What I would really like Santa to bring me this Christmas is a genuine kink free hose or two. We own lots of garden hoses here and all are meant to be kink-free. Over a period of time, none are… There is little more annoying than using the hose and finding the water stops suddenly because it kinks in the same spot every time. Then the water pressure either blows it off the tap which sprays water everywhere, or when I bend to straighten the offending kink, the end of the hose suddenly develops a life and will of its own and sprays me with water. Either way, I get wet. Maybe Santa knows a manufacturer of hosepipes which don’t ever go into kinks. I am told that using a hose reel keeps kinks at bay, but as I regularly use four different garden taps, unless I want to keep moving the entire shebang, I would need four hose reels and four brand new hoses which may be asking altogether too much from Santa.

I am hoping Santa may also go to the Boxing Day sales (I may need to accompany him) and buy me two ladders. One needs to be a stable but lightweight two or three step affair for pruning plants which are just above my reach and one needs to be taller for reaching higher. OSH would not like our ladders here at all. They are somewhat unstable and held together by baling twine, but at least they have their rungs.

Other gifts for gardeners that I would recommend include good secateurs. Decent secateurs last for many years (as long as they don’t end up in the compost heap) and will retain a sharp edge for clean cuts. It is false economy to buy cheap secateurs which are invariable nasty. Grape snips, however, are lightweight and cheap and much appreciated by women gardeners with smaller hands (and presumably by Asian gardeners according to the Lockwood Smith school of thought). They are so much easier to carry in a pocket and I prefer them to conventional secateurs for lightweight trimming. If you are feeling generous, give the recipient a couple of pairs. We own a smaller and lightweight pair of secateurs bearing the brand ARS which Mark and I both treasure as being easy to use and keeping a good sharp edge. We bought them years ago for taking cuttings and they have remained firm favourites for ease of use.. I did have a handy secateur sharpener given to me by friends, until I mislaid it (quite possibly with various secateurs and trowels in the compost heap). It doesn’t do anywhere near as good a job as a proper sharpening stone but for a quick-fix sharpen, it works well enough to get by. They are cheap enough and I need to buy another one but I am still waiting for my missing one to reappear.

Pruning saws are not cheap, at least not for a quality brand, but are worth their weight in gold. My preference is for a straight blade, not a curved one.

Every gardener needs more than one wheelbarrow and here, too, you really do get the quality you pay for. The last barrow I purchased was dirt cheap but alas something went wrong in its design and if you put anything in the tray at the handle end, it tips back. If you are going to go for a really cheap option, at least look at an assembled model and try putting a couple of unbreakable items in it before you buy, to check for stability. I recall inheriting a dreadful barrow from my mother with the same design flaw. The big chunky contractor’s barrows are sturdy, but most women will find them too heavy and the handles too thick to use comfortably. Plastic trays don’t rust out if you leave them out in the rain or filled with debris.

Trowels are another item which every gardener needs in multiples. Even with the best of intentions, they go missing on regular occasions, sometimes never to reappear. I am sure that trowels take themselves off to some secret gathering place, there to commune with other wayward trowels, forever safe from discovery. Either that, or they are imbued with some deluded desire to grow up and become spades and they are hiding out in the interim, awaiting their metamorphosis. Mark’s advice is that blue is the easiest colour to find in the garden so he prefers bright blue handles. But many of us can testify that even secateurs and trowels with high viz handles can disappear when your attention is momentarily distracted.

I really prefer not to be given garden ornaments or decorations. These are a matter of personal taste and being rather pernickety in the matter, I would rather chose my own (or have none).

If you are looking for books to give for Christmas, it is hard to go past The Artful Gardener (reviewed on this page last week), by Rose Thodey and Gil Hanly. It is a very good book and would be welcomed by most serious gardeners. In the classics, Hilliers Manual of Trees and Shrubs is a good standby for every bookcase. If you are feeling really generous, Audrey Eagles massive tome on New Zealand plants would be welcomed by most enthusiasts. Botanical art prints are also a safe option, well liked by most people who enjoy plants and gardening. You can often find these reproduced on quality greetings cards and picture frames are so cheap now that it could make a thoughtful gift within even a child’s budget. Botanical art, by the way, shows the botanical detail of the plant being painted – the stamens, petals, seedheads and other parts of the plant anatomy. They are not just chocolate box pictures of pretty flowers which may fall into the same category as garden ornaments and decorations.

Ours is a household which never gives gift vouchers or money in any shape or form. Second hand books are acceptable because they show thought, but gift vouchers are utility and take no thought at all and it is perfectly obvious to the recipient how high a dollar value you place on them. But, as a friend pointed out, others view vouchers differently and gardening vouchers are often well received when other inspiration is lacking.

Another friend suggested sun hat and sun block as a thoughtful gift. I would add that littlies who need help buying small gifts for gardening parents, relatives or grandies could do much worse than giving a new nail brush and hand cream!

