Dream Big, in Small Gardens

Forget the quarter acre section! With just a patio or small balcony, you can still have a thriving food and flower garden. This National Gardening Week, think about embracing your tiny space.

To celebrate NZ's biggest week in gardening, we've put together our best tips for creating a gorgeous or productive happy place, in miniature. Even the smallest empty spaces have room for a garden. And the smaller the garden, the easier it is to bring your vision to life!

Established in 2015, National Gardening Week aims to foster a love of gardening with a focus on growing not only plants, but friendships, good health, strong communities and closer connections with nature. Whether it’s a few pots on the balcony, a small patch or an extensive garden, everyone can experience the joy of gardening.

Is your garden space really restricted?

Think of this way: it’s actually a big advantage. It means your garden is a manageable scale, that gives you an opportunity to have every centimetre of it just the way you want.

If you’re planning a tiny garden, you’ll get the best results from deciding what you want to use the space for, then focus on that. Do you want to grow vegies and herbs, or just make an inviting and beautiful space? This choice can take you in very different directions. Are you going to be moving around or sitting in the garden, looking into and appreciating it from the outside, or just maximising your productive growing space?

If your main focus is a productive edible garden, you can jump ahead to the next section, while we talk about pretty gardens - how to make a small space into a feast for the senses.

In a very small space, focus on elements that engage all your senses: sight, smell and sounds. A wonderful floral scent, or the sound of trickling water will make it a much nicer place to be in.

• If your garden has a small footprint area, the vertical dimension becomes quite important. Think about how you can use the whole thing, from the floor space right up to the top. There’s so much more usable space than just ground level! This is an idea we borrowed from traditional Japanese tiny enclosed gardens, called 'tsubo-niwa'. These gardens have a mini footprint, a little over 3m², so tsubo-niwa gardeners consider the entire garden space as a sort of 3-dimensional 'container', from the very top down to the bottom surface. In fact, tsubo is Japanese for 'jar', so the idea is to fill the interior of the jar in an aesthetically pleasing way. This way of thinking is more like creating a walk-in sculpture than a garden!
• Create height with tall plants; a classic tsubo-niwa might have a single tree in it, paired with some low spreading plants and rocks at the base. Or you could place tall plants around the edges of the garden space, to give you the sense of being ‘inside’ the garden. Trellis, wire, or mesh fixed against walls makes an ideal frame for climbers like roses or grapevines to scramble up.
• Limited space gives you complete control over colour schemes – you can choose flowers and foliage for pops of colour and texture, plus how they interact. Simplicity works well in a tiny garden, so it’s best to restrict your planting palette to shades that work together.

• If space allows, having somewhere comfortable to sit means you’ll be able to relax and spend quality time in your garden.
• Consider adding fragrant plants, like lavender or freesias. On a still summer evening, night-scented stock or star jasmine will simply transport you. Don't overlook spring bulbs, or winter-flowering daphne to stretch out your sensory season.
• A water feature in a tiny space has a big impact. A small bubbler, water bowl or fountain really breathes life and a sense of calm into a garden…and can even help mask traffic noise. 
• Mosquito repellent plants like lemongrass, peppermint, basil, rosemary or lavender deliver a very practical benefit in a small outdoor area, along with smelling fantastic to us humans.
• Adding a little sparkle of outdoor lighting will really bring the romance to a tiny garden. A simple strand of waterproof fairy lights will extend your garden relaxation time into the evening, plus make the space feel even more intimate.

