I have to warn you that you’re about to see a completely ordinary suburban garden. There are weeds, bamboo stakes, bare soil, rustic features and some scrappy looking plants. If you can handle that then proceed with caution. You’ve been spoilt these last few blogs by designer gardens. Gardens with big budgets and teams of professional gardeners. But I figured that it was about time I gave you a selfie, well at least the gardening equivalent. It’s time to show you my garden, warts and all. So you’re invited to visit my front garden and its diminishing front lawn.
In the photo above you can see where the side garden meets the front garden, just by the bay tree. Yeah I know, my bay tree needs a prune. And I would’ve done it this week, only I was too busy making my rustic brick edging. Incidentally, the word ‘rustic’ when used by professional landscapers in relation to garden features is code for ‘homely, hokey and crappy’.
I’m a big fan of recycled bricks. They’re nice to look at, easy to move around and can be fashioned for lots of different purposes: plinths for pots, barricades for delicate plants against a marauding dog, garden edging and raised gardens.
I can build a new garden anywhere I choose and if I choose to move that garden to a new location then I can, thanks to the portability of bricks. Eventually, when I’m happy with the size, shape and placement of my gardens I’ll get a landscaper to turn my ‘rustic’ brick edging into something more permanent. But until then I’m having a lot of fun experimenting.
Here’s the first third of the front garden. I wrote about this part in a recent blog post about shade loving plants. All my new shade loving plants have exceeded expectations. Not only are they all alive, but they’re flourishing. The bamboo stakes are to stop my dog from trampling plants as she rushes to the fence to bark at passersby. She’s only allowed into the front garden when she’s supervised and even then she’s a menace.
I’ll give you a quick tour of the garden before diving into details about some of the plants.
The very largest trees were growing in the front garden when we bought the house 13 years ago. There were a lot of large trees back then. Too many. They blocked out the light, crowded each other out and made the garden seem cramped and poky. It took a few years to work out which trees stayed and which ones were chopped.
I’ve experimented with a number of plants in the last 13 years. Some plants were disastrous. I planted too many flax bushes and Astelias. They didn’t leave room for much else with their spreading fanning growth, so I removed 2 flax bushes, which required some serious digging. Two hundred years ago my garden was a thick forest. It keeps wanting to return to its previous life. Bracken, silver ferns and kawakawa, to name a few, keep popping up everywhere.
On the lower left, of the photo above, you can see the thin sticks of my greengage tree. It didn’t blossom this year because of the gale force winds. Behind the greengage is a mamaku and silver fern (both tree ferns), and behind that is the place I throw old Christmas trees and pruned branches. Two Griselinia lucida bushes (with the big shiny oval leaves) are slowly growing up to hide this pile. In the top right corner is a kawakawa bush, Piper excelsum.
On the grass is a tray of seedlings that I’ve grown and am about to transplant into the garden.
This is the view from the driveway. The front garden is a long thin wedge shape.
This is my latest garden. I made it with concrete retaining bricks (from my brother-in-law) and 2 free tyres. It doesn’t look like much but once it’s filled with plants (lush leafy ones) it will be a thing of beauty. I built a garden here for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to break up the long thin lawn and provide some privacy from the street. Secondly, I wanted to change a garden that looked blobby, namely the one with 2 Astelias and 1 mountain cabbage tree, into a garden worth looking at. The Astelias and mountain cabbage tree are good hardworking plants but they aren’t stars. They’re going to look a lot better as background greenery.
I love this kowhai tree. Not only does it have beautiful yellow flowers in spring but it has lace-like leaves and delicate seed pods that hang down in a very fetching way. This and the moss on the trunk and branches give the tree a look of Southern American gothic.
A lacecap hydrangea.
I’ve admired an unusual tree in the scented garden at Wellington Botanic Garden for a long time. Its called Calliandra portoicensis, the snowflake acacia. It’s from Central America. I bought one from Peter Cave Nursery, which sells lots of unusual plants. It’s frost tender and I hope it will be protected in this corner.
Calliandra portoicensis.
Calliandra portoicensis.
Geranium pratense ‘Plenum Caeruleum’.
I bought two beautiful geraniums from Heirloom Perennial Nursery. The one above, Geranium pratense ‘Plenum Caeruleum’ and 3 G. phaeum ‘Sambor’ (which has the beautiful leaves three pictures down).
