Wedged between mountains and sea, a Kaiōura garden is created with love and dedication.
Sea salt, wind, frosts and rock – these gardeners have conquered them all
Moira Howard and Mother Nature have an intimate if tempestuous relationship. It’s unavoidable when a determined gardener sets out to cultivate a tranquil enclave in a capricious environment.
Extreme conditions are the price you pay for a spectacular location and, with the ocean below and mountains rising steeply behind, the strip of Kaikōura coastline where Moira and husband Richard farm has both in full measure.
“The wind whips through the valley and around the mountains. You can’t get out these doors sometimes,” says Moira. Summers are dry and hot and the winters freezing. As for the soil, Richard sums it up in one word – stones.
Moira came from a harsh but very different landscape in Perth, Western Australia. She met Richard in London. It’s an oft-heard story: he worked in a pub, she as a nanny, boy meets girl at an Aussie-Kiwi barbecue through a mutual friend.
Richard is the third generation of his family to work the farm and grew up in the old homestead by the sea in the neighbouring settlement of Hāpuku. It was there, in her mother-in-law’s huge garden, that Moira learned the ropes and developed a love of gardening. But Richard and Moira’s eyes were always looking upwards to a site on the escarpment above them with stunning views. “For 20 years we yearned to get up here,” says Moira.
Fifteen years ago, when their son and daughter were in their teens, the Howards built a house up
the hill and, on a beautiful but bleak blank canvas, Mother Nature and Moira drew their battle lines. The gardener knew there were a few fights she had to win in order to create peace in a territory lacking two vital ingredients: shelter and soil.
“For several years I mulched the whole area with newspaper and pea straw. It was before the hedge was up and we had the worst three years of nor’westers,” she says.
A romantic image might be of Moira standing legs astride commanding the winds to cease but the reality was a desperate woman lying spread-eagled on a mat of mulch crying for help as the nor’wester tore it from under her, rolled it up and blew it out to sea. She persevered (this happened more than once) and eventually established shelter in the form of hedges of the hardy native hoheria, or ribbonwood, regarded by some as noxious but by Moira as a lifesaver. “The wind might shred all the leaves but the branches bend and come back again.”
Within three sides of hedging, Moira cleverly integrated natives and exotics to establish a halfhectare of garden. Nature’s small revenge is that the sheltered microclimate now tends to hold the frosts, but Moira carefully selects her plants for their hardiness as well as year-round performance. White-barked birches, leathery viburnums and rhododendrons intermingle with silver flaxes, hebes and lime-green euphorbias.
In spring and summer, swathes of heaths and daisies brighten the garden islands in the lawn, and walkways deliberately zigzag through layered shrubberies to thwart the wind-tunnel effect.
“I planted it all myself and have RSI to prove it,” says Moira. But it was never anything other than a
labour of love. “I always feel so much better for gardening. You get out there and lose yourself.”
An avid propagator, she took cuttings and grew seeds from established plants to extend the garden and keep costs down. Nature helped on that score. “There is a lot of self-seeding, which can be a mixed blessing. I can’t pull out a seedling without potting it up.” Her green fingers have had far-reaching benefits, with the local beautifying group using seed from her prolific deep-red kākābeak, the progeny of a single specimen, to plant alongside the highway.
The stones, too, have a silver lining. “Richard’s father rock-picked some of the paddocks so they could cut hay. I just go and pick out of the big pile in the paddock,” says Moira, who uses them to suppress weeds and to hold soil and moisture.
Stones were also the foundation of a charming vegetable garden that Moira designed and built herself. “I looked at English potager books and made up my own style with raised stone beds.” Richard made a boxing frame out of old shutters and Moira moved it around, bed by bed, hand-mixing concrete a barrow at a time and building the walls. “You’ve got to get the mix right and the rocks right. They need a flattish top and bottom and the corners are tricky. It took about a week to make each bed.”
The garden, particularly the potager, has more recently become both a playground and outdoor learning centre for their small grandchildren. Sadie, three, and Archer, one, live on the farm 300m away, and their son’s three-year-old daughter Lux regularly visits from Christchurch.
“The girls will only eat Nana’s peas and raspberries. They love helping in the garden and have their own little gardening sets and watering cans,” says Moira.
Visitors staying in accommodation units the Howards have built alongside the garden also appreciate the unique environment. “Our Chinese visitors tell us there is good feng shui here.” It’s to do with having the mountains behind and the sea in front, but also about being in a place where a gardener and Mother Nature have settled old scores and are working in harmony.
‘THE GIRLS WILL ONLY EAT NANA’S PEAS AND RASPBERRIES. THEY LOVE HELPING IN THE GARDEN’