Lynda Hallinan
Can you turn your back on your summer garden, yet still enjoy an abundant autumn ? Yes, you can, says Lynda Hallinan
Veges that can cope with neglect
I’d be lying if I said I felt any guilt, because I didn’t. I didn’t fret over the fate of my freshly pimped cutflower beds, fear for my fruit trees and vegetable crops, or worry about the efficacy of my watering system (because I don’t have one).
At Christmastime, I packed my kids and the dog in my car (my husband drove separately with all his fishing gear), locked our farm gates and went to our bach on the Coromandel Peninsula, where we stayed until the first week of February. Even the most obsessive gardener needs to take an occasional break, and over six carefree weeks the only time I picked up a spade was to dig a hole in the steaming sand at Hot Water Beach.
It’s the first time in years that I’ve downed tools for so long, and on my return I expected to find my summer garden overrun with weeds, pests and drought-stressed plants. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that most parts of my plot actually coped admirably in my absence.
Sure, birds stole most of the plums; the annual nicotianas I’d planted as potted colour had shrivelled up; my sweet peas and lettuces all went straight to seed; my courgette plants packed a sad (in itself, not a bad thing); my new grove of weeping katsura trees, Cercidiphyllum
japonicum ‘Pendulum’, shed their leaves and entered dormancy early; and my new hosta walk ended up decidedly sun-frazzled at the front (it turns out that young claret ash trees cast next to no shade). But on the whole, no real harm was done.
It helped that the weather, though glorious in Tairua, was fairly drizzly and cool back home in Auckland, so the soil retained some moisture in the shady areas. I’d expected my Chatham Island forget-me-nots to turn up their toes, for instance, but they were still hanging in there.
Before I went away, laying two trailerloads of mulch proved vital in keeping most of the weeds down. I wasn’t too happy to see wretched convolvulus strangling my Cercis ‘Forest Pansy’ trees, but at least its vigorous new growth is easier to target with herbicide than its devious snaking roots. And our lawn’s dreadful state didn’t matter because resowing it was already on my autumn to-do list.
What else thrived on neglect? Coleus (see page 86), shiny-leafed
Ligularia reniformis, hydrangeas, dahlias, achilleas, my ever-expanding clump of giant African lobelias ( Lobelia aberdarica) and showstopping
Rudbeckia ‘Goldsturm’. I can’t sing the praises of this hardy, drought-tolerant, long-flowering, self-seeding prairie perennial enough. I first grew ‘Goldsturm’ in my city garden, where it did okay, but it has clearly found its niche on the hot, dry bank under my quince and plum trees. Having started with six wee seedlings I got from my friend Fiona three years ago, it has now colonised the bank with 50cm-tall goldpetalled, black-eyed blooms.
Propagate Rudbeckia ‘Goldsturm’ by division (wait until it has been in for two years before taking a spade to the clumps in early spring or autumn), or simply plant it along a gravel path and wait for the seedlings to pop up.