How two city-siders discovered a love of vintage flowers just south of Auckland.
This ex-city couple discovered a passion for tiny houses, rural living and growing old-fashioned flowers
Debbie and Clive Sisam were instantly smitten with their very little house in a very large garden at Puriri Lane in rural South Auckland. Apple green curtains hang idly beside the large lounge windows in their tiny home. They have no need to pull them, for their well-kept secret garden is cleverly hidden behind clipped cypress hedges. None of the neighbours can see in, although the Auckland Gliding Club’s pilots are afforded a bird’s-eye view as they soar above the grassy airfield over the boundary fence.
Those imposing hedges aren’t the only reason the couple could happily dispense with their drapes. Most nights they’re out working in the 1ha garden and nursery at Puriri Lane until the sun has set, but even if they weren’t, they’d be mad to pull the curtains on the views of their tree-fringed lawn.
Debbie and Clive both came to gardening late. When they met, Debbie was a cosmetic sales manager in the city while Clive was a former farm boy from Taneatua in the Bay of Plenty working in the export fruit sector.
They settled happily in suburbia and were climbing the corporate ladder until 2009, when they spied a wee house with the makings of a wondrous garden for sale in Drury.
“The first time we walked up the driveway,” Debbie recalls, “I looked at Clive and said: ‘We’re meant to be here.’”
“We both said it,” he concurs, and the real estate agent knew it, too. He took one look at the captivated couple standing in the lane and told his colleagues that he’d found his buyers. “It had such a beautiful feel to the place,” says Debbie, a feeling due in no small part to the property’s graceful groves of mature trees. >
The previous owners, Penny and Paul King, were landscapers with good connections; they sourced a classy selection of deciduous magnolias, ornamental cherries, honey locusts and dawn redwoods (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) from iconic Taranaki nursery Duncan & Davies, and provided hand-drawn planting plans along with the sale and purchase agreement.
The one-bedroom house, a former cut-flower packing shed clad in bandsawn ply and batten, hadn’t been lived in for a while and the garden had also been let go, but Debbie and Clive weren’t fazed by the overgrown undergrowth. “We spent the first year just pulling things out,” she says.
When they’d cleared all the rampant jasmine, ivy and woolly nightshade, they popped into a boutique nursery up the road and left full of ideas, not just for filling their garden but for growing their own plants for sale.
They signed up for night classes at Taratahi Institute of Agriculture to learn the basics of plant propagation, and set about establishing a nursery in their front paddock. They started off growing colourful native flax cultivars but soon hit a snag. “We didn’t actually like flax,” confesses Debbie with a laugh. “We weren’t planting any in our own garden.”
So they changed tack to focus on old-fashioned flowers with vintage appeal, like the hard-to-find cottage annuals and rare and unusual perennials that Debbie had coveted in English gardening magazines.
For five years, they juggled their weekday corporate careers with sowing seeds, tending to trays of cuttings and selling plants at weekend markets, but eventually the lure of their land won out. Having gone part-time at first “purely to keep the gardens up to scratch”, they’re easing out of their contracting roles to make a go of it full-time.
Puriri Lane Nursery now offers an enviable catalogue of “yesterday’s flowers for today’s gardens”. Their best-selling oldtimers? Debbie rattles off plant names like a schoolteacher confessing to pet pupils: there’s burgundy-spiked Lysimachia atropurpurea ‘Beaujolais’, creamy apricot perennial pincushions Scabiosa atropurpurea ‘Fata Morgana’, claret-pokered Pennisetum glaucum ‘Purple Majesty’ and the white bellflower Campanula persicifolia ‘Fleur de Neige’, which looks like a delphinium in disguise. Honourable mentions go to purple breadseed poppies, drought-tolerant achilleas, mignonette, foxgloves, cornflowers and the fluffy-tailed Astilbe arendsii ‘Diamant’ (its white plumes starred in Meghan Markle’s wedding bouquet). >
As well as their regular Sunday stall at the Clevedon Village Farmers’ Market, last spring the Sisams opened their garden for the first time for the Franklin Hospice Garden Ramble. Despite the rain, they did a roaring trade selling plants and accessories from their old garage, which has been transformed into a pop-up shop and workshop space complete with wallpaper from The Potting Room collection from Sanderson.
The garden is now open to groups by appointment, although not all visitors – especially those with sharp teeth and beaks – are welcome. Debbie and Clive share their garden with two freerange hens: Harriet, a Plymouth barred rock, and Bluebell, a blue australorp. There are also kererū, tūī, kākā and paddlings of neighbourhood ducklings. They tolerate pūkeko, those vexatious native swamp vandals, but Clive isn’t so forgiving of rabbits and possums. During the past nine years, he’s dispatched with 154 and 92 of each respectively.
As well as his sharpshooting skills, Clive’s a dab hand at DIY and is – mostly – happy to oblige with Debbie’s to-do lists. He can build anything, “as long as it’s rustic”, he jokes, and this creative couple agree that working together in their garden “sure beats working in any office”.