Love (and a garden) in a Warm Climate

Our daughter Elizabeth has a garden at Lyttleton on the South Island of New Zealand.

It is an overused word, but her garden really is ' lovely'

 

Lyttleton is a quirky village ....lots of old characterful wooden houses, arranged around the slopes of a volcanic harbour.  At the bottom of the hill is the port for Christchurch.
The busy Port and the comings and goings of container ships and ferries make Lyttelton a real lively place.

Lizzy's garden is a real cottage garden in all senses, though without livestock as yet.

She has bowers of roses and native plants side by side, and beds of annuals and old fashioned flowers like columbines next to lush rows of potatoes and beds of silver beet and kale.  Leeks and many coloured lettuce and fruit bushes backing up and filling border gaps.

 

If Lizzy has learnt anything from her nurserymen parents, it is to feed and to make compost, both of which she does.

 

New Zealand is blessed with warm summers and mild winters, but with enough of a chill in the winter to ensure the plants have a real rest season and know where they are.

Elizabeth has also learnt our love of annuals and the garden is hence ensured of pots of summer colour - cornflowers, pot marigold, cosmos, and lots of sweet peas.

 

And here and there are the native plants, flax, southern beech, ake-ake.  All happy and thriving and full of birds in the early morning and late afternoon. You have to love the liquid notes of the bell birds and the fantails, along side naturalised European birds, the yellowhammers and goldfinches and black birds.

She has to water a lot with the dry New Zealand winds and strong strong sunlight. This will become less as she builds up the humus and fertility in the soil.
 

Whilst deadheading in Lizzy's garden today, It struck me that it is the job of every gardener to pass on their soil in better condition than they found it.  Viva la compost!
 

MD Lyttelton.  January 2013

A Pohutukawa Christmas

We are in the South Island of New Zealand again, visiting family and friends for Christmas and New Year and taking every chance to get out into the hills and the native bush.

We also spend a fair amount of time looking over fences and into people's gardens as we walk up the steep hills here in Lytellton.

What you notice straight away is that many of the tender summer bedding plants we grow at home in Scotland, do exceptionally well here, in fact they thrive.
Banks of geraniums, vast clumps of pelargoniums, flowering clumps of aeoniums and roses to die for.
The roses, the roses, it makes  you  understand that many roses really love a milder winter.

 

 

 

Many of the modern Hybrid T roses look great. In Scotland, Iceberg is a virus ridden, frequently black spotted, defoliated white floribunda, here it is a healthy vigorous shrub and completely reliable white!
David Austin roses are very popular  here.  I believe that is because many of the repeat flowering modern roses that he raises also love a mild winter.

Of course, It can get too hot and dry in their New Zealand summers, but they really can't have it all ways!

The large white scramblers and coloured ramblers are magnificent, as you can see.

 

 

Oh my, it does inspire you to have another go, and hope and hope that we get that long overdue good summer.  To dream

Margaret

 

Beautiful Red Pohutukawa

 

A link to A lovely song about a sunny kiwi christmas by a talented family friend 

Azaleas - A memory of colour

My midyear resolution is to look through some of the old photographic slides we took during our first sojourn in New Zealand. Well, that is if I can be bothered schlepping through the attic manage to find the time, It may have to wait until Cat returns here for the next rugby world cup!

What I would be looking for, is a fabulous garden, I don’t even remember exactly where it was/is, but somewhere in the South Island of New Zealand there was a wall of deciduous azaleas in full colour, backing onto a still pond. It took my breath away.

Azalea Luteum (Yellow) and Azalea Persil (White)

I think many gardeners have moments like that and these sights burn themselves onto our retinas and we find ourselves trying to replicate them over and over. Of course there are many gardens in Scotland that have Azaleas, and there are places on the far west, Arisaig and elsewhere that have Azalea lutea naturalising and thriving, but that wall of colour was the moment for me.

Azalea Golden Eagle

It was orange, red and yellow and that is what I have tried to replicate at Abriachan.
We have Azalea Gibraltar and Golden Eagle doing very well , and they are large enough now to make real impact.

Azalea Gibraltar

When I don’t know what varieties to choose to plant, I go to the Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs and look for ones with First Class Certificates or the newer Award of Garden Merit. And they have never let me down.
From there I planted Persil, a lovely white with yellow markings and my very favourite - Irene Koster. She is a soft pink with yellow makings, but best of all, her fragrance is wonderful. I have planted several amongst the upper woodland section of garden and she is sublime this year.

Azalea Persil

Azalea Irene Koster

Azaleas are one of those wonderful plants that lift their fragrance into the air, so if you have one or more, visit them in the evening or even in the middle of the day when any warmth will intensify the scented air. 
Just lovely, I must plant many more, and that's a resolution I will definitely keep.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Rose Discoveries - Beauty in a Shattered City.

If you know Christchurch as we do, it is very sad just now to see the cleared sites and demolition work that followed the Earthquakes earlier this year. However, walk down to Hagley Park, their botanic gardens and it is thriving.
In Mid December we walked into their rose garden and I was blown away. I am still seeing images of the garden in my mind's eye.
Usually, I walk into a rose garden and what do I  see? Well it can be lovely , but all too often the garden can be dry soil, defoliation, spotty yellow leaves far too much bare earth
Not an enthusiast then?? Well all changed now. Christchurch showed me how it can be done,

Look at these arches, look at these red reds.  Let me share some photographs with you.

What you don't get in a photograph, is the shimmering sunshine and the scented air around some of the rose beds...just lovely

Many Happy Returns

Large bed of  "Many Happy Returns"   white, pink bud.
It was the white roses that made the most impact. Fantastic.

Molly Kirby

Molly Kirby...a sizzling orange, clean shiny foliage.

A bright yellow bed of " Casino"

Casino.

The red voluptuous "Ingrid Bergman"

Ingrid Bergman

The roses were all looking wonderful. Why?
1.  Well New Zealand has a kinder climate. Christchurch has milder winters and hotter summers that we have in UK, and certainly more than we have in Scotland.
And Roses love warmth. We sometimes forget that and wonder why we lose rose bushes, particularly Hybrid teas in a bad winter. At Abriachan we only grown shrub roses and climbers as others just can't take the cold.

2. The roses looked well pruned and well fed. Like all plants that you want to see bloom on the new growth you have to ensure they are well fed. Blood fish and bone or dehydrated Chicken manure are my favourites, followed by tomato feed to get lots of blooms.

Nancy Hayward

3. New Zealand breeds many of its own roses and they were well chosen, but there were also very good looking David Austin varieties and old well known varieties such as "Compassion" and "Iceberg"  They looked great so I believe they are using good clean material for propagation.

Just wonderful. No wonder they call Christchurch the Garden City