Geranium pratense ‘Plenum Caeruleum’.
White cosmos.
Geranium phaeum ‘Sambor’.
Euphorbia mellifera.
Lobelia abderdarica.
Melianthus major.
Luculia tsetensis.
Comfrey.
The plants with the big green leaves and tufty flowers are plume poppies, which I bought at a garden fair. The white flowers are Hydrangea Quercifolia ‘Pee Wee’.
Here’s a close-up of the plume poppy flower. Behind it is my new kaka beak tree, Clianthus puniceus.
The bronze leaved plant is one I moved from another garden. It’s Actaea simplex ‘Black Negligee’
My bargain-bin Hosta ‘Mildred Seaver’
Hosta ‘Mildred Seaver’.
Hydrangea Quercifolia ‘Pee Wee’.
Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’.
Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’.
The tree at the back is my karo tree, Pittosporum crassifolium.
The long leaved plant at the front is Lobelia aberdarica. I have planted 2 of them in this garden.
The view of the front garden, from in the garden, looking towards the driveway.
After sitting and looking at the front garden, a cup of tea in hand, I decided that what it needed was orange. There are a lot of blue and white flowers, some purple, some green and a little yellow. Orange would bring it all together. At the moment there’s only this orange dahlia called Dahlia XXL, which looks out of place, like a flamingo amongst ducks, but mark my words - this garden will soon be a unified tapestry of colour with many other orange flowers. As soon as I publish this blog I’ll be ordering some orange flowers online.
Feverfew.
I’m very pleased with these green gladiolus flowers. I really need to stake them earlier. Next year, all going well, they’ll be surrounded by bushy plants that will help keep them upright. I’m also on the hunt for other green flowers to add to this garden. I know of a green rose that would look lovely next to the glad.
Artichokes are such winners. What’s not to love? They’re architectural plants, bringing a sense of order to a shambling flower border, with stunning leaves and flowers, loved by bees.
Artichoke.
Dahlia XXL.
Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Raspberry Crush’.
I had to move this hydrangea from my side garden. It’s Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Raspberry Crush’. And as you can see it’s turned blue. That’s because my soil is acid. If I gave it regular helpings of lime it would turn pink again, but I can’t be faffed. So I moved it to the front garden where it has other blue friends.
Ammi majus Bishop’s Flower.
Echinops ritro ‘Blue Globe’ that I grew from seed along with the mignonette and bishop’s flower.
Nigella damascena, Love-in-the-mist, that I got at the Wellington Botanic Garden seed swap last year.
My seedlings, Eryngium planum sea holly, which I had to stratify for 10 days before I sowed them, and a dessert spoon which is my top gardening tool for transplanting larger seedlings.
Eryngium planum sea holly,
I planted my sea holly two days ago. It’s foolish to plant seedlings, so small, into bare soil in the hottest part of summer. It will be a miracle if they survive. I’ve ben sneaking out to water them every morning.
In my last blog I hinted that this weeks blog would be about me drawing a plan of how I want my garden to look. Well I didn’t and quite frankly I can’t. I discovered that I like to plan my garden while I’m gardening. It’s only then, while the light changes, the plants change and the seasons change, that I can see what must be done. And using my old bricks and sticks and hand-me downs I can build new gardens or move the ones made in the wrong place. With the exception of big trees, most plants can be moved, so there’s no such thing as mistakes, not really.
My dear friend Ali gave me a book for Christmas, ‘Vita’s Other World - A Gardening Biography of V. Sackville-West’ by Jane Brown.’ I can’t put the book down, it’s brilliant. And to top it off there’s a painting on the cover by John Piper (who I love) of Vita’s ‘White Garden’, which she’s most famous for. The book is really a gardening manifesto. An insight into the artist-gardener that Vita was.
I’m halfway through the book and I’m intrigued by Vita’s collection of old sinks, which, I admit, is an odd thing to fixate on given how many masterpiece gardens she created. But it’s true, i’m utterly fascinated by her sinks. She put the old sinks on plinths and used them to make gardens for small plants, often alpine plants. These were gardens designed to be viewed by a single person, up close and intimate. I like the idea of sink gardens and I’m wondering how I could make some. They’d be perfect in a suburban setting.