent stone work and a very limited range of plants heavily clipped to within an inch of their lives.

Good formal gardens will stand the test of time and formal gardens certainly have their place. But the flurry of DIY lookalikes are probably destined to take their place in history alongside the conifer gardens and the minimalist gardens.

I have, as we say here, been Doing the Bulbs. This used to be an event which took place at this time each year with every pot or tray being repotted on a two yearly cycle but it was a practice which somehow dropped down the priority list until it fell off the bottom and I don’t think anybody has Done the Bulbs since I last tackled them six or seven years ago. It is rather a case of survival of the fittest and some of the thugs have taken control.

Mark’s late father was very keen on bulbs and built up a good selection in the garden. In turn, Mark bought or acquired every different bulb he could lay his hands on over a period of years but he held them in the nursery while he built them up and assessed them. Many never got out of the nursery because finding the right position in the garden hasn’t happened yet so we had developed this area that we would walk past with eyes averted so we couldn’t see the weed infestation. We are talking several hundred trays and pots so it is not a little task that can be done quickly. After a week’s work, I am about half way through.

Over the years, Mark has removed the really special bulbs to his covered house so what I am dealing with are the survivors of benign neglect.

When bulbs are mentioned, most people tend to think of daffodils, tulips (which prefer areas with cold winters), anemones and ranunculus (those shrivelled up little brown packages of promise you buy are technically tubers), maybe dahlia tubers, freesias, snowdrops and a few others. Taranaki gardeners have adopted rhodohypoxis (or roxypoxies as one garden visitor called them) as our own emblem because they obligingly flower year in year out in the week of our Rhododendron Festival. But bulbs go well beyond go well beyond these common types.

Technically bulbs, tubers, corms and rhizomes are all geophytes which are characterised by their fleshy underground structure where nutrients and moisture are stored making it possible for the plant to survive periods of drought or cold. The greatest threat to bulbs in our climate is that they can be too wet and rot out, especially those which have a dormant period (not every bulb goes dormant). In their native habitats, growth periods coincide with optimal growing conditions which, in the case of the large majority of our successful garden bulbs from South Africa, mean that they are triggered by autumn rains. Of course here we don’t just have autumn rain. We have winter rains, spring rain and, thank goodness this week, summer rain, so we can struggle with bulbs which require long dry periods. So good drainage, better drainage and excellent drainage are the three most critical elements to growing them in the garden.

The advantage of holding the bulbs in the nursery has also been to sort out which are invasive. Our worst weed in the rockery came in as a garden bulb – a geissorhiza with a pretty blue flower in spring which then seeded everywhere and put off multiple, tiny off shoots all of which seem to survive and to reproduce. It is a menace. The most common menace bulb which many gardeners suffer from is one of the oxalis family but over the past week I have uncovered others. Not all lapeirousia or moraeas are worth cherishing. Some just look dangerous. And while we are quite happy to naturalise some bulbs in our garden, those which are attempting to naturalise themselves with no assistance from us at all are inviting an encounter with Round Up. They are not all precious.

Doing a quick flick around the garden, I see there are a number of summer bulbs in flower. It is peak time for the completely OTT auratum lilies (of Japanese origin) which are a mainstay of our summer garden. The scadoxus katherinae (from South Africa and Zimbabwe) are in full flower, as are the glorious gloriosas from the same part of the world. The pretty cyclamen hederafolium from Southern Europe and Turkey have started. The zephyranthes, sometimes referred to as rain lilies, hailing from the Americas are putting up intermittent neat little copper coloured flowers alongside our driveway. It is a veritable United Nations flowering and the beauty of an extensive bulb collection is that you can pretty well guarantee that there will be some with fresh flowers for every month of the year. They add a wonderful seasonal interest and detail to a garden.

