The quiet of midwinter

Well, it’s happened- our lawns in Wellington City are all at a standstill! This means we can finally crack on and attack garden areas that we don’t usually have time to attack.

What I am obsessed with this week

We have a client who really wants to replicate the look of an agapanthus bank without the agapanthus- tall, purple heads blowing in the breeze- bulk planting- and unfortunately a hillside which is so steep that I would like to access it exactly once and never again!

Everything I can think of which might have a similar effect has been rejected by one of us-

Flax has received an ‘absolutely not’ after it was the cause of multiple trippings and other issues when planted in other places. Fair enough

Ornamental- or really any- alliums are difficult to keep alive year round, and their dormant period is just what the bank would need to get completely weedy again

Ahhhh a whole lot of jacaranda trees? I have not seen one grow successfully on the coast… they get up to 15m tall… hmmm

Anthropodiums (rengarenga) have also been politely declined..

Right now the front runner is the mighty hebe (veronica)-

I don’t think this will be approved… but we shall see.

There are multiple species of Hebe- more than I could possibly count- and their favourite thing is to be completely untamed. It will be quite nice if we don’t have to scrabble up and down that bank, the bank that at times I would quite like an abseil harness to go down.

What we are up to in the garden

This is my favourite time of year to trim ivy and weed tradescantia.

Both of them are absolutely ruthless in their speed to multiply, and in Wellington in winter both of them seem to be twice as obvious and half as fast, so it is a great time to tackle them.

Ivy is cut back hard where it can’t be removed, and we find all of the edges, the ground, everywhere that it has tried to creep, and remove it from there too. Then in Spring we wait until a nice sunny warm day when the ivy has dared to grow about 20cm… and we cut it back even harder. This stunts its growth all year, because plants put so much energy into those shoots, that they really struggle when the shoots are removed (this is, conversely, why we don’t trim buxus early in the season).

Oh, and I have spent a lot of time this week cutting ivy off of trees. Sigh.

Tradescantia is weeded methodically, as even the tiniest part will bring more problems next year. It seems to be best tackled in Winter, so the really dense parts are attacked in Summer and then in Winter we pick through everything to get the remnants.

Tradescantia- nasty stuff

We are also enjoying pruning Big Stuff- for instance, overgrown hebe, spots we can’t really get to, trees etc- the problem with this is that it takes so long for any improvements, that trimming things back to make them look more bare and exposed often horrifies clients (and fair enough, but we always aim to spend the same amount of time per property year round, so it’s a balance!).

Have a fantastic week everyone. Go attack some ivy.