Gardens are more than flowers, I often tell myself. Because it's easy to think that flowers are what gardens are all about, that the job of foliage is to act as a backdrop to showcase the flowers. Those type-A personalities, those fickle, temperamental extroverts with their special diets and high maintenance lifestyles. Flowers.

Foliage is so often treated like the plain and loyal friend she is. Ignored and undervalued. And yet foliage makes up 95% of my garden, probably more, and it does all the hard work. Foliage screens ugly fences and ugly views, it clothes the garden all year round and gives it a feeling of green tranquility. Without foliage there is no show and the flowers would be nobodies.

When I say foliage I really mean leaves. And when I say hard work I mean photosynthesis. According to this website I stumbled across, cid-inc.com, 'Leaves are the primary way plants interact with the atmosphere and take care of their basic needs.' Leaves make all the food for the plant by taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, water from the soil, and energy from sunlight (using the green bits in leaves, called chlorophyll) to make simple sugars for the plant to consume. Plants let water out through holes in their leaves (little windows that open and close called stomata) and this process is called transpiration. Really, all you need to know is that leaves are the business end of the plant and they're designed, by evolution, to adapt to the environment they originate from. And really, we should be pretty impressed that something as overlooked as a leaf should be so important, not just to the plant it belongs to but to the world.

Leaves tell you a lot about plants and where they come from. Whether they lives in a hot dry place, the bottom of a forest floor, a meadow or near the sea.

Here are a collection of plants in the Wellington Botanic Garden that come from places with limited rainfall. All these different leaves have different adaptations to conserve water and limit transpiration, be it thick fleshy leaves or hairy surfaces that hold on to water droplets.

Wellington Botanic Garden, February 2018.

While I know this blog is all about appreciating and celebrating the humble leaf, but, well, I just had to sneak in this flower. It's the splash of red in the above photo.

Unknown succulent, Wellington Botanic Garden, February 2018

I couldn't find the name of this strange succulent. Beauty and the beast. Leaves like a pile of dead oysters and flowers like something from the Carnival of Brazil.

Back to foliage. Here are some plants in my garden with specially designed leaves to cope with dry climates and irregular watering.

My Aeonium has thick fleshy leaves which store water. Most aeoniums come from the Canary Islands or North Africa.

Corokia x virgata 'Red Wonder'. — *Corokia x virgata* 'Red Wonder'.

My corokia is a New Zealand native. Corokias like sunny situations. They have small shiny leaves.The small surface area of each leaf means it loses less water during transpiration then a plant with big leaves.

Last year I turned a dull and featureless area into a fernery and stumpery (the stumps are still to come). Full credit must be given to Ryan the landscaper who transformed an ugly retaining wall in a thing of beauty. There were already 4 tree ferns growing in this area: 3 silver ferns and 1 mamaku (the most noble of our tree ferns according to L.J. Metcalf). I planted a whole lot of different ferns (more on these in a future blog), 2 whau trees (quick growing and very exotic looking), a nikau palm Rhopalostylis sapida (very slow growing), a Podophyllum kadeidoscope (with patterned leaves the size of dinner plates), a Tecomanthe speciosa (a climber from the Three Kings Island, which I transplanted from an area that gets frost), a Elatostema rugosum parataniwha (NZ begonia) and a couple of staghorn ferns, (which my dear friend rescued from the garden of a condemned house in the Bay of Plenty.)

I learnt about 'stumperies' on a British gardening show. Back in the 1850s dead trees were collected and displayed together upside down so that people could admire their strange twisting roots. Fern collecting was a big craze at the time and the stumps provided a dark, damp and rotting environment, perfect for growing ferns. These spooky fairytale gardens, with their winding paths between the fern covered stumps, looked like the ancient graveyards of unicorns and basilisks and other mythical creatures.

Incidentally, Prince Charles had a stumpery made for him in his garden at 'Highgrove'.

My local forest on a misty morning, 2014.

My local forest is, to my mind, a naturally occurring stumpery. It's what's called a 'pioneering forest'. That is, a forest that is not an original native forest (but once was) and has been planted with exotic trees and where native plants are naturally re-inhabiting the space.

My local forest is a pine forest. The trees were planted during The Depression. Many of the pine trees in my local forest are coming to the end of their life and getting blown over by Wellington's strong winds. The pines are shallow rooted and these are clearly visible when they fall down. All manner of plants grow on or around these dead trees and the canopy gaps that have been created bring dappled light to the first generation native trees and bushes.

My son standing on a fallen pine tree in my local forest, 2014.

Ferns and moss growing on a fallen tree in my local forest, February 2018.

Notice how the ferns grow in clumps on the dead tree and the moss grows around the ferns (or the other way round). The shadow from the dead tree keeps the forest floor damp making it inviting for damp loving plants to grow.

Here's a wonderful little book I'm reading at the moment. Beth Chatto, that innovative and creative English gardener, changed the way gardeners garden. She is a charming writer who shares her failures and success. 'Right plant right place' is her maxim. This book is a joy to read. Luckily for me I have two of her other books to read when I finish this one.

The Dry Garden by Beth Chatto, published 1978.

And finally, here is a mighty tree from the Wellington Botanic Garden that I happened across today. It originates in the south of Chile. It's common name is the monkey-puzzle tree and It belongs to the Araucariaceae family, which is a very ancient family of conifers (the Norfolk Island pine and NZ kauri belong to the same family). Each leaf on the monkey-puzzle tree has a lifespan of more than 20 years. Unless you have an enormous garden then you wouldn't want one at home...they can grow up to 5 metres in diameter and 40 metres in height. Also, they produce giant cones, one of which could seriously hurt you if you were walking under the tree at the same time as a cone was falling.

Araucaria araucana, monkey puzzle tree, Wellington Botanic Garden, February 2018. — *Araucaria araucana*, monkey puzzle tree, Wellington Botanic Garden, February 2018.