One of the new plants - Blackberry Nip - Hybrid Tea

Back on November the 10th when I started writing this blog post it'd been raining for a couple of weeks, Wellington had had a cold snap and our central heating had broken down. I had a huge pile of mulch to move off the driveway and a whole lot of seedlings and plants to transplant. I wasn't feeling like gardening. There was too much to do and the weather was off-putting. And besides, large parts of our yard had become a construction site. There were big bare patches of soil, puddles, piles of gravel and sand, a jury-rigged orange plastic fence to keep our dog contained (which she jumped with ease), wheelbarrows, a concrete mixer, and construction tools. We'd never spent a cent on landscaping before and were excited and frightened in equal amounts. We could put up with all the small hardships: mud, concrete dust, noise, the broken heater and a disappearing dog because our garden was going to look amazing by Christmas.

It's early January now. We're still living on a construction site. Christmas came and went in a blur and summer hasn't arrived. It's still raining on and off most weeks with only the occaisional sunny day. And if that isn't bad enough, we're regulary attacked by gale force winds. My poor flower garden has been battered and wind burned, limbs have been snapped and everything now grows at a 45 degree angle to the ground. It took weeks for our heater to get fixed and now it's broken down again, which is depressing for two reasons. One, that we even need to run a heater in January, and two, the heater will be expensive to fix, which isn't the sort of news you need straight after Christmas.

Back in November I was on the hunt for a cheap potting solution for the flower seedlings I'd planted. I had some old plastic plant pots, but not enough for all the seedlings. What I did have was a big pile of newspaper. I'd heard that it was possible to make pots out of old newspapaer, so I turned to the internet for help.

First I watched a YouTube video. A pleasant American man, with hairy hands, folded a beautiful square pot out of a single sheet of newspaper. I'd done origami before, it'd be easy. I set myself up in front of the computer with my sheet of newspaper facing the correct way (an important, yet often overlooked, detail in origami). I followed the man's insturctions, stopping often to rewind and rewatch bits of the video. No one was going to accuse me of being sloppy. I ended up with the pot on the far left. No matter how many times I tried to fold it I couldn't get the damn thing to stand up. Clearly the square pot was out of my league so I moved onto round ones. I read two instructional craft blogs that involved rolling several layers of newspaper around a cylinder (one used a can and the other a jar). You can see 4 of my attempts, which are flimsy and don't hold together. I give up.

Honesty Lunaria annua seedlings, January 2017. — Honesty *Lunaria annua* seedlings, January 2017.

I ended up using used old tins (that I'd hammered holes in), tomato punnets, a chocolate powder cylinder and the old plastic plant pots to put my seedlings in. So far I've only finished the honesty Lunaria annua. I used store bought compost to grow the plants in.

The Central Otago Rail Trail, December 2016.

In the week before Christmas, my family and I cycled the Otago Rail Trail. Here's a typical meadow along the trail. There were miles of yarrow Achillea, vipers bugloss Echium vulgare and sun-parched grass. It inpired me to get stuck into making my meadow garden when I got home.

The site of the soon-to-be meadow garden, December 2016.

I dug up a small patch of grass turf, replaced it with compost and planted it with some of my flower seedlings, straight from the seed trays. I'm not hopeful about their life expectancy...they were very premature. I found some yarrow growing wild and transplanted it into the meadow garden...a week on and this robust wild weed is looking a bit peaky.

The 'meadow garden', showing the lime tree, transplanted flower seedlings and supermarket coriander.

Here's a happy story about a lime tree. About 6 years ago when our old dog died I buried her ashes under this lime tree. Back then we had the lime tree in a big terracotta pot, which sat in the brick courtyard. In the last couple of years the lime became poorly. Its leaves kept turning yellow. I gave it regular applications of citrus ferilizer and watered it often, but things didn't improve. Then the leaves turned black, looking like someone had set fire to them. Soon after that, some of the leaves dropped off. By November last year it was obvious that the tree was dying. I dug it up, cut off the worst-affected branches, dragged it over by the oak tree and left it propped against a clump of agapanthus. I told myself I'd replant it somewhere. Then work got busy, Christmas came, and I forgot about it.

A week ago, when I was in the back garden, I noticed that the lime tree had grown new leaves and fruit. For 8 weeks it'd been sitting in partial shade with its roots exposed to the elements. By rights it should've died. Yet, all the black had disappeared from its leaves and it was growing. This seemed incredible to me. And, even though I don't believe in any kind of afterlife or reincarnation, I told myself that my dead dog was alive and talking to me, 'Plant the damn tree,' she was saying.

As you can see I've planted the tree in the 'meadow garden'. Lime trees aren't traditional meadow garden plants but what the hell.

After some research I found out why my lime tree ended up with black leaves. It had become affected with sooty mould. A little sooty mould isn't a death sentence, but a complete infestation is. If it covers the leaves it stops them from photosynthesizing (which was happinging to my lime). Nonetheless, the real bad guys are soft scale insects. They excrete a sugary substance called honeydew which the sooty mould grows on. If I didn't kill these guys then they'd kill my tree. The recommended way to attack soft scale insects is with something called Neem oil. I just bought a bottle of it so I'll let you know how I get on.

Roses at St Peters Parish Centre, Queenstown, December 2016.

