A garden of beauty and bounty Where the dahlias screen the spuds

Press, 5 February 1987, Page 13

A garden of beauty and bounty Where the dahlias screen the spuds

No secrets to success with veges

Although Betty Johnson of Shirley has been gardening for 40 years, she has only recently entered the Christchurch gardening competitions. She has won many awards, particularly impressing the judges with the care and maintenance of her garden, and with the quality of her vegetables.

The main feature of the Johnsons’ sunny and peaceful back garden, is a large circular bed ringed by a path, where there was once an above-ground swimming pool. Within this area, Betty Johnson grows her main crop, Ham Hardy potatoes, screened from view by a circle of tall dahlias, pelargoniums and bright red begonias.

The boundaries of the garden are mostly hidden with borders of trees, shrubs, and colourful perennial plants. Several of the trees are fruit trees which provide good quantities of produce as well as their blossoms in spring, their colourful leaves in autumn and the tracery of the bare branches in winter.

The Johnsons’ vegetable garden is separated from the flower garden by a

shoulder-high wall which provides additional warmth for the tomatoes. Beneath these are beautiful bulging blue-green cabbages forming a type of ground cover. In the main body of the vegetable garden, the luxuriant foliage makes beautiful contrasting patterns reminiscent of a Victorian embroidery sampler. The purple and green leaved beetroot enhances the light feathery foliage of carrots. Grey-green spikes of onions contrast with the abundant green

of parsnips. The dwarf beans are held neatly and invisibly in place by large hoops of fencing wire. There is a row of celery at right angles to the main crops, taking advantage, of the cooler conditions provided by the shady back wall.

Betty Johnson considers that she has very few secrets behind her success with vegetables. She adds home-made compost to the soil each, year, together with rotted lawn clippings mixed with sawdust in a separate compost tumbler.

In spring she digs in an over-wintered crop of green manure — usually lupin, to replace the humus in the soil, and also adds blood and bone. No chemical sprays are used in the vegetable garden, except derris dust and pyrethrum. Betty Johnson’s favourite part of the garden is a shady area of foliage plants tucked round the corner of the house. Here there are native plants — pittosporum and rimu, pungas and maidenhair fems as well as rhododendrons, hydrangeas . and hostas.

Betty feels she would like to add a seat to this area to enjoy its leafy peace on a hot day, but realises at the same time it would be little used, as most of her spare time is happily spent gardening.