I have a confession to make. I love flowers. Because I love flowers so much I made a flower garden from scratch out of a strip of lawn.

While I'm on the subject of confessions, here's another. I own over 17 books and over 100 magazines all about cottage gardens, herbaceous borders and flowers. I'm pretty sure that I'm the only person in New Zealand under 80 who bothers with such things. And while I know that meadows and prairies and swathes of new perennials are very fashionable and include lots of flowers in their planting schemes, you couldn't call them 'flower gardens.' Flower gardens, real flower gardens, are 90% flowers and 10% leafy filler.

Flower gardens are really hard work. Great ones look wild, as if the plants all ended up in one spot through good fortune. In reality flower gardens are the end result of careful planning and research and completely contrived. Very good gardeners understand the needs, habit, colour, texture, height, foliage, size and flowering cycle of every plant in their garden and how they all work together. Making a four seasons flower garden is like writing and directing a play with a cast of unruly drunk actors during wartime.

My flower garden only looks good in spring and early summer. At the moment, the moment being winter, it looks, at best, unpromising. Better gardeners then I would have their flower gardens looking like 5 star rolling banquets all year round. They wouldn't have weeds and ugly gaps, and they'd make damn sure no one ever saw the cheap brush fencing used to camouflage an even uglier fence. The solution is obvious - I need to try harder, which is where the 17 books and 100 magazines come in.

It's easy to get dispirited and want to give up the whole gardening business. And every winter I tell myself it's the very last one tending a flower garden. Maybe all the hard work isn't worth it. Maybe I need to tear up all the flowers and replace them with low-maintenance hardy perennials, like hebes or flax.

Luckily I recently discovered Margery Fish and her book 'We Made A Garden'. It wouldn't be a lie to say that she changed my life, well maybe not my whole life but all the gardening bits.

'We Made a Garden' was published in 1956 and is still in print. Margery took up gardening for the first time in her late forties. With World War Two looming Margery and her husband Walter decided to move from London to the country. They took up residence in an old house in Somerset that had a wreck of a garden. Even before they moved in the two of them had rolled up their sleeves and got stuck into dismantling a lot of stone walls that crisscrossed the garden. Margery's book is a record of the first few years and it's very funny. She wanted one kind of garden and Walter wanted another. She wanted a cottage garden with lots of old fashioned and unassuming flowers; Walter wanted an ordered garden with lots of technicolor dahlias. Walter was very domineering and somehow managed to kill lots of Margery's plants. In the end Margery won.

Here is what Margery has to say about garden making. 'I have never regretted our foolhardiness. Of course, we made mistakes, but at least they were our own, just as the garden was our own. However imperfect the result there is a certain satisfaction in making a garden that is like no one else's, and in knowing that you yourself are responsible for every stone and every flower in the place. It is pleasant to know each one of your plants intimately because you have chosen and planted every one of them. In course of time they become real friends, conjuring up pleasant associations of the people who gave them and the gardens they came from.'

Margery Fish's garden at East Lambrook Manor, Somerset. A photo of a photograph by Clay Perry.

Margery has a chapter titled 'We Made Mistakes.' It begins like this, 'In our endeavours to make the garden more interesting we made every mistake that was possible, and I hate to think of all the hours of work I have put in undoing the result of our labours.' That's my sort of garden book. Margery Fish not only made an extraordinary garden, but she wrote about the process of making one with such honesty that I feel less embarrassed about my own mistakes, failures and general dimwittedness.

One summer, a long time ago, I planted around 30 new plants straight into sand and couldn't understand why they all died. I once chopped down a 4 foot tall pohutakawa tree and planted a pink rhododendron in its place. When I was 16 I made a herb garden and every week I'd dig up the plants and move them around into new positions; eventually they all died. Once I planted cuttings all around my garden of what I thought was a beautiful native creeper called Parataniwha. Recently I found out it was a Class A noxious weed from Asia. Last winter I built a vegetable garden in a sunny spot near a sycamore tree (which being deciduous was bare). When summer arrived, so did the sycamore leaves and the garden was thrown into complete all day shade. I don't much like growing vegetables anyway, so no great loss.

