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A formal landscape is filled with the natural forms of native plants – and the result is a peerless Governors Bay property lush with native birds and wildlife.
A formal Christchurch garden replanted with natives takes on a new character.
Dick Tripp cautions his wife, Sally, “Keep an eye out for the kiwis.” Sally and I are setting off to explore their Governors Bay garden, and although the retired vicar has a twinkle in his eye, I am momentarily confused about the status of our national bird on the Port Hills. For if they were to re-establish in the district, then the Tripps’ native garden, neighbouring hectares of native forest, is probably a better place than most to start.
With an uncertain nod to Dick, I follow Sally out to the balcony, where she points out a vigorous climber engulfing the balustrade. “Clematis foetida,” she says. “It just made itself at home, came in from the bush.”
Sally relishes the rapidity with which native plants move in and around her hillside garden. It was not exactly planned but not entirely unexpected either.
When the couple bought their property up the Zephyr Valley in Governors Bay, Lyttelton Harbour, 30 years ago, the garden was described by the real estate agent as an “English terrace garden surrounded by native bush.”
The roses, chrysanthemums, irises and delphiniums on the flagstone terraces were to be nurtured for another 14 years until the convergence of two stances resulted in their eradication.
It was Sally’s first garden of her own. Being a vicar’s wife, she explains, meant she and her family moved every five to seven years around various vicarages in Canterbury. “It was terrible moving from garden to garden,” she recalls. “Sometimes we’d have to start from scratch; once, in New Brighton, our backyard was all concrete. I was so thrilled when I got this garden of my own.”
Now in her late 70s, Sally did not take on the garden unthinkingly. She says that from the word go she was aware of the challenges managing such a steep and large garden at her advanced years. Then she developed an enveloping interest in native plants, more specifically plants endemic to the Harbour Basin. She had joined a local walking group, where she describes herself and a friend, Rosemary Koller, as the group’s tail-end Charlies. “We were always stopping to look at some plant and trying to identify it.” (This was eventually to result in the pair writing the definitive book, Ferns of the Port Hills).
“I was quite surprised to discover the range of plants that grew locally,” she says. Banks Peninsula botanist Hugh Wilson provided her with a list of plants in the area and “it stretched over pages,” she says, sounding still slightly stunned. “I set a mission for myself to find more and more plants. I knew about the trees and ferns of the region but little about all the shrubs and grasses.
“Then I thought, with these plants that grow locally by themselves, I wouldn’t have to look after them, they would look after themselves.” Old age sorted!
With the help of landscape architect Jeremy Head, a planting plan for the garden was drawn up. The new garden retained the original landscape design with its network of flagstone terraces, stone walls and paths, which, with all their curves, detours and dead ends, lead down and out from the Charteris Bay stone 1940s-era homestead to a stony creek veiled in native bush.
The style of the new native plantings emulated much of the formality of the previous exotics – in groups and with attention to shape, colour, form and size. The exotica were all dug out and given away.
Maintenance was almost immediately reduced once the new garden went in, Sally says. “Once I got it planted, all I had to do was keep the weeds down and do some trimming back. I didn’t have to worry about spraying – as in roses – or pests and diseases. Or watering really.”
Whereas once she might have despaired at such despoliation, she soon grew to love the likes of the holes in her kawakawa leaves – a sign the insect population was flourishing, which in turn meant more food for the birds. “Insects are pretty important in our garden. All our native birds, bar kerer¯u, love them. Bellbirds feed their young entirely on them. Fantails come and go. We have shining cuckoos, grey warblers, kingfishers…”
On the terraces, shrubs with colourful berries for birds and lizards were chosen, the likes of Coprosma propinqua with its flecked blue berries and Coprosma rhamnoides for its red ones. Massed Corokia cotoneaster was planted on lower terraces and has become one of Sally’s favourite plants. “Look at it with its grey foliage, yellow flowers and red and orange berries. Everyone should have it!”
