A WOR LD OF THEIR OW N
A huge Northland property has given two avid gardeners room to indulge and experiment
Landscaper david monks was very, very nervous when his partner Jürgen Tofahrn “dragged” him out of Auckland to a different life in the far north. “I couldn’t imagine leaving the asphalt and neon behind and going from designing little courtyards to coping with a 1.4-hectare garden.”
Jürgen’s plan to extricate David involved finding the perfect property to show him, and he spotted a Kerikeri property on the internet that reminded him of a place he’d had in the Black Forest in Germany.
“We came up to see it on a day when I was hung-over with a fuzzy brain,” David says with a laugh. “I just thought ‘don’t overthink it’, and said ‘why not?’”
So the two moved to Kerikeri and began planning a garden for the property, which at that point was nothing more than lawn and a few mature trees. >
David quickly embraced the idea of a large garden, and a twoyear honeymoon period began as he and Jürgen started sculpting a framework for the sort of garden they wanted.
“In the third year I panicked and got really worried about how we were ever going to finish it all,” he says. “I’d always had it in my head that if you start a job you have to finish it but Jürgen changed the rules about that. Now I’m loving it and nothing is a chore.”
Many other rules were changed in the creation of Monto Garden, now about 10 years old. Eclectic doesn’t even begin to describe it, and it’s certainly no place for purists. Yet it’s not a selfindulgent muddle. David is an award-winning landscape gardener and has been for more than 20 years, and there’s method in his madness. “I like to build in the shock and wow factor, because that starts conversations,” he says. “So some parts of the garden are peaceful and relaxed, and some have tension.”
He and Jürgen didn’t have a master plan at the outset, but decided they’d sort out a few areas to start with. They decided to do the pool first. “We knew we’d never have time to go to the beach so we had to have a place to relax,” Jürgen says.
In reality there’s been very little relaxing going on as the two have developed the property, which gained a five-star rating in 2016 from the New Zealand Gardens Trust.
The garden surrounds the house and extends out across a sloping lawn and planted terraces to a creek. Beyond this is a wetland area traversed by boardwalks, alongside a shady woodland walk. Opposite, Jürgen’s pet sheep graze in sunny paddocks.
The overall design is underpinned by David’s love of rocks and group plantings, using natives, subtropicals, exotics, drought lovers and bog plants to create different areas. He used to have favourite plants, he says, but now his choices are more seasonal. >