The Magnificence of Native Flora

 When we started to build our house 15 years ago it was standing in a bare paddock with only a few trees along one boundary and multiple seedlings we had planted for the rest of the boundary and for a woodlot for future firewood.

We had dreams of planting a native garden that you could drive through to get to the house with the bush so tall you couldn't see the house from the driveway. It took a lot of imagination and optimism to see what we might achieve - it's like trying to look into the future.

Planting out a large plot unfortunately takes a lot of money if you buy all the plants and we were on a tight budget as we had great plans for our passive solar house built of concrete tilt panels - also not cheap! Luckily we had friends who grew natives for wholesale and they had a whole heap of very sad looking root bound plants that they were going to chuck out so they gave them to us for free. It was luck of the draw which ones might grow but we put them in and mulched around them with old wool carpet and waited. I can tell you now it did not look pretty!

All those years later we have achieved what we set out to do. As we have lived with it growing it is easy to forget what we started with. The plantings are not quite native bush status yet as the trees are still growing up however they are getting tall enough that you can not see the house from the gate and the driveway meanders through these plantings making you wonder what you are going to arrive at around the corner - just what we wanted to achieve.

Today I spent some time just stopping and enjoying the variation in the plants e have managed to get growing and marvelling at the diversity in the NZ native flora. Just seeing the difference in the foliage between the lancewood, the kowhai and the meuhlenbeckia. All so different yet they all work so well together. The added bonus to all of this established growth is the multiple seedlings we get so we have been able to plant out extra plants to fill gaps over the years - all for free!

Nature is very clever and I think she is a stunning designer!