A borrowed landscape

Words Federico Monsalve

From time to time music from Wellington Botanical Garden’s Soundshell wafts past a sparse periphery of rhododendrons, camellias and magnolias. It then filters through a shoulder-height fence of wrought iron and red brick pillars, ebbs across the two lanes of Glenmore Street and quietly drifts into this home’s backyard. Music is not the only thing that ignores the porosity of boundaries here. Birdlife and sporadic seeds are sometimes carried across the divide. Yet, more importantly for this award-winning landscape design, the Botanic Garden’s nearby scenery acts as a sort of borrowed backdrop that the designers sought to utilise.

“It sort of allows you to ‘own’ the land visually beyond what you actually own,” explains Mark Newdick, principal at landscape architecture studio Local. Well-thought-out sightlines allow parts of the garden to extend visually well beyond the property’s boundary. This means the garden appears stitched to its surrounds, hence continuing the neighbourhood’s fabric, and in a way making itself seem larger.

This interest in context and how it is reflected in the landscape design goes well beyond scenery and into the realms of topography and indigenous flora and design values.

The garden, for instance, celebrates the characteristically rugged terrain of Wellington through “a series of sculptural stepped steel, concrete and timber elements that are based on abstractions of local landform, specifically the jagged greywacke which underlies the site”, according to Local.

“The whole stepped landscape seeks to play with the topography that we've been given,” says Mark, “and have a garden that responds to and plays with that… rather than trying to override the natural qualities of the site.”

Plant selection is, likewise, a reflection of locality with lancewoods, ribbonwoods, lacebarks and putaputaweta used throughout: “All small trees to provide verticality without taking up space,” says Mark. He mentions prostrate kowhai, Muehlenbeckia astonii and divaricating coprosma as providing twiggy textures, while astelia, and native irises and ferns provide a “more strappy contrast of form”.

Beyond texture, privacy and beauty, the designers also sought food production with some of the higher steps entirely devoted to fruit and vegetables.

The judges of the bi-annual awards run by the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architecture gave this project the highest honour in the residential category (2022) and said it was, according to Mark, “very much a future-thinking garden, not just in terms of the reference of indigenous plants and indigenous landscapes but also food self-sufficiency”.

“We do a lot of social housing,” explains the designer, and things like food production and water sensitivity are themes that we always deal with.” Besides rain catchment, the food and vegetable steps allow the owner to partake in and share their own produce. Another significant layer to this project has been the indigenous context which has served as a central tenet to the design. Local defined its response to the brief through the lens of Te Aranga Māori design principles — a set of outcomebased principles founded on intrinsic Māori cultural values. Mana, whakapapa, tohu, taiao, and six other te ao Māori concepts were integrated into the design via plant selection, naming conventions, promoting “spiritual wellbeing by providing connections with the natural world”, respect of the land and more. The garden cocoons most of the house and its most impressive enclave is the way the courtyard and the interior interact through height, variety and shadow. The proportions of the concrete steps and metallic planters co-exist beautifully with the elegant mid-century personality of the Parsonson Architects’ design. According to Local: “The fencing has been carefully designed to be both elegant and recessive. Palings of varying height and thickness blend in with the planting to create a seamless transition from the inner garden to the bush clad hills beyond, while providing a shadow-play at certain times of the day and smooth the transition between flat and sloping areas of the site. Both side yards are protected by perforated powder-coated steel sliding gates to minimise footprint and create continuity with the steel planters.”

This landscape design is impressive by the many layers — conceptual, textural, cultural and context-wise — that fuelled it. Here is hoping that some of its strengths, much like the music from the Botanical Garden next door, ebb outwards and inspire, to germinate into similarly in-depth projects.