Home » Plants & Animals » New Zealand Gardens » Getting Friendly with the Natives

Getting Friendly with the Natives

© Lynda Jardinet

Those in the horticultural know view New Zealand as something of a gardening enigma, as many of our native plants are utterly unique to our small (but significant) corner of the globe.

Hugh Johnson's Gardening Companion sums up Aotearoa as offering "few garden plants of brilliant colouring, but a horde of quiet evergreens of subdued design which have made their mark in sophisticated modern gardening, in zones of no very hard or prolonged frost".

It's hardly an award winning advert for delving into the delights of down-under, now is it! Let's hope I can be a little more enthusiastic, so that by the end of this article, you're salivating at the mere thought of a New Zealand native garden in your neck of the woods. After all, I'm sure our economy could benefit from a boost in international seed sales.

New Zealand native plants are enjoying something of a revival in the 1990s. Just a few years ago, they were far from fashionable, and garden centres tended to stock straggly specimens of flax (Phormium tenax) and very little else. But the times, they are a-changing! Even in really small gardens, there's room for a native or two.

I have to admit my own "native garden" was something of an after-thought. I had a small triangular chunk of dirt left over, and I really didn't have any idea what to do with it. Initially I planted a hotch-potch of hebes, hostas and a few perennials. But, I was the first to admit - it looked ugly. It had to go, and thus I confess, my native gardening success was something of a happy accident.

The local garden centre happened to have cabbage trees (Cordyline australis) on sale for $2 each. I bought two. Tiny hebes were just one dollar, so I bought ten, to use as a hedge. I liked the glossy foliage of Pseudopanax arboreus, so a couple of them went into the wheelbarrow as well. I bought a few Carex grasses for just 50 cents, from a lovely old man selling home-grown plants on the roadside. Then, my father gave me two seedling Karaka trees, from a patch of native bush on the family farm. Dad and I also spent a most enjoyable afternoon knee-deep in his boggy wetland, pulling out clumps of different ferns.

Now, I could wax lyrical about the hours I then spent labouring over a garden design to best display my new-found natives, but I'm afraid I'd be lying! I simply chucked them all in together with some compost, and hoped for the best.

The copyright of the article Getting Friendly with the Natives in New Zealand Gardens is owned by . Permission to republish Getting Friendly with the Natives in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.