Christchurch woman Colleen Foley-Smith has poured seven decades of creative thought into her dreamy streamside garden.
A bountiful garden is the culmination of seven decades of creative thought
They say it takes seven years to create a garden, but Colleen Foley-Smith’s streamside garden in Christchurch is the culmination of seven decades of wisdom and experience. Two years ago, Colleen and her husband David bought an empty 1040sqm section upstream from Riccarton Bush with one resolve.
“I wanted to build my dream house and plant my dream garden,” says Colleen. “Architecture and gardens are my absolute passions, and at this stage of the journey I know what I like and where my strengths lie.”
Colleen’s journey began with a childhood filled with music and flowers. Her father was a singer and mother a piano accompanist. They later ran hotels and Colleen remembers sitting with her mother arranging flowers in foyers. Her 20s were spent raising five boys – by the end of that decade, on her own. In her 30s, she trained as a teacher and went on to work for Barnados as a day-care coordinator. But she hankered to do something more creative and in her 40s, by now married to David, she studied interior design at polytech. In her 50s, Colleen added an art history degree to her repertoire, and when she turned 60 started training and working as a florist.
Along the way, she has developed a number of gardens, but always ones inherited from others. “With this section I had the opportunity to start from scratch and express the intrinsic me,” she says.
Colleen is a devotee of Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf, a leading figure in the New Perennial movement and responsible for New York’s High Line park. He favours block groupings of colour and texture with interest throughout the seasons. (He famously said, “A plant isn’t worth growing if it doesn’t look good when it is dead.”) Oudolf also maintains that one should not try to copy nature but give “a feeling of nature”. >
That is just what Colleen has achieved. With the help of landscape designer Dan Rutherford, she has transformed the stark plot into a sea of soft form and colour reminiscent of a Monet painting in a palette of purples and blues with greys, greens and rusty highlights.
Dan designed the garden after poring over Colleen’s dossier of notes, pictures and lists of favoured plants. “Colleen is clear about what she loves and has been planning this garden all her life, so it’s been a pleasure helping her make her dreams come true,” he says.
The garden’s ethereal mood is set with a gently curved floating boardwalk leading to the front door, and continues out the other side with timber stepping stones through the planting and an elevated walkway to the water’s edge. “You are connected to the garden but it’s a really light touch, as if you are tiptoeing through the landscape,” says Dan. The boardwalks, decks and pergolas are stained charcoal as a dark foil for Colleen’s colours.
The garden was always integral to the design of the Hinuera stone house and Dan worked closely with architect Charlie Nott to ensure they were in harmony. A feature central to both is Colleen’s much-loved glass garden studio in the paved courtyard. “It’s where I can do what I like when I like. I turn on my classical music and indulge in my flower fantasies.” >
A massive amount of preparation went into modifying the site. “There was a steep lawn with a big retaining wall between the land and water,” says Dan. “We dropped that right down and put in a rock embankment with planting to the water’s edge.” That involved moving digger-loads of land, separating out the topsoil, and bringing in 40 tonnes of rock.
When planting among rocks, it was all the more important that the soil was nutritious and moisture-retentive. “I trained as a geologist so I love this side of things,” says Dan, who has developed an accelerated planting system that ensures plants not only grow quickly but are strong and resilient.
This garden might have been seven decades in the conception, but it won’t take the customary seven years to come to fruition. “It’s just over a year old but its growth belies that fact. It’s like a herbaceous border on steroids,” says Colleen, who couldn’t be happier with her garden. “It’s even more than I envisaged. We feel pretty blessed. We are surrounded by beauty.”