TINY BUT MIGHTY
Two gardens where diminished dimensions don’t mean compromise
Jungle drama
The renovation of an Auckland villa set the scene for a dramatic garden makeover that saw a straggly backyard transformed into a dramatic jungle tableau. From the street, passers-by still see a traditional white villa but the descent down the central staircase brings an ever-widening tropical vista.
Passage continues through two terraces to a dark reflection pool, behind which stand the pale columns of a Doric folly. “It’s a celebration of neo-Palladian symmetry with a Memphis-Gaudi-tropical twist,” says the owner and co-creator.
The narrow sloping section gave the owners the opportunity to create a terraced amphitheatre. “Because the land drops away, you look out over garden rather than into it,” says architect Graeme Burgess.
A high wall of bangalow palms forms a visual barrier as well as creating the illusion that the garden has been hacked out of a tropical forest. In another sleight of hand, the pool is not the rectangle it seems but a subtle trapezoid shape, its decreasing width giving the illusion of greater length. It’s edged with a grey-gold gravel path and at night, lighting completes the drama.
Architect’s courtyard
Gardens, like people, mature and grow old and if their bones are strong the advancing years bring character rather than decay.
In the 1960s, Sir Miles Warren, doyen of New Zealand modernist architecture, designed an apartment that would double as his business premises in central Christchurch. Integral to it, in an 8 x 16m void between buildings that had been a car yard, he made a garden. “I’ve always been interested in gardens as part of the architectural process,” says Sir Miles.
His garden is a restful and orderly urban oasis, both inspired and defined by the limitations of space. Its backbone is a central pool laid perpendicular to the apartment. A rill of irregular rectangles, it divides the garden into two very different territories. Excavated soil from the pool was used to raise the garden on the west side, where less formal plantings grow behind blocks of Oamaru stone. The other side, with a row of formal English yew topiaries, is more structured.
The once tightly clipped yews now tower over the pool. Lanky saplings have filled out and grown tall. Supersized yuccas have been joined by a rogue cabbage tree behind the pond, where rocks have been added to keep the garden from spilling into the water. “I see it as the remains of an urban garden,” rues its now-nonagenarian creator. But it is much more than that. Blessed with good bones, the architect’s garden is an abiding if wilder version of its younger self.
This is an edited extract
from Secrets of Small Gardens in New
Zealand by Sue Allison and Juliet Nicholas, published by New Holland, $59.99.