The final suggestion over morning coffee for a welcome Christmas gift was a gardener. Although it is more likely that a willing garden labourer is what many of us would prefer. I am not sure that Santa himself fits the bill on this one. A younger, leaner and fitter model would be better to have at one’s beck and call. Preferably one that is amenable, obedient, has a little initiative but not too much and is easy on the eye. Thanks, Santa.

Hostas have been preoccupying me for the past fortnight. First up, Mark and I volunteered to take a workshop on the topic during our recent festival and were a little taken aback at how many people turned up to hear our pearls of wisdom on the topic. And secondly, I have spent this week dividing and repotting hostas in the nursery. I have reached the point where I even dream about them which may be a sad commentary on the state of my life at the moment. But there are probably worse subjects to dream about than hostas.

When we used to sell plants by mail order, we were often surprised by the number of people who fail to understand that hostas are deciduous – in other words they disappear underground in autumn to re-emerge in all their glory in spring. And it is all that fresh spring growth which is their greatest appeal. That and their endearing tolerance of shaded conditions, even dry shade.

The worst example of hosta ignorance came from a new customer in Auckland. We despatched her order by courier in late autumn and she faxed back to say that the carton had arrived and all the plants were in excellent order, bar the hostas. I can still recall her words: “It appears there has been a rabbit in the carton eating the hosta foliage. Or if the hostas are meant to be like this, then I don’t want them.” I can not remember how we resolved the situation but I am pretty certain we never sent her another plant list. Some customers, as Mark has been known to observe, put the cuss into the word customer.

As with most other plant genus, hosta aficionados like to search out the new or the different (and in the hosta world, new does not always equal visibly different) so a full hosta collection can become rather large. But we are tending the other way and weeding out varieties which have minor variations at best. In fact I find it impossible to tell the difference between Patriot (itself a sport of Francee) and Minute Man. All three varieties are green with a white edge and googling hostas throws up a host of other minor variations of the same original plant. Hostas are not all stable in type and some varieties tend to throw up what are known as sports – aberrations or variations. Occasionally it will be something worth having but that is rare… The flip side of the coin is that the variegated hostas can tend to revert to a plain colour and that reverted part of the clump will often be stronger growing so will take over in time. So if you have a fancy hosta with a plain section, it pays to cut out that reversion. As most of the newer varieties in this country have come in as tissue cultured plantlets (in other words they have not been divided from an established clump but have been increased in a laboratory from cell divisions and grown on agar), the problem of reversions is becoming more common. Tissue culture is not always stable and can throw up variations or reversions.

The most common mistake made by less experienced gardeners is to be seduced by all the wacky variegations and to plant them together – the green with white edging, the reverse variegation of white with a green edging, the blue and yellow both ways and the green and gold options. After all, who wants to buy a plain coloured hosta, especially if it is plain green or a low key blue toned one? My rule of thumb is that every variegated hosta needs at least two plain coloured ones to set it off. So a showy big blue hosta with a yellow edging is going to look a great deal more effective if it is grouped with a small plain yellow and a mid sized plain blue plant. It is the variation in size, leaf shape and some level of restraint in combining patterned leaves which makes a hosta patch pleasing to the eye.

If you can’t bring yourself to buy plainer hostas and nobody is offering you divisions, raise seed. No matter what parent plant you collect the seed from, the vast majority of offspring will return to plain colours, mostly green.

Hostas are predominantly for shady areas of your garden. They are tolerant of very dry shade under trees but equally they will be happy in damper areas with heavy soils. What they don’t like are light soils in full sun – their foliage will just burn and the plants will fail to thrive. You can get away with reasonable light levels on the margins of sunny areas but the paler variegations (the plants with white or pale yellows) will burn and crisp around the edges in direct sun.

The greatest problem with growing good hostas, as every gardener knows, is slugs and snails which feed voraciously on the leaves. I spoke to many garden visitors, particularly from Auckland and Hamilton, who talked about walking out at night and crunching their way across snails and I can remember seeing the phenomenon once in Palmerston North where it was like a horror movie (The Invasion of the Snails, perhaps, or Snails’ Revenge) with literally hundreds of them teaming across a concrete pathway. If you have a snail problem of this magnitude, forget growing anything that is snail fodder. But if you have only a moderate issue with these herbivores, a combination of good selection and good management can keep the problem within manageable bounds. Choose hostas with thicker, tougher leaves rather than the soft and wispy types. Slimy crawlers do not appear to like slithering over gritty surfaces so circling plants with sand, sawdust, baker’s bran or similar will often deflect them elsewhere. We have little problem under our rimu trees with the thick carpet of rimu needles. Yes you can use slug bait, but it is not very nice stuff and can poison dogs, hedgehogs and birds so be very sparing – one bait per plant is all that is required. If you head out with a torch on a misty or rainy night after a dry period, you will often find the hungry offenders on the move.

Given that every discussion about hostas comes down to slug and snail control in the end, I leave you with the thought that most of the slugs in this country and all of our icky snails must have come in on plant material. What I do not understand is why, on those early boats bringing settlers to New Zealand along with all their trappings to remind them of home (blackbirds, thrushes, sparrows, trees and plants), they did not usefully employ themselves on the long sea voyage exercising digital control to ensure that not a single pesky slug or snail survived. It would have saved us a great deal of trouble in the garden.

