A hushed haven lush with foliage and old-fashioned flowers hides behind high hedges on a busy Auckland city road.
A hushed haven lush with foliage and old-fashioned flowers hides behind high hedges on a busy city road
There’s something delightfully old school about Martin Keay. A professional gardener in the unsentimental Big Smoke of Auckland, he doesn’t juggle cellphone and secateurs – because he doesn’t have a cellphone. “Well, I do own one,” he says. “I just don’t use it. It’s here somewhere. People know that they can leave me a message at home and I’ll always get back to them.”
Email? Nope. But his wife, graphic designer Donna Hoyle, will get a message to him. “When I retire I’ll get organised,” he says. “I’m just too busy.”
Endearingly eccentric, Martin is not one to brag about his own garden. In fact, he’s extremely reticent about opening the gate to strangers. His Sandringham garden is so well shielded that you could drive past and never know it exists.
But once you’re inside the double privacy layer of tall acmena hedge and rock wall and unlatch the solid wooden gates, you enter a hushed world of green. Thanks to the sound-absorbing qualities of hedge and wall, you could be in the country rather than on one of the city’s most congested thoroughfares. “We come in off this busy road to quite a nice oasis in the city.”
Though the garden is a mere 760sqm, it feels generous and uncrowded, because of Martin’s clever design. He has matched open spaces with tight turns and narrow passageways, the better to slow your pace and make you look down at plants carefully chosen for that particular spot. This is a garden to be savoured slowly, like a special wine.
Martin’s is a cool garden, shaded by towering trees along the perimeter, with a keyhole cut into one on the north to let in a few rays of sun. A garden seat gives the dawdler a view across the flower garden to the other rock wall boundary. >
The front garden is divided by paths that cross in the middle, centred on the front door. Symmetry is the key to its success: on the left, two beds lined with Japanese box house a plantsman’s dream collection of old fashioned flowers in shades of green and white – plants such as bells of Ireland (Moluccella laevis), Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota) or green tobacco (Nicotiana alata). You’ll rarely find them in garden centres now, he sighs.
Nothing is chosen at random. “I’m a plantsman and a collector. I love unusual plants.” In fact, he feels an obligation to grow (and sell for charity) the rare and overlooked.
High health is the order of the day in the rustling greenery: the ground here is blessed with deep volcanic soil, and compost is his friend. Martin recycles every banana skin, weed and leaf, as well as vege peelings, to which he adds a bag or two of horse manure to keep three bins churning.
Layers of trees left unclipped are a signature look. “If you go into a garden where everything is perfect you can’t relax,” he explains. “I love shabby in the garden.” Except when it comes to hard surfaces; he’s used stone paving because it lasts longer. >
‘If you go into a garden where everything is perfect you can’t relax’
“You’ve got to pretend you’re going to be here forever. You’ve got to have a commitment. I thought we might be here for 10 years because we were going to move to Dunedin.” After 22 years, that decision has been shelved.
Martin says he was born a gardener. He gardened his way through a degree in art history in the spade and wheelbarrow era. “There were no diggers. It was very hard work.” And when the mud got too much he became a nurseryman at a garden centre. “Then one of my customers asked if I would like his garden round. I’ve never looked back. And never advertised.”
One client and mentor was Nancy Steen, the champion of heritage roses. “I learned so much from her.”
Martin still works in the Nancy Steen rose garden in Parnell, and although heritage roses had their moment in the 1980s, Martin lives in hope that they’ll come back into fashion. “But then my style is not fashionable. I like soft planting, blurring the lines. It’s good to show people what can be done in a small section,” he says. “Not all gardens have to be the same. This is better for the environment, for the bees. It’s a nice, friendly, healthy garden that gives us and our friends pleasure.”