Backyard landscaping in Wellington gets talked about like it’s a straightforward add-on to a house — some turf, a few plants, maybe a deck. I found out otherwise on my own section in Johnsonville. It started blank and sloping, and I priced it the way most first-timers do: plants, turf, a paved area, some fencing,…

A mate of mine gardens up in Mornington, one of Dunedin’s steeper, shadier hill suburbs, and the first thing she said after moving into that house was that the back section spent half the winter in shadow and the soil was cold enough to store meat in. She wasn’t far wrong. I’ve spent years building…

I’m Grant, and I’ve spent close on twenty years putting shelterbelts into exposed sections around Rotorua, Owhata included, ever since my own block taught me the hard way. When we first took the place on out Owhata way, the wind used to come straight across the open paddocks and flatten anything I planted before it…

My name’s Grant Ellison. I’ve spent the past 12 years buying, renting out and personally maintaining rental properties around Tawa, on the northern edge of Wellington. When I bought my first rental here, the section had a garden a previous owner had clearly loved: rhododendrons, a couple of ornamental maples, roses along the fence. It…

A couple of hectares out past Lynmore, a ute-load of nursery plants, and more enthusiasm than any one weekend deserves — that’s how my brother-in-law started his lifestyle block a few years back. By the following autumn he’d learned what most block owners around Lynmore and Ngongotaha eventually work out: you can have a high-maintenance…

Grant here — I’ve spent forty years on the tools around Wellington, most of it up on the hill sections around Karori, Northland and the western suburbs. Every spring my neighbour up the hill in Karori leans over the fence and asks me the same thing: why does half of what she plants end up…

Every summer, usually in late January, I get the same phone call from my cousin over in Bethlehem, Tauranga — the lawn’s gone brown and the veges are cooking in the heat. It’s a fair complaint. The Bay of Plenty gets long, bright, dry stretches and some of the fiercest UV in the country, and…

I’ve got a few rentals scattered around Palmerston North, one of them right in Milson, and for a long stretch of years lawns were the thing I quietly resented spending money on. A tenant would move in over a green spring, and by February the front lawn had gone to straw, the tenant blamed me,…

My mate bought a lovely-looking section in Ngongotaha, just out of Rotorua, and worked out fast why it had gone for a bargain. Half his backyard sat over warm, gassy ground, and everything he planted in that half curled up and died while the lawn next door grew like it was on steroids. I’m a…

My cousin bought a place up in Khandallah with a picture in her head: long summer evenings on a big open deck, glass of wine in hand, looking out over the harbour. Anyone who’s actually spent a winter on that hill knows how that story usually ends — the deck gets used maybe half a…