Whether you have $10, $100, $1000 or more to spend on your garden, consider this cash-savvy advice
Be it a dispassionate assessment or wild fantasising over what could be, before the garden dons its spring glories an appraisal may be in order. Starting a garden from scratch or wanting to tart up an existing one, there’s a budget to consider but whatever the state of your wallet, there’s plenty that can be bought to make your garden more beautiful.
$10 & under
Sow, swap & cut
You don’t get much for that little blue note. It will be a toss-up between a couple of packets of seeds or punnets of seedlings. Annual flowers are great for ready summer colour. Especially desirable are those like alyssum, poppies, lupins and nigella, which bloom for ages and self-seed readily so they’ll be coming back year after year. Cheap and cheerful might spring to mind, but with a good eye and a touch of research the look can be moody, sophisticated, dreamy, exotic – whatever you desire.
While it pays to buy seeds of easy-to-germinate vegetables (we’re thinking tomatoes, lettuce, radish), it is prudent to buy seedlings of those that are difficult to get started such as celery, eggplant, fennel and peppers.
Free or nearly free plants are, however, obtainable. Look out for seedling swaps. Visit your local community garden. Some have plants to give away, or in return for an hour or so of gardening.
A tub of rooting hormone will gobble up all your cash but cuttings can easily be taken without it. Especially on those plants that root readily, including geranium, pelargonium, succulents, fuchsia or many salvia. It’s easier and more satisfying than you may imagine.
$50 & under
choose natives
Five times the dollars, 20 times the impact. Double the seed and seedling numbers of what you’d buy with $10, and with the change buy a shrub or small native tree. Department of Conservation and other community-based nurseries up and down the country usually sell – at very good prices – young native trees, as well as mature ones. Many natives are fast growing, so the rewards come quickly. And if you choose according to your location, they should grow well with little attention.
Flowering shrubs will give foliage, screening and beauty in one hit. Roses, Californian and French lilac, viburnum, hydrangeas, hibiscus and flowering quince are perennially popular for good reasons.
$100 & under
Growth fund
With a dash more cash to splash, it’s time to look ahead, invest in the future with bigger, longer-living plants. Trees give a garden instant mana. Although they say you plant a tree for the next generation and the best time to plant one is 20 years ago (and the second-best is now), the feel-good, selflessness of the act is compounded by the physical and aesthetic benefits you’ll reap within a year or two. And then there is the joy and anticipation of seeing them grow, slowly but surely. Before long they will be big enough for children to climb, hang a swing from and provide shade on a baking-hot day.
Try a plum tree, which in one lovely package yields blossom, green leaves, fruitfulness, autumn colour and bare beautifully formed branches.
Perennials are smallish and (usually in the domestic garden sense) flowering plants that live for years. Many die back in winter. As most can be steadily multiplied by division over those years, only one of whatever takes your fancy need be bought right now.
Most bulbs are also good multipliers and are useful for those who need to step back from instant gratification. It may seem an act of faith, planting these onion-like objects, but in six months or so when they flower you will be glad of the foresight.
$500 & under
Big ideas
Now the budget is big enough to change direction and think of going up and over, with trellis, teepees, obelisks and archways and all the fabulous plants that can grow over them. Attached to a fence or wall, a trellis makes an attractive plants support, or covered with lush plants can become fences and screens to separate the garden into different areas, which is one of the oldest and most effective landscape design tricks in the book. Arches also act as dividers, and what lovelier way to go from one space to another than through an arch smothered in flowers. Roses, clematis and wisteria are classic English-style: for a more exotic mood consider bougainvillea, pandorea, passionfruit and tecomanthe.
Teepees of bamboo or mānuka can be bought readymade but are easy enough to construct with some patience and string, and really are needed for most tomatoes, many curcubits and some beans.
Don’t forget, too, that many taller perennials such as dahlias, delphiniums and the late-summer heleniums and michelmas daisies can need support.
$1000 & under
On the landscape
Entering four figures territory, you might well start thinking of buying your landscaping by the metre, which one enterprising Kiwi company has started selling. “Six metres of exposed contemporary, please. No, wait. Make that cottage sheltered.” These flatpacks contain three types of plants, big medium, small and in multiple combinations. No more second-guessing numbers and distances, or fretting over what looks good together or likes the same conditions.
This is the budget for some more serious planting of everything, from trees to herbs. There’s cash for raised vegetable beds and white shingle paths, and an in-ground irrigation system.
It’s also big enough to bring in a substantial container or two. Ornately classical or modernist pots, urns, planters, tubs and baths, always imbue the garden with something special. The plantings can be temporary, seasonal, permanent; the containers can be left in situ for years, or moved according to your whim.
$5000 & under
Arbour views
At this price point, there is no mucking around, arches and screens give way to more dramatic garden structures – tunnels, pergolas, arbours, places to be. It may just be an elongated arch but a tunnel (and it has to be at least two metres long to qualify) is a wondrous thing to amble through. A laburnum tunnel with its dripping racemes of yellow is a classic. Pergolas, which are in many ways shorter, fatter tunnels, are however designed for dallying, for long lunches and twilight assignations. Shrouded with table grapes, they provide fruit and shade in summer, and precious sunshine over winter. An arbour is well-suited to a smaller garden, being in one form a sheltered built-in bench seat with roof, and constructed of trellis, wire or basket weave and overgrown with some glorious vine.
Outdoor lighting can be considered – wired-in electric affairs with spotlights angled at trees, downlights along paths, mood lights in far corners; lanterns over tables, all making the garden a night and day affair. Plumb in a water tank.
$10,000 & under
Blow the budget
Now we’re talking landscaping and indulgence. Think stone walls, brick patios, hahas (sunken fences), swales (grass channels to treat stormwater run-off), computerised irrigation, outdoor kitchens and pizza ovens. Charm the wildlife and yourself with decent quantities of water, as in a rill or fountain. Blow the budget on a sculpture. Crane in some mature trees for an instant shrubbery, mini forest or private orchard. Hire a gardener for those tasks you loathe. Happy spending.
Words by: Mary Lovell-Smith
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