Style Insider: Rocky beginnings didn’t stop this garden becoming a wonderful place to be.

Rocky beginnings at Penny Milne’s Auckland garden didn’t hinder a beautiful result

Before producing anything pretty or edible, this garden yielded a mother-lode of volcanic rock. Penny Milne and partner Paul Treacher had just moved into their first home together in Auckland’s Devonport. Faced with a sloping jungle behind their house, they brought in the diggers to excavate a wide, flat terrace, and that’s when they discovered a lava flow running through their property. Some people might have panicked but Penny saw opportunity. “I knew immediately I was going to build a wall,” she says.

The generous plot beyond the wall was Paul’s designated potager for fruit and veges, with obligatory grapevines, while Penny would concentrate on her Italian-inspired box-hedged parterre closer to the house. “The garden you have when you’re 30 is completely different from when you’re 70. It’s about energy levels. I don’t want to be a slave to it.”

She concedes that many people starting a new garden in their sixth decade might shy away from quarter-acre lots but being a country girl at heart, she relished the challenge.

Penny’s background is full of creative ventures. An art teacher for many years, she trained in interior design in London on her OE but never practised. She worked in landscape gardening and more recently managed gift shop The Garden Party.

Penny had a narrow wish-list of plants including buxus, chocolate brown corokia, lilly pilly and parsley, for low hedging. With a favoured palette of autumnal colours and red and orange for leaves and flowers, Penny’s pick also includes sedums, salvias, cannas and alstroemerias. She’s also a sucker for hellebores and succulents.

Even with her chosen few, she admits to having a ruthless streak. “If it doesn’t do well, it’s out!”

‘It’s about energy levels. I don’t want to be a slave to it’

THIS PAGE (clockwise from left) Parsley grows to the left of the vege potager, with the garden’s focal point to the right – an ancient urn surrounded by clipped corokia, with a lilly pilly hedge behind. The venerable plum tree of murky origins is propped up Japanese-style to prevent breakage when it’s in full fruit. Sow’s ear to silk purse: unearthed volcanic rock was crafted into striking walls, ”just like a piece of sculpture,” says Penny. OPPOSITE Penny Milne potters in her Devonport garden every day; if plants she loves don’t thrive, they’re replaced, without qualm. Native plants are a new discovery – here vibrant orange Libertia peregrinans grows at the foot of a corokia hedge, with a potted flax to the right.