IN THE GARDEN
Virginia Winder discovers surprising twists and turns, art and quirky landscapes in the huge garden at this large Eltham property.
Don’t expect to take a quick spin around Leonie and Adrian Hofmans’ garden – it goes on and on. ‘‘By the time I go around, it’s time to go around again,’’ Leonie says. ‘‘I know every nook and cranny.’’
And that’s saying something, considering the giant size of this country garden, which is part of an Eltham dairy farm.
Sitting at the dining room table over a cuppa, Leonie, like all the gardeners heading towards the 30th Taranaki garden festival, is lamenting the rain. ‘‘You can’t write what I think,’’ she says, placing a photograph of a flooded garden in front of me.
While this was taken last year, the same area has flooded twice this year and the last time was just a few weeks ago. ‘‘That was over my gumboots walking home up the track. But everybody has had the rain.’’
She shares another photo, this one of a bare garden when they moved in 26 years ago.
‘‘It was my in-laws’ house and she had a bit of garden along the front, which we ripped all out and started again. We did the big garden in one big go.’’
With the help of landscape designer Chris Paul, they put in another big garden area three to four years ago, changing things as they have gone along.
Pulling out, replacing and replanting is all part of gardening. ‘‘You just take it as you find it. You can’t change nature can you?’’
Leonie is self-effacing about her garden, although she has no need to be. ‘‘It’s not colour co-ordinated. I’m just a gardener’s gardener. If I find something, I put it where there is a hole.’’
Heading toward to the festival, she’s always a bit nervous. ‘‘I can see fault in everything. I see weeds and holes in the lawns. It’s not an immaculate garden. I try.’’
But she finds the visitors are always nice people.
The property is also a Garden of Significance and has been for about nine years.
To be rated by the NZ Gardens Trust and the garden festival assessors, it has to be up to scratch, which it is.
Although Leonie doesn’t quite know where her love of gardening came from, she says her mum did grow a lot of dahlias.
‘‘I don’t have any. I just love being outside and when you have got four boys you are always outside,’’ she says.
Those boys are grown up now, but when they were young they had their own area, where they played rugby, tennis and they even had a cricket net.
Surprisingly the quartet, now aged from 28 to 34, never trampled the garden. The worst they did was block the culvert across the road with a frisbee.
One used to cut the hedges and as they’ve aged, they’ve helped in other ways.
‘‘I would be in my garden and they would be in their area.’’
These days Adrian helps in the garden, cuts the hedges and mows the lawns, which take about four hours to trim.
Leonie milks cows every morning, except in the couple of weeks leading up to and during the festival. That’s why she doesn’t open every year; she’s too busy on the farm.
But she is an organised person, who makes sure she’s totally ready for festival time.
And when she’s in the garden, nothing else matters. ‘‘You get out there and forget about time.’’
She doesn’t think about anything but what she’s doing and listening to tui in the trees. ‘‘It’s my happy place.’’
Visitors will find the same. While Leonie is a gentle, quiet woman, the garden she has created is flamboyant and ‘‘out there’’.
There’s a secret garden edged with tractor seat ligularia, bluebells, fiery Japanese maples, rhododendrons and featuring the Magnolia ‘‘Star Wars’’ and a white bench.
A daphne walk leads to a waterfall of white clematis. ‘‘I’m naughty letting it grow up the trees, aren’t I?’’
Rocks from the farm – there is an endless supply – are scattered below a dramatic array of lancewood and a wisteria walk is covered in twisted vines and purple froth.
This garden is studded with stone walls, which pop up everywhere.
About three years ago, Leonie became fully focused on making stone walls. She spent every day for three months creating them and the results are graceful structures that look as if they have been there for eons.
The area that was under water just a few weeks back is slightly soggy underfoot, but has recovered remarkably. Standing on curved bridge, Leonie says it was washed away in the flood, but is now back in place and solid.
‘‘The hostas must like the wet because they haven’t died.’’
Past more flaming maples, red, pink and white azaleas, we enter the cool of a shade house, which is made using windows from an old house on the farm.
It’s filled plants that Leonie likes, including ferns, tinkles with the sound of water and is backed by a stone wall that Adrian made many years ago.
Outside, Nandina ‘‘Firepower’’ is mass planted and punctuated with healthy looking lancewoods.
Then we enter a garden room starring a cherry blossom underplanted with a circular carpet of purple ajuga. Around the edges are Japanese maples, pink and cerise rhododendrons and a lilac, which Leonie and the writer bury their noses in.
Striding on, there’s sudden movement in the trees.
But it’s not a stray animal or a branch bending in the breeze; it’s us, reflecting and reflected. Leonie says she read a magazine article about having mirrors in gardens so decided to hang her own.
There is another picture up ahead. Five silver birches, rocks, green mondo grass and liverwort create a dramatic island that leads to a tomato house and sculptural Chinese toons.
Then we’re in a Japanese area backed by bamboo. A red seat, matching azalea and clumps of mondo grass creeping across gravel beside a hole-ridden rock lead to a tall red gate made by one of Leonie’s sons. There are more clumps of mondo grass, like a planned invasion, surrounding the Japanese walk.
Following Leonie, we find another large garden that’s peppered with more silver birches, fan palms, and irregular shapes of coprosma. ‘‘They look like zombies or something.’’
A climbing member of the birch family is slowly taking over a metal archway that frames Mt Tongariro on a clear day. A Corten steel disc aims towards a tree backed by blue totara and surrounded by muehlenbeckia and her favourite, oioi. ‘‘I could plant a whole paddock of that I reckon.’’
Huge barbed wire balls sit near a tastefully decorated summerhouse built for weddings. Then we’re off, back into the round-the-home garden, where vegetables are rabbit proofed and an Escher-like metal ball sits on gravel.
‘‘And that’s my garden,’’ she says, with a smile.
"If I find something, I put it where there is a hole."
Leonie Hofman