Southern comfort

The Partner and I are always squaring off over north versus south. Although we're both Dunedin born, he's lived the past 10 years near Tekapo, while I've been in the Far North.
Although I'm still a mainlander at heart I've felt honour bound to defend my adopted neck of the woods against his disparaging comparisons of autumn colours, spring flowers, spectacular frosts, fantastic apricots and boxes of cherries - the purchase of which does not require topping up the mortgage.
He had ample opportunity to gloat when we went south in early December. As soon as we hit Central Otago we screeched to a halt at the first fruit stall and spent the rest of the day blowing cherry stones out the car window and wishing we could grow them in Kerikeri.
Then there was the parsley. I was quite proud of my parsley patch, until we went to Dunedin. The first lot had grown vigorously to cover a respectable area of the herb garden and the new plants I put in just before going on holiday had survived being home alone and doubled in size.
But they were nowhere near as impressive as the parsley patch at the Dunedin railway station, where a series of large, boxed gardens have been planted with vast quantities of parsley.
The gardens have evidently attracted a huge amount of attention since they were planted in April.
Dunedin City Council parks and reserves officer Martin Thomson says it was decided this year to try the parsley, teamed with silverbeet, to show people that vegetables can be grown anywhere. The vegetable gardens served another purpose as well, with Anglican Family Care workers harvesting the silverbeet for the organisation's food bank.
"They're a lot more inventive down here, aren't they," the Partner commented smugly.
I thought I was getting my own back when we arrived at Arrowtown. The funny, bumpy, tumbledown little town I remembered from the 70s was gone - replaced with the upmarket, sanitised tourist version where there was no such thing as a Four Square in the main street. and the chances of being able to buy anything ordinary were remote.
But he wasn't to be beaten. He dragged me off the beaten track and into the "suburbs", where I was again green with envy at the variety of flowers, the intensity of colours, the proliferation of roses and the casual, rambling style of the Central Otago cottage garden.
"Such a shame we can't grow roses like that in the Far North," he smirked.
He was already winning hands down when we came across his piece de resistance - the endless drifts of Russell lupins that carpet the roadsides from the Lindis Pass to Fairlie.
I must have seen these before when, as a reluctant and sulky teenager in my parents' car, I was dragged off on holiday when I'd much rather have been at home thinking about boys.
That I could have ignored the lupins in favour of daydreams about some spotty 16-year-old with outsized feet and appalling clothes fills me with shame.
The variety of lupin that provides these extraordinary swathes of colour in the blond landscape of the Mackenzie basin was introduced to the area by Connie Scott of Godley Peak Station in the 1950s.
They've gone mad because they're incredibly tolerant. They love damp, gravel soils but they'll also thrive in the hot, dry winds and hard frosts for which the region is famous. The gravel roadsides and braided riverbeds are the perfect habitat, therefore, and the lupins have rapidly colonised every available surface.
Tourists and gardeners may love them, but DoC warns that they are displacing the low-growing native plants and therefore reducing the all-round visibility wading birds need for nesting.
It also states sternly that "before lupins were identified as an invasive weed, the New Zealand Tourism Board issued visitors with lupin seeds and encouraged people to spread the seeds around road edges".
Well, the bad news for DoC is that visitors are still encouraged to buy packets of seeds, and I have to confess that the Partner bought a packet.
He had no intention of scattering along the South Island roadsides, however.
He's brought them home and sown them in a seed tray where they are now a couple of inches high.
A friend who is a very experienced Far North gardener assures us that the humidity will defeat them, but we live in hope.