The September issue of the NZ Gardener magazine had a profile of Palmerston North gardener, sculptor and retired florist, David Anyon. We have never met David that we know of, but several of our friends and colleagues speak highly of his skills so it was with interest that I read the article. The photos of his garden did not, we suspect, do it justice but it was his philosophy on pruning and shaping that particularly struck a chord.

To quote the article: “David emphasises that what he does isn’t pruning so much as shaping, to create mood and drama. He’s convinced that if more gardeners got stuck into a little clipping and shaping of their trees and shrubs from the outset, it would help to prevent mishmashed jungles.”

We first noticed this technique of picking out and shaping accent plants carried out to great effect a few years ago at Hollard Gardens in Kaponga. I can recall writing about it at the time. It acts like a punctuation mark in a garden, a feature which is a plant and not some placed object. It gives a degree of formality and a focus to what can otherwise become a melded mass of foliage and flowers.

Gardening conversations here can start as early as 6.30am with the pre breakfast cup of tea and for a while we mulled around the appeal of freshly planted young gardens. Owning and working in an old and very well established garden as we do, the appeal of a young garden is not part of our personal experience. But there is no doubt that there is something fresh and charming about newly planted gardens and Mark figured that it was because when you start with young, smallish and fresh plants, each one stands largely on its own, in its own clearly defined space and therefore has a distinct shape. As the plants grow and start to compete for more space, often intertwining and encroaching on their neighbours, the whole effect starts to meld into the mishmash referred to by David Anyon. A very different set of skills are needed to take the garden to its next level of maturity – lifting the skirts of larger plants to expose the trunks, creating layers, thinning, shaping, changing some of the underplanting to meet different conditions for starters. But New Zealanders tend to be great at creating young gardens and too often we have seen the response of trying to recreate the juvenile charm by either starting again and repeating a similar planting from scratch or by taking plants such as camellias and evergreen azaleas back to stump level so they will rejuvenate and look as if they are young and fresh again. Too few garden plants are ever allowed to reach maturity in this young country of ours.

David Anyon was articulating a different approach. And, as he pointed out, going against the prevailing ethos of the 1960s which still prevails to some extent today, where clipping is seen as fine for formal hedges but rather naff in other contexts. Personally I don’t want a garden where everything is clipped and restrained, which is just as well because we would need a small army of clipping minions to manage our seven acres. We saw too much of that in Italy where very little was ever allowed to grow naturally. But shaped and clipped accents have their place in gardens both large and small – probably even more in large gardens which can become jungle-like or rambling over time.

I spent Saturday afternoon pondering this as I was up and down the ladder cloud pruning Camellia Mine No Yuki. Even though Mine No Yuki is now in her third year of this treatment and I was just going over old ground, it still took me the better part of five hours to recover her allocated form. At the time I was wondering if devoting so much time to one plant was justified when we are feeling the dreaded weight of pressure to get the entire garden groomed up to the level we like for our upcoming festival. But when I had finished, I decided it was definitely worth it. It provides a key point, a feature to arrest the eye in what is otherwise a rather formless and featureless area of garden. The controlled formality makes the surrounds look natural by contrast, rather than unkempt.

In that Gardener article, David Anyon also refers to what he calls ‘defuzzing’ – removing little twiggy bits and dead bits from branches of larger plants. He sees it as making for cleaner, more attractive trunks and framing small spaces and vistas in the garden. I couldn’t agree more. This defuzzing is, I decided a while ago, one of the most satisfying and fun aspects of gardening. You can’t defuzz in young, juvenile gardens- there is not enough to defuzz. But it has a most rewarding impact in an older garden.

I am thinking of requesting a new ladder for Christmas. Our ladders are OSH hazards and need care. But we do at least have decent tools here. There is nothing more off putting than blunt or stiff hedge clippers, secateurs that won’t keep an edge, pruning saws that are blunt and bent or loppers that no longer lop cleanly. Mark is adamant that he won’t teach me how to use a chainsaw and they terrify me anyway, but I have learned that I can achieve a great deal with a good pruning saw. Gardeners with small hands or arthritis may like to treat themselves to grape snips as well. They are pretty cheap, as I recall, and pleasant to use as well as being light enough to carry easily in a pocket. I tend to wreck them by trying to cut through wood that is too thick but we bought a dozen pairs a couple of years ago and I still have a couple of brand new sets waiting hidden in my drawer. Mark favours a lightweight and small set of secateurs which were very expensive to buy but much easier to use than heavier and cheaper brands. If you are a serious gardener, buy quality.

The sky is the limit when it comes to pruning, shaping and tidying individual plants in a large and mature garden but I am really looking forward to having more time to indulge in this aspect of gardening. I certainly would not claim to be in David Anyon’s league (taking everyday plants and turning them into unique works of art, according to the writer of the article) but I would certainly like to get there. It is a great deal more creative than weeding.