Five reasons why I shall always love Dunedin

5. If you get a little sidetracked while looking at gardens, then suddenly realise you're supposed to be boarding a plane in 30 minutes, you can drive (quite quickly) right across the region to get to the airport without passing a single speed camera.

4. When you get to the airport with exactly 7 minutes to spare before the flight's scheduled departure time, the nice man at the counter will still check your luggage on even though the flight has officially closed.

3. Even when you are wearing jandals and clutching a lemon-scented geranium in one hand and a plastic bag of oyster mushroom-inoculated peastraw in the other. Yep, my weird hand luggage obsession has now officially moved into eccentric territory. I'm going to have a crack at growing my own mushrooms! Sam from the Shadow Gourmet mushroom company gave me the kit after my vege-growing speech at Nichol's on Teviot Street on Sunday morning.

2. Only in Dunedin can you swap a 12 month subscription to the world's most fabbo gardening mag with the promise of a big box of green walnuts in early December. I want to try making my own Italian nocino liqueur this summer. (The recipe is published in our new special edition, Homegrown, which will be launched at this year's Ellerslie International Flower Show and will be on sale in all good bookstores and supermarkets for $14.90 on November 19. (Did I mention it's the perfect Christmas gift idea?)

1. As for the number one reason I shall always love Dunedin? Contrary to previous reports, they still reckon I'm young in the deep south! And I'm sure the most fabbo newspaper in the deep south won't mind me reprinting reporter Mark Price's story on my self-sufficient endeavours.

UNABLE TO NOT TALK OF VEGES
Otago Daily Times, Monday 29 October
Young, photogenic, media savvy.. she could be just another of those annoying Auckland celebrities. But Lynda Hallinan is different. She has moved into a world we old men in gumboots and baggy jerseys usually have all to ourselves. Like the spring growth of the couch grass, Ms Hallinan - 30-something and single - has spread her tendrils into the vegetable garden. She is the woman who has been all over the television and in magazines talking about surviving on what she grows in the backyard of her typical suburban Auckland home. And, in the process, she has helped make growing vegetables almost "trendy".
But more than that: she seems not to care about weeds. Or lawns. Or codling moth.
Ms Hallinan was in Dunedin this weekend for the Rhododendron Festival as a guest of Nichol's Garden Centre. Nichol's brought her down because, well, Ms Hallinan is on the crest of the vege-growing wave.
Until the start of this year, she was merely the editor of New Zealand Gardener magazine. Then she made a New Year's resolution to live off what she could produce from her garden and whatever food she could buy each week for $10. "When I decided to do this, it was a bit of a gimmick. I was like, 'let's see if this is possible. But actually, it was so possible. It wasn't hard at all."
She keeps saying that. "It's not hard."
But then she recounts the weeks in winter eating nothing much except roast potatoes, and the other weeks, in summer, eating nothing much except courgettes - baked, grilled, roasted, in fritters. "I could probably go for the rest of my life without eating another courgette."
After 10 months of self-sufficiency, however, Ms Hallinan is still bursting with enthusiasm for a lifestyle that is simple and cheap. She worries she sounds like an evangelist. "If I could reach out to the non-gardening people out there, I would say it's actually really good fun. And it's not hard work at all. It probably takes me less time to garden than to go to the supermarket." Ms Hallinan spends her $10 food budget on sugar, eggs, flour, butter and milk. She makes her own cheese, pickles, jam and chutney; bottles her own fruit; makes pasta and pizza.
Her section, she says, is nothing special. The soil is "pretty lousy". She gets frosts and she is next to a motorway.
She finds the cooking harder than the growing but has found that "anything can be fixed with garlic and olive oil".
She went on a date with a man who noticed she could not go for more than two hours without talking about vegetables. "I can tell you that growing your own vegetables is very good and satisfying, but perhaps not a great way to find a husband."
Althoguh she plans to go back to a more normal regime next year, she will not give up the weedy patch she calls her garden and "the meadow" where lawn once was.
"The biggest problem with New Zealand gardens today is that we have this obsession with having good-looking, tidy, low-maintenance gardens because we think they're going to add value to our houses. But they don't add value to our lives."

Go Otago! I might even buy myself a blue and gold rugby jersey next winter...

