FOR A START . . .
Leigh Bramwell offers a cunning plan for those who ‘haven’t a clue where to start’
IWROTE UP A QUESTIONNAIRE to give to a friend who is trying to decide what kind of garden she wants. She has a new, very edgy modern house with different garden areas and is in a quandary about what to plant where.
After a few conversations and lots of staring at the spaces, she told me she hadn’t a clue where to start and needed someone to hold her hand through the process.
Her comment immediately brought to mind a piece of advice offered by a woman with an incredible garden here in the Far North. “Make a plan, and do it a step at a time,” she said.
For my friend, making the plan needed to start with defining what she likes, and even that wasn’t cut and dried, hence my idea of the questionnaire.
After I’d written it, I realised it would be useful for many new gardeners who “hadn’t a clue where to start”. And having answered all the questions myself, I also realised it could be an eye-opener for those who have become a bit trapped in a certain style. So if you have a spare minute, give it a go.
WHAT’S YOUR PERSONAL STYLE?
■
❏ Natural/wild
❏ Tidy/casual
❏ Structured/casual
❏ Formal
❏ Mixture of styles
❏ All of the above
I’d have chosen “all of the above” but decided to discipline myself and narrowed it down to “structured casual” which allows for areas of hard landscaping, indiscriminate planting and free-range weeds.
PLANTS
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❏ Native
❏ Exotic
❏ Subtropical
❏ Mixture of plants
I so envy people who are disciplined enough to stick to one type of plant as it gives a garden a cohesive look. I can’t do it but I’ve compromised by having some areas pretty much limited to one type.
COLOURS
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❏ Coloured foliage
❏ Flowers
❏ Lots of similar colours
❏ Lots of different colours
❏ Mainly one or two colours (which two favourites)
❏ Bursts of colour
The people I’ve tried this questionnaire out on so far spent ages on this one, and the most popular answer was “lots of similar colours”, and coloured flowers as opposed to coloured foliage. Not many went for “mainly one or two colours” apart from me and my niece. Must be in the genes.
PLANTING STYLE
■
❏ Full, closely planted ❏ Sparsely planted with a few specimen plants
❏ Mixture
The great thing about planting a garden is you can change the planting style at any time during its evolution. And having just spent a weekend trimming, cutting back and eliminating quite a few plants, we’ve found that creating space in a full, closely planted garden has given us a much better look. Everything has the space it deserves, and special plants are showcased.
GARDEN ELEMENTS
■
❏ Lawns
❏ Shrub beds
❏ Picking gardens
❏ Wildflower areas
❏ Paved/pebbled areas
❏ Hedges
❏ Manufactured garden art/sculptures/ urns/pots etc
❏ Natural art — stones, rocks, Maori pou (posts), driftwood
❏ Multiple
Most gardens are made up of much the same elements, such as lawns, hedges and garden beds. If you’re designing from scratch, it’s good to get these onto the drawing board at the outset. And anything large — swimming pool, tennis court, helipad — needs to be factored in at stage one. The fun stuff — picking gardens, wildflower areas and garden art, can be incorporated over the long term.
■ MAINTENANCE (weeding, clipping, pruning, mowing, dead-heading, clearing dead leaves)
❏ Little as possible
❏ Medium
❏ Mixture
I probably shouldn’t have left the maintenance question until last, since I wish it had been top of my list when I first started this garden. However, I have been rescued by The Landscaper, who cheerfully looks after all the above tasks, while I pat myself on the back for zooming around on the ride-on once a week with a glass of wine in the coffee holder.
GARDEN DESIGN FEST
Certainly one of the best ways to decide what you like is to look at other people’s gardens, hence the huge popularity of the Auckland Garden Designfest.
It usually attracts more than 1200 people and showcases the best of garden design.
Unfortunately, in the light of the uncertainty wrought by Covid-19, it has been decided to postpone this year’s planned November event until November 2022.
As Deb Hardy, Chair, Auckland Garden Designfest explained, with the two-day event involving in excess of 12 months planning “it would be heart-wrenching if our event had to be cancelled at the last minute.”