Share this incredible gardening journey with a visionary Manawatū couple.

A spade in the ground was the start of an incredible gardening journey for two South Africans

Hlomo Hlomo Gardens: The Zulu words roughly translate to: I have taken my spear and I have stuck it in the ground and I claim this land as mine. It’s a bold name for a brave enterprise, transforming 7.2ha of steep, windpummelled Manawatū paddocks into a lush garden showcasing New Zealand native trees, but 19 years later, Martin and Louise Badenhorst have created something unique in the Turitea foothills of the Tararua Range, a scant eight kilometres from the centre of Palmerston North.

‘I tried to create patterns as I planted the trees’

Sticking a spade into the ground is probably more apt than a spear. Martin, a dentist, estimates he’s planted thousands of seedling native trees to create this garden. Natives, because as immigrant South Africans they wanted the garden to reflect their new identity as New Zealanders, growing into that identity alongside the trees. There’s an echo of tūrangawaewae in their Hlomo Hlomo garden creation; the idea of having a place to stand, a place to hold and love, a place that is unique in all the world, a new identity earthed in growth, shaped and nurtured by the land.

“With us coming from a different country, the New Zealand natives gave the garden a sense of place. It’s a Kiwi garden,” Louise says of their planting choices. Martin nods, and takes it a step further. “It grounds us as Kiwis.”

The view from grass terraces in front of the house, cupped round with lonicera painstakingly trimmed by Martin into formal hedges, is serenity itself. The hillside is clothed in green, a three-dimensional, growing tapestry of green on green on green. The colours shift and change, glistening as a light Manawatū sun shower paints highlights on the leaves.

“I tried to create patterns as I planted the trees,” Martin says.

“You can play with the textures, leaf shapes and form and colour, and all the different barks.”

The trees all started as small seedlings, because the wind smashed anything of size. “They blew out of the ground.” Martin isn’t kidding. “That’s when we learned we had to work with the land, let the land and the conditions shape what we do. Let the land talk to us, and to listen to it.”

The couple didn’t have a plan when they started.

“Nothing landscaped, or on paper,” Louise says. Things either worked, or they didn’t, and after a while, Louise, who works full-time on the garden, stopped worrying about it. “Martin said to not take it so seriously, to just have fun with it. And we weren’t open to the public then, so our mistakes were made in private. After all, we garden for pleasure.”

What the public sees now is well worth the garden’s five-star rating as a Garden of National Significance, awarded by the New Zealand Gardens Trust. A long, teasing entrance brings visitors along a driveway russet-red with pine needles from their boundary shelter.

Two ponds glimmer at the bottom of the tree-clad valley, with glimpses of bush walks and Louise’s redthemed garden. Formally clipped box, lonicera and pittosporum hedges define the house and garden rooms and contrast with the trees.

Louise leads the way to a deck positioned perfectly between the two ponds, the ponds planted with punctuation points of bulrushes that are echoed by the spine of the pine shelter high up the hill. Carex secta edges the ponds, with statements from bold, billowing leaves of Gunnera manicata.

An easy stepped boardwalk meanders through the trees, curving round the ponds to the Shady Walk, one side of which is planted with hostas, and blue and purple hydrangeas. The other is planted in Lobelia aberdarica, and its long, sculptural leaves are a favourite of Louise’s.

The red garden offers a colour and temperature change, a garden room defined by Martin’s formal lonicera hedges, but with flowers and foliage

THIS PAGE Martin and Louise with Kerry blue terrier Cleo in the Iris Walk; clipped buxus hedges frame the white irises, and Louise’s brightly painted bench continues her love of red. OPPOSITE (clockwise from top) A variety of pittosporums grow beyond the Lonicera nitida hedges of the formal garden; the flashes of red in between are Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’. A stand of silver birches guard the entrance of the Shady Path garden with impatiens and spikes of Lobelia cardinalis ‘Queen Victoria’ flowering in red. The vertical lines of a red-striped flax Phormium ‘Evening Glow’ echo a timber obelisk built by Louise.

THESE PAGES (clockwise from right) The Shady Path offers a temperature change with the cool blue and mauve tones of Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Merveille Sanguine’, at right, and Louise’s favourite plant Lobelia aberdarica, at left, with its spear-like clumps. More red fireworks from impatiens at the start of the Shady Path, planted with low-growing Japanese forest hakone grass (Hakonechloa macra) with the taller, green-and-white striped Japanese silver grass (Miscanthus sinensis ‘Variegatus’) behind. Stepping down to the ponds and decks past the rounded leaves of the tractor seat plant (Ligularia reniformis); the ferns and cool blue hydrangeas are a promise of the water round the corner.

THESE PAGES (clockwise from right) Formal hedges of layered buxus and Lonicera nitida welcome visitors to the front terraces of the Badenhorsts’ house; pittosporum ‘Golfball’ specimens grow to the left of the steps. The edge of The Cloud, the couple’s representation of Aotearoa New Zealand – tall Olearia lineata forms the central billows, edged with the silvery Corokia cheesemanii. Louise’s labyrinth, where she says good luck lies in following the path to its heart, the Pete Collins sculpture Inside Out.