Family Trees
Five generations of Davisons have farmed along the Lowry Peaks Range near Culverden since the late 1880s, planting trees and creating gardens as opportunities allowed and their families grew. Tim and Lou’s home at Wynyard is the happy result of Tim’s parents’ foresight, and the beautiful garden has prospered under the care of two resourceful women: first established by his mother Brownie Davison, and refreshed in recent years by Lou herself.
PAST THE LIMESTONE COUNTRY AROUND WEKA
Pass and Hawarden and over the Hurunui River Bridge, the view opens up across the Amuri Plain with Lowry
Peaks Range to the right. Wynyard (named for an English township with family connections) is almost directly across the plains from Culverden, facing north and west towards the Hanmer and Amuri Ranges. The farm lies on the sunny northwest aspect but this is still inland Canterbury, with typically drought-prone summers, drying winds, and subject to what writer Fiona Farrell calls ‘the bright blue blast of a Canterbury winter’. The original Davison property Lowry Peaks was divided in the early 1940s and Tim’s parents Hawdon and Brownie built their home and farmed on what was virtually bare land at first; there were few trees for shelter, let alone ornamental plantings. A few tough English oaks endured from the early days but most of the hundreds of mature trees now on the farm and around the homesteads were planted by Tim and his father; some of their original shelterbelts have reached maturity and are gradually being milled and replanted.
A section of shingle road leads to Wynyard’s entrance driveway which is lined with massive old Lombardy poplars – it winds up past Lou and Tim’s home on the left to the top house a few hundred metres further on.
Different generations of farming families can’t be milled and replanted of course; fortunately the Davisons have the knack for orderly succession! When Tim’s parents decided to hand on the day-to-day running of the farm to Tim and Lou (she’s also from a farming background) in the mid-1970s, they built their retirement home just a few hundred metres down the driveway. The driveway itself follows along a gentle ridge next to a gully stream, with shallow swales leading off it here and there. The new house site was next to one of these natural swales, which was eventually incorporated into the garden.
Tim’s father ‘didn’t want one step in the whole house’, so using the farm’s bulldozer Tim prepared the building platform for a single level dwelling. Designed by architect David Robens, the house is a confident example of his mid-20thcentury style – asymmetrical, with characteristic angles and clean lines, generous windows, and unpainted concrete block exterior. Completed in May 1975, the house is angled almost due north with an unobstructed view of the highest peaks of the Hanmer and Amuri ranges: Percival, Tinline, Goosey, Terako, and Mount Lyford. Brownie was keen to establish an area for native plants – under her eagle eye Tim brought down heavy greywacke boulders from the slopes above the farm, nudging them to create outcrops, crevices and pathways: the foundations of a native garden extending from the east end of the house. This area had drainage issues, and the bulldozer had to penetrate 2.4 m (8 ft) of loess clay to reach
free-draining shingle. Tim also excavated a ‘ha-ha’ at the far side of the main lawn. Widely used on grand estates during the English Landscape Movement in the 1700s, this is a deep swale supported along the lawn’s edge, which keeps stock out of the garden while giving the illusion of a continuous lawn extending out into the paddock. The building platform, ha-ha and boulders for the native area were the only changes to the site’s natural contour. Walking through the garden now, the different levels all appear to be part of a complete integrated design – a great compliment to Tim and his parents who had the sensitivity to leave most of the natural landforms undisturbed.
Brownie planted the basic structure, carefully placing many different bulbs, perennials, shrubs and trees in groups and vertical layers around the lawns and paving, with paths to link the areas together. Plants are gathered in sunny or shady spaces according to their needs, and Lou says she can always find a sheltered sunny spot at different times through the day. In late autumn there’s still rich colour from flowers and foliage; excellent for picking too, although the fine views from the house mean there’s not a great need to bring the garden inside. Lou enjoys these warm, ruddy, soft autumnal colours, including on fabrics and furnishings. In late April and May there are white nerines, Sedum spectabile ‘Autumn Joy’, Nandina domestica ‘Pygmaea’, Nyssa (a small tree with intense autumn colour), Golden ash Fraxinus excelsior ‘Aurea’ or ‘Jaspidea’, ornamental grape Vitis amurensis draped along the front of the house, Hydrangea ‘ Merveille Sanguine’, a shrubby Berberis with leaves glowing like embers; and thoughtfully
Tim brought down massive greywacke boulders from the slopes above the farm, nudging them to create outcrops, crevices and pathways.