Tiny Edible Gardens

• Grab the opportunity to have an herb garden within reach of your kitchen – if you fill it with flavours, your tastebuds will thank you at every meal! Herbs will thrive in pots, raised gardens, planters or hanging baskets. Most herbs can be planted together; basil, oregano and lavender get on especially well. Rosemary and thyme are a winning combination. Parsley, coriander and chives will share a pot happily. But nobody likes living next to fennel or mint, put these bad neighbours into their own pots!
• How about a cocktail garden? Having fresh mint, lemon verbena or lime zest on hand takes your drinks to the next level. G&T? Mojito? Yes, please.
• If space is at a premium, go vertical! Choose tall vegies like climbing tomatoes or beans, that have a small footprint and can be trained upwards.
• You can install trellis or steel mesh for climbers, or even strain wire to espalier fruit trees. You can support lower-growing vegetables with wire supports, stakes or obelisk structures, that hold up and protect your plants. Get them in early, while the plants are small.

• Match hanging baskets with your style: you can hang pots or baskets with natural fibre rope, sleek wire, chains or chunky macrame. If you have multiple baskets, you can hang them in groups at varying heights to make them a feature. If you’re running out of space down low for your vegies, move them up into hanging baskets!
• Berries are a great choice for pots (blueberries, dwarf raspberries or blackberries, and of course strawberries). They’re also fantastic in hanging baskets; as well as a great yield of berries, they also look gorgeous trailing over the edges of the pot.
• Dwarf fruit trees in pots are a brilliant addition to a tiny garden. Not just pretty, but productive too; who doesn’t love fresh fruit? Try multi-grafted trees with different fruit on them to make them work even harder! Citrus, apple, nectarine or fig trees are all excellent choices.
• Apples and pears are suitable to espalier (where branches are trained to grow flat against a wall) as they have more flexible branches, plus they fruit repeatedly on the same spurs.
• Even if you’re focused on vegies, you’ll benefit from weaving in some flowers amongst them. Flowers attract more pollinators, which means better vegies!

Top 5 Vegies for Tiny Gardens or Pots

There are so many great choices for a small garden, it’s a tough job to narrow it down to five! So, we’re going to cheat and sneak in similar vegies under one heading. We chose vegies that are space-efficient and give good yields, but also the ‘tastebud treats’ that are always expensive at the supermarket.

• Lettuce (especially colourful ‘picking’ varieties, so you just take what you need, and they keep on going)
• Cherry Tomatoes (dwarf or climbing tomatoes can fit into a surprisingly small space)
• Chillies and Capsicums (compact plants, very comfortable in pots)
• Leafy Greens, like Spinach, Silverbeet, Choy Sum and Tatsoi (quick to grow, and always ready when you are)
• Shanghai Bok Choy, Sprouting Broccoli and Gai Lan (these succulent brassicas are real space savers and add body and crunch to a meal)

It’s actually easy to grow rooty vegies like carrots, radishes, beetroot or shallots in containers, the trick is making sure your pots are deep enough; give them generous legroom.

Top 5 Flowers for Tiny Gardens or Pots

We’ve chosen no-fuss flowers that are versatile in a small space; these old favourites work just as well in hanging baskets as they do in pots. The first two are compact and give you a huge range of vibrant shades to work with; the last three will spill colourful flowers right over the edge of their container. If you mix them together in the same pot, you can really play with colour combinations and palettes.

• Marigolds & Calendulas (these two are distant cousins. Both are pretty, but very different; calendula petals are edible and smell sweet, marigolds are an eye-wateringly pungent classic for companion planting. They’re the go-to choices for bright oranges and reds, ranging through to subtle lemony yellows)
• Pansies & Violas (these hardy choices have the cooler blue and violet shades covered but are also available in warmer pastel tones. They’ll give you vivid splashes of colour in the cooler seasons)
• Alyssum (blanketed with tiny blooms, ranging from cool, snowy white to pink, violet and cream pastels. Gorgeously scented, and excellent for attracting pollinators into the garden)
• Lobelia (This hardy spiller comes in bright primary blues and rich purples. It’s also very attractive to bees)
• Petunia (Cloaked in showy, velvety, trumpet-shaped flowers in all the colours of the rainbow, and a stunning variety of patterns and bicolors. By the way, did you know the flowers smell a-ma-zing?)