Autumn brings a lot of work

I have finally defeated the Lomandra

May 2025

The garden at dusk, with the colour of the liquidambers stark against the evergreens

With Autumn here and some pretty horrific weather thanks to ex-tropical cyclones and the like, the soil is now soft enough to remove the last of the lomandra. If you have read my earlier post, you will know I hate the stuff. It may have soft leaves, unlike our native carex, and it may be a tough customer in dry conditions, but its spiky flower stalks ripped up my legs and they were taking up a huge amount of space in the existing borders. With help from hubby, we cleared the last eight today. I mean, I got one out myself, but they are so heavy and I can't really lift the digging bar, so I loosened them with a fork and hubby wrenched them out of the ground. He also dug up a couple of native carex, after being left unsupervised, but they were taking up space too, so I'm not too put out. They have all gone to a friend who is much more appreciative of the plant's good qualities.

That has created space for some natives, like hebes, that will be coming from the nursery at the Kaipātiki Project for the banks that transition the garden from English borders to New Zealand bush. In the butterfly garden, there is now space for sweet pea wigwams and the snail vine obelisks. They will both serve the same purpose. They will provide either buds for long-tailed blue butterfly caterpillars to chomp on or perfumed flowers. I'm happy with either and if I can get both, even better!

There is a lot of digging still to do. Bushes and shrubs were planted along the east fence, taking up all of that border's precious space in the sun. If I can I'll dig them up and move them, I will, as some are beautiful, such as the houhere / lacebark. This is also a plant that attracts butterflies and moths, so a perfect native tree for the garden, but it is happy in partial shade as well as full sun, so I'll shift it up the garden and keep the sunniest area for the plants that will sulk without 6-8 hours sunshine.

Common blue butterfly feeding from lacebark flowers

The trees will be replaced by other flowering plants with height, including Mexican tree daisies and tree dahlias. Aotearoa also has tree daisies, olearias, but the nursery was sold out. Olearia grows in the local reserves so it would be a good native plant for the garden and has beautiful gold undersides to the leaves in the local species, Akepiro. The Mexican tree daisy is special because it is an original, indigenous food source for the Monarch butterfly and transplanted here to New Zealand, provides a good source of winter nectar for butterflies on sunny winter days when not a lot else is flowering. Sounds like it will be a cheerful display in the grottiest months.

The tree dahlia, Dahlia tenuicaulis, will be interesting. The garden dahlias planted this summer failed spectacularly under my care, so I hope the tree dahlias do better. There is no information about growing them in New Zealand online, so if I don't kill them, I'll write a blog post about them. They are also from Mexico and will apparently flower almost all year. They are susceptible to frosts, but we were told this garden doesn't get any. We'll find out in the coming months. We would get the odd light one in the old garden and some areas of Auckland get them more regularly in winter.

Tree dahlia flower

I've been trying to plant two plants every time I have a gardening window and the plants are slowly going in. When the nursery plants arrive, I'll need to work a darn sight harder as they'll be over 50 plants, mostly for the bush area. I foresee getting muddy a lot in the next few weeks.