How a Masterton paddock became a magical garden.

Bewitched by the country, these gardeners have woven a special spell

Fresh snow on the mountains, the sound of the rushing Waingawa River and a beautiful grove of native bush filled with tōtara trees were the enchantments that drew Adrienne Hewitt and Grant Allan to their 2ha block of Masterton farmland, which was otherwise, says Adrienne, just a paddock.

They confess it was an impulse buy. “We didn’t know if we wanted to live here because we were city people really. We thought, we’ll give it a year and see how we like it.” They have now been at Tarata, named after the lemonwoods they planted, for 25 years.

At first Adrienne and Grant simply came up at the weekends and planted shelter belts. Then, armed with a $7.50 plan from Popular Mechanics magazine, they asked “a lovely guy who lives down the road”, who just happened to be a joiner, to build them a weekender home. At that stage, daughter Mirren was three and son Jack just two.

Since then both the garden and the house have grown in leaps and bounds, although not all at once. “When the children were young, we didn’t really do anything except plant trees,” says Adrienne. Busy parents everywhere will know that feeling.

Watching the city folk carefully plant out their $1 tree seedlings was highly amusing for the locals. “Derek, a farmer, said: ‘What are you planting there?’ ‘We’re planting tōtara, Derek.’ ‘Ahh,’ said Derek. ‘Planning on living a long time, are you?’” It’s not just the Wairarapa climate that tends towards the dry.

And their landscaping design? That, the couple say somewhat self-deprecatingly, sprang from the “magic path”. To get round the property through the long grass (“it was up to the window ledges,” says Adrienne), they cut a path with a hand mower. As the children were very young, the family christened it the magic path. “You could see the kids as they ran around, with their heads bobbing above the long grass,” says Grant.

Neighbours were happy to provide advice. Grant asked one how to keep the stock away from the trees. The neighbour replied, very deadpan: “Best plan, Grant, is not to have any stock.” “So we never had any stock.”

Rabbits were kept at bay with a famous rabbit repellent recipe recommended by the then Forestry Institute. Mix six eggs, 150ml of old acrylic paint and 600ml of water. Spray or paint it on the foliage of ornamentals (but not food crops), says Grant. It keeps hares and opossums off too.

They also read up on permaculture. The main thing they did, says Adrienne, was to position the areas that they went to most frequently right outside the house. “That really works well. The things

needing the most intensive work, the flower gardens and the vegetable gardens, are right here and it never feels overwhelming or too daunting.”

Which is why the chooks are beyond the vegetable garden, adds Grant. “So that as you get the eggs, you pass the vegetable garden and can see what needs doing.”

You wouldn’t recognise that bare paddock now. Tarata is a place of sudden enchantments, happy accidents and “plenty of places to sit down and drink wine” as Grant puts it. Almost every tree, statue or clearing in the bush has a name and a story attached. There’s the azalea that was a present from Mirren’s music teacher, who asked if she could get married among the tōtaras. And a bench hewn from a beautiful big old oak tree felled by a storm, that still has old musket pellets embedded in it. Adrienne’s favourite oak is one that grew from an acorn that Jack picked up from the school playground when he was about six. “He brought it home and looked after it. We call it Jack’s oak.”

Then there’s Grandad’s Clearing, a memorial garden not only to Grant’s dad but also to his muchmissed two sisters who passed away some years ago. With its dappled light and native birdsong, it is, he says, a place to think of those who have gone.

Although his dad enjoyed growing vegetables, it was Grant’s mum who was the real gardener. Anything he learned about gardening he reckons he picked up by osmosis from her.

“I do think that’s true,” says Adrienne. “Children, even if they’re not that interested when they’re young, if they see their parents gardening, I think they get a feeling for it.”

In fact Jack, now 26, still checks up on his parents’ gardening prowess. “Did you remember to put the comfrey leaves in with the potatoes?” he recently rang up to ask. Bit of a chip off the old tōtara, then.

Tarata was one of 13 gardens opened for the annual Pūkaha Wairarapa Garden Tour held in November to raise money for forest restoration at the Pūkaha National Wildlife Centre.

Q&A

Favourite new plant: Flowering dogwood. (Grant) Best tip for gardeners: You can never plant trees too soon. (Grant)

I’ve learned through experience: It’s a great idea to label things. It’s surprising how soon some names escape you. (Adrienne)

Any environmentally friendly tips to deal with weeds: Use grass clippings as mulch but spread thinly or they turn to mush quite quickly. (Adrienne)

Our biggest gardening mistake: Planting cabbage trees on lawns and pathways. We are forever picking up the leaves. (Adrienne)

Grant Allan and Adrienne Hewitt

THESE PAGES Adrienne Hewitt and Grant Allan’s 2ha garden on the fringes of Masterton is a mixture of tōtara bush and informal planting with touches of formality, such as the cherry avenue; Prunus ‘ShimidsuSakura’ (the moonlight cherry) lines the limestone path to the fountain, which was a gift from Grant’s late sister Jill; the fountain is backed by a camellia hedge ‘Paradise Joan’ whose foliage, says Adrienne, “just sparkles”; the fountain is on every day as the sound “is like always having company in the garden”.

THESE PAGES (from left) Grant and Adrienne under a pin oak (Quercus palustris), one of their many oak trees. The foliage of a claret ash (Fraxinus oxycarpa) frames this view of the cherry trees and the weekender house towards the tōtara bush that inspired the couple to buy the land; the garden is sited on a river valley terrace and though you catch only a glimpse of the Waingawa River, you can hear it rushing.

THESE PAGES (from left) Much of the paving in the courtyard was done many years ago by a friend who rolled up in his campervan to help Grant with the hard landscaping; to the left is Adrienne’s herb garden with white-flowering pyrethrum, tarragon and rosemary and to the right is a sage bush and a standard New Zealand cranberry (Myrtus ugni). California poppies (Eschscholzia californica) stud the wildflower meadow where there’s a restful place to sit under a houhere (lacebark tree).

THESE PAGES The garden owes much to local landscaper Paul August, says Grant: “We’d come up with the ideas and he’d gently steer us away from the bad ones,” but full credit goes to Paul for the outdoor wood fire and pizza oven area, enclosed by lonicera hedging and Boston ivy; being on a frame keeps the normally thuggish ivy in check; behind are feijoas, Adrienne’s glasshouse, citrus trees and soft fruit cages.

THIS PAGE (from top) Box hedges enclose the potager and horticultural mesh protects potatoes from psyllid bugs; the glasshouse was Adrienne’s 50th birthday present, recycled from an old commercial glasshouse. Looking from the upper deck over the cherries to the Tararua Range. OPPOSITE Every time you dig a hole on a river terrace “you pull out three rocks, so quite early on we started making things out of rocks,” says Adrienne; these gabions mark the entrance to the bush walk and are topped with English stone pineapples as a nod to the garden’s fusion of native bush and European planting.