North Island
Jennie Chillingworth's garden is an unexpected delight on the bank of the Whanganui River
Down by the riverside in Whanganui there’s a wonderfully wild creation
On the sweeping, sunny, sheltered slopes near the house, close planting and surprising combinations of colour and texture are the preferred strategies
If the Whanganui River could talk, it’d have a tale or two to tell. The nation’s second-longest stretch of water had been a highway and food source for generations of Maori before European settlers arrived, and more recently the prospect of a canoe journey or cycle trip along its bushclad bends have attracted scores of visitors. Jennie Chillingworth, meanwhile, is crafting a different sort of story on its banks, with her ever-evolving garden, Ohorere. Loosely translated from Maori to mean “unexpected”, this place of peace and beauty at Papaiti, about 20 minutes out of the city, certainly has more to offer than your typical Kiwi country garden. The style is loose and rather lovely, with great swathes of perennials, roses, shrubs and trees, a highly productive orchard and vege garden, and the odd rebellious splash of tropical colour thrown in for good measure.
When Jennie and her husband Mark bought this 0.6ha lifestyle block 15 years ago, the garden had plenty of mature trees and sweeping lawns, as well as rhodos, roses and camellias. But thrips took the shine off the rhodos and the roses weren’t the heritage varieties that Jennie loves, so out they all came. The lawns were retained to anchor the colonial cottage-style home in the landscape, and they also kept a vast liriodendron by the gate, but many of the original trees were cut down to bring in more light, or were lost during winter storms.
On the sweeping, sunny, sheltered slopes near the house – where Jennie and Mark did all the digging, hard landscaping and put in steps – close planting and surprising combinations of colour and texture are the preferred strategies. One of the standouts is a dense clump of Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firedance’, which provides beautiful foliage topped with tall spikes of bright red flowers for a good three months from summer to autumn. Ceratostigma willmottianum (plumbago) provides an attractive groundcover with bright blue flowers and leaves that turn red from early autumn. Bee-friendly dry-lovers Achillea millefolium ‘Terracotta’ and Verbena bonariensis float and waft in the gaps, adding height and attracting “enormous bumbles”.
Rosa ‘Blush Noisette’ delivers its heady scent with repeat-flowering throughout the season and Japanese anemones spread freely, as is their wont. “They’re such thugs. I hate them the rest of the year, but in late summer, they’re lovely,” says Jennie.
Orange Canna ‘Tropicanna’ is the loudest, liveliest guest at this particular party, though not unwelcome. By winter, the remaining seed heads and stalks sparkle in the frost, and Berberis ‘Helmond Pillar’ provides height. The effect is always relaxed rather than prescriptive. “There are no rules," says Jennie. “I hate rules; I’ll put flax in with cottage garden-style perennials, because I like to mix colours and textures. That’s the fun of it.”
Once flowering is over, Jennie’s plants are left to their own devices. “I like the different forms, seedheads and contrast – and I just don’t have time for deadheading.”
The difficulty for Jennie, as with many keen gardeners, is knowing what to leave out. “The close planting and mulching suppresses the weeds, but it’s a challenge to
“There are no rules. I hate rules; I’ll put flax in with cottage garden-style perennials, because I like to mix up colours and textures. That’s the fun of it”
find space – I’m always buying new plants like salvias, echinaceas, achilleas and asters.” If this sounds suspiciously like a yen for prairie-style planting, think again. “I prefer the contrast of grasses with something a bit bolder, so for me it’s more about mixing it up.” Jennie has been engrossed in Lawrie Metcalf’s book
Cultivation of New Zealand Native Grasses and is taking her garden in a different, more low-maintenance direction, recent additions including more flaxes, chionochloa and silver tussock ( Poa cita). “We’re looking to put in more grasses throughout the garden, because there’s such a vast range and I’d like to explore them and experiment a bit. I love their form and the movement they create – plus they’re just so hardy.” Natives are sourced from Pukerau Nursery and the Taupo Native Plant Nursery; Jennie loves those that flower and provide an essential food source for the resident tui and bellbirds.
Another source of inspiration, advice and beautiful plants is Sue Hill, who runs the nursery Ravenhill and previously worked at Coton Manor garden in the UK. “She’s a great friend and I’ve learned an awful lot from her,” says Jennie. “We share a passion for perennials.”
Jennie has been a local convenor for Heritage Roses New Zealand. “I just love heritage roses’ grace and form,” she says. Among the varieties dotted around Ohorere are ‘Mutabilis’, ‘Maiden’s Blush’, ‘Blanc Double de Coubert’, ‘Aimée Vibert’, ‘Tuscany Superb’ and the white climber ‘Lamarque’, all of which are treated to regular feed and mulch in the form of mushroom compost and pea straw.
