Replace the woodchip and bark below your shrubs with a living layer of plants. My last piece was about allowing grasslands – mainly lawns, to grow more naturally and to include flowers both for our enjoyment and for the benefit of those crucial insects, the pollinators. Here I will look in a bit more detail […]
This is the fifth article of a series of short pieces for landscapedesign.co.nz in which I look at current trends and ideas in garden design. There is a lot of intensively mown grass in New Zealand–road berms, parks and reserves, garden lawns and various types of ‘unused land’–even if we exclude sports pitches. Most of […]
This is the third article of a series of short pieces for landscapedesign.co.nz in which I look at current trends and ideas in garden design. I think there is a need to move ‘native’ design in NZ beyond the twin poles of revegetation. On the one hand and garden design with natives on the other to […]
This is the second of a new series of short pieces for landscapedesign.co.nz in which I look at current trends and ideas in garden design. We live in a biodiversity hotspot (to find out more about what make this the case see the Conservation International website and especially here. What makes us so important to global […]
This is the first of a new series of short pieces for landscapedesign.co.nz in which I will look at current trends and ideas in garden design. I’ll focus on ideas of ecological design, using both herbaceous perennials and native plants in a new way and how we can realize the potential of home gardens and […]
This week it seems timely to celebrate autumn and plan planting schemes for the winter. The summer recedes, but autumn can be one of the most beautiful and colourful seasons and the autumn leaf colours last an unusually long time in New Zealand especially in the north where leaf fall is not speeded by frost […]
Can you have a garden without plants? – a good question indeed. Many people’s idea of a garden is somewhere to grow flowers, vegetables and fruit. Indeed one definition of a garden is ‘a place set aside from the wilderness where the hand of the gardener works in harmony with nature to cultivate for use […]
Many beautiful gardens and public landscape plantings owe their success primarily to restricting the colours of flowers, fruits, stems and foliage within a limited, related range. This is sometimes known as colour themes. Some of the first examples of colour theme borders, especially of white flowers and grey and silvery foliage, were created in the […]
