History and heart
Their garden has been 59 years in the making and Ngaire and Bruce Cheetham have enjoyed every minute. Carly Thomas has a look.
The garden she stands among is immense. Ngaire Cheetham is a dot of a woman, but her strength and energy to create a garden from nothing is large.
The garden, on the outskirts of Palmerston North, is part of the Cheetham family heritage.
Bruce Cheetham is Ngaire’s husband and his grandfather built the house that stands among the mature trees and bursting-forth perennials in 1915.
The farm out the back was established and built up by him, and his brother and Bruce and Ngaire eventually took over the house in 1960 and started ‘‘working our wages on the farm’’.
‘‘There was no garden then,’’ Bruce says, as he walks down a straight-as-a-ruler tree-lined alleyway. ‘‘This was all paddock’’.
Now, it is a jam-packed two acres with rambling roses weaving their way through wide flower beds and borders. A native walkway buffers the house from the busy road out front that Bruce says has got busier ‘‘as all the years have gone by’’.
His grandfather planted the palm trees lining the driveway like saluting soldiers and while they were only small when Ngaire and Bruce moved in, they are now towering and impressive.
The house is also a real beauty, but that too is something they have worked on over the years – fixing up to begin with and then adding on and making better as they eventually bought the farm and their family grew.
Ngaire says the garden was part of building their life together. Nothing was really planned, she just started as soon as she got here, first by putting in garden beds around the homestead and then slowly taking over more and more of Bruce’s paddocks. Bruce laughs, saying: ‘‘She kept nicking my land.’’
Ngaire nods mischievously. ‘‘I did.’’
‘‘Interest spots develop when you don’t plan, I think. They just happen. You just keep going and it grows.’’
And the business of growing things is something Ngaire has learnt through a family of gardening women.
‘‘I tell people about my mother. She had a little green enamel tea pot and she would make Dad a cup of tea at night and then she would say to everybody: ‘I’m just going out to empty the tea pot.’ She would empty them around the plants and she would be out there for ages.’’
She would then come back in, Ngaire says, and she would say: ‘‘Can somebody please come and help me find my tea pot?’’
Bruce chuckles even though Ngaire says he has heard that story ‘‘a million times before’’.
‘‘Looking back through Ngaire’s family tree, even some of the distant relations were gardeners.’’
Passing by the wall of hedging at the edge of the property offers garden visitors a second-glance moment. About five metres up in the dense foliage, a patio rose has set its sights on being more than it is supposed to be and has grown its way to heady heights.
‘‘When the chap cuts the hedge he just zips along and chops it, but it seems to love it because it just gets further and further,’’ Bruce says.
All of Ngaire’s roses are prolific. She likes the rambling variety and they mingle with everything else rather than stand alone. The garden looks natural and flowing, and it is a garden to explore and walk around – a garden to exclaim over and enjoy.
‘‘Gardens are a restful thing aren’t they?’’ Ngaire says. ‘‘They should be a place you can relax and feel happy in.’’
A trickling waterfall finds its way into a large pond where Charlie, the Cheethams’ cat who adopted them, watches fat goldfish. There is an old row boat upturned beside the impressive water feature, which Bruce says he found after the 2004 storms, washed up in a waterway on the farm’s Kopane block.
‘‘It was a bit of a find so I brought it home and it has been there ever since.’’
Many of the plants and trees have been finds from other people’s gardens and Ngaire says that is one of the great joys of gardening – ‘‘meeting other like-minded people and exchanging clippings and knowledge’’. Ngaire looks at her garden and associates people with many of her plants. A garden as old as this carries history as well as stories.
Bruce has more time to help out now he has sold the farm to his son, and Ngaire says he has become an expert chopper of things, ‘‘and he is very good with picking up all my rubbish’’.
Is it finished? That is a question they are used to being asked and Bruce scratches his head and says he hopes so, while Ngaire smiles as she says she thinks so.
‘‘But there is always something to do, though, isn’t there?’’
Ngaire and Bruce Cheetham open their garden this weekend as part of the Manawatu¯ Art and Garden Trail.