Rex Williams is a gardener who refuses to rush, and his plants love him for it.
A Paeroa plantsman has taken his time when creating a naturalistic garden that celebrates his love of clivias
Patience may be a virtue but it’s also one of the best tools in a gardener’s kit. Rex Williams knows better than to rush into anything. Yet here in his leafy acreage near Paeroa, where palms, cycads and colour-drenched clivias rub shoulders with native trees, banks of bromeliads and succulents, you could be forgiven for thinking this has always been here. But this .4ha garden is just a teenager, mature beyond its years.
Rex is a landscaper and builder by day and in his spare time a clivia specialist, selling seed around the world through his business, Cosmic Clivias. He’s always been a plantsman, raising his favourites from seed. For years, orchids were his passion. “I was New Zealand’s youngest orchid judge,” he says. Then palms took his fancy, followed by cycads, bulbs, vireya rhododendrons and now clivias. At the family home near Tauranga, he used to grow them all, run a market garden, plus sell cut flowers and orchids, all in his spare time while working in a nursery. But when his parents decided to downsize, Rex went looking for more land to house his bulging-at-the-seams plant collection. >
It took a few years to find this place, a bush-clad section on a disused quarry, but it appealed immediately. It ticked the boxes: at 2ha, it had the room he craved; Rex loves native bush, though much of it was masked by scrub (“I didn’t even know there was a stream at first,” he says); as for soil type, he didn’t mind. An accomplished grower, Rex was confident he could make it work, whatever the soil. And it had a house. Plus, it was cheap.
What kind of garden did he want to create? Somewhere to grow his collection of plants in a natural setting, for a start. And he was brimming with ideas inspired by the late Brazilian landscape genius Roberto Burle Marx. “Out of all the landscape designers, his is a style I most associate with,” says Rex. “I like his big free-form drifts of plants and colours. Structure and order is not my thing.” There’s not a hedge or lawn in sight.
Rex didn’t move in immediately but the plants did. “I brought two and a half truckloads of them from Tauranga,” he recalls. A neighbour spotted the palms and cast doubt on their prospects in this windy nook (it whistles in from every direction except the west). “But you can build your own microclimate,” says Rex.
He started by clearing the scrub, driving up from Tauranga every Friday night. Who knows how he found the time, but in 2002 he met Deirdre at ballroom dancing classes. Their first date must have been illuminating for his dance partner: “I couldn’t take her in my car because it was filled with bags of compost.”
On their honeymoon they went to South Africa to meet other clivia enthusiasts, returning with a suitcase full of (approved) seeds and plants. After which they moved here permanently.
For every planting hole Rex dug on these steep banks, he hauled away at least one barrow-load of rocks, before replacing them with a wheelbarrow and a half of compost and topsoil. Once seeds turn to seedlings, he trials them in the garden he calls his proving ground. “Another reason not to rush into things,” he says.
‘If I design it in my head, it’s easier to change things. You’ve got to be fluid’
For stage one of the new scheme, he cleared a flat space around the house giving access to a stream bed, now called Dede’s Dell. Here a wedding gift of boulders formed the backbone of a naturalistic bed, which was fattened up with truckloads of compost and topsoil. Rex gathered suitable plants and marked out their potential sites with rocks or coloured sticks.
Then came a pause for contemplation. This process can take weeks, he says. “Or months,” adds Deirdre, with a smile. Rex doesn’t plan his designs on paper. “Too restrictive,” he says. “If I design it in my head, it’s easier to change things. You’ve got to be fluid.”
Then disaster struck: a flood in 2003 scoured out the dell and driveway, uprooting precious plants – but Rex says this cloud had a silver lining. With the insurance payout, he realigned the straight drive into a more natural-looking curve. In Dede’s Dell, he sculpted the land anew, adding tonnes more boulders to the wedding rocks, and got planting. Better than ever, they reckon. >
On the steeper banks beyond the house, Rex has carved out walkways to access the rest of his extraordinary plant treasury. After “years and years of collecting”, he has over 70 different palm species and over 35 different cycads, not to mention masses of clivias. In spring, the hills are alive with pulsating colour ranging from green to peach to red to orange. But there’s colour all year because each clivia species (there are six in all) blooms at different times. Rex likes colour, but he reckons he’s a leaf man at heart – which accounts for the extraordinary range of foliage too.
From the back deck, alongside the frog and fish pond, you look back on the multi-layered mosaic of lush growth. “Americans can’t believe the variety of plants we can grow here,” he says.
At the front door, dozens of dwarf mondo grass plants await Rex’s next project: an Asian-inspired pebble garden. But first he must build a stone retaining wall, and find suitable boulders to symbolise significant landmarks on the nearby Coromandel Peninsula. That should take a couple of years, but Rex isn’t bothered – he knows it will be worth the wait.