Beautiful garden ‘to be shared’
Finalist Shu¯ringi garden features ponds, a fountain and a pergola
We added 1100 plants over three years and just filled it in.
Penny Daddy
Abride getting married at Whanganui’s Shu¯ringi garden can arrive under a pergola of pink roses to a lawn where doves coo and flowers tone with the bridesmaids’ dresses.
The Kaitoke Rd garden has hosted two weddings since Penny and Andrew Daddy bought the property three years ago. When they left Auckland for Whanganui, Penny wanted a garden, one that already had “good bones”.
The 1ha-plus property had been gardened by Susan and Paddy Edmonds who added ponds at the bottom of a slope, with an island and ornamental bridge. The ponds have weeping willows and water lilies — a Japanese look with echoes of Monet’s famous garden at Giverny.
The name Shu¯ringi means cherished garden in Japanese.
Penny Daddy set off to “colour in” the picture.
“We added 1100 plants over three years and just filled it in,” she said.
Some are native orchids and ferns, and others are rare native plants. All are named, for the benefit of people who come on fundraising garden tours or guests of the bed and breakfast wing at one end of the Daddys’ house.
“You can’t have a garden like this for yourself. It’s to be shared.”
One garden is mostly succulents. In another she wants to include nettles to feed native butterflies. Another is formally laid out with trimmed box hedges enclosing masses of white roses.
For children there’s a wishing well and a treasure hunt. They have to get into a boat and row to an island to find the treasure.
The ponds are filled by water redirected from the house roof. They dried out completely last autumn, leaving Penny to rescue 150 goldfish. Other water for the gardens is provided from nearby Lake Wiritoa, in a scheme shared with 11 neighbours.
One big plus is the property’s hilltop location, with “borrowed landscape” views across grazed hillsides to the north and seats where both Taranaki and Ruapehu can be seen in clear weather.
Penny sees the garden as a sanctuary for rescued and neutered cats, hens, ducks during duck shooting season, native birds and pet doves. Stressed bed and breakfast guests feel the peace immediately, she said.
She has loved gardening since the age of 8 and is bubbling over with plans to extend or improve. She’d like a butterfly garden, a wild garden, a treehouse and a sculpture trail, and they already have pieces made by Whanganui ceramic artist Ivan Vostinar.
She envisages glamping or an evening concert of classical music played by a band in a rotunda.
The garden needs an average of 20 hours a week to maintain — 40 in spring time. Penny works fulltime as head of science at Nga Tawa Diocesan School, and gardens before school in the mornings and after dinner in the evenings.
Andrew Daddy sees to building projects and the bed and breakfast and he mows the lawns which take four hours each time.