Champion gardener’s formula: muck, sweat, and money

Press, 26 October 1982, Page 25

Champion gardener’s formula: muck, sweat, and money

By

GARRY ARTHUR

Plant nurserymen rub their hands when they see Barrie Prebble coming. As home gardeners go, he is quite a spender. Every autumn he calls on his favourite nurseries with chequebook at the ready and chooses mountains of bedding plants for his front garden in Cashmere View Street, just across the Heathcote River from Princess Margaret Hospital. He will not reveal how much he spends to help make his garden the best spring garden in town for its size, but it works. He has won the Christchurch Beautifying Association’s spring garden competition five times since 1969. If the rules did not require the winner to stand down in the next year he might have won even more

often. Some gardeners spend a lot of time raising their own plants from seeds, and cuttings. but Barrie Prebble has no glasshouse; and anyway he believes that the professionals are much better at it than he would be. He buys the lot. His masses of tall lilyflowered tulips are his pride and joy, but they let him down on judging day. A cold spell had delayed their flowering, and the judges awarded him only 14 out of 20 for his flowers, which made him a bit despondent. Many of the 400 tulip bulbs came from a Dutch grower in Southland, and he wonders if they may have been a bit retarded by the southern climate. Tulips of the same

variety which he bought at Springston' flowered earlier. But simply buying the right plants is not enough to make a champion garden. There has to be what a Yorkshireman would call muck as well as brass. Barrie Prebble makes an annual pilgrimage to a Halswell horse stables and fills his car up with bags of rotted manure. He augments this with compost that he makes himself. The results are very satisfying. White, pink, and flamecoloured tulips nod their heads over masses of violas, pansies, daisies, and other colourful groundcover and border flowers.

He has chosen huge flowered ranunculus in white and pink to match the tulips, and added greenery with lots of little conifers and weeping maples. A rock garden at the gate impressed the judges, and so did the neighbour’s huge arbutus tree which forms an effective backdrop on the south side. Barrie Prebble owes a debt of gratitute to his neighbours. In the first place they do not compete with him — he is the only one in the street who enters the competitions. They keep a neighbourly eye on his garden while he is at work (he’s a chartered accountant) and report to him on the numer-

ous cars and buses of sightseers who come to see what he has done. A feature of his garden is his pink clematis (montana rubens) which would be much less spectacular if it was not allowed to ramble into the branches of the neighbour's arbutus and prunus trees. Right across the street from Barrie Prebble is another keen gardener who has a garden fountain that lights up in different colours. He considerately left the lights off the day Barrie won the spring garden contest. “I didn't want to steal your thunder," he told him. Unfortunately, the neighbours did not see who it was who pulled the netting off his feature goldfish pond and left

one little red corpse on the crazy paving. Might have been a cat, but Barrie Prebble does not think so. “It would have eaten the fish, wouldn't it?" The pond, framed by pungas. fems, and hostas, does not satisfy Barrie Prebble, and he plans to redesign that corner of his garden with the help of Fred Green, the friend who got him started on competitive gardening in 1967. That was when they pulled out the front hedge, dug everything up, and started from scratch. Fred Green had already won the Beautifying Association’s premier award for his own state house garden in Aranui. One of Barrie Prebble’s secrets is timing. He plants his spring garden on Anzac Day and if all goes well it is in full bloom for judging week in October. Another factor is perspiration. In the month before judging week he puts in a full six hours every Saturday weeding, hoeing, trimming, tying, watering, and adding new shrubs here and there where others ’ have become too old or straggly. He is a keen tennis player — treasurer of the Cashmere Lawn Tennis Club for the last 22 years — but sacrificed his winter tennis this year to devote time to his front garden. The contest that Barrie Prebble enters is just for the view from the street. The two judges stay outside the property and award marks only for what they can see from the gate. He confesses that his back garden is a wilderness, and he keeps it out of sight. But he has plans for that too. Gardening is in his blood. His father was a dahlia fancier and also became secretary of the New Zealand Lily Society. His mother was secretary of the Cashmere Garden Club. Once the spring flowering is over, Barrie Prebble replants for a summer display. He won the Herbert Cup for his summer garden last February. but he has yet to realise his greatest ambition — the premier award for summer gardens. Perhaps next vear.