So back to sorting out our packages of promise here, many of which will remain a mystery until they grow because while some bulbs at least survived a prolonged period of neglect, the same can not be said for their accompanying labels. Those which the birds did not scatter have tended to fade beyond deciphering stage. By the by, writing on plastic labels with a soft pencil is preferable to felt pen – pencil lasts much longer (a trick we have learned over the years in the nursery). While I can recognise a fritillaria bulb from a scilla or a lachenalia, when we started with a collection of around 15 different frits, even more lachenalias and goodness knows how many different scillas it has become more problematic. It may take a season or two to re-establish the identities.

Postscripts to my last column. Mark was absolutely delighted to lay his hands on a Planet Junior from a reader and has been carefully oiling the handle and wondering where he might find some of the additional attachments which were originally available as extras. In case you are wondering what a Planet Junior is, think of it as the manual pre-cursor to the rotary hoe.

And the Monarch Trust secretary in Northland was delighted to read my last column on the topic. She has been sending information through, along with two packets of seed for red and yellow flowered forms of swan plant (we do have a blue flowered form here too). I think she has recruited Mark to join the band of taggers (those who put tiny stickers on monarch butterflies which are wintering over). If you want to contact the Trust, they have a wonderful email address: members@monarch.org.nz (nothing to do with the Royal Family). She tells me monarchs arrived here naturally around 1840 so they are technically native to our country. I did not know that.

The monarch caterpillars have been contributing to the stress in our lives recently. While our backs were turned, they stripped the plants in vegetable garden to the point where not a single leaf remained and then they started the exodus in search of more plants. I knew this had happened because I came across some intrepid souls in the middle of the driveway heading off to goodness knows where. As the nearest plants were in Mark’s terrace gardens a good 100 metres away, I didn’t like their chances of finding them so I had to do a manual transfer.

In preparation for the late autumn famine and in an attempt to get sufficient population wintering over, Mark sowed fifty metres of swan plants in a nursery block across the road. As these plants are only about 10cm high and already sporting eggs and baby caterpillars, he has regretfully come to the conclusion that he will need to practice some infanticide in order to allow these plants to grow sufficiently to achieve their purpose. The culling now will allow the survival for the greater good of later generations of caterpillars.

New Zealand is sadly lacking in a range of spectacular butterflies enjoyed in many other countries of the world. We have some beautifully marked moths but you need an eye for detail and an appreciation of understatement to perceive the beauty in moths. In the butterfly stakes, the miserable and unwanted cabbage white probably rules supreme in numbers. Red and yellow admirals are extremely rare around here but then so is their preferred host food of stinging nettles. The common copper doesn’t quite rank up with the admirals and monarchs.

In common parlance, a species indigenous to New Zealand includes those that arrive without assistance (this means that coconut palms up north are native now because there are instances where they have washed ashore and taken root). So I guess whether monarchs might now be regarded as natives here depends on whether the first butterflies were perhaps blown over from Australia, or whether somebody introduced them. But they do not, as far as I know, have any negative impact here and only enhance our visual environment.

Butterflies do on occasion blow over from Australia and are not unknown on the north coast of Taranaki. Our elder daughter spotted the lesser wanderer caterpillars on her grandmother’s swan plants at Urenui when she was very young. They were the usual black and yellow caterpillar but smaller and with an extra set of antennae. They morphed into a small monarch type of butterfly with slightly different markings but failed to naturalise despite our best efforts. The large and spectacular blue moon butterfly arrived tattered and exhausted after its long trans Tasman flight and despite Mark’s attentions, it failed to reproduce before it died. It would have been a showy addition to the summer garden.

So all we have in the showy butterfly line is the monarchs and they need some care and attention to their food source to flourish. I read a letter in the Weekend Gardener from a woman who works on three established plants. She nets two to prevent butterflies from laying eggs on them and restricts the caterpillars to one plant at a time. We can’t quite work out how she stops the caterpillars themselves from migrating to the two netted plants. Monarch caterpillars seem perfectly capable of finding swan plants even some distance away but this system seems to work for her. With plenty of space and having saved seed, Mark is more of the overkill type where he hopes his 50 metre planting will ensure continued food supplies.

