More than meets the eye
Here’s how one creative and determined Aucklander planted a Japanese-style garden using only New Zealand natives.
An amazing Japanese-style garden in Auckland filled with native plants.
A“I love the bush. I’m so biased that when I go over to other countries, I go, ‘That’s not as good as New Zealand bush’.”
t some point, every gardener has paused over a plant and experienced an epiphany. Aucklander Malcolm Hayward calls his a “clap to the forehead epiphany”. With the construction of his Japanese-inspired garden set to get underway at his Bucklands Beach home four years ago, he had a sudden eureka moment which provided the inspiration for his extraordinary front garden. He set out to create a Japanese style garden with traditional plants. “I had the maple tree and crabapple tree sitting there in their bags, and I suddenly thought, why don’t I do it with New Zealand natives? So the maple and crabapple went into the back garden and I used New Zealand natives instead – not one thing is not native there,” he says. And that includes the fish. Malcolm’s inspiration came from his love of our native flora and fauna, and a desire to replicate a part of the country he and his family often travel to in order to waterski. “I love the bush. I’m so biased that when I go over to other countries, I go, ‘That’s not as good as New Zealand bush.’ So here, I’ve tried to do it a little bit like Lake Karapiro from the air – the rolling farmland is the muehlenbeckia, the little bit of water there is the lake, because it’s long like that, and if you’re driving down State Highway 1, you’ve got all these huge rocks coming out of the hillsides with grass around them. I tried to replicate that feeling.”
The result is a view as good as an aerial photograph, but like most gardeners embarking on a new project, Malcolm had a couple of hiccups.
“I put down leptinella as a ground covering, but it died off in big patches. It looked beautiful initially, but I was told by Oratia Native Plant Nursery that it tends to do that.”
So he kept an eye out for a replacement, and inspiration struck 12,500 miles away at Claude Monet’s garden in France. “Two or three years ago, I was in Monet’s garden. I’m in the shop, and guess what? I look down and see Muehlenbeckia axillaris for sale.”
So he gave it a go, and hasn’t looked back. “That’s done very well,” he says. “It stays vividly green and it’s tough. I trim it with electric trimmers – I just get down on my knees and trim it regularly in the summer. The coprosmas at the back – the low-growing Coprosma
‘Hawera’ and the other ones – I just keep them trimmed very low with my hedge trimmers.”
In his haste to get planting, though, Malcolm admits he didn’t take the necessary precautions to prevent weeds from appearing, and after a time oxalis started to pop up everywhere. “I had to get a little 600mm square of steel and just go from one end to the other. It took the whole day, twice in a row, getting down and flicking them out of the soil, and it dealt to them. They didn’t come back.”
It’s a sign of Malcolm’s meticulous attention to detail, and, as a result, a beautiful garden emerged with a nod to two cultures.
At the rear of the house, Malcolm introduced two more cultures – English and Italian – and a style that is completely in contrast to the front garden.
“I like that order-disorder mixture,” he says. But not only that, “I love colour, I love texture, I love light changing, I love greenery. I also love bright, striking, in-your-face colour. I knew I wanted an Italian and English feel here because I love both English rambling and Italian structure.”
The pond has a wrought iron overhang in Italianate detail (“I wanted to make it so when you stand on the edge of the pond, the goldfish disappear under your feet a bit”) and the statues are classic English.
The plants ramble in a fashion that accentuate one another, with striking colours and textures, and ample flowers and foliage.
To one side of the paved courtyard stands a rather handsome English-style glasshouse. “I saw them extensively advertised in European garden magazines and always loved them,” says Malcolm, “but I never found one in New Zealand that came close enough to that. I happened to be chatting to my son’s boss at his work, an aluminium joinery company, and he said he would look at drawing it up for me and constructing it.”
After several long meetings to nut out the design, Malcolm finally got notification last August that the glasshouse was completed. “I was in South Africa at the time and he sent me an email with a photo of the construction of it and I wanted to come home instantly,” laughs Malcolm. “It’s exactly like the ones in the garden magazines. I’m entirely satisfied with it. The English glasshouses are solid, have heavier joinery, long panels, and a domestic aluminium front door that is the same joinery.”
The last addition to the garden was an aluminium
At the rear of the house, Malcolm introduced two more cultures – English and Italian – and a style that is completely in contrast to the front garden.