An idea to remove a weedy wet lawn and replace with crushed limestone led to a perennial garden bed overflowing with flowers bees and birds.

Site

Orakei

Installed

August 2018 by Second Nature

Designers

Louise Hanlon

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The original garden was a blank canvas of lawn. Wet and muddy in winter, dry and weedy in summer. The lawn was removed and replaced with hoggin, a fine limestone gravel that when compacted forms a stable, usable surface that is also porus. A generous garden bed edged in Corten steel provides year round interest by combining perennials with New Zealand Native grasses.

Featured

A fire pit extends the use of the area into the night.

Low maintenance grasses, Lomandra ‘Evergreen Baby’ provide soft texture beneath a Crepe Myrtle shade tree.

What we’ve accomplished:

1.

Many gardeners shy away from large garden borders perceiving them to be to high maintenance. This is not actually the case if plants grow to their full potential they smother weeds and self mulch.

2.

The border successfully mixes natives and exotics enhancing foliage colour, texture and form.

3.

Species diversity encourages bees and insects that otherwise simple wouldn’t be present if there was only lawn.