Modest Muriel just loves to garden
Muriel Davison isn’t big on receiving awards; she would rather be working in her garden.
Hers is no ordinary garden - it’s 16 hectares and getting bigger, has thousands of varieties of trees and plants, as well as ponds and birdsong.
Behind it all is a woman who just loves gardening.
Despite 76-year-old Davison’s reluctance to be in the limelight, she has received the Royal New Zealand Institute of Horticulture’s most prestigious award.
A maximum of 53 people have the associate of honour award at any one time, and now she’s one of them.
Her Maple Glen garden at Glenham, Southland, for which she won the award, is no hidden secret.
It’s been open to the public for 40 years and in 2014 Maggie Barry, who hosted Maggie’s Gardening Show on television, rated it as one of the top three gardens in New Zealand.
‘‘What did I do to deserve that [award]?’’, Davison asked before receiving it from the horticulture institute this week. ‘‘I am just a gardener.’’
Maybe so, but she’s a very good gar- dener, and she credits the plants.
‘‘Everything I learn, I learn from the plants, if you take notice [of them].’’
What started as a small vegetable garden half a century ago has kept growing.
She jokingly says it’s a ‘‘nut case’s garden’’.
‘‘I just things.’’
Husband Bob and son Rob also work on the property, which includes a nursery business.
‘‘The nursery is all from the garden,’’ Muriel says. ‘‘This is what we have lived on for 40 years, ever since we gave up milking cows. found a love for growing
‘‘It’s not work when you love what you are doing.I love getting my hands dirty and seeing things grow.’’
Many of the plants and originated from seed imported around the world.
‘‘We have found out in the last 50 years what will grow in our climate and soil.’’
Of them all, daffodils are the one thing she would hate to live without.
A big garden comes with a big workload, with weeds to pull and lawns to mow.
It takes Rob 11 hours to mow the garden’s grass paths on his ride-on mower. trees from