New Zealand candle lights up the long green border

By Diana Studer

- gardening for biodiversity

in Cape Town, South Africa

Discovered Treasures 2

Marble Chips is light and sparkles against a long green shrubbery. The Southeaster howls vengeance in this our first summer of serious gardening on False Bay. My January choice is not here today and gone tomorrow fragile flowers, or the plants that sulk till March rains, but seriously tough, indestructible and happy Coprosma.

Coprosma repens Marble Chips in our garden

In summer a mediterranean garden rests thru the heat and wind and the Ungardener GRRRumbling Gartenzwerg says - it's brown, it's dead, it looks like a desert. Pissed Off Gardener replies - that would be the Karoo Koppie, I like it!

UGG - It'll never grow, it'll take 8 years, I'll be dead.
POG - looks back with quiet horror at how the plants have GROWN in only a year. 

We have made space for six more compromise trees.

(Fiddlewood and) Coprosma

Part of the green coffin which put me off the first time we saw this garden is two huge plain green Coprosma also called mirror leaf. One wraps around half of the table - making that a green and shady corner - lovely when the summer Southeaster isn't raging. The second gives a blank green view to the guest room.

Fiddlewood, Buddleja and Coprosma

Layers of green. Fresh green leaves on the fiddlewood, then some grey Buddleja, backed by a mass of Coprosma.

Mirror leaf from New Zealand

Coprosma repens comes from New Zealand, a reminder of my father, and was the very first plant I bought for our Porterville garden. There it sadly faded away, murmuring, hot, dry. On False Bay the plants are in their element enjoying the fresh sea breezes of home. In the Rubiaceae family with coffee, quinine plant, Gardenia, Ixora, Pentas and the South African tree Rothmannia globosa.

Future pond and carob tree
Coprosma on the right

Green hulk is the carob tree. Bit daunting. It needs some strategic thinning - by a team of arborists with chainsaws. I'd like the green privacy around our garden to be the sort of eave-height barrier that Coprosma offers, which I can prune for myself.

Coprosma Picturata leaves

But the one I cherish is the Marble Chips. Carefully rescued from the smothering effect of a couple of honking great bottlebrush we removed in our first December. It has a gracefully twisted trunk, hard to capture in a photo, but striking as you walk in the garden. At first the poor thing had hardly any leaves. Now it is lush enough to pick bits for my vases. Curiously my plant ranges in colour from really white with green speckles (Marble Queen too much of a good thing), to half and half - a green splodge with a wide cream border, to some which are mostly green with a gold heart (Picturata not good enough)

Coprosma repens Marble Chips

In False Bay Dozen for Diana I'm running two series in tandem. The first Discovered Treasure was the carob tree. Anyone got a January plant to share with us? (Northern gardeners are welcome to bring photos from a kinder month remembered in their garden)

Marble Chips

Beth at PlantPostings in Wisconsin has a mystery buckeye, five leaves spread out like a hand in welcome.

Pam's English Garden in Pennsylvania brings a weeping Norway spruce (luminous green leafy candles in spring)  

Donna of Gardens Eye View in Central NY State chooses horsetail rush, the stems twisting in a winter vase. 

Marble Chips
with camphorbush, Asparagus fern, ivy and Grewia

For Pam at Digging's Foliage Followup on 16th.

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