the gorgeous kaka beak
All Eco-Gardeners, wherever they may be, need a good set of reference books to help them identify and grow the indigenous flora of their land. Ecosystem gardening obviously starts with the respecting and maintaining the original ecosystem where the garden is located, if it is still in existence, or restoring as much as possible if it is not.
In New Zealand we are fortunate in having a great diversity of evergreen broadleaf trees and shrubs in our indigenous flora, many of them with attractive flowers as well, so it is easy to design a beautiful and easy-care garden which is green all year, and floriferous most of the year, using only native plants. Native trees and shrubs also make great hedges, or more informal protective boundaries to a property, which can double as wildlife refuges. Or native plants can mix and mingle very well with exotic plants in a pleasure garden, attracting more birds and butterflies than exotics alone, and anchoring the garden securely and confidently in its native land.
The only thing that holds the gardener back from making such gardens is a good knowledge of the native plants and how to grow them, and this is where the need for reference books comes in. In New Zealand there are some classics which no home should be without. Some of them are no longer in print, so you will need to look for them second-hand. If I didn't already own the books I am about to mention, I would be giving the hunt-and-peck method that is Trade Me a miss and going straight to the on-line catalogue of an excellent second-hand book shop, such as Jason Books.
Jason Books' stock currently includes the two essential books for those who want to know how to grow native plants, L.J. Metcalf's The Cultivation of New Zealand Trees and Shrubs and The Propagation of New Zealand Trees and Shrubs. A former curator of the Christchurch Botanic Gardens, and before that of the Invercargill Botanic Gardens, Lawrie Metcalf is a great native plantsman who has written the definitive books on how to grow the full range of garden-worthy trees and shrubs successfully. For beginners these books get one off to a good start; more advanced gardeners who want to increase their native plants inexpensively will make good use of the propagation book.
For those who are looking for garden design ideas as well as cultivation information the must-have classic is Gardening with New Zealand Plants, Shrubs and Trees by Muriel Fisher, E. Satchell and Janet Watkins. This book has gone through several editions since it was first published in 1970, each one expanding slightly on the first one, and all of them illustrated with photographs taken in Fernglen, Muriel Fisher's extensive all-native garden on Auckland's North Shore. If Metcalf is New Zealand's pre-eminent public gardener with native plants, Fisher is the private native gardener par excellence. Her book shows what is possible when native plants are treated as gardenworthy subjects in their own right, suitable for creating every desirable garden feature, from shady groves through flowering borders to rock or water gardens.
New Zealand's native plants have a 'deep history' which they share with the other flora of the ancient super-continent Gondwana, which began to break up some 167 million years ago. New Zealand broke off from what is now Antarctica thirty to fifty million years after that, and Australia some few million years after New Zealand. At a rock fall in central Otago I have seen fossils of leaves which look like casuarinas, which are common in Australia today but are no longer growing in New Zealand. In the Christchurch Botanic Gardens, running along the native garden side of the avenue of lime (linden) trees is a collection of well-grown Nothofagus trees from Australia, Chile and New Caledonia. The Nothofagus is our native 'beech' tree, species of which are also native to other former Gondwana countries. All this plant history and more can be found in the The Looking Glass Garden Plants and Gardens of the Southern Hemisphere by Peter Thompson, along with excellent illustrative photographs taken in public and private gardens and the wild in New Zealand, Australia, and southern Africa. There are also photographs of 'Gondwana' plants growing well in gardens in the UK and USA, for as the title of the book suggests, Thompson is not native to anywhere in the southern hemisphere. He has had to learn how to grow southern plants in the more challenging conditions of Britain. Sometimes it takes a foreigner to point out what treasures we have on our doorstep, often neglected or taken for granted. Thompson has done gardeners and plant lovers in both hemispheres a great service by writing this book, which is equal parts information and inspiration.
My cottage garden of native plants
The space between our Diamond Harbour cottage and the ugly side of the neighbour's house is only 5 metres. We have beautified it with a range of native plants, seen here through my study window on a rainy December day. The plants include rengarenga lilies, red-flowering manuka, white-flowering putaputaweta/marbleleaf, cabage trees, makomako/wineberry, mahoe, purple-flowered hebes, and titoki.
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