I'd think your climate might be closer to that of the Bay area of California rather than to WA state :-) It does get cold here, often well below freezing, and we can get varying amounts of snow, depending on location. And if your hardiness zone info is accurate, you are definitely in a much milder location. While a great many southern hemisphere plants grow here, including many from NZ, a lot are also of questionable hardiness. We lost a great many NZ plants this past winter, including hebes, phormiums and pittosporums to name a few.

And while you are more than welcome to join any of the discussions here or at the California forums, there IS a GW site specific to Australia and New Zealand that may be more to the point for you :-)

Here is a link that might be useful: GardenWeb Australia

I agree with Gardengal48. While the areas west of our Cascade Mountains is considerably milder than the areas east of those mountains, we do get zapped with freezing temps most winters...sometimes rather severely. And we do get brief periods of snow/ice most winters. Our summer temps sound a lot like yours, although less windy most of the time.

I remember reading that New Zealand, our Pacific Northwest and Great Britain are amongst the best areas in the world for gardening...a very wide range of plants can be grown in these areas.

I've passed through Aukland twice, enroute to Melbourne. Unfortunately, I've never had the pleasure of making NZ my destination.

Thanks, people.
Newark's clmate does look more like mine.
I have to remember US descriptions like 'cool, moist' might tranlate to NZ as 'freezing, snow'!
Unfortunately the NZ forum is very quiet, so it's tempting to go where the action is...but of course I should put effort into my figurative as well as literal back yard...so I'll go and introduce myself over there.

Hi pippimac
I have been to your wonderful counrty twice, both times on garden tours. I would say Western Washington is a bit more like Dunedin and the west coast of the lower island of New Zealand. Driving around the west coast of the South Island, it felt like I could have been back in Washington if it weren't for those wonderful tree ferns growing wild in the forest. We can't grow those very well without considerable effort to protect them over the winter! I agree that your climate around Wellington is much closer to the San Francisco Bay area. I too have grown a lot NZ plants only to have lost many this last winter. What I didn't loose will take a while to look good again but I will keep at it. NZ has a fantastic gardening climate and I love their native plants. Cheers

An important difference, touched on above is that even in colder areas you do not get Arctic fronts there, due to the greater amount of salt water relative to land mass in the southern hemisphere.

When we get those it is both cold and dry at the same time.

Not only that, everything in New Zealand grows upside down.

I say post on pippimac! How lucky we would be to have someone from a roughly similar climate sharing home-grown info on the New Zealand native plants that we love to grow here. I'm sure you could learn a lot here as well as teach us a lot. Welcome!

Thanks pepperdude, I've never hung out on a forum before; the idea of ineracting with people who grow things 'upside down' (ha ha ian wa) is really interesting, as long as I keep the enormous continent/small island thing in mind.
Of course natives just 'do their thing'round here! They thrive on neglect, dry, and poor soil, which i have plenty of! Ask away though, please. Extreme cold's obviously something I know nothing about, although i am wearing a scarf right now.
Wellington's the closest capital to Antarctica (now there's a handy fact!) What bboy says about lots of ocean affecting climate makes sense, though we've been treated to the obligatory news coverage of sheep 'Down South' wading through the season's first snow (please, no sheep jokes; we've suffered enough!)
Apparently the settlers thought NZ was a tropical paradise or something, and ditched all that old-fashioned insulation. I am the proud, but freezing owner of a 100 year old wooden icebox, Cute but deadly... excuse my weather obsession, a two-week Southerly front'll do that to anyone.

pippimac - maybe you could start my education on the climate kiwi native plants grow in by telling me if you have much of a summer rain pattern? You alluded to dry soil and here in the NW we are definitely a summer dry climate. It is one of the limiting factors of plant growth here along with, and sometimes more limiting than, winter "cold". Our low temps of 0 to 10F make gardeners in most of the rest of the country laugh.

