Views to delight
A beautifully landscaped garden over Taieri Plains.
Starting a garden around Trudi’s new home provided the creative outlet for the potter still in her.
You don’t have to have gardening genes to become a gardener. David and Trudi Stewart have proven that on their 2ha garden Northview, which sits on an elevated site overlooking Mosgiel and the expansive Taieri Plain. The homemade recipe they used to make themselves gardeners has consisted of just giving it a go, a bit of trial and error, a good lashing of creativity, and potentially the most important bit of all, having fun.
Even after 25 years developing the garden, however, Trudi, who grew up in Holland, still doesn’t feel like a “real gardener” but instead loves the art and design that is part of gardening. David is the primary keeper of plant knowledge, so it’s their combined skills that collectively have set them up as a qualified gardening team.
Trudi had never envisaged owning a five-acre block of land, but the opportunity to live next door to her son came out of the blue, so she went for it. Starting a garden around her new home provided the creative outlet for the potter still in her, and a couple of years later David arrived on the scene. “I admired what Trudi had done so I just joined in,” says David. “The Dutch like things to be neat and tidy so we extended the garden to cover all five acres with no untidy or uncultivated areas, so boundary to boundary is now covered entirely with gardens, lawns, ponds and the waterfall.”
They have done wonders creating this veritable feast of a garden as they inherited a soggy challenge with the profusion of springs, along with shallow topsoil underlain by clay that exacerbated drainage problems. The springs did have an upside: the central pond feature was easily created and filled without any need for lining, and it has never been empty due to replenishment by the springs.
It was due to these shallow soils that one of their first gardening lessons was finding that trees refused to bed in and grow deep roots if planted in small holes. So, for each new planting, a big hole had to be dug and filled with good soil to plant into. The intensive labour required didn’t stop there, as an additional step was then needed to construct a drainage channel for each. Thankfully, shallow-rooted plants such as hydrangeas and rhododendrons grew happily in these conditions, and David has planted more than 1000 of the latter to date, many of them now labelled as a reminder of their names.
Drainage continued to be a major issue for planting and developing, and when big rains arrived, the swampy gully dissecting the block left “a week’s worth” of rocks, mud and debris to clean up. That’s when engineer
David came up with a plan, involving the construction of a channel, 1m wide, down the gully to disperse the excess water.
“The Dutch like things to be neat and tidy so we extended the garden to cover all five acres with no untidy or uncultivated areas,” David says.
The idea however was turned on its head when David returned from an overseas work trip to find a slightly enlarged excavated channel. “Trudi and the digger driver decided the larger width looked better and suited the scale of things,” David now laughs.
With the soil now turned, David forged ahead, and juggling a busy professional work life, worked on its construction on weekends and in his spare time for 13 years. While the feature achieves exactly what it was designed to do and channels heavy rains down a series of stunning cascading layers, the original plan of keeping it filled and running permanently was never realised. Hence the feature is now known informally, and with a hint of humour, as “Trudi’s folly”.
With a garden so expansive, Trudi and David often have to phone each other to see where they are. Trudi will most likely be in a garden around the house; one of them is the rose garden containing around 60 plants. It was planted in memory of her late mother, who loved the roses that surrounded her big vegetable patch. Trudi admits it’s the rose garden which she has the most rocky relationship with, and is torn between her emotional attachment to the roses, and the care and attention they constantly demand.
In an ideal world, Trudi Stewart would like to have all her plants on wheels so she can more readily relocate them around the garden.
Trudi remains quite amazed at what the property has become since her purchase of the bare block of land 25 years ago.
In an ideal world, Trudi would like to have all her plants on wheels so she can more readily relocate them around the garden. She is a constant curator of plants, and spends hours snipping and shaping to control their heights and levels. Otherwise she says, they run the risk of getting lost. “I like each plant to have their beautiful time, like a group of ladies all dressed beautifully but who like to be seen as individuals.”
(This creativity extends to the sculptures in their collection. When the Julie Butler pottery body fired in three sections first arrived, Trudi liked it split apart due to the outline of the body but David would push it back together assuming it was the grandchildren who kept on pulling it apart. Trudi, on the other hand, thought it was the grandchildren who kept pushing it back together, until one day the penny dropped!)
It’s fun banter like this that permeates the Stewarts’ day-to-day life at Northview, including the pond’s goldfish that Trudi had read (“probably in a Dutch publication,” David adds quickly and dryly) would just arrive one day courtesy of transport by birds. David waited patiently for two years until he secretly brought several fish and deposited them in the pond. The problem was it then took another three years for the shy goldfish to be spotted by Trudi, by which time David thought she must be making the fish-sighting story up! The great result is that the goldfish have had such reproductive success, the couple have even been able to sell the excess.
There’s a certain yin and yang to their relationship and approach to the garden. Trudi loves winter when the raw forms of trees show themselves, and later in the season when new heads start to emerge from the ground. Conversely, spring is her least favourite because of the intensity of growth and colours. Fortunately, her other half appreciates the flowering bulbs and the period when rhododendrons come into their own.
One plant they do agree on though is their favourite tree, Cornus controversa ‘Variegata’. Commonly known as the wedding cake tree, it grows in layers and is appreciated for its grace and the catching of light as the sun shines through.
Another common ground is their love of sharing the garden with visiting public and other members of the Dunedin Open Garden Association.
Trudi remains quite amazed at what the property has become since her purchase of the bare block of land 25 years ago. There wasn’t any birdsong back then, but there’s no shortage of it now.
On more than one occasion, the couple have been known to have a wine out on the patio enjoying the peace of the garden, and any plans of heading out for dinner just slip by along with the setting sun over the Taieri Plain. What Trudi and David have shown and proven, is that there’s a gardener in all of us.
How to visit: Northview is open from September to May by appointment. Ph 03 489 8904; email trudidave@gmail.com.