Creating ‘the perfect place’
It’s amazing what you can find in an ordinary street, on an ordinary day in New Plymouth – as Sonja Slinger found out recently - an extraordinary garden created by a man enjoying life to the max.
Allan Inch came home for lunch one day to find complete strangers picnicking on his front lawn.
So lush and inviting was his garden in urban New Plymouth that they mistook it for a park.
‘‘I let them stay, had a bit of a laugh about it – it is a tranquil spot,’’ he said. The house hadn’t been built and it would have beckoned as a lure to anyone passing by.
Allan and wife Lorraine’s garden is a surprise find. It’s tucked away in an average street, in an average suburb – nobody would expect to find it. And their life is much more than a garden – classic cars, pristinely maintained, a basement wine cellar just begging for tasting and a men’s room packed floor to ceiling with car magazines and service manuals from every era. When you get over admiring the cars, you could spend hours with the magazines before a wander through the sub tropical threequarter acre garden.
Allan is all about living life to the full. A heart scare a few months ago has only heightened that attitude. He’s a free spirit too – warning that if anyone pops in over summer, they might find him completely naked going about the garden.
But if cars are his passion – and they would be as this is the man who co-owned New Plymouth’s Gray and Inch Toyota for four decades, taking over from his father Ivan Inch and Keith Gray, gardening is his second drive.
He bought the land in the 70s, when TV personality Selwyn Toogood was promoting it as Kingsdown development. ‘‘I could see then the potential, especially bordering the lake and reserve,’’ he recalls.
‘‘It was just gorse and scrub, bare land, and pretty rough.’’
Allan planted trees for shelter first as the wind ravaged the property from all directions. He bought in a landscaper too for a bit of help to create his vision for what is now a divine subtropical oasis.
‘‘The trees have pretty much gone as have those original plantings, it’s moved on a lot since then. I call it a man’s cottage garden because I have so much stuff. There’s a hell of a lot of things in here, plant-wise.’’
His greatest love are clivias and he has them in all colours, of all leaf variety and size, even bold striped versions that many will never have seen. And those clivias are part of the impetus behind Allan opening the garden again for the Taranaki Fringe garden festival come October.
He’s expecting a group of international clivia buffs (serious growers) for a New Zealand tour so he had to clean the place up a bit and have it looking its best so thought he may as well open it for the festival. Allan (who is the chief gardener, Lorraine is a bowls queen, of indoor and outdoor prowess) has been in the festival before but a few things have changed since then. There are new beds with a different feel, such as mass planting of orchids of every hue near the house, and unusual plants on the lower slope which appreciate the shade.
He doesn’t know the names of them all, and doesn’t want to. Some he’s bought (and a lot from Pukeiti, as he’s a perpetuity member there) some he’s picked up along the way, such as some fern-like creatures he nabbed growing on a bank on Mt Messenger during a trip home one day. The clivia, though, are special, as are a number of rare vireyas and other plants that thrive there.
He’s always had a thing for plants, ever since his grandmother Emma Inch took in a boarder, who went on to become a well-known plantsman, Oswald Blumhardt, who served his apprenticeship with Duncan and Davies in New Plymouth.
As a boy, Allan was inspired by the German-born man, who was an avid plant collector and breeder, known for his work in hybridising magnolias, vireyas, camellias and rhododendrons.
He is letting the garden grow naturally now, the palms throw out a lot of seed and young plants and trees spring up where they can. ‘‘I’m going to let it happen, let it do its own thing now.’’
Allan is happy with how the garden has matured. The years of toil over, he sits back now and enjoys it with Lorraine, when she is not out bowling. The purposebuilt gazebo is a summer love, great for capturing the evening sunsets and sipping a wine, or two, from that marvellous cellar.
‘‘That was built by an absolute craftsman,’’ he said. ‘‘I had that made, it all locks together, magnificent structure. Sometimes you have to do things without asking the price because if you got the price first you’d never get it done.’’
Allan has three pohutakawa standing nearby, all of different size yet they were planted at the same time. ‘‘It’s all about mulch, that is. The biggest one gets mulched, the next gets a bit but the other one gets none, and you can see the result.’’
In one, he has planted young clivia in the nooks and crevices of the largest tree, and they will grow as epiphytes, quite happily, he says.
In his spare time, he draws, particularly when on holiday - the couple like to cruise. There’s a mixed subject range but most are colourful floral images and he often sends them to his daughter Tracey in Australia. And, they might find their way to your walls one day. Tracey’s friend is an interior designer who wants to turn them into funky wallpaper.
But Allan still loves a great car, especially a sleek Citroen or Mercedes and he’s not without a classic Toyota from the 60s, a super cool Corolla K10. He may not be over collecting but he won’t buy another one unless he has room to store it – and that might be a problem. His cars are immaculate. ’’I don’t like anything unless it’s perfect, especially with cars.’’
He and friend Tony Barnes, also an avid gardener, from Oakura, took three Citroen 2CVs to South America in 2012 as part of the great Shadow of the Andes expedition.
In a 1986 Citroen 2CV, they drove up mountains, along narrow passes and across deserts on a 51-day, 9500-kilometre journey.
It was too easy to motor along the main highways, so they took the back roads similar to those a team from Top Gear had attempted, Allan said.
‘‘Top Gear went on some of the roads and gave up, saying it was too hard. We did them and more.’’
It was a trip of a lifetime, he adds, and there’s that zest for living to the full again.
He is looking forward to welcoming people again to his garden, named Pai rawa atu, which means the perfect place or the perfect spot which he says is what it is. ‘‘But I don’t garden for other people. I garden for me, they are just fortunate that they get the opportunity to see it, it’s as simple as that.’’