Art in Matakana
One couple combine their passion for art and love of plants in this unique Matakana garden.
Check out this garden designed to make art seem accessible and fun
Anthony Grant is a man with a mission. He wants to make art fun and interesting. To achieve this goal, he and his wife Sandra have spent the past 12 years creating a unique sculpture garden and museum, or Sculptureum as Anthony prefers to call it, in Matakana. Built on 25 hectares near Warkworth, the property includes six indoor galleries and three enclosed gardens, all designed to display the roughly 500 artworks and decorative objects that the couple have been collecting for more than 20 years. The interior galleries include works by Picasso, Chagall, Matisse and Cezanne while outside there are pieces by international and local sculptors such as John Ferguson and Richard Wedekind.
Then there are also pieces you might find in the studio of a local craftsperson. “Many of the pieces on display would not commonly be called ‘artworks’,” Anthony explains. “They are decorative works, not expensive. They are good fun, colourful and kids love them. That’s ultimately what’s happening here. It’s about making a garden more fun, interesting and enriching.”
He’s as passionate about landscape design as he is about art, and has visited many of the great gardens of the world. Indeed he named the Garden of Creative Diversity – one of the three main gardens in Sculptureum – as a gesture to Charles Jencks’ well-known Scottish masterpiece, the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. The other two main outdoor areas are the Palm Garden and the Pink Snail Garden, the latter named for the enormous pink plastic snails by the Cracking Art Group of Milan at its centre.
Anthony designed the layout, structures and planting (“everything in the place”) and says there was no overall plan. He preferred a more organic, some might say spontaneous, approach. “Generally the gardens have two styles: formal with trees planted in gravel and surrounded by clipped hedges; and more naturalistic areas with curved paths and swathes of vegetation.”
Planting started in 2007 but most of it has been done in the last few years. “In the Garden of Creative Diversity, I started with rocks but they looked too dull so I put figurative sculptures with them. Then I decided to plant palms to screen them from the road,” Anthony explains. “I come up with different ideas every day. Only some will come to fruition.”
The Garden of Creative Diversity has a kilometre of paths and comprises more than 40 areas or features. There’s a classical garden with clipped planting, statuary, fountains and geometric ponds while other areas have an intellectual focus featuring panels designed to encourage reflection on wisdom, gardens, inspiration, art and music. Seven panels are inscribed with quotations related to the question: What is art? “This feature embodies the main reason why I have created Sculptureum,” he muses. “My aim is for it to be unlike any art gallery you have ever seen. There’s a wide range of different forms of art incorporating a diverse array of materials on display, much more than what you’d see in most municipal art galleries. It’s designed to give people an introduction to a huge variety of different forms of art. I hope that some people who find art too confusing will see things they like or it will rekindle an interest in art.”
“Many of the pieces on display would not commonly be called ‘artworks’,” Anthony says. “But it is about making a garden more fun, interesting and enriching.”
Because the Garden of Creative Diversity is close to the road and theft is always a concern (“although there are cameras everywhere and very good security”), it mainly features big works, many of which are set in concrete. “There’s also a lot of rock that’s millions of years old and works made from driftwood,” he points out. “Some of this work is quite a bit cheaper, to show people they don’t have to spend a fortune to have art in their gardens.”
The giant rocks are from Puhipuhi in Northland. Anthony saw some of them for sale on the roadside while driving past Hikurangi one day and was so intrigued he’s bought several over the years. It’s not just their aesthetic beauty that attracted him; he felt they could help encourage New Zealanders to appreciate the natural features of their own country. “I think it’s all wrong that people only traipse off to Europe to see gardens and landscape. We should be encouraging them to use the unique landscape elements that we have here.”
Nevertheless, he is a great admirer of European formal gardens and created the Classical Garden area to illustrate the different kinds of physical imagery in classical art. On display here are formal rectangular ponds, a series of wall fountains, Florentine ceramics, nymphs and the Courtyard of the Lions, another playful nod to a famous courtyard of the same name at the Alhambra in Granada.
In contrast to the rectilinear lines of the Classical Garden, most of the paths and gardens have organic shapes, inspired by Central Park in New York which has
One reason why Anthony used so many palms in the garden was due to the tall trunks, which allow him to position different works at various heights.
nearly 97km of curving paths. “Frederick Olmsted deliberately designed the paths in Central Park so that people wouldn’t rush, they’d take their time going through the park. I put a lot of effort into the shapes of these curves until I was happy with them. I’d spray the proposed shape 30 times or more before was I satisfied. When people see them, they tend to like them. They know the shapes are natural and look right.”
