Gardening NZ, Gardening In New Zealand.

Gardening NZ.Com is here to provide New Zealand gardeners, with useful information on gardening in New Zealand related subjects.
Interestingly gardening is the the second most popular physical activity in New Zealand, according to Active NZ Survey in the 2007-8 year. It’s second to walking. The top ten physical activities in order are: Walking, gardening, swimming, equipment based exercise, cycling, fishing, jogging/running, dance, golf and tramping.

Intention

This Gardening NZ website is here to provide a useful guide to help a range of gardeners, from beginners through to gardeners interested in more specialised subjects. This will provide visitors with a useful and comprehensive resource to help create a greener and higher quality environment for humans and our native flora and fauna to enjoy. While being aware that introduced plant species, that in many cases have useful qualities such as pleasant flowers, or are hardy and quick growing, may have a propensity to become rampant invasive weeds, if allowed to escape the confines of cultivated gardens.

New Zealand’s growing conditions.

New Zealand’s climate and topography create a wide range of conditions, allowing a broad range of plants to be grown here. Our climate is considered to be sub-tropical in the far north, ranging to the far south, where it is considered to be cool temperate, with severe alpine conditions in the mountains. The mountain ranges that extend the length of New Zealand, create a barrier for the prevailing westerly winds, that divides the country into distinctly different climatic regions.
The rainfall ranges between 600 and 1600mm per year, with a considerable difference occurring between the West and East Coast of the South Island, where the annual rainfall on the west coast is between 4 to 10 metres, while in Canterbury there is between 0.5 to 0.75 metres per year. The two ares are only about 100km apart!
The soil in New Zealand also varies over a wide range of types including, clay, the finest particle size through silt loam, that have a predominantly medium size soils particles, to coarser particle sized sandy coastal and alluvial soils. There’s also the volcanic soils with large particle size, and peat based soils with a high organic content that tend to be acidic.
All these variants allow a wide range of plants and gardening specialties to be cultivated by New Zealand horticulturalists. Combined with the high educational standards, that our universities, polytechnics, and libraries provide, we have all the ingredients for some of the best gardens in the world.

Hamilton Gardens – Italian Renaissance garden

I hope you find this website helpful and return to utilise it over time. If you want to, make a contribution, then contact us.