The bottom line is that monarchs really only like swan plants (asclepias), or milkweed as it is sometimes referred to overseas. The term swan plant comes because of the seed head which is shaped like a swan and full of white fluff which enables the little black seed to become windborne and disperse more widely when the seed pod bursts. Desperately starving mature caterpillars will apparently eat pumpkin or melon flesh to stay alive and chrysalis but I have never heard of anyone successfully raising monarchs from egg to butterfly on anything other than swan plants.

Fortunately swan plants are very easy to grow from seed and if you can keep your swan plant from being decimated during the season, it will flower and seed freely. We had a truck in collecting plants here this week and we noticed it had a load of swan plants destined for a garden centre so if you want to buy one to get you started, ring around and see who has them in stock. Just be warned that if you buy a plant, you will need to keep it netted until it gets established or you will find that a stray butterfly will find it and lay its eggs while you are not looking.

Raising monarch caterpillars is loads of fun, unless you have the distressing experience of running completely out of food for them, and I am of the view that it is mandatory for parents and grand parents to introduce children to the delights of the life cycle of the monarch. Later in the season, Mark starts a hospital where he saves chrysalis which are in danger because they have been spun in inappropriate locations (at times some caterpillars are unwise enough to metamorphose on the swan plant where their brothers and sisters then eat the supporting stem, or on nearby plants which may not last long enough for them to hatch). The chrysalis need to hang in order to develop and hatch cleanly so he used to tie a fine cotton thread to the tip but has now graduated to the faster but less aesthetic masking tape, hanging them from a safer place. He does not get 100% success rate from this intervention, but the row of chrysalis hanging from a bar in front of one of our windows keeps us mildly entertained.

We have had occasional years when we have had good numbers of monarch butterflies wintering over in our garden and it is a joy and delight to see them stretching their wings together on a sunny winter’s day. They tend to congregate in one spot over winter. But every year we manage to keep at least a few resident around here to start us off again for spring.

If you want to know more about monarchs, there is the Monarch Butterfly NZ Trust whom you will find at www.monarch.org.nz

On another topic entirely, Mark has a yen to own a Planet Junior, a manual tilling device from way back, decades ago. If anybody has an unwanted Planet Junior in a back shed, he would be really pleased to hear from you. My attempts to locate him one on Trade Me have failed so far. We could promise said PJ a good and appreciative home.

Life is full of amusing little interludes. After my facetious letter to Elton John was published, I was copied in to an email from Don in Colorado. He wrote: “Every so often I receive a Google News Alert linking me to a gardening news article that makes me want to stick my finger down my throat or laugh ’til I drop. Today’s article, by Abbie Jury, in the Taranaki Daily News of New Plymouth, New Zealand is one of these. If anyone would like to send this gardening writer a Dear Abbie, she is: Abbie Jury Phone/fax +64 6 754 6671 jury@jury.co.nz”

Being sharp eyed, I instantly noticed that Don was a d*hlia aficionado (the reason for the asterisk will become clear soon) and each time this genus was mentioned, Google would notify him. My words in that letter to Elton were: “Big, blowsy d*hlias are so vulgar and OTT, really, without even the bonus of fragrance.” While fearing that my email inbox would quickly become overloaded by international d*hlia enthusiasts, I naturally emailed Don by return to clarify whether my column had in fact made him laugh or made him want to vomit. Sadly, he did not reply and there were no incoming emails. Just a few postings on his site.

Tom took it all rather seriously and commented that he was “Surprised we didn’t hear about her Royal Dalton tea service with the hand painted periwinkles.” . I bit my tongue and resisted the temptation to correct his spelling of Royal Doulton. There were a few other neutral entries but it took Elaine from Christchurch to clarify the situation. “Thanks for the article Don. I am assuming that Abbie Jury is a family member of a well known and respected hybridiser of Rhododendrons, Camelias (sic) and Magnolias from the Taranaki area. Elton, is Elton John who recently performed in that area. The Kereru referred to is a native wood pigeon, and the morepork is a tiny native owl. All tongue in cheek I would say.”

