Pick and mix approach helps the garden grow

Terry Dowdeswell relaxes in his Whanganui garden. Photo / Paul Brooks

The Ingestre St home of Terry and Janice Dowdeswell is renowned for its garden.
Terry is a retired horticulturalist, famous for his delphiniums, and he has made use of a small space to produce a garden both prolific and picturesque. Unlike your normal Kiwi garden, flowers out the front, veges out the back, Terry really only had the front to play with, so that's where the veges are ... and the flowers.

They left the expanse of their rural home to move into town in 2016, and found they had to adapt to a much smaller space.
"That's why the vege garden's at the front," says Terry.

What should be the driveway is lush with sweet corn, passionfruit, sunflowers, beans, tomatoes, a profusion of herbs, scatterings of self-seeded flowers, an apple tree ...
"There's quite an array. I like growing odd things. If I'm going to grow a cabbage, I won't go to the garden centre and buy a cabbage plant, I'll see if I can find a weird one somewhere, seeds, that sort of thing."

He grows mayflower beans — they look "normal" until you pop the seeds, and they are pink and white. There's daphne, a coffee plant, which bears fruit; five different types of beans, wallflowers, calendula, violas everywhere. He uses kale as living stakes for his beans. A healthy swan plant stands near the fence.

Naturally, there are delphiniums in the garden, ones he bred at Brunswick and brought with him into town. They greet him like old friends at the gate.

"I like being released from the business of growing stuff, and growing just what I fancy. I grow things for the house, to give away, and just to look nice. People think you don't put veges in the front garden: that's one rule I can break." Then, he says, if you're planting anything you've got to have them in orderly lines — that's another rule he can break. "You find that if you mix it up, the problems are fewer. If you're growing a lot of one species together, you tend to attract the insects or disease that like it." His garden is an example of a loose form of companion planting.
He has his favourites, like his herbs for the kitchen.

"A kaffir lime is a good one to have ... and I've got a curry plant from Sri Lanka. There's a little veggie called misome, it's a brassica, and a sort of a cross between a kale and a lettuce, and it has a lot of flavour and a very nice leaf."
A lot of his garden he allows to self seed.
"Then it's just a matter of weeding out the plants you don't want than planting the ones you do."
He swears by sheep manure and water.

Terry and Janice give a lot of vegetables away.
"It's very easy to grow too much," says Terry. "If you want to be sure you've got enough for you, you grow more than you need.
"I feel sorry for people who have been brought up without a relationship with plants. I'm hoping to be able to do more to encourage that."