Episode: New Zealand Ellerslie International Flower Show

Presenter: Neville Passmore

The featured garden that Neville is in contains a riot of colour that actually comes from a pack of seeds and represents one of the easiest and low cost ways of starting a garden.

They are called wild flowers and they are all old fashioned annual blooms. Old fashioned they may be, but they are at the forefront of a new trend that is all about low maintenance gardens.

The varieties in the garden have been grown in Australasia since the first European settlements.

The first impression of the many colours is all quickly followed by a delicious perfume and two of the main perpetrators are Wall Flower and Sweet Alyssum. The flowers produce nectar and pollen, top tucker for a range of birds and insects as well as butterflies.

Butterflies are released into the garden everyday and the colourful flights of fancy can bring another dimension to the home garden. If you really want to encourage these beautiful creatures into your garden then plant out a couple of the coloured flowering forms of the Swan Plant. Neville cautions against using the white flowering form as it is a shocking weed that should be avoided like the plague.

Once you home grown garden flower seeds have germinated there is nothing more to do. Winter rains keep it growing and after flowering has finished there is another bonus as many set seed and pop up in the following year without any work at all.

Wild Flower World
PO Box 8161, Taurunga
(07) 576 0470
Fax: (07) 576 0447
seeds@wildflowerworld.com
www.wildflowerworld.com