Italian style by the Auckland seaside

A formal garden well worth the nearly 30-year wait.

dianeShe likes a relaxed kind of formality, and her priority for this garden was for it to be a space that people would be drawn to spend lots of time in…

Davidson is a perfectionist. She strives for symmetry and balance in a garden – hedges that are precisely clipped, trees that are neatly pleached and plants that look flawless. “I’m quite a stickler about everything,” she confesses. However, in the four years since Diane created a formal Italian-style garden in the seaside Auckland suburb of St Heliers, she has had to accept that plants don’t always behave the way you want them to.

“I thought I could go against nature, but I’ve learnt that I can’t,” she admits. “Nature does in the end dictate, and you have to compromise, sometimes quite a bit.”

Diane has waited a long time for this garden. For 29 years, she and her husband Nigel lived and worked in an Auckland motel they owned, and while it had landscaped grounds, it didn’t pay to get too attached to what was growing in them.

“I remember once putting in a whole lot of plants out the front, and it looked really beautiful, then the next day finding someone had come along, pulled them out and strewn them around,” says Diane. “At the motel you always had to be practical, and accept that guests might have children who would race in and trample over things. So to have this garden now is lovely.

I think we enjoy it so much because we didn’t have this sort of freedom for so many years.”

Diane’s style is traditional. She likes a relaxed kind of formality, and her priority for this garden was for it to be a space that people would be drawn to spend lots of time in, with areas to gather, low walls to perch on and the sound of water tinkling in fountains.

Since she is a long-time breeder of Persian and exotic cats, Diane also wanted their area to blend seamlessly with the rest of the garden.

Landscape designer Robin Shafer came up with the initial plan to transform what was previously a leafy but unremarkable section. Her vision has been invaluable as a foundation, but Diane couldn’t resist getting creative.

All the elements of an Italian-style formal garden are here: symmetry, stoneware, promenades, water and manicured evergreen plants. The two buxus-filled Italian pots on either side of the steps are investment pieces from Ambience Interiors. Like all the plants in Diane Davidson’s garden, the weeping cherry trees are pruned fiercely so they don’t hide the layers of green beneath.

Diane gives her potted Bubblegum petunias a serious haircut several times in a season and so gets multiple flowerings.

The pergola is planted with grapevines to attract the birds.