South Island
Artist Nancy Tichborne’s new plot
Some architects find creating a garden unsatisfying – the plants, changing shape as they grow, compromising the original design. Some artists, on the other hand, revel in the transience of a garden, encouraging it at every turn. Take watercolourist Nancy Tichborne. Three years ago, she left her 20-year-old, four-hectare Garden of National Significance in French Farm near Akaroa for a property 98 percent smaller in Rue Balguerie, one of Akaroa township’s prettiest streets. “And Zimmer frame distance from the shops and cafés,” she says.
Having worked on it continually since she moved in with her husband Bryan, Nancy considers the pocketsize plot at the front of their cottage not so much a work in progress but rather an eternally changing, eternally fascinating canvas. When they took over the garden, she had two mighty Phoenix palms removed. In their place, she planted a ‘Billington’ plum, and an Albizia julibrissin that lost a limb in a recent storm. Its trunk bears a long scar, and with some of its bright green leaves already beginning to yellow, Nancy suspects it’s dying.
However, she’s not upset by the loss of a such fine tree in a prominent position – she says it doesn’t worry her. Instead, she finds its new form sans limb even more attractive than it was before. Moreover, she’s thrilled at the chance to deliberate over what she could plant in its place if and when it does bite the dust.
“This is a garden to give me pleasure, and for me, pleasure is anticipatory – it’s dreaming about what I’m going to do that’s pleasing,” she says. “I’ll dream about my garden till my dying day. I’ll always change it.”
“For me, pleasure is anticipatory – it’s dreaming about what I’m going to do that’s pleasing. I’ll dream about my garden till my dying day. I’ll always change it”
Although Nancy has designed many gardens professionally, she didn’t have a plan for this one. “It’s completely undesigned,” she says happily. “I put a tree in because I love it. I can poke in some plants just because I feel like it.”
The paths are made from pavers, so they can be easily moved as the mood strikes or the plants dictate. They meander carelessly through the plot, which is about 20 metres by 10. Nancy doesn’t care to find out its exact dimensions. Size is irrelevant to this, her “beautiful muddle,” where “plants can do their thing” and Nancy can be adjudicator supreme. “I might think, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful, I love it but I might try something different next time.’”
Planting on a whim? “Absolutely,” she replies. “I never thought I’d garden like that. When designing gardens, I was interested in voids and focal points. Everything was a third this, a third that. I really, really wanted gardens that were good compositions, like paintings.”
Now it’s the detail that fascinates her, she says. “As in a big pebble next to a flat paving slab; spiky grass; a touch of colour; that one exquisite spot of garden. I can think, ‘I’ve planned it well, I’ve accomplished a lovely thing.’”
The apparent wildness of the garden is deceptive. Plants might be going to seed and bursting across the path in a disorderly manner, but look closely and what you’ll notice is how cultivated it really is. The soil is rich and full of organic matter, thanks to Nancy’s ongoing passion for composting. She reveals with pride her specially constructed compost bins built