chosen roses. Greenish-white ‘Iceberg’ is beautiful, tough and adaptable – unfortunately it often suffers from being pruned too low. Here it makes a graceful shrub nearly 1.8 m tall, and is all the better for it; similarly for ‘Sally Holmes’ whose single flowers turn soft apricot-pink in the cold, and alabaster-white ‘Pearl Drift’. There are Hybrid Musk roses, modern Hybrid Tea ‘Nobilo’s Chardonnay’; and a heritage China rose Lou tells me is most likely ‘Comtesse du Cayla’, raised in 1902 – related to ‘Mutabilis’ with similar drought and heat tolerance, and flowering almost continuously on tall stems until the first hard frosts. The individual flowers are not classically formal, but this variety is hard to beat for its combination of height, natural open texture and long seasonal colour; the heritage tea rose ‘Jean Ducher’ from 1873 is similarly valuable.
An aerial photograph from 1980 shows the garden growing strongly, particularly the native area to which Brownie was adding rare and endemic local species – a glimpse of the natural vegetation which may once have been here including flax, wineberry, Clematis, tōtara, kōwhai, Fuchsia procumbens and the Marlborough weeping tree broom Carmichaelia stevensonii. Tim tells me that old tōtara trunks can still be found high up behind the farm, confirming that parts of this landscape were once forested. Lou cherishes these native plants, and is skilled in gentle trimming to let in light and air while maintaining their natural form – they’re part of the garden, rather than a rewilding project.
The local environment has some parallels to the northwest slopes of Banks Peninsula. Northwesterlies have deposited silt and clay particles from the Amuri Plain and local riverbeds across the lower slopes of the Lowry Peaks Range, in the same way thick loess deposits blanket the foothills above Christchurch. The original native vegetation was likely similar too – allowing for differences in altitude and bedrock composition. Wynyard’s native garden frames the view and shelters the house from the east, and also attracts birdlife, including fantails, silver-eyes and kererū native pigeons – plus bellbirds during autumn and winter; their songs in the garden give Tim and Lou a lot of pleasure. To avoid winter’s cold, bellbirds move down from exposed higher altitudes on the Lowry Peaks to milder sheltered valleys, and pockets of trees and native bush near the plains.
Something similar happens on Banks Peninsula during May: bellbirds move down off the tops into sheltered valleys with good nectar sources such as Orton Bradley Park and lower Cashmere, and out across Christchurch at least as far
Tim tells me that old tōtara trunks can still be found high up behind the farm, confirming that parts of this landscape were once forested.
as Harewood and Riccarton. Apparently they eat insects and fruit when nectar is not available. Some named selections of species such as bush kōwhai Sophora ‘Dragon’s Gold’ are also attractive food sources and thrive at Wynyard; exotics such as Eucalyptus and autumn flowering Camellia sasanqua ‘Setsugekka’ also attract bees and bellbirds – and perhaps tūī in the future.
From 1975 Lou and Tim managed the farm’s predominantly sheep and beef operation, raised their three children in the top house, and continued planting trees for shelter and beauty. Theirs is the ‘pocket arboretum’ in the paddock between the two houses, with conifers such as Wellingtonia Sequoiadendron giganteum, cedars, pines (possibly P. muricata Bishop Pine) and deciduous trees with an emphasis on autumn colour: variegated elms, North American oaks, London planes, and Liquidambar. Additional shelter protected the new house and inevitably pinched the view a little: locals say that ‘if you can see [Mount] Tekoa you’ll get the northwester’. These maturing trees and the homestead garden at Wynyard made a wonderful environment as the ultimate home of the Culverden Fête. Launched in 1991 by Lou and her farming friends Fiz Rutherford, Sue Gardner and Jossy Davison, the fête gathered momentum over 25 years, welcoming around 6,000 visitors at its height, on the last Thursday each October.
In 2013 the next amicable family succession brought changes (a dairy conversion and the hill country sold) and saw Tim and Lou take up residence in the ‘new’ house. They freshened and modernised, opening up internal walls and lowering the living room ceiling. Double sliding doors next to the kitchen and breakfast bar open to a generous covered veranda with jute rugs, comfortable seating and tables – a perfect layout for gatherings, looking out across the lawn and ha-ha to the mountains. The garden is a little larger (approximately four hectares including the arboretum): paddock has become lawn to include a shapely London plane, and there’s a cool green composition of native Astelia and clipped Pittosporum shrubs behind the native garden. ‘Lou’s the gardener,’ says Tim. ‘The trees are more my thing.’ With Wynyard part of a local art in autumn gardens initiative it’s clear that they’re not resting on their laurels …
Wynyard’s native garden frames the view and shelters the house from the east, and also attracts birdlife, including fantails, silver-eyes and kererū native pigeons – plus bellbirds during autumn and winter.