Natives and exotics: Happiness is a garden of mixed marriages

Press, 21 February 1986, Page 15

Natives and exotics: Happiness is a garden of mixed marriages

Oardener’sl W DIARY

Derrick Rooney

Exotics are exotic and natives are, well, native, and never the twain etc. ... in some gardens and many public plantings. For my part I think it is nonsense to separate native and exotic plants in gardens, because while it’s true that natives include some splendid plants which associate well with their own kind, it’s also true that some natives can look even better in combination with exotics. I’ve never been afraid to juxtapose the two, and I’d like to describe a few mixed marriages in my garden which have, I think, been very successful. One of them uses astelias.

Astelias, sometimes called bush lilies, are native members of the lily family which have small spikes of fleshy flowers, usually half-hidden among the leaves.

Most manageable for garden purposes, I think, is Astelia nervosa, which has silver leaves, and as a

ordinary hydrangeas, it has a convential horten-sia-type flowerhead, which has a very valuable attribute: its colour, whatever the soil type, is always pink on opening, turning to red with maturity. Other hydrangeas can vary quite a lot in colour, from blue through purple' to red, and vice versa, depending on whether the soil is acid or alkaline, and very often you don’t know where you are with them from one season to another. Underneath the camellias, and thriving in very heavy shade, is another astelia, a bushland species, A. fragrans, which sometimes grows on forest margins but is

garden of its own accord). Mellifera, however, is a much superior foliage plant with elegant narrow leaves which are pale lettuce green. Coming as it does from the Canary Islands, it is rather less hardy than the Mediterranean plant, and sometimes is badly knocked about by frosts in winter. If cut down in spring it quickly refurnishes (or has done so far). This prevents it from flowering, but unless you want seed the flowers are no great loss because they are smallish, and dull brownish green. The habit of Euphorbia mellifera is to form a neat, dome-shaped bush, wider than it is high. This is convenient, because the variegated Olearia is a very narrow, erect bush and the two make a nice contrast. Olearia traversii comes from the Chathams, and the variegated form has been in existence for some years, though it has not been widely distri-