The life of luxury

I never thought that I'd be able to say that I've shared the same bed as Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow. But it's true. And here's photographic evidence. This is the bed that Gwyneth slept in for two weeks when she was filming Sylvia in Dunedin a few years ago. It's wonderfully comfy. And it's all mine this weekend. In fact, I'm sitting in it now, tapping this out on my laptop while warming up my toes after a day gallivanting around gardens.
I'm staying in the Scottish Room at the lavishly luxurious Corstorphine House. How lavishly luxurious? Well, my room here (actually three rooms) is bigger than my house at home, which I've decided is going to be the yardstick by which I judge all hotels from now! One of Otago's exquisite historic homesteads, Corstorphine House was built in 1863 and has been lovingly converted into a marvellous boutique hotel. I could definitely get accustomed to swanning about its corridors, marvelling at the chandeliers and clinking crystal glasses of champagne with the other guests...
I'm here with Juliet Nicholas, our South Island photographer, checking out Dunedin's annual Rhododendron Festival. Unfortunately, we've had a bit of a frosty reception from the weather. It was 6.6 degrees when I flew in last night and it hailed this morning. The sun's out right now but it's definitely a coat and scarf sort of spring day. Anyway, enough of the weather... I'll be accused of being a soft Aucklander if I don't stop going on!
We started the day with a tour of Corstorphine's magnificent grounds with its two gardeners. They grow almost all of the fresh herbs and veges they serve in the kitchen in the gardens here and they're part-way through the organic certification process. Juliet and I have been salivating over the globe artichokes (and scheming about how we could end up with a few in our suitcases!), not to mention the herbs in the potager, and the blackcurrant bushes that are smothered in flowers. I'm picking there will be a bumper blackcurrant season at Corstorphine this summer! There's a lovely old conservatory too, which is now a fine restaurant, but it's the glasshouse that shares the conservatory wall that I've been eyeing up. It's wonderful - and wonderfully productive, with rows of young tomato plants, courgettes, pots of lilies, sweet peas and sunflowers coming along nicely. I want a glasshouse now. In fact, maybe I could extend my self-sufficiency project for another year and attempt to grow mangoes in my own tropical microclimate...

Age and beauty

Despite the fact that I spend most of my time interviewing other people about their gardens, it's still slightly odd to read what other people think about me and mine. Odd, and equally hilarious. When I was in Christchurch a couple of weeks ago I grabbed the weekend edition of The Press to read on the plane on the way home. Unlike The Herald in Auckland, which canned Neil Ross from the pages of Canvas a couple of years back and now devotes precisely zero regular column inches to gardening each week, The Press has a weekend gardening section that sprawls over several pages and is both intelligent and informative.
The week I was in Christchurch, several of the city's garden writers had joined forces to argue about whether Christchurch could still rightfully claim to be the country's "garden city" or whether it was "trading on its past glories". Robyn Kilty, who has one of the city's prettiest gardens and one of the few small private gardens deemed a Garden of National Significance by the NZ Gardens Trust, went further, asking whether gardening itself was now "untrendy for words" and "a nana-hobby". Not so, Robyn continued, citing "our hip young designers who have won us medals at the Chelsea Flower Show, and Lynda Hallinan, the youngish editor of our only garden glossy, New Zealand Gardener, which won the Magazine of the Year Award for 2007."
Hang on! Pull up! Rewind!
"YOUNGISH!"
I nearly choked on my dry Air New Zealand biscuit. It wasn't so long ago that I was described by my media colleagues as "the young and energetic editor of New Zealand Gardener". How did I suddenly progress from young, to youngish? And what comes next? Oldish? Slightly dishevelled? A tired horticultural hack?
Actually, as I discovered in this week's New Zealand Listener magazine, what comes after youngish is... well... fattish! Maggie Barry interviewed me a couple of weeks ago about my self-sufficiency project for an article she was writing about the upsurge in urban edible gardening. I forgot all about it until Julian Matthews rang me this morning to tell me he'd spotted my smiling face on page 23. I definitely look youngish, at least - the photo must be at least three years old - but I had to laugh at the accompanying story. And I quote...
"One unwanted measure of success is that Hallinan has gained weight - 'all those spuds over winter'".
Hehe.
Might be time I joined Maggie and pushed play to work off those potatoes, huh?

