Two of a kind
A shared passion for plants spanning decades has spurred Pat and Keith Stuart to transform an acre of peat bog into a garden full of rare delights
Pat and Keith Stuart have in every way grown together, spending their long and highly energetic lives working with plants.
The Wanaka couple, who are fast approaching their 65th wedding anniversary, met while completing their horticultural apprenticeships.
“Keith started his training at the Botanic Gardens in Dunedin, and I started in Christchurch,” Pat says. “But then Keith’s boss was made superintendent of the Christchurch Botanic Gardens and Keith and his twin brother Ross moved up with him. There were about eight or nine marriages between the staff there!”
The Stuarts eventually left Christchurch to manage Keith’s family farm at Waipahi, where they built up a substantial nursery business – propagating and selling rare trees, shrubs, alpine, herbaceous and native plants – and raised their three children.
Pat had a particular interest in hellebores: at the time, not popular plants. But one of the first interesting seedlings she isolated was Helleborus ‘White Magic’, a clear white cultivar that went on to be exported all over New Zealand and the world. (This keen interest has been passed on too; Pat and Keith’s daughter Kate Telford runs the specialist hellebore nursery Clifton Homestead Nursery in Balclutha, with her husband Ken, and still sells many of her mother’s cultivars.)
Keith and Ross had a nursery sideline too, growing and planting trees for the nascent forestry industry – one of their first contracts involved planting out 1000 acres in pine, which they had grown from seed. “Quite hard work,” says Pat, rather dryly.
(Ross, who died in 2013, was a notable plantsman too, and bred many plants still well known today, including the pittosporums ‘Tom Thumb’, ‘Elizabeth’ and ‘Victoria’, the last two named for his daughters.)
But Wanaka was always part of Pat and Keith’s lives, even when they were farming. Keith’s family had a crib there, so he’d been holidaying in the area since the 1930s, and Pat and Keith used the family bach when their children were young. “But Keith’s family was quite big and nana would forget who she’d lent it to,” Pat says. “We’d sometimes arrive and find it full!”
At one point their daughter Jane was working in Wanaka for a photographer, who had a sideline in real estate. He told Jane about a property her parents might be interested in, and they decided to buy an old cottage on a section of boggy peat and use it as a holiday home before eventually retiring there. (The original home on the site, which still stands, was one of the first four houses built in Wanaka.)
Previous owners had run a market garden on the site and planted a few things to remind them of England… including ground elder, periwinkle and campanula.
“I’ve got rid of the periwinkle,” Pat says. “But I’m still struggling with the ground elder and campanula!”
By the 1980s, when Pat and Keith’s son Lynn got married, they decided to hand the farm on to him and build a new place on the Wanaka property where they would live full-time. The plot was so boggy in places you could sink into the ground up to your waist. Keith spent hours digging drains to channel all the water under the ground into the Bullock Creek, the watercourse which is such a feature of the garden today. Once the drains had been laid and the new house had been built, the Stuarts had to decide where next to focus their considerable energies.
“We felt we were too young to really retire,” Pat says. “So we decided to open a floral studio. Everybody said we were mad but we happened to be in the right place at the right time.”