It was my grandmother, Phoebe Vaughan, who got me into flowers in the first place.

Phoebe Vaughan in her garden at Waihi Beach in the late 1990s.

Phoebe had a medium sized garden built on top of a sand dune. Almost every plant was grown for its ability to produce pretty flowers. There were dozens of azaleas, camellias, hibiscuses, geraniums pelargoniums, daisies, lavender, agapanthus and succulants; and that's just the plants I know the names of. Even her two biggest trees, a flame tree and a pohutakawa, had beautiful flowers.

There wasn't anything modern or minimal about Phoebe's garden. If you had to describe it you'd call it relaxed English cottage with some areas of exotic flora and lots of nana touches: gardens edged in rocks and old bits of concrete, a bird bath constructed out of an old drainage pipe and a tin dustbin lid, old tree stumps treated as tabletops for flower pots or used as poles for growing vines over. 'Waste not want not,' was Phoebe's motto. Every gap, every corner was stuffed full of plants with the exception of 3 places: the driveway, the grass around the clothesline and a strip of front lawn for family cricket games.

As you can see, I photographed my flower garden from the most flattering angle, giving the illusion of fullness, trying to obscure the many bare spaces and the brush fencing. I forgot to move the pile of dead weeds in the bottom right of the photo but I think they're well camouflaged. The garden is long and narrow and has a series of stepping stones running through the middle. It's sloped and faces north-west so it gets great summer sun. In winter it gets a lot less sun and the lower bits only get it for a few hours. Many of the plants grow on a 45 degree angle to the ground. This is because Wellington gets regular gale force winds and wind gusts of over 100km an hour. The climate is temperate with cool winters, warm summers and regular rainfall. The soil is clay.

Every year I try out a few new plants. Last spring I planted fennel, angelica and tansy. They sound like three girls in a reality show. Fennel was a haze of bronze mist and contrasted tastefully with every plant. Tansy on the other hand was like some long leggy bottle blonde trying to get noticed by a talent scout. Everything around her was cast into darkness. By the end of summer both plants were too tall for the spots I'd placed them, so I moved them to the back. As for angelica, what a disappointment. Angelica always looked so pretty in all the photographs. I ended up with a stunted looking plant whose flowers looked like they were wrapped in plastic. Needless to say, angelica doesn't live there anymore. She has, however, self seeded prolifically so I might try some of the new plants in my, soon to be dug, umbellifer garden, maybe the babies will be prettier than their mother.

I have this thing for roses and every year I manage to squeeze in one or two new ones. I especially love purple ones. The roses seem to flourish provided I give them lots of sun. Once a year I prune and fertilize them and mulch their roots in summer. The only problem I have with roses is that for half the year they look like rusty wire cages. I'm experimenting with plants that can hide them in winter. Here are 3.

Honeywort (Cerinthe major), Euphorbia and foxglove (Digitalis). — Honeywort (*Cerinthe major*), *Euphorbia* and foxglove (*Digitalis*).

These 3 are easy to grow and hardy. They all have pretty flowers and outstanding foliage. Honeywort and foxglove self-seed like weeds and the euphorbias are easy to propagate. I bury a stem or two in soil, hold it down with a rock and eventually some roots will grow.

Here's another hardworking plant.

Erysimum - something-or-rather. — *Erysimum -* something-or-rather.

Erysimum grow enthusiastically and need to be regularly pruned. Sometimes they get too unwieldy and need to be dug up and thrown on my pile of unwanted things at the back of the garden. Erysimum take easily from cuttings. I poke them straight into the ground. These purple ones have a subtle scent and look good in a vase.

You will have noticed my rather haphazard approach to plant names. I apologise. Thanks to a book I was given, called Latin For Gardeners by Lorraine Harrison, I will soon be an expert.

Rather than signing off with some witty quip I'll leave you with another photograph of Margery Fish's garden and one of her quotes.

'I could go on and on. But that is just what gardening is, going on and on. My philistine of a husband often told with amusement how a cousin when asked when he expected to finish his garden replied 'Never, I hope.' And that, I think, applies to all true gardeners.'