Featured Gardener from New Zealand

Today’s featured Gardener is with Living of the Land with Maggie Lil, selected images taken from her garden.

Where do you garden?

Marlborough, New Zealand

Why did you start gardening?

I started gardening as a way to heal, it actually saved me. I had become depressed and in my attempt to become well again I some how found myself in the garden, since then I have never looked back.

What do you like most about gardening?

The process. I love going through the rhythms, planting a seed and watching it grow or going through the changing seasons. Its all a great cycle that never ends and I love being apart of it.

What are some things that you grow?

I grow a lot of different things but I’ll tell you about a few things I grow well, In my area we grow fruit trees really well especially Apples and Plums, we have a unique climate where we have cold Winters and hot Summers not uncommon to have -3 degrees Celsius in Winter and 31 degrees Celsius in Summer which the fruit trees seem really like. I have many self seeded fruit trees in my garden, some of them are not in the most ideal situations but I can’t bring myself to cut them down. Salvias really enjoy the hot dry summers here and I’ve also discovered Penstemons seem to enjoy it as well. Watering is important in the heat of the summer but its surprising how many traditional cottage garden flowers thrive in our hot conditions.

What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned from gardening?

To be in tune with nature, when you create a garden you, sometimes unknowingly, create an ecosystem and you get to be the custodian of that little eco-system, the more in tune you are with it the easier and more enjoyable it is to garden.

What are your biggest successes and failures with your garden?

My biggest success I suppose is the garden itself, its really starting to come into it’s own and mature, its something every gardener looks forward to and its nice to sit back and watch it do its own thing. My biggest failure, that’s hard to answer as I try not to see things as failures only learning experiences, I guess if had to say a failure it would be forgetting about plants in pots as I do that often and have lost a few…