Editorial

Looking ahead, Mei Leng Wong has just the thing for your summer garden.

Do not be alarmed. Jo is on leave, so it fell to me to fill this page while she, untroubled by deadlines, meetings and appointments, travels the length and breadth of New Zealand exploring town and country, gardens and parks. I made the mistake of asking her itinerary, and all I can reveal is that it is far more extensive and ambitious than I would’ve chosen for my own holiday, and it seems to me that wherever you are in the country, if you have a garden interesting enough, you run the risk of finding an NZ Gardener editor somewhere close by, studying a well-chosen hedge.

Luckily for us all –- and by that I mean both you and me – Jo has been considerate enough to leave instructions, lots and lots of them. So many…

I shall start with the most important, and that is our amazing summer bulbs giveaway! Thanks to our friends at NZ Bulbs, every reader who wants one can get a bag of summer bulbs worth $20 (while stocks last, naturally). Your lucky dip bag might contain dahlias, gladioli, lilies and more! All you have to do is send in a self-addressed A4-sized prepaid courier bag and we’ll send you a selection of gorgeous bulbs from New Zealand’s largest mail order and online bulb supplier.

We did the same giveaway last year and were simply thrilled to receive, months later, photos of dancing blooms and happy gardeners. I hope you will all do the same this year – we love it when readers share their hard work with us.

I must admit this is one of the most rewarding aspects of working for this magazine. We get to see the happy results of months, and in many cases, years of hard work. And we get to meet a lot of gardeners and experts in the gardening space. And gardeners are simply the nicest people anywhere you go – as generous with knowledge as they are with seeds, curious about the world around them (soils, climate, edibles), industrious and – I am convinced – happier and more content than most.

Many aspects of gardening explain this: the sure knowledge that they can coax food out of empty ground, the joyful experience of picking and arranging blooms you have grown from seed and bulbs, the certainty that in time, the work will pay off, and surely the connection with nature – we take these magical abilities for granted but these are the very things that give the kind of confidence and stability that promote happiness.

It’s not just me and my theories either. The science backs me on this. Being in nature has been shown to improve mood, and has measurable effects on blood pressure, heart rate and stress hormone levels (all go down). There is evidence to show that working in the garden can improve our sense of wellbeing, sometimes as much as medication can. Jo pointed me to a study by a team of researchers (ah those lovely instructions) that showed flowers have a direct and immediate impact on happiness. The mere presence of flowers led to increased contact with family and friends. In short, flowers have strong positive effects on our emotional wellbeing.

As gardeners, I don’t doubt that you know this already. So indeed,

I hope you will make time to get your self-addressed A4 prepaid courier bag, and send to NZ Gardener, NZ Bulbs Giveaway, PO Box

6341, Victoria St West, Auckland 1142 by July 31, 2020. Let us help you make your garden truly bright and beautiful.

Mei Leng Wong