Of course it's easy to remedy by watering - but not necessarily cheap or responsible to over-use the resource. We do well by adding plants to our gardens from summer-dry climates, but I just don't know a lot of other temperate climates like that. If NZ is similar in that way I will have to look closer at your flora.

A large number of New Zealand native plants I could describe as moderately drought tolerant for the Pacific Northwest... including many Hebes, Carex, Olearia, Pittosporum, Pseudopanax, Astelia and others. I think it's better to grow these plants a little bit on the dry side as it may help their cold tolerance. I can personally attest that Olearia x haastii, Corokia cotoneaster and C. macrocarpa can handle any amount of summer drought in our climate without being watered.

New Zealand sure does have a lot of intriguing native plants and I would agree that cold tolerance is the main limiting factor for growing most of them here. I would love to have Agathis australis, Metrosideros, tree ferns, Knightia excelsa, Brachyglottis repanda, Rhopalostylis sapida, or Pseudopanax lessonii in my garden but they really aren't cold hardy enough to have a chance here. Mostly though I'm envious of the NZ climate for its ability to accommodate non-natives and especially Protea family plants of which we have relatively few to choose from for our climate.

What Ian said...
Despite rumours otherwise, NZ is quite dry in summer- my folks live on the West Coast of the South Island (no fancy-shmancy names for us..) and ran out of water this summer.
We've seen some pretty severe droughts in the last few years. Historically the West sides of the islands have been significantly wetter, capturing rain and leaving the East dry, but since we seem to be getting 'hundred year' droughts and floods every couple of years. Damn Climate Change. Anyway, despite our small landmass, NZ's soo long and thin it goes from sub-tropical up North, with some (NZ style) desert in the middle to sub-antarctic down South.
A lot of natives succumb to phytopthera if too wet, even the tree ferns and other 'tropical' looking plants.
Like Ian, i highly recommend hebes- they are TOUGH- I don't know what your access to NZ plants is like, but if they have the 'wiri' cultivars, they are really stunning.
Astelia is one of my favourites. Very hardy, dramatic pale green and silver spear-shaped leaves. Astelia fragrans...need i say more?
How about the Caprosma and muehlenbeckia families. Maybe a bit of an aquired taste; divarcating, very 'architectural'. I love em!
I think heat and dry would't be a problem. Months of freezing...not so sure. Of course alpine plants would cope, as it's blimmin boiling up those mountains in summer!

Coprosma, relatively new in the marketplace here, uniformly turned up their toes during this past winter. They are stunning foliage plants due to their unique coloring and I wouldn't hesitate to use them in containers but I wouldn't take any bets on their longterm hardiness here :-) The wire vines (Muehlenbeckia axillaris, complexa, etc.) seem to fair much better. Also great container plants and appear to be quite hardy in the ground as well. I recall a very large, well-established planting at Kubota Gardens (that surprised me with the extent of its upward growth - at least 9'!) and a somewhat rampant planting of the same at a client's Mercer Island garden. They seem to lose some foliage in winter but bounce back rapidly.

I had to battle vigorously-growing wire vine that I planted in a small-scale backyard planting a few years back. It was too vigorous for the space I gave it. Seems like it makes a great, larger-scale groundcover in the Puget Sound trough. Not for the faint-of-heart (and small-of-garden) though!

I am curious as to what zone you are in? I am in zone 5. I am interested in growing the fuchsia tree here. Do you think it would grow? It does get below 0 here at times in the winter. I live in Ohio, but actually in a pocket of zone 6, but most of Ohio is zone 5. Any hints would help.

Sorry, no chance in USDA 5. Not sure the fuchsia would even make it through the summer there, let alone the winter.

i went to college in one of those NE Ohio pockets that are listed as zone 6. i remember it getting down to -30 one winter. my room mate and i got in his car to go to the mall since our house was about 40 degrees inside with the heat blasting. he went to shift his car in reverse and the shifter snapped off.

fuchsia weather? bring them inside!