Christchurch
Garden tours and open gardens can be fabulous affairs and showcase the handiwork of some very clever and creative gardeners. However, I am just as happy indulging in what I call incidental garden tourism.
Mary Lovell-Smith takes an unofficial garden tour.
This sort of touring isn’t limited to any particular time of year. It’s also free, the range of gardens is vast and the number almost infinite. So each week, I try to take my dog for a walk in a different suburb – purely to have a nosey at the gardens.
Old suburbs, new suburbs, posh suburbs, down-at-heel suburbs, middleof-the-road suburbs – all have their very good gardeners and also their lackadaisical ones. All are a worth a stroll through and a gawk over the fences and a peer through the hedges.
Oh the sights! Who would have thought that roses and succulents were fit bed companions?
Check out the front path of a turn-of-the-century villa in Linwood, where standard roses are embedded in voluptuous pink and grey cushions of Echeveria ‘Imbricata’.
I have been fascinated by a townhouse’s emerald lawn encircled with dozens of brightly coloured children’s gumboots used as plant pots and bursting with bedding colour.
I have seen a cottage genteelly decaying under a tangle of rambling roses and wisteria.
There was also one where even the bees fly in straight lines.
I find scenes that amuse me as well as those that make me despair, and at each, I try to work out what I like or don’t like, and how I can copy or avoid it in my own garden.
For confirmation that trees make a garden and a street, wander the suburbs.
No matter how many shrubs a garden might have, without at least one large tree and going-to-be large tree, it is nothing.
Trees soften, give charm and are pretty much always easy on the eye. Without them, buildings are too harsh, roads too long and skies too bright.
If you want to see what that sapling at the garden centre is going to look like in its full glory, head to the suburbs.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Christchurch’s Avon River Red Zone, where more than 600 hectares contain the remnants and ghosts of more than 130 long years of suburban life. The houses and outbuildings are gone, the trees and shrubs are now the only landmarks. Lines of shrubs and trees mark the boundaries of individual gardens – fruit trees their backyards, specimen trees their front yards.
Old and sometimes not-so-old graveyards also contain a wealth of horticultural artefacts.
Sombre and massive yews and hollies are traditional graveyard trees.
Beneath them, in a downtown Christchurch cemetery, the tombstones are etched with mosses and lichens. Ferns push up through cracks in the concrete slabs.
In a diminutive cemetery on the remote west coast of the South Island, the bush tries to reclaim the sacred land, the wire perimeter fence struggling to hold it back. Around the graves, roses, muehlenbeckia and blackberry intertwine.
Another Christchurch graveyard spreads over the sandhills. Above the broad, white-pebbled path which runs along the brow of the hill are towering gums and macrocarpas. Noisy in a wind, they fill the air with their pungent fragrance on a hot day. A mauve lavender and an unusual yellow one grow wild over the graves, despite the best efforts of a local gardener to keep it under control.
Some people go to wineries for the wine, others for their restaurants.
I go for the gardens. Two of my favourites in Canterbury exemplify the range.
The gardens at Pegasus Bay Winery are vast, grand and glorious with herb parterre, sweeping lawns, pond, roseclad buildings and river stone walls.
A few kilometres away in the rolling hills of Waipara, the Boneline Winery garden sits lightly on the ancient hills – a broad shingle path through a roughly mown lawn is flanked by ti¯ ko¯uka, or cabbage trees.
Marking its intersection with another path is a large and ancient limestone boulder. The path ends at a row of old man pines. Beyond, sheep graze the stony paddock. Charming.
So I don’t feel too bad if I can’t make it to open gardens – the world is one, really.