Garden Life

It would take about four hours to walk every track in the Dunedin Botanic Garden. Although that sounds like a make-the-best activity for locals in lockdown, on the other hand, why not at any time?

Good gardening is not only about creating. It’s also about editing. Renewal and replacement of plantings is an essential part of garden maintenance.

You are at a plant sale and you spy a plant that you have been on the hunt for. It is not an option to leave without it.

The 700 camellias in the lower botanic garden camellia collection are all regularly checked and evaluated. This helps staff make choices for the future, culling underperforming plants and noting...

In wintertime, instead of bright colours from flowers, visual interest comes from trees’ and shrubs’ attractive shapes, textures of bark or buds.

This deciduous tree is usually singled out for admiration due to large, white, petal-like bracts that hang down over the round cluster of contrasting reddish anthers below.

Whau is a northern native quite unlike any other. It is the sole member of its genus, Entelea, found only in New Zealand.

Making a bright winter statement are the red, berry-like pomes of an often-mispronounced shrub.

Climbing roses are ideal for highlighting vertical and horizontal dimensions in your garden.

Under the protection of the Winter Garden glasshouse, Pentas lanceolata provides wonderful colour over many months: flowering in early summer, through autumn and well into winter.

Complementing the camellias and specimen trees in the lower botanic garden camellia collection, which covers an acre of cultivated land, are the underplantings of herbaceous ground covers.

Borrowing a view is a well utilised concept in garden planning and design. Linking to the wider landscape extends your garden views and when done well can seem almost seamless.

With shorter days and cooler temperatures, lush summer foliage and bright blooms give way to autumnal colours as nature slows down and prepares for the cold winter days that lie ahead.

Earlier this year, the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital had a puzzling case of toxoplasmosis in a family of South Island kaka sent to them from the Te Anau Bird Park, following the death of one of the...

The genus Crataegus contains hundreds of species, all from the northern hemisphere, but has developed a bad name due to the invasive European or better-known common hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna.