The site for the butterfly garden

Or why I hate lomandra to my very soul

November 2024

The planned garden steps are out of order now and I blame it all on lomandra.

Yes, lomandra.

New Zealand loves lomandra and various varieties of this Australian native plant that can cope with drought and whose leaves are soft and bright, unlike the our native carex, are sold everywhere. But I am never one for following fashion and in me they have found an enemy. I don't tend to hate things. Loathing takes energy and I'd rather put that into positive activities. There are, however, exceptions. Pineapple, for example. Wasps. With lomandra it was loathe at first sight.

The last owners of the property LOVED them. They were planted everywhere in great numbers. Whilst the leaves are soft, the flower spikes are indeed that - spikes. Long, sharp spikes. And because they have grown so well here, they spill out of every bed and border, ready to scratch up my legs, and take up valuable space where there could be non-lethal flowers.

Evil lomandra flower spikes

So, number 6 on the project plan took no time, but freeing up the space took AGES.

6. Need to identify a sunny site for the garden nectar flowers.

As you will know from previous posts, about half of garden here is bush and the ground is sloping, allowing for the garden to be viewed from the surrounding houses built on higher land. That means a lot of trees have been planted to help with privacy. That all adds up to a lot of shade.

Now, this is northern New Zealand where the ozone layer is rubbish and all the people with light skin tones cook to a lovely red if they don't put on lashings of sunscreen. So shade is good for pasty humans like me and many of our native plants love shade from their days in the forests.

What shade is not good for is a butterfly garden. Butterflies need sun to warm themselves for activity and many nectar-rich flowers are sun lovers too. Whilst the garden is big, there is only one area that consistently gets sunshine - the bottom of the lawn.

The site of the butterfly garden with its drunken hedge and its many, many lomandra plants

The bottom of the lawn has a narrow bed already in place, with a slightly wonky hedge behind it. The hedge is perfect for giving the butterfly garden protection from the prevailing south-west winds, especially as we are in a high wind zone. I wouldn't have picked griselinia myself, despite being native, because it is an incredibly boring plant to look at. I'd have mixed it up so there would have been a variety of plants that provided food at different times of year, as well as shelter. Yes, a single species gives a uniform, tidy look, but its a snooze-fest and it doesn't help the wildlife. Don't be surprised if I sneak something else in between, like ake ake, if I decide to smooth out the drunken line of hedging in the future.

The east side bed with young trees and many lomandra plants

Sun and shelter. Perfect. Except the bed is narrow. Hubby has stipulated that I can't dig up any lawn to create a bigger garden area until I've planted the existing beds out. That seems reasonable, given it's a big project, and he would be lost if he didn't have a lawn to mow. The existing beds are not well established and were probably planted in the year before the house sold. There are young trees to the east, a few camellias, a few lavender that weren't cut back so are woody, and, in vast numbers, lomandra.

I decided to dig out the lomandra from our side courtyard first, because the main garden was still slippery from the winter rain. I then moved onto the main garden.

Putting up a fight - a lomandra still refusing to come out despite being trimmed to reduce weight

They were so difficult and heavy to remove, I spent over SIX WEEKS digging them out. I bent a fork. Not a cheap one either. I would go out for an hour in the last light after work and wrestle with them. In the end I managed to get under the plants enough to cut the roots with a knife. Then I had to haul them to the compost heap at the top of the garden. All that weight pulled uphill for every one of those horrible things. To be fair, this is a huge factor in my hating on this plant. I got hubby in on the act too, because he is definitely the muscle in our relationship, but even he had problems.

All the planning went out the window. I had wanted to move those young trees from the east border and plant in the bush area where the trees had come out, which was number 5 on the task list, but it took so long to dig out the lomandra, nothing else got done. By mid-November, I realised if I wanted flowers for summer, I needed to focus on propagation and plant up the space I had. So, there are still lomandra plants in the garden. But come autumn, those remaining plants are toast.