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GROWING IN A CHANGING CLIMATE

- Adapting plants and style for the changes ahead.

STORY: PENNY ZINO

Are we considering what plants will be best suited to our gardens in this fast-changing world? What are the challenges for the next generation relating to plants? What are our schools and universities teaching? Where is the plant knowledge in the next generation?

These are all questions I ask myself as we face a quite different world from my youth.

The Hurunui District in north Canterbury, where I garden, is extremely diverse at a latitude of 43 degrees south, gardens at sea level and gardens at 400m above sea level close to the Southern Alps, varying from subtropical coastal gardens to harsh alpine gardens.

My garden, Flaxmere, is situated just under the shadow of the Southern Alps where summer temperatures can range into the 40C days in summer to -15C in the winter, so it resembles a continental climate of extremes.

Rainfalls can vary enormously over the years, down to lows of 300-350ml. This last summer has been an exception with rains throughout the season, but we would not expect that to happen again soon.

Then come the winds from the northwest, which can be horrendous, and so damaging to trees and all plants, and of course earthquakes add to the story.

So, not really the ideal place to garden in, but tenacity has grown here, and the Hurunui District has enormous diversity in the plant world. The beautiful areas at sea level such as Gore Bay to the Southern Alps are all within a short distance. It did cause one garden editor to comment, “Central Otago gets all the kudos but north Canterbury has more!”

Having lived in this garden for 56 years and feeling concerned for the future, I am more interested in what will survive in these extremes with little or no water. It may not be our native plants which are so widely thought about in recent years, but a list of plants that are best suited to extreme conditions from other lands.

I remember reading as much as I could of Beth Chatto and how she involved ways of gardening with the dry soils she lived on. Much of what she wrote is still applicable today, and the plants she recommended I did plant all those years ago and they are the ones still growing well in spite of some pretty awful summers.

Over the years, I have witnessed a number of trends in the garden world – very formal with lots of box, knot gardens, white gardens, cottage gardens, herbaceous borders, the swing to all-native gardens, and now the more naturalistic approach that has gripped Europe and North America for the past 25-30 years. This has been slow here, as the swing to native plants has been prevalent. For me, it is more about what will survive drier and tougher conditions going forward, and very often our native plants do not fall into that category.

I have been lucky enough to travel widely to see plants grown in their natural surroundings. The Himalayas in Nepal, Armenia, Iran, Italy, Spain and Portugal have been a huge source of inspiration.

To see tiny dwarf irises flowering in the wild high in Nepal, Armenia and Iran was a real joy. What a brave little plant coping with dry and cold.

Madrid with its similar temperatures in summer and winter was another huge source of inspiration; often the plant palette in these areas is small, and of them all, Madrid was the closest to our climate here, although without the soaring and bruising winds.

In 2019, I travelled through Madrid with Christchurchbased garden designer Robyn Kilty on a superb week with British garden designer and writer Noel Kingsbury. Looking back on my notes, the naturalistic approach and plants that cope with the dry were high on our agenda. I was fascinated by the mix of hardy perennials and grasses, using the odd hardy shrub for background.

These included Spanish broom and a number of the cistus, Erica darleyensis, berberis, ceonothus, rosemary, eleagnus, euphorbia, teucriums, Rhaphiolepis, yuccas, potentillas and low-growing junipers. In one garden, Rugosa roses and Rosa glauca which are extremely hardy were used very freely.

The tree list was short: Algerian oak (Quercus) and evergreen oak (Quercus ilex), umbrella pines, macrocarpas, Arizonicas, Cedrus atlantica, cypress, London plane (Platanus), poplars, pseudo acacias, gleditsia, juniper, sophora and lots of olives; Olea ‘Cordal’ in the tougher areas which will survive -20C of frost. Olives were very much part of the scene, their shimmering silver leaves in such contrast to often quite red soils.

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2022-08-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

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