Love (and a Garden) in a Warm Climate

Our daughter Elizabeth has a garden at Lyttleton on the South Island of New Zealand.It is an overused word, but her garden really is ' lovely'
 Lyttleton is a quirky village ....lots of old characterful wooden houses, arranged around the slopes of a volcanic harbor.  At the bottom of the hill is the port for Christchurch.
The busy Port and the comings and goings of container ships and ferries make Lyttelton a real lively place.
Lizzy's garden is a real cottage garden in all senses, though without livestock as yet.
She has bowers of roses and native plants side by side, and beds of annuals and old fashioned flowers like columbines next to lush rows of potatoes and beds of silver beet and kale.  Leeks and many coloured lettuce and fruit bushes backing up and filling border gaps.
 If Lizzy has learnt anything from her nurserymen parents, it is to feed and to make compost, both of which she does. New Zealand is blessed with warm summers and mild winters, but with enough of a chill in the winter to ensure the plants have a real rest season and know where they are.
Elizabeth has also learnt our love of annuals and the garden is hence ensured of pots of summer color - cornflowers, pot marigold, cosmos, and lots of sweet peas.
 And here and there are the native plants, flax, southern beech, ake-ake.  All happy and thriving and full of birds in the early morning and late afternoon. You have to love the liquid notes of the bell birds and the fantails, along side naturalised European birds, the yellowhammers and goldfinches and black birds.

She has to water a lot with the dry New Zealand winds and strong strong sunlight. This will become less as she builds up the humus and fertility in the soil.
 Whilst deadheading in Lizzy's garden today, It struck me that it is the job of every gardener to pass on their soil in better condition than they found it.  Viva la compost!
 
MD Lyttelton.  January 2013