My Space: Landscape designer Phillip Smith’s untamed paradise.
Oratia in West Auckland is landscape designer Philip Smith’s happy place
Describe the space: “A nearly 0.8ha plot of land subdivided from the home site of what used to be the Oratia Native Plant Nursery. I always got on well with its founder Geoff Davidson, right back to when I was a young practitioner. I used to say to Geoff: ‘If you ever want to sell some land…’. Now we’re moving into a new home we’ve built here, and I’ve started to plant our garden where our research ideas will be tested out. The modernist house, by architect Marc Lithgow of Space Division, is based on horticultural structures like plastic houses. It’s long and narrow, sitting like a bridge in the middle of the hillside.” What inspires you about this space: “Oratia is a place of old orchards and native forest within the Waitakere foothills, a perfect combination of open land and nearby forest. There’s an unusual rhythm that’s been set up from productive horticulture here. And when this was still the home property of the nursery they planted straight lines of cabbage trees, and a grid of pōhutukawa and cabbage trees above where we’ve built. I love the tension between that military order and the more amorphous planting.” What do you do: “As owner of O2 Landscapes my focus is on championing overlooked and underappreciated plants, both native and exotic. My book Vernacular, written with David Straight, sums up my ideas on the everyday landscape. I’ve worked on more than 200 gardens for other people. This will be the major garden for my family and the business, after experimenting with plants since I was 13 – more than 30 years now.” What’s next: “What I’m most looking forward to here, apart from getting plants that I have potted up for years into the ground, is developing a collection to propagate plants that might be hard to get, for our clients – and me. That and seeing trees grow over the decades. My favourite plant, Phyllocladus toatoa, is a close relative of the native blue celery pine. I will only ever have one tattoo – the toatoa is on my shoulder forever as well as featuring on our work shirts.”