I love scented roses. I can't see the point in having a rose if it doesn't smell. I have lots of roses and all but one are scented. The scentless one was given to me as a thank you gift and I feel I ought to keep it. It's banana yellow and a proflific flowerer, but I don't like it. I hope it dies. And, while I love roses and they seem to do alright in my garden, I don't know much about them. I know there are different sorts of roses but I couldn't tell you what those sorts are.

Recently I was given a book called Readers Digest Illustrated Guide To Gardening, published in 1979. It was written specifically for Australian and New Zealand gardeners. The rose section is surprisingly informative. If I ignore the possibility that its infromation could be out-of-date or 'dumbed down', then I can believe the book when it tells me that there are 7 types of roses. There are: species roses, old roses, hybrid teas, floribunda roses, modern shrub roses, climbing and rambling roses and miniature roses. In the past I've read pages and pages, on blogs and in books, about 'rose types' and got utterly confused. The Readers Digest Illustrated Guide To Gardening brought instant clarity. There are the original wild roses, there are old roses and everything else that comes after is a modern rose. I'm sure a rose-fancier will disagree.

Sweet briar growing alongside the Otago Rail Trail.

Species roses, even though they sound well-bred, are actually the wild parents of all the roses grown today. Most have simple flowers and ferny foliage. Sweet briar, the clump in the photograph above, is a species rose.

Here's one of my favourite roses in the garden. It has bushy natural-looking foliage and shaggy purple flowers with a great scent. I had thought it was a floribunda called Ebb Tide - Weksmopur (I have a bunch of rose lables in a scrapbook and some labels have a photo), but I'm not so sure. I think it might be a moss rose (a type of old rose) because it has whiskers growing along its stems. Then I saw a photograph of a rose just like it in Gardens Illustrated. It was called Rosa 'Henri Martin'. It was a musk hybrid shrub rose gowing in a French garden. I don't know if a musk hybrid shrub rose is an old rose or a modern rose. The only thing I know for sure is that it's not a species rose. This whole rose classification thing is very confusing. I need a diagram. I need to find a rose book with a diagram. Endless descriptions just confuse me. I only have myself to blame for not knowing the names of my roses. I really ought to have a better record keeping system. Actually, I really ought to have a system.

Here's another rose. And I know the name of this one. It's a climber and the very first rose I bought for the flower garden. It's a trooper. Wellington has been having endless gale force winds, with gusts over 120km, and this plant, because of its height and position, is right in the face of them. It's still standing and flowering, dark red and deeply scented blooms.

Yesterday I made myself a herbal tea from leaves and petals growing in my garden. I was inspired by a book that I bought at the Salvation Army Family Store called 'Herbs - The Complete Gardener's Guide'. It's written by a Canadian gardener called Patrick Lima. He writes about making all sorts of different herb teas and promotes experimentation. Inspired, I picked a selection of herbs: lemon verbena, lemon balm and spearmint. I followed Patrick's suggestion and put a leaf of sage and a handful of rose petals into the pot. It tasted...well... herbal and slightly medicinal. I added a generous dollop of honey, which improved it considerably. Thank goodness for bees.

Lemon balm, lemon verbena, sage, spearmint and rose petals for a herb tea.

Back in November my son found a bumblebee nest in the pruning pile. He'd been tasked with clearing it to make way for a garden shed, but gave up when he kept bumping into flying bees. I'd seen beehives before, those charming wooden boxes sitting on the edge of fields. I'd even seen one of those clever beehives with one glass wall, giving a cross-section of the hive with all its compartments. The beehive in the pruning pile it didn't look anything like either of those hives. It doesn't look like a hive at all. The only giveaway is a hole in the dead branches that the bumblebees fly in and out of.

After a quick internet search on bumblebees I discovered how stupid I was. I had always believed that honey bees and bumble bees were the same sort of bee. I thought that bumble bees were actually the queen bees or at least a special sort of bee in the beehive. It turns out they're a completely different sort of bee, as different as grizzly bears to polar bears. Bumble bees don't make honey, honey bees do. Bumble bees eat and collect nectar. They collect pollen too, to feed to the baby bees back in the hive. Bumble bees are the best pollinating bees; they're twice as good as honey bees, and they don't mind the rain or the cold. The bad news is that bumblebees are under threat. Their habitats and food sources are disappearing. Forests and wild areas are being destroyed to make way for farms and houses. Bees need wild places to build their nests and flowers to provide nectar and pollen (like my pruning pile). They don't travel far from home so it's important that there are lots of flowers and flowering trees within a kilometre radius of their hive. If I wait for two years I can put the garden shed where they've built their hive because they'll have moved on somewhere else. I read somewhere that bumblebees often build hives in old rodent holes - now that's a cheery thought. Now I feel very righteous about growing flowers instead of vegetables, which I've often felt apologetic about in the company of do-gooder-vege-growers. I have the perfect excuse - I am saving bumblebees.

I'll finsih off with another feel-good story. You may remember an earlier blog post about my pear tree. The namless one I bought for twenty dollars. A pear tree's name, as it turns out, is very important. Every pear tree has a perfect pear partner, which it must be planted with if any pears are to grow. Bees will pollinate the pear flowers and the flowers become the pears (don't quote me on that). I, owner of the nameless pear tree, had come to terms with a forever pearless tree and had turned my mind to a celebration of its other assets. It had a lovely curved form, produced pretty blossoms and gave an orchard look to my emergent meadow. I was very, very surprised when, in early December, I saw this...

I have the bumblebees to thank.