Why you should never plant trees in threes

I hate spring storms. Not only do they turn my cats into boggle-eyed nutters who body slam the cat door and rip around the lounge in a feline frenzy, they selectively decapitate new trees and demolish tender subtropicals. Last spring my ancient pear tree lost its one of its largest limbs when a rogue tornado ripped through the suburb (mind you, one of the houses in the next street lost its roof so you could argue that my garden escaped rather lightly).
Even so, I'm still in a huff after coming home from work this afternoon (yes, I know it’s a Sunday but our new special edition magazine Homegrown goes to print this week so I’ve been putting in a few extra hours) to discover the most strategic tree in my backyard had been karate-chopped in half by a big gust of wind. It was the middle tree in a row of three lollipop-shaped China doll trees (Radermachera sinica). I planted these trees 18 months ago to block out the next door neighbours but now, thanks to my dear friend Mother Nature, I've been left with the sort of awkward gaping hole that small children proudly show off when their first front tooth falls out.
Radermachera sinica isn't the prettiest tree on the block but there's nothing I know that grows faster to fill a gap in a frost-free climate. I planted mine to replace a big ugly ivy-covered privet tree that, for all its faults, was doing a primo job of hiding the neighbour's house when I bought this property. I can tolerate many things but privet isn't one of them, so last winter I got my dad up with his chainsaw to deal to it. Which he did. Unfortunately, its removal left me with a panoramic view of the neighbours' back deck - scene of many a summer party - and their kitchen. (As I type, one of the tenants is doing the dishes.) I needed privacy, and I needed it fast.
The China dolls, which I picked up at Roger Hunter's nursery in Tidal Rd for the bargain price of $100 each, were about 1.5m tall when I bought them. They're now at least double that, and probably three times as thick and lush. Well, two of them are. The other is lying in state on my deck. At least it might act as a diversion for any snails heading in the direction of my seed trays tonight.

Sacrificial lambs to the slaughter

It's the first rule of successful gardening: only choose plants that suit your climate. It's also the first rule that almost every gardener breaks at some point. Auckland gardeners fantasise over fancy paeonies and fritillarias, while southerners yearn for subtropicals and posh UK designers instruct their clients to wrap their New Zealand tree ferns in sheep dags and plastic bubble-wrap to get them through frosty winters. It's all a bit mad, but as Mick Jagger so rightfully put it, you can't always get what you want. Note that he didn't continue to croon "so stop trying, you dorks" - which is just as well, because I can't help myself when it comes to pushing climatic boundaries in my own garden.
Take, for example, the trillium I bought from Larnach Castle the last time I was in Dunedin. I'm not even sure how long it took to kill it, because it succumbed so quietly that I forgot I even had it in the first place. I've killed at least half a dozen Chatham Island forget-me-nots (Myosotidium hortensia) and a trio of tropical Medinilla myriacantha. But I'm proud to say that two clumps of exotic Lobelia aberdarica have made it through this winter intact, which is more than I can say for the other eight plants I put in. They drowned in my waterlogged soil. Fussy sods.
Anyway, I have a confession to make. The next plant I'm consigning to an almost certain death is the sub-Antarctic perennial mega-herb Stilbocarpa polaris, pictured above. It's a ripper of a foliage plant, with leathery, scalloped green leaves that are as hairy as an organic pork chop. I got mine at Texture Plants in Christchurch yesterday afternoon.
Texture Plants is a specialist nursery that caters for plantaholics with a taste for the unusual and brothers Hamish and Tim Prebble, who run the nursery, are modern day plant hunters who grow all sorts of fascinating species. Hamish joined Christchurch gardening commentator Rachel Vogan (how's the head this morning, Rach?), NZ Gardener writers Dennis Greville and Julian Matthews, landscape designer Philip Smith and myself for a fun debate at the Canterbury Horticultural Society Centre on Saturday night, so yesterday we headed out to Prebbleton to buy a few plants on the way home. Philip loves native plants and was ordering up large for a project he's working on in Tekapo, whereas Julian and I were impulse buyers. We both snapped up a Stilbocarpa polaris so it will be interesting to see whose survives the longest: mine in Auckland, or his in Waikanae.
On a related note, Hamish took us on a guided tour of the nursery's propagation houses, with its thousands of plants - from tiny seedlings in trays sporting their first true leaves to fully-grown nikau palms just waiting for the right landscaping opportunity. Down the back, Hamish pointed out a row of Echeveria 'Hot Chocolate' looking just a bit worse for wear. They'd been defoliated - it was as if someone had systematically snipped off their leaves with a sharp pair of secateurs. As for the culprit, no, it wasn't a rogue nursery worker. It was rabbits. The sneaky fluffballs had been squeezing under the back door and helping themselves to the fat, fleshy, succulent leaves. And I thought snails were a formidable enemy!