Christchurch
Competition keeps traditional bedding displays alive, says Mary Lovell-Smith
Aesthetically aligned with cupcakes and ruffled aprons, bedding plant displays are an oft-maligned style of flower garden.
The style endures in much of New Zealand largely due to the efforts of local-body gardeners who create the gorgeous and sometimes gaudy displays in front of clock towers, war memorials and the like.
However, in Christchurch, encouraged by the beautifying and horticultural societies’ biannual gardening competitions, it is domestic gardeners who have kept alive this Victorian pastime, which is well suited to the city’s flat and rectangular gardens.
New Zealand came late to the fashion, embracing it only in the late 1930s. When it was popular in Britain in the late- to mid-19th century, Kiwi gardeners were favouring the wilder and more free-spirited cottage gardens.
Not all winners and high achievers in the spring and summer competitions are bedding displays, but a goodly number are in all categories, which include private gardens, and those of hotels, factories, resthomes and clubs.
The quintessential Christchurch garden competition winner will have plantings outside the front fence. The fence must be low, for scores are given for street appeal. Ideally, there should be garden on the street side of the fence on the berm.
As the name of this game is, after all, flowers, beds will be almost anywhere and everywhere they can be fitted in.
Straddling paths and drives, all around the house and other outbuildings, often with a feature bed in the centre of the lawn, around perhaps the likes of a miniature weeping maple mop top. More ambitious gardeners elevate the central tree with the circular bed rising up around it, like the cone of a volcano. While the choice of plant is very much up to the gardener, long-time favourites include alyssum, begonia, calendula, candytuft, lobelia, petunia, poppy, salvia and verbena, with the grey-leafed senecio used as contrast.
The lawn itself is of paramount importance.
These immaculate expanses of green – often the only green visible at lower levels – are an excellent foil for the flowers. They are maintained with skill, rigour and, above all, devotion.
Many are the tales circulating in gardening circles of competitors sneaking onto the lawn of a rival in the dead of night with grass killer, or of the champ who never let his young sons near his lawn.
Generally, not having the space (and sometimes the inclination), competition gardeners tend to eschew grand and ornate designs in favour of repeat patterns – two of one plant, five of another, two, five…
But be not fooled by any apparent simplicity. The very best of these bedding displays are, if not works of art, then at least triumphs of diligence. Their creators will begin planning the garden months before it reaches its zenith, poring over seed catalogues, matching up colours on paint charts and creating water colour impressions. Then will follow lengthy mathematical calculations, establishing how many of each plant will be needed.
Gardens can be composed of any number of different plants – 20 or so. The mature size of each need be factored in. Orders will be placed with nurseries, which grow on demand. A single garden may take thousands of plants, and each will be planted exactly the predetermined distance apart as satisfied by a ruler.
Of course, it never ends with merely planting.
Weeding is assiduously undertaken, as is deadheading. Spare plants must be maintained out of sight to replace any whose performance is not up to scratch. Timing is crucial for those entering the competitions, so Christchurch’s erratic seasons can provide another anxiety.
Since the earthquakes, the numbers entering competitions has fallen dramatically, and the organising groups have attempted to simplify the oftencomplex array of divisions and categories that have evolved over the decades.
However, if you are in Christchurch this month, do have a look at some of its prize-winning gardens. The summer competitions won’t be judged till early February, but the Canterbury Horticultural Society has lists of addresses of previous winners – and they tend to be more or less the same over the years. Or book in for the bus tour of the winners which run just after they are announced.