Last week it was roses, roses, roses. This week all I’m thinking about are exotic foliage plants. My biggest challenge as a gardener, apart from keeping plants alive, is loving so many different sorts of plants. I love cottage gardens with roses and yarrow and wallflowers. I love exotic looking gardens with oversized plants and oversized leaves. It’s a plant combination that, put together thoughtlessly, can look bloody awful.

While I was thinking of ways to combine the two types of plants I remembered a garden I visited in December last year. It was The Katherine Mansfield Garden at Hamilton Gardens. The garden is made around a replica of a house that Katherine Mansfield’s family owned in Wellington, in the early 1900s. The house was a typical colonial wooden house and the garden is based on a typical Edwardian cottage garden. You’ll notice that behind the house and garden are lots of tall native bushes and tree ferns. This would’ve been a familiar backdrop for many people living in New Zealand at that time. It’s certainly a familiar sight for most people who live in Wellington.

The thick leafy ferns and bushes in the Katherine Mansfield garden contrast beautifully with the dahlias, roses, lilies and pelargoniums.

The Katherine Mansfield Garden at Hamilton Gardens, December 2018.

In the Katherine Mansfield garden the bush and exotic looking plants are in the background. That’s how it is with most of the native plants in my garden. They form a wall of green. But what I’m trying to do is weave exotic looking plants through my cottage gardens and weave cottage garden plants through my exotic gardens. I have small areas that are dedicated to one or the other but they all link up and flow one into another.

Tropical Garden, Hamilton Gardens, December 2018.

There’s an exotic ‘Tropical Garden’ at Hamilton Gardens. I passed through it on my way to The Katherine Mansfield Garden. Here are a few photos of it below (and one above). I’ve been studying them, getting ideas for my courtyard garden.

This tropical garden gives the illusion of being a big jungle. The densely planted leafy plants belie the fact that only a few metres behind them are walls. The secret is to cram as many plants together as possible, almost all of them green.

I love the black pool in this garden. It wasn’t very deep, but the darkness of the water made it seem bottomless.

This weekend, between bouts of heavy rain and thunder storms, I started work on the courtyard garden. I’d avoided it completely when we had rats living under the house. They crossed this area when they moved between my neighbours house and ours. My big dog wrecked half the garden behind the Acer on the left, trying to get to the rats.

Last week, 2 boxes of plants arrived by courier. One box contained roses and cottage plants from Grassroots Roses; the other box had exotic plants and grasses from Peter Cave Nursery. You can see the plants in the wheelbarrow below, along with 3 white lupins (not in flower) that I grew from seed and 8 white Primulas from my local hardware shop. The exotics I ordered are: 1 Manihot grahamii, 1 Lobelia gibberoa (which I’ve been admiring at the Wellington Botanic Garden for over a year), 1 Calycanthus chinensis and 1 Cyperus papyrus.

Behind the wheelbarrow is a section of my front garden. It’s a good example of how I’m trying to mix cottage plants with exotic plants. Here are the plants from left to right: a Strelitzia reginae (Bird of Paradise), 2 yellow David Austin roses (Windrush and Happy Child), a purple geranium (unknown kind), a yellow Abutilon x hybidum, a Euphorbia mellifera, a Griselinia lucida, a Melianthus major, a Kniphofia (yellow hot poker), a Macropiper excelsum subsp. excelsum (kawakawa, pepper tree).

Most of the big flowers in this area are yellow. Colour is one of the ways I’m hoping to link the exotics with the cottage.

Here’s a better view of the courtyard garden. It faces north-west. All of it gets the sun, more in summer, less in winter. The left side gets good morning sun and the right side gets good afternoon sun. It’s well protected from the wind and frost. The long thin garden on the right is easy to keep moist. Often it’s too wet, almost boggy. That’s because the gutter from the ‘Man Cave’ empties directly into it. It was too wet for the Eucomis (Pineapple Lily) to flower (so I moved them into pots), but it’s great for damp loving plants like Elegia capensis (big green feathery plant on the right).

Because of the terrible weather I only managed a couple of hours in the garden this weekend. 1 hour was spent in the courtyard garden. This is what I planted.

The thin green stick behind the copper bed warmer (photo above) is Manihot grahamii. It likes sun or semi-shade and moist rich soil.

In the grey pot above is Cyperus papyrus. It likes to grow in water or boggy soil. I don’t know how it will like life in a pot. I must remember to keep the soil damp!

The plant in the photo above is Lobelia gibberoa. It likes moist soil and will grow very very tall in a sunny spot and not quite as tall in a shady spot.

I have a little helper in the garden. He likes to hide hand trowels, gardening gloves, plants in pots, empty pots, bamboo canes, bits of string, plant labels and scissors. Anything that he can fit in his mouth or drag is fair game. So far he hasn’t learnt how to dig up recently planted plants, which my older dog likes to do from time to time.

Here are a few photographs of the courtyard garden in the last 6 months.

I promised my family that I wouldn’t dig up any more of the lawn to extend or make new gardens. It’s a promise I couldn’t keep. I hope they don’t notice that a bit of the lawn is missing; it’s not as if it was useable. And anyway, I had nowhere to put Lady Hillingdon. What choice did I have? I don’t know if she’ll like this spot but at least she has some company: a self seeded foxglove (transplanted), a plum coloured penstemon and a Plectranthus ‘Velvet Elvis’ (both grown from cuttings). By the time spring arrives this new garden will look like it’s always been there.

I didn’t do any of the the things I said I’d do this week. I didn’t sharpen my secateurs. I didn’t prune anything and I didn’t put up wire supports on the fences for climbing plants. I always get sidetracked by more urgent tasks. A bulb catalogue arrived in the post yesterday. What the garden desperately needs are more dahlias. Dahlias are versatile plants. They can be whoever you want them to be: Christine, Juliet, Bishop of Dover, Dark Tiger, Dark Diamond or Chat Noir. Dahlias can do cottage and Dahlias can do exotic.