A luscious, flower-filled Marlborough garden has a colourful potager at its heart.
Visitors flock to a magnificent flower-filled Marlborough garden with an elegant and colourful potager at its heart
There’s a photo of Carolyn Ferraby’s husband Joe asleep in a garden seat somewhere in the UK, a candid moment taken on holiday. The caption reads: “One garden visit too many.” Carolyn tells this story with her trademark playful twinkle. Other times, she tells people that Joe thought he was marrying a wife; instead he got a gardener.
You’ll see ample evidence at their farm in Marlborough that when florist met farmer, he supplied the biggest vase ever — and nearly 50 years on she’s still having the time of her life arranging it.
Carolyn has rebelled against the property’s name, Barewood, and created a luscious, fragrant, flower-crammed farm garden. Even the vegetable plot, a must when you live 40 minutes from the nearest town of Blenheim, is an enviably beautiful French-style potager. Celebrated for her immaculate colour sense, she uses a florist’s flair when choosing plants, laying down tone on tone as if in a watercolour painting.
Foliage is as important to the flower garden as it is to the vase, and she prides herself on growing complementary shrubs to fill out the scheme. She may live in a remote valley, one of the driest in New Zealand, but people attracted by stories of this elegant garden come to her by the coachload, up to 1000 a year, many from visiting cruise ships docked in Picton.
Others may open up their gardens for weddings, conferences or B&B guests, but Carolyn concentrates on welcoming garden lovers. She’s determined that every season will offer something different in the borders.
Excellence on this scale has its rewards. The New Zealand Gardens Trust has stamped Barewood a six-star Garden of International Significance. It’s an accolade not given lightly and for the owner, it’s hard won – and even harder to maintain. But it’s still the thing she loves most: “I feel very lucky. I can go out after breakfast and be there till dark.”
Carolyn says she’s fortunate to have started the garden at a time when lots of plants were available, specialist local nurseries abounded and sourcing seed from England was still possible. She’s always on the lookout for perennials that are interesting and different and finding a new one is a special moment. Lately she’s been designing gardens for other people, which she says is a stimulating discipline, and tracking down plants for someone else has a useful spin-off for her own garden.
Carolyn is blessed with an acute visual memory. Her mother died when she was nine, but she says she could draw her garden now with every plant in it. Her mother was artistic, and she had a large picturesque garden at a time when there were few illustrated gardening books to inspire and inform.
When Carolyn and Joe took over the farm from his parents, she stood at the gate and visualised how it could be. They took the 100-year-old homestead back to its romantic best by knocking off a rather ugly modern sunroom and extending the verandah around the side – “I wanted it dripping with old-fashioned roses,” she says. Other changes included revamping the existing vege plot behind the house, building a summer house up the back, and putting a hawthorn walk up there – because hawthorns are more appropriate than cherry trees in a farm garden, she believes. They shifted the driveway so it wouldn’t cut the lawn in two, making a generous green entrance. >
Carolyn Ferraby’s best tip for gardeners: ‘Keep on top of the weeding and everything else is pleasure’
Carolyn devoured books: she learned from the writings of 19th century British designer Gertrude Jekyll that a garden should curtsy to the house, and Penelope Hobhouse taught her about plants. But the first and most memorable gardening book she read was on Sissinghurst Castle by English writer Anne ScottJames. When she visited the castle garden — the creation of Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, and perhaps the most famous English garden of all — it lit a spark. “I can do this,” she thought, “albeit on my own terms.” And to keep the flame burning, she’s returned five times to Sissinghurst.
In Marlborough Carolyn joined a local rhododendron society, which was a great learning curve; the best lesson was that she can’t really grow them well at Barewood. But people were fantastically knowledgeable about all aspects of gardening and she soaked it all up. And, of course, she shared cuttings with other gardening-mad friends. >
But what to do with the clay soil? On the plus side, it stays moist in the summer. But what can you plant that won’t drown in winter, especially on the scale she envisaged? Joe helpfully softened it up with the farm gelignite until a better, less explosive, solution was found. Now she slathers the ground with trailerloads of sawdust, oak dross, pine needles and sheep manure plus handfuls of gypsum, and lets the worms do the work converting clay to friable loam. “I can’t not do that every year,” she says.
Looking back, she thinks she should have designed the garden on the page first, because of course she’s made a mistake or two – like the time they dug out a pond then realised they couldn’t see it from the summer house. It might have been a disaster but visiting Australian designer Michael McCoy had a solution: bash through the wall. Hey presto, a water view revealed.
Then it was decided a second summer house behind that one would tie it all together and make sense of the nascent orchard area behind. Done and done.
Carolyn and Joe often travel to visit great gardens, to look and learn, which keeps Carolyn’s creative batteries fully charged — and Joe’s flagging interest topped up by power naps. >
(Malus tschonoskii)
But this regime also lit a fuse back home. Why not celebrate the efforts of her local peers? So Carolyn and friends set up a festival of Marlborough gardens, which has grown steadily more popular every year: a quarter of a century later 3000-plus tourists are drawn to the region for the four-day event. Rapaura Springs Garden Marlborough runs from 8-11 November this year.
They’re also lured by the promise of rubbing shoulders with famous names in horticulture — for instance, Fergus Garrett, head gardener at the late Christopher Lloyd’s masterpiece Great Dixter in the UK. For Carolyn, having Fergus to stay had specific benefits: he taught her how to prune her newly established orchard. “There’s work to be done there,” she says happily.
A less task-oriented visitor left a lasting impression too. Cruise ship passengers usually come for the chance to stretch their sea legs and explore the countryside. But occasionally, says Carolyn, “I get a gardener,” such as an attentive Frenchman who followed her around Barewood, kissing her hand. “C’est magnifique,” he insisted, speaking in a language we understand.