The soil here is sandy loam over pumice, which drains freely and is great in winter, but less so when drought hits in summer. The Chilling worths share a bore with three of their neighbours. “To do any decent watering we have to run the pump, so mulching is a high priority,” says Jennie. “We have our own mulcher for the smaller stuff and each year hire a big one for larger branches that can’t be used as firewood.”
Regular frosts naturally kill off most of the bugs that love the roses, so Jennie doesn’t have to spray, although bronze beetle has been the scourge of Whanganui gardens this past summer, so she sprayed them and the cranesbill geraniums with pyrethrum. The cold winters help spring bulbs perform well here, particularly the tulips backed by an old philadelphus that still flowers profusely.
A forestry block protects the garden from the northwesterlies and the hill behind the house shields it from the worst of prevailing westerlies. Still, it sometimes suffers in winter’s extreme cold – down to -5°C – and in the fairly hot, humid summers. It’s the river and its languid waters that have posed the greatest challenge in the Chilling worths’ years of gardening here, however. The city’s residents have come to expect regular flooding, but the June 2015 flood was the worst on record, with
Ensete ventricosum ‘Maurelii’, with Phormium ‘Dusky Chief’ in the foreground and Nandina domestica ‘Gulf Stream’ on the right much of Whanganui’s CBD awash. Upriver at Ohorere, water covered the road and rose as far as the gazebo. The evergreen shrubs below the house – camellias, hydrangeas, rhodos and cistus – were the hardest hit.
High winds and a good spring dried out almost everything in the intervening months, but the soil in the lower part of the garden remained congested for the better part of a year. After the water receded, it left behind a layer of silt, which was full of weed seeds and broken willow branches that started sprouting.
“There was no point getting upset, it’s just part of life by the river,” says Jennie. Instead, she and Mark created silt terraces and as an experiment planted Rugosa roses, rosemary and grasses, which are doing well. Hellebores, hostas and rosy-leaf sage ( Salvia involucrata ‘Bethellii’) also perform well in the shade here. Another positive side effect of the 2015 flood is that it drowned the resident snail population. “The hostas have never been better!”
Like any garden, weeds are ongoing problem. The deep-rooted horsetail grass left behind after the flood is particularly bad by the stream. And recently warmer, more humid summers have encourage swathes of passionvine to multiply, which the couple spray.
Other casualties of the changing weather have been the formal hedges, previously a drawcard for visitors to the garden. Box blight wiped out the lot – possibly encouraged by the tall perennials drooping artfully and lethally over them. Nearer the gate and riverside there’s sufficient airflow to permit a few closely clipped hedges to encircle beautiful old varieties of hydrangea and a flowering cherry. This autumn, Jennie is trying to restore order and a sense of form by putting in some ‘Aussie Box’ (westringia) hedges.
There’s an impressive orchard and vege patch here too. With their children now living up north, the couple has
Another positive side effect of the 2015 flood is that it drowned the resident snail population. “The hostas have never been better!”
cut back on the veges a bit so there aren’t any gluts to contend with in the heat of summer. Still, each year they harvest baskets of apples, as well as peaches, plums, nectarines, mandarins, lemons, currants and raspberries. Free-range chooks keep the trees well fertilised and fairly bug-free, and the manure from the chicken coop is excellent for getting the compost working, says Jennie.
Heading into the gully are Phlomis russeliana – another great perennial for year-round interest – as well magnolia and Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Raspberry Crush’, whose mophead flowers start out blood red and turn deep burgundy as the season progresses. Jennie is enthusiastic about this hydrangea, explaining that unlike other varieties, the colour is reliable regardless of the soil. The deep green, lush foliage is an added bonus, and it too takes on a deep red hue later in summer. Hydrangeas are a favourite plant of Jennie’s: “I’ve brought them with me over the years, every time we’ve moved house.”
Jennie has been bitten by the tropical-plant bug too, as evidenced by the huge gunnera and hot orange hedychium clustered around a creek downhill from the house. (Aware of their somewhat weedy reputation, she’s at pains to state that the seed heads are carefully removed each year.) For a garden that can get heavy frosts, they’re surprisingly resilient. A non-fruiting banana is wrapped up each winter, but other exotics, such as a rather glamorous datura and a taro ( Colocasia
esculenta) are left to fend for themselves. In general, Jennie is undeterred by the cold winters. “If you believe everything you read, you’d never try half the plants that we have here. Lots of things will come back, even after a hard frost.”
How to visit: Ohorere is open to garden clubs by appointment only. Please phone 06 342 5848 or email manjchill@inspire.net.nz.