I spent Saturday painting a fence. Not the whole fence, jut the bit opposite the deck. I’m making a new garden and I’ve been daydreaming about it all week. A new garden. Apart from a few small plants and a lot of weeds, the garden is bare. It had concrete pavers, laid as stepping stones. I say ‘had’ because now it doesn’t. I pulled them up. Someone had laid plastic weed matting under the pavers. I pulled the weed matting up and threw it away. I hate plastic weed matting. It’s a stupid and pointless invention. It doesn’t work. Mulching the soil is the best way to suppress weeds. Lots and lots of mulch applied often. And even then, weeds will grow. Weeds are the rats and cockroaches of the plant world. And we should be thankful. They grow in the most inhospitable and harshest of places where any normal plant would shrivel up and die.
This new garden has some challenges. It’s long and narrow. It doesn't get a lot of sun (although the bit alongside the deck gets sun). The dogs will run through the middle of it so I need to make a path for them. I’ll probably put the pavers back.
The new garden sits beside this shelly courtyard. The shelly courtyard is looking pretty scruffy and unloved. I wrote about it several blogs back. There’s weed matting under the shells. The weeds are growing through it.
After I painted the fence I weeded the shelly courtyard. Weeding is a good way to assess a garden and its plants. As you crouch or kneel, eye-level with the plants, you get to see if they’re thriving or struggling. Most of the plants are doing well. There are only 2 I have to relocate. A clematis that hates the salty wind and a grass that hates the shade. I’m surprised how well the bromiliads in pots are doing. I’m going to buy more for the new garden, and keep them in pots.
There are some things the new garden has to do. I’d like to have a few host plants for butterflies and some flowers for nectar. I want it to look bigger than it really is and integrate with the borrowed landscape beyond it. I want layers of plants and lots of contrasting foliage.
It’s going to be a foliage garden. Even the flowers for the butterflies and bees will have a foliage look about them.
It’s been fun reading about plants. I’ve made a mental list of favourites. Here are some of them and the 3 books that helped me out.
I'm going to grow lots of Eryngium and Echinops flowers from seed.
I’ve never seen these two coastal plants (in the photos above and below) for sale in nurseries and plant shops. I hope I can track them down.
Almost every garden in Paekakariki has a couple of pukas. The ones right on the waterfront, which cop the westerly, have browning on the leaves.
Muehlenbeckias are host plants for various copper butterflies (boulder, common, glade and Rauparahas)
I didn’t know that tecomanthe are happy beach plants, but I do now.
Here is how the shelly courtyard looks after I weeded it yesterday.
All the bulbs I planted in these containers have come back this year. I wasn’t sure if the tulips would because they can be one minute wonders in containers. But then these are Darwin tulips and they’re tougher than most. I think I planted 2 different daffodils, at least I think I did. The ones flowering are ‘tete a tete’.
Tree of the week is Ngaio, Myoporum laetum. It’s a fast growing coastal tree with a pleasant rounded shape and narrow leaves. It’s an ordinary looking tree, some would say nondescript or boring, but not me. I think it looks friendly. It has a light canopy, as you can see in the 2 pictures. A good pioneering tree that lets in enough light but provides enough shade for other plants to grow under it. (like the one in the first photo).
See you next Sunday.
