Dialogue: Grab your trowel for growing trend

I can feel it happening - repotting some baby succulents one minute, taking cuttings from friends' properties the next, all the while managing to keep the household plants alive - I am surrendering to my instincts to garden.

I have resisted it for some years now, writing it off as something I will do when I am old. A couple of years ago I gave my free Ellerslie Flower Show tickets to Dad, but this year I can't wait to go.

Meanwhile, my biggest party-animal girlfriend spent last weekend installing a "water feature," a fashion designer I know has perfected the art of compost in his Dolce and Gabbana jeans and another 30-something, whom I never would have suspected, has commissioned a four-stage garden plan.

No longer dismissed as a passive pastime for the elderly, gardening has been repositioned, repackaged and relaunched as a fashionable hobby.

Growing up I recall agonisingly boring episodes of Dig This and magazines full of camellias and more camellias. It was back in the days when vases full of carnations and gypsophila were a favourable look. But things have changed.

While I am sure ageing and getting a mortgage are major contributors to a trendier public image, gardening has paralleled the flourishing interest in home décor and design. Notice how we have become obsessed with the architectural concept of the indoor-outdoor flow?

Our need to feather our nests has now transgressed into nurturing our garden. It has even driven a new fundraising phenomenon - the garden tour. Attracting the voyeur in some and the show-off in others, garden tours can raise literally tens of thousands of dollars in a few hours, which sure beats endless raffle tickets and cake stalls.

Although on the surface, gardening is about imagination and creativity, like those who own plenty of cookbooks, we seem to make the same dishes over and over. Which is why the Ellerslie show will be chock full of brochure-grabbing, idea-hungry budding gardeners with money to burn who will end up merely creating the look of the moment.

In every sector there are always a few key trends that are slavishly followed and gardening is no exception. Remember the heavily concreted yards of the 50s and 60s featuring seals and gnomes? Being raised in Pakuranga in the 70s it seemed that bark was discovered en masse, thus popularising that ubiquitous brown and bland feel.

Today it seems that our new gardeners can't help falling for one of four standard looks - New Zealand native subtropical (ferns, bark and a few railway sleepers), Italian villa (imported paving stones and lions spouting water), the trendy inner-city succulent patch (all agaves and aloes) and the clipped English manor (shaped trees and boxed hedges).

These days the beauty of all this is that we can literally buy in a garden already grown. Although the traditional enthusiast may have windowsills choked with cuttings, the new house-and-garden set can fast-track the whole process.

It started with ready lawn - and now this "why wait?" mentality means we don't even have to suffer the inconvenience of waiting for things to establish or even getting our hands dirty. Plants are available to time lapse our garden over a few days.

Gardening is big business and the money flies out of our pockets at the garden centre. Strangely we don't feel as guilty spending up large at the garden centre as we do at other retail outlets. It is almost as if it is going to a good cause - it supports nature for goodness' sake. This justification sure helps when we are confronted with all the paraphernalia that goes with the hobby.

The basic equipment of trowels, a watering can and fertiliser is mere kindergarten equipment as keen gardeners talk of heating features, lighting design, and reticulation systems. Thus, although conceptually gardening embraces everyone, it can be intimidating for novices such as me.

It is not that it's a closed shop but enthusiasts cannot help casually breaking into Latin, assuming you know what they are going on about. They take a whole lot of gardening history and info for granted. For instance, this flower show is not even held in Ellerslie.

Gardening is one of the few tri-generational, gender-neutral activities that also crosses the socio-economic divide. In my quest to understand why gardening is so popular I discover consistent themes.

It seems gardening fulfils on three basic levels - exercise, entertainment, and escape. As one savvy punter put it - "Gardening? It's the new sex."