Thank goodness for that. But my moment of fame on the internet seemed all too brief and insignificant. Now it is just back the garden pages of the newspaper, as long as I do not mention d*hlias in anything other than a glowing reference.

We had some interesting visitors from Philadelphia this week. We have been having our usual summer conversations on achieving more summer glory in our garden. For us, it is the next big gardening challenge. New Zealanders generally excel at spring gardening. It only takes about ten years to achieve a reasonably mature and pretty spring garden in our climate and we tend to do it with trees, shrubs and spring bulbs. When you think about it, the majority of trees, shrubs and bulbs flower in spring. Summers tend to be rather green. In fact we have more colour and flower in mid winter with the camellias, early magnolias and rhodos than we have in mid summer.

Mark and I have been talking for some time of wanting to make a summer trip to England to see the splendor of their perennial borders. We had assumed the Brits still lead the world in the practice of herbaceous borders. Apparently not. An esteemed colleague emailed and told us to forget going to the UK to see summer gardens. Philadelphia is the place to go, he urged. This may have something to do with the fact that he is leading a tour of summer gardens there next year and he would like us to join him. And it certainly had something to do with the Philly duo that were visiting him and subsequently came here.

hese visitors came bearing a gift of a splendid garden guide to the notable gardens of the Philadelphia region. The front cover shows a colourful mixed border including a cordyline, coloured flaxes and canna lilies, photographed in early summer I would guess. One of the visitors gardens at Chanticleer which takes pride in its tropical plantings of bananas, coleus, cannas and the like. Tropical? In Philadelphia? It gets so cold the ground freezes solid. Yes, he explained. The garden is not open all year and as soon it closes at the end of October, they lift the plants. Some get forced into dormancy and kept in cool, dry conditions (even the visitor toilets and facilities are utilized for plant storage). Others are brought into the glasshouses. Yes, they lift much of the garden every year (it is a mere 35 acres). Not even camellias will survive the big freezes. When the ground is frozen, it prevents any uptake of moisture and evergreen plants get dessicated by the dryness. In early spring, they replant each year in preparation for opening on April 1. Mark and I were stunned at the prospect. It certainly is not gardening as we know it.

It does explain to some extent how they achieve such splendid effects with herbaceous material (all those leafy, clumping plants which will give flowers from spring through to autumn). These types of plants like to go in to freshly cultivated soil and they need dividing and refurbishing often. Presumably the freeze kills weed seeds and soil afflictions too. It should be said, however, that the challenge of very hot and dry summers following on quickly from their springtime is another gardening hurdle we do not have to contemplate.

Lacking a small army of skilled gardeners, a suitable budget (no grandfather who owned a pharmaceutical empire here, alas) and large visitor numbers, we can not contemplate a style which is dependent on lifting much of a garden every season. Nor do we have long periods of dormancy to accommodate this activity. We did not enter into any discussion with these Philly visitors on the sustainability of this approach to gardening. In time, history may consign it to folklore – the latest example of gardening practice which can trace its roots back to Versailles in its heydays when a legion of lowly paid staff could change the entire colour scheme of the vast bedding plant displays overnight so the French king and queen could contemplate a different view if they looked out their bedroom window when they rose.

So it is still a matter for much discussion here as to how we can achieve a sustainable summer garden full of flowers. You can only go so far with utility but reliable hydrangeas and agapanthus. The lilies are coming in to flower and are wonderful but there are few other summer flowering bulbs. Clematis continue to put on a splendid display. The roses limp on but are past their peak. Our few d*hlias continue to perform well. If we want a summer garden, the bottom line is that we are going to have to turn to greater use of clumping herbaceous perennials.

Gardening would be dull if all one did was to maintain what is already in place. The challenge of achieving a sustainable summer garden will continue here for some years to come.