Colour never goes out of fashion
WELCOME VISITORS: EXOTICS HELP BEES AND CAN BE PLANTED ALL YEAR
Make the most of locally occurring plants that have low water needs and grow easily in your area.
Exotic flowers and other non-indigenous garden plants are not the bad guys – we just need to plant them wisely. That is the message from landscaper Mike Rickhoff, whose students from the Lifestyle Garden Design College created the show garden at this year’s Ball Straathof plant trials.
It took students eight days to transform a gravel parking area into a swathe of colour, incorporating indigenous and exotic flower varieties, grasses, millet, vegetables and herbs.
A gravel pathway meanders through the beds, with an area to sit and just admire the interweaving of colours, which, on closer inspection, consist of plants grouped according to their water requirements.
Mike believes there is a massive place for exotics because they help bees, can be planted all year round, and have a place in water-wise gardens. Most of all, they are colourful and planting for colour has not gone out of fashion.
“You just have to visit a garden centre on a Saturday and see how gardeners are attracted by colour – like moths to a candle!” Using colour – quick tips Planting design is very important because it produces a pleasing effect, especially when using lots of different colours. Mike’s tips:
“Colour helps to define your space. Bright colours ‘come at you’ so you use them close-up, to create intimacy and warmth, while cool colours are more distant, and provide depth. Lay out plants in such a way that they create a journey, from warm colours to neutral to cool colours, or plant them in blocks to make a statement.
“Run a ‘spine’ of white flowers through a garden as this brings it all together. Even if one uses a lot of colours, the use of white takes away the ‘fruit salad’ effect. White flowers also highlight other colours, they help to transition from one colour to another, they lighten and brighten a garden bed, and most importantly, they are liked by bees.” Help for the bees Gardening for bees has become a huge trend globally. It is estimated that 50% of the bee population in northern Europe is extinct.
Mike also pointed out that 70% of the food we eat depends on being pollinated by bees, and if one considers beef, pork, lamb and chicken production, those animals also depend on bee-pollinated foodstuffs, which increases the percentage.
Habitat destruction and the use of garden sprays that are poisonous to bees are the main reasons for the decline in population.
“The most bee-friendly gardens,” says Mike, “are meadow plantings with flowering grasses, like weeping Anthericum saundersiae and banks of yellow, blue and white flowers.” Can we be truly indigenous? In advocating for interplanting exotic and indigenous flowers, Mike points out that it is very hard to have a truly indigenous garden in Johannesburg, because the only indigenous plants that occur naturally are grasses.
He says a new term, “locally occurring” is being used to include indigenous plants that are not endemic to the area, but grow easily like agapanthus, osteospermum, diascia, nemesia, and bacopa.
There is concern in the garden industry that the term exotic has been equated with invasive, which means that all exotic flowers have been tarred with the same brush.
Mike feels that it is important to put out the message that exotics are not the “bad guys” as growers and garden centres comply with the invasive species list that prohibits their cultivation. What is water-wise? Equally, it has been assumed that exotic plants are water guzzlers while indigenous plants are water-wise.
Plants that have low water needs are those that will exist on whatever rainfall occurs, and this can include exotics like bougainvillea, euphorbia and succulents.
Water-wise gardening is about hydro-zoning: grouping plants with the same water requirements, based on the Rand Water classification of one drop (minimal water) two drop (moderate water) and three drop (high water) users.
Water-wise gardening still allows one to choose plants that require more water, but it means more thought goes into their positioning, and combination with other plants.