The house rests innocently at the top of a gentle rise. But breast the slope and a magnificent view of the lake, town and Mt Tauhara unfolds
an alarm clock in our house – we get woken by the birds at 6.30am, even on a winter morning. They are so beautiful,” Jill says. A tall Banksia integrifolia, one of the first trees they planted, is a big attraction and its flowers are a favourite for the tuis, as are the flowering gums. Being autumn when NZ Gardener visits, there are plenty of fallen leaves on the path: “I throw them into the back of the borders, which saves work and provides a mulch at the same time,” Jill explains.
Emerging from the woodland, the garden changes. There we spy a spectacular piece of wood that had been rescued from a bonfire on a nephew’s farm halfway to Rotorua; it sat on a truck for three days until they decided how to use it. Low herbaceous groundcovers together with small cones of buxus are the perfect foil for this unusual ornament.
A mature specimen of the hybrid Magnolia ‘Yellow Bird’ sits on the lawn nearby. The Lloyds are justly proud of this small tree and although it is deciduous, spring brings a rush of bright yellow, goblet-shaped blooms; it is the perfect small accent tree.
Nearby Jill has artfully combined the yellow colouring of the magnolia with the white of a paved circle of standard ‘Iceberg’ roses. This seems to be the only formal area in the garden. Nigel’s commanding steel sculpture of a garden trowel – copied from a picture once seen in an English gardening magazine – stands at the end of this lawn. Nigel fashioned this over a year from the deck of an old steel truck although the Lloyds had to hire a crane to lift it from the road into the garden.“It symbolises our commitment to the land,” Jill says.
Apart from Nigel’s trowel there are few other ornaments in the garden. Pride of place, perhaps, is an ancient seed drill that is almost overgrown with