An ebullient row of Muehlenbeckia astonii bounds the front of the top terrace. It is one of a handful of plants in the garden not native to the harbour basin. Found on Kaitorete Spit by Lake Ellesmere, it was included because it was endangered and extremely rare in the wild (though nowadays it is popular in Canterbury gardens). Sally loves it. “It’s a wonderful, wonderful plant. The small, bright green heart-shaped leaves are lovely all summer, then – as one of New Zealand’s rare deciduous shrubs – they drop in autumn to reveal the tangle of dark red stems all winter long.” Although she refuses to have it described as a hedge, the muehlenbeckia used to be trimmed regularly. “Then I discovered it had a whole lot of case moths, so I didn’t like to cut it back. I missed a few seasons, and it just got bigger and bigger…”
A native jasmine, Parsonsia heterophylla, grows up the front of the house, exploding in a mass of scented flowers under the bedroom window. “I never planted it, it just grew here,” she says. “The bees love it.”
Reptiles are welcome too. “The common skink and geckos live here, though we don’t often see geckos because they are nocturnal. The lizards love this plant’s lovely berries, they’re white and navy spotted,” she continues, pointing to a small shrub nearby. The spiky branches of porcupine shrub ( Melicytus
alpinus) are draped in pale grey-green lichen – something Sally doesn’t mind. “I have taken a liking to them. Mind you, naming and identifying them is far worse than for ferns,” she sighs at the daunting task ahead.
That the garden has taken on a life of its own and that plants seem to move of their own accord pleases Sally. “It’s gone from a garden to a habitat of things. Plants have come that I have never planted. Get the habitat
“It’s gone from a garden to a habitat of things. Plants have come that I have never planted. Get the habitat right and the natives take over.”
right and the natives take over,” she says beneath the towering, self-seeded wineberry, magnificent in its cloak of pink blooms. “Coprosma propinqua pops up everywhere, as do cabbage trees. Sometimes I intend to pull things out but often I leave them be to see what happens.”
Disturbing the once symmetrical sweep of flax is a wayward clump, a metre to the fore. Rather than despairing, Sally is elated. “See, there’s one, there’s a plant that’s on the move,” she exclaims, almost proudly.
Dead trees are not removed as a rule of thumb. “It’s dead, but I won’t cut it out,” says Sally of a cabbage tree. “Look at all those ferns climbing up its trunk.” She scarcely pauses to draw breath. “It’s important to leave it rotting there for the insects. Did you know that cabbage trees are home to nine insects that only live in cabbage trees?”
Minutes later, Sally’s head and shoulders suddenly disappear into a swathe of wind grass ( Anemanthele
lessonia) cascading over the path from a high bank. She parts the thick curtain of foliage to reveal small ferns flourishing underneath. “It acts as a nursery. If I get in early enough I can transplant the ferns. A lot of ferns have come in, they like the habitat.” She explains that the garden does not have long hours of sunlight – it is pretty much gone by 5pm in summer – and the slope means rainwater runs through the ferns’ roots rather than pooling around them.
This is a garden of light and dark. The pavers through a pool of bright green lawn lead to a tunnel through dense foliage. Here, ferns spill over the edges of the low rock wall along the path to the composting and shredding area in a clearing in the bush – or is it in the
In the lower reaches of the garden, where the air is damp, still and mysterious, the plants have the upper hand.
outer reaches of the garden? Such is the now almost seamless merging of the two, it is hard to tell.
Sally shows me one of her favourite ferns, inviting me to stroke it. The underneath of its fronds feels, somewhat disconcertingly, like velvet. She laughs. Yes, she exclaims, pleased. “It’s the velvet fern, Lastreopsis velutina.”
Houndstongue fern was originally planted as a border along the lowest lawn. Now the bed of ferns is getting wider and the lawn narrower. “I’m trying to get the lawn to disappear altogether,” Sally says.
The disappearing lawn seems a metaphor for the whole garden as the endemic species assert their dominance over the human-made environment. On the upper levels, the plants are still kept in check by the concrete paths and rock walls. In the lower reaches of the garden, where the air is damp, still and mysterious, the plants have the upper hand. The rock walls are mossy and barely discernible through the trunks of shrubs.
It is here I see, at last, the kiwis, scrabbling for insects in the humus-y soil. Sure, they are made of iron, but they are right at home.