Many of the curved paths wind through the Palm Garden, where works made of ceramics, metal and glass are displayed along with hundreds of palms.
Anthony’s passion for palm trees began when he was the owner of a boggy site on Waiheke Island. The property was frequently inundated with water and when he realised that they helped dry the site out, he planted hundreds of palms. “I love their shape, the tall stems. You can do a lot of close planting with palms as all their vegetation is at the top. Soon we’ll be planting orchids and other epiphytes below the canopy. I started with queen palms as they’re fast growing, about a metre a year. But they are very surface-rooted and the ground gets saturated here. We have a high water table. Plus it gets very windy so they rocked about and didn’t do well. Several hundred have survived though. I also presumed there were no frosts north of Waiheke but in our first year
here in Matakana, we had 17 frosts. I lost several hundred bangalow palms in a matter of days. I also lost up to 400 n¯ikau palms to frost two years in a row.”
More recently, they’ve used faster-growing fishtail palms ( Caryota sp) and Pitt Island nˉikau ( Rhopalostylis
sapida), which is much larger than the mainland varieties and grows much faster. “They also have a deep tap root so are more stable. However they are frost sensitive so we have to use frost netting on the young plants in winter.”
There’s no lawn in the Palm Garden; instead, dwarf mondo grass ( Ophiopogon japonicus ‘Nana’) has been planted throughout. “Ordinary grass is far too hard to mow. The upfront costs of dwarf mondo grass are horrific and it can take a long time to establish but now that it has, it works very well.”
Many of Anthony’s planting choices are based purely on what he likes – and this has not always worked well, he admits. In the Pink Snail Garden he decided to plant London plane trees ( Platanus x acerifolia). “I like them and they remind me of Paris and London, European streets. I planted 50 or more in the Inspirational Garden. They’re fast growing, about 1.5m a year, and they look great, but I only found out through this process that they are quite brittle. A number of them have broken in half on at least two or three occasions because we are exposed to strong winds here. And because of the high water table, which is only 60cm below ground in places, a number have died from phytophthora.”
Anthony says it’s also important to think about concealment and surprise with art and other focal points.
Seasonality was a big factor in his planting choices. Hundreds of roses, especially carpet varieties, are planted in the Sculptureum gardens along with a miniature variety called ‘Chameleon’ that has different coloured flowers – yellow, orange, pink and red – on each plant. The carpet roses are covered with flowers six to eight months a year but the ‘Chameleon’ roses are not quite as floriferous. Rhododendron, walls of wisteria as well as thousands of daffodils, irises and freesias create interest throughout the year. “I wanted to plant lots of flowers so people would come for the seasonal changes and the colour. Along the main driveway and the stream, I planted thousands of ‘King Alfred’ daffodils. We’re experimenting with planting them at different depths so you have flowers emerging at different times as Monet did in his garden at Givenchy.”
One of the trickiest things about using art in the garden is how to display it properly. Selecting the appropriate plants, security, lighting, sensitivity to UV, exposure to wind and rain – there are many factors to consider. One of the reasons why Anthony used so many palms in the garden was due to their tall trunks which allow him to position different works at various heights. “Their shapes are not disproportionate to the art, they give it stature. I have several metres of free space beneath
the canopy of the palms to display things. In the Palm Garden I had to experiment with different structures – plinths and other supports – to display the art. I had many different mock-ups made. It took a few years to make them all.”
Anthony says it’s also important to think about concealment and surprise with art and other focal points although this, of course, depends on how big your garden is. The placement of the driftwood elephants by Whanganui artist Jack Marsden-Mayer is a case in point. “I designed it so you approach the work via a curved pathway which leads into a hedged courtyard, ensuring you have no idea of what lies ahead.”
The height of an artwork is often critical, he continues. “Big works are so much more impressive if you place them significantly above the ground. When I first saw the driftwood elephants, for instance, they were sitting at ground level. Crazy. I raised them onto a substantial pedestal framed with old sleepers about a metre high so they could be seen properly. I planted a canopy of Oriental plane trees in the courtyard around them and surrounded the courtyard with green hedges, 10 park benches and a large fountain. It’s now a very special area in the garden. If you want to have art in the garden, it’s worth taking the time to do it well.”
How to visit:
Sculptureum is located at 40 Omaha Flats Road, Matakana. Open from Thursday-Monday, 10am-5pm. For more information, visit sculptureum.nz.