GIVE FLAX AND ASTELIA A CHOP

Trim your astelia and flax bushes back from the paths they are so often planted beside. Strap-leafed plants like these are marvellous foreground features; they are soft to brush past and grow low enough to look over, into the wider garden, but they can also get thick and sprawling if not attended to with some sort of sharp tool. The best of those tools, in my opinion, is the Niwashi Shark, a saw-toothed, Japanesemade draw-knife that makes short work of trimming back the blades of any floppy plant. A quick and decisive pull through the lower part of the leaf of flax, toetoe or astelia is all it takes to bring those plants back into order and favour.

Don’t drop the severed leaves onto the path; they become very slippery in the rain and you’ll have visitors sliding off into the shrubbery if they try to walk over them. Niwashi Sharks can be ordered online and remain sharp for a very long time. This column is adapted from the weekly e-zine, get growing, from New Zealand Gardener magazine. For gardening advice delivered to your inbox every Friday, sign up for Get Growing at: getgrowing.co.nz

stay well away from your wintersweet! I pruned mine for years, growing as it did underneath the kitchen window and trying with all its might to block my view as I washed the dishes. I had to trim it every year or lose the morning sun.

I did wonder as I snipped away, why my wintersweet flowered so poorly, while others around the district were dripping with blooms and redolent with the exquisite scent that wintersweet is famous for. Finally, I twigged – I was pruning off the flowering bits. Wintersweet requires to left alone, remain uncut, untrimmed and unmolested, so I’ve taken action. I couldn’t move the kitchen, so I shifted the shrub.

The wintersweet now stands where it can grow tall and wide and won’t be visited by a secateurwielding me.