Help me with this plant!

Matt.. They do make good plants to fill a front garden space I will say, but sometime we need to tidy them up a bit.. We recently had some New Zealand people in our village who did a house swap with some keen gardeners in our village.. They too were keen gardeners & we had some brilliant informal garden talks & demonstrations in some of our gardens around the village in the months they were here.. They showed us how to trim them back & also told us all about how The phormium (new Zealand Flax) is a very sacred plant to the Maori people historically it has and continues to be used for weaving. In fact there is such a thing as the ‘Maori police” The new Zealand flax is so sacred that in one botanical garden which I visited “Maori police” would check on these plants to make sure they had not been pruned incorrectly and often they would supervise the pruning on designated days. Of course here in the UK we don’t need to worry about the plant police, but you may want to follow a similar rule. The general rule is to prune in late spring and remove any dead or damaged leaves all the way to the base. In fact, you will usually find large, linear leaves, each folded into a V-shape with 5-7 shoots on each leaf. To reduce in size remove several of the outer shoots on either side of the main ‘V’ leaf leaving the 3 central shoots. Do this on many of the outer V-shaped leaves as desired all over the Phormium. Oh & never "top" flax as the leaves will never grow back into a point again.. Soo hope that helps you out a bit.. :thumb:

 

:thumb: I have to say I find it a slightly strange plant to hold sacred & go to such lengths for, but who am I to question such a tradition..!:dh:

 

:hehe: Oh Ziggy.. You can always make us smile it seems... ! :D Yes Aaron please do ask your nephew then, but I expect you are right though, it is a very useful plant to them... :thumb: