Meet YOUR MATCH
IF YOU’RE ON THE FENCE ABOUT FENCES, THESE PRETTY CLIMBERS MIGHT BE ENOUGH TO TIP THE BALANCE
When I first started work on my garden, my sole purpose was to fill it up. At the outset, the only plants in it were
150 lime trees, three ugly cryptomeria shelter belts and a towering stand of eucalyptus trees that regularly flung their dead branches into the grass.
I wanted flowering shrubs, climbers, groundcovers and specimen trees. Unfortunately, back then, I knew very little about growth rates in the far north, having lived most of my life in Dunedin, where it took 10 years to grow a wattle. Here, a wattle grows about a metre every half an hour.
So I could be forgiven for planting half a dozen camphor trees along the boundary to screen us from the road – overkill, considering the road was a gravel track and there were only two houses on it.
The camphors were a metre tall and cost $5 each. Today, they’re 15m tall, 8m wide and are costing close to $1000 to be topped and chipped so we can again enjoy the westerly sun in the orchard. And, of course, it won’t end there.
The moral of the story is: horses for courses. If you want to screen out traffic noise or neighbours, a simple fence and a climber are as effective as trees, easier to control and won’t need their top third removed every couple of years at great cost, not to mention a whole day of chipper noise and a mess to
clean up afterwards.
The great thing about fence-and-climber pairings is that at the bottom of the price range, you can build a cheap post-and-netting fence and cover it with, say, nasturtiums. They’re annuals but will survive the winter in some places and even if they don’t, they’ll reappear in the blink of an eye.
Sow the seeds in early spring in moist, well-drained soil in good sun. In part shade, they’ll grow but won’t flower as well. They’re fine in poor soil, so don’t be tempted to fertilise or you’ll end up with heaps of leaves and fewer flowers. The seedlings will appear in about 10 days – my kind of plant.
And you can eat the flowers – they look wonderful in salads.
If you’re concerned about bare patches, should your nasturtiums lose the plot for a while, intersperse them with another evergreen climber. Check out Bougainvillea “Pedro”. I’ve never planted a bougainvillea because I have a phobia about thorns (yep, no roses either), but this is from a new generation bred for minimal thorns. It has tiny white flowers surrounded by brickcoloured flower bracts. Like nasturtiums, it likes sun, doesn’t mind poor soil and you won’t need to fertilise it.
Another match made in heaven could be clematis and star jasmine. Clematis “Hagley Hybrid” Large 6 is, despite its cumbersome name, fragile and frilly, with dusky pink flowers and chocolate stamens. It likes its face in the sun and its feet in the cool. Plant it with star jasmine ( Trachelospermum jasminoides), which many consider to be the best evergreen climber available. Its glossy, dark green leaves take on a reddish tone in winter and it produces highly fragranced white flowers in summer. There’s also a lemon-scented variety called
Jasminum azoricum.
If pale pink, white and lemon are too wishy-washy for you, consider purple
Hardenbergia, an Aussie native. There’s one called “Happy Wanderer” that settles in super-fast and grows about 2m a year. It’ll behave like a creeper, a groundcover or a climber, and if you like the habit but not the colour, you’ll also find it in less assertive shades.
‘ Seedlings appear in about 10 days. And you can eat the flowers’