Formal dissolves to wild in NZ garden
Author Christopher Woods began his gardening life at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew. More recently he has travelled the world for his new book Gardenlust.
He spent a year crisscrossing the globe in search of the most exciting gardens, whether public or private, and reports the art of gardening is alive and well.
Actually, he says, that’s putting it too mildly.
“Gardening is bursting with energy and creativity. It’s heading in directions that couldn’t even have been imagined a few years ago. It’s confronting the massive challenges of climate change. It’s transforming cities. It’s making people’s lives better.”
Included in this beautifully presented publication are several New Zealand gardens including Paripuma in Blenheim and Gibbs Farm in Kaipara, North Auckland.
Following is an extract from the book, used by permission of the publisher:
PARIPUMA
Blenheim, South Island, New Zealand
Rosa Davison / 10 acres (4 hectares) / 2001 to present
Native plants have been gaining increasing respect in 21st century garden design. Not only have we “rediscovered” the beauty of native flora; it feels good to imagine we are somehow, even if only in the abstract, taking action that is also ecologically sound. This is interpreted almost exclusively by designs that tend toward the wild, the untamed. It’s unclear exactly why native must equate with informal, but the concept clearly appeals. It is exceedingly rare to come across a garden that uses native plants in formal design. It is a brave thing to do — but why shouldn’t natives be used, as many other plants are, in varying styles?
At Paripuma, a private residence on the South Island of New Zealand, Rosa Davison excels at crossing these established boundaries.
“I wanted to make a formal garden that dissolves into the wild,” she says. “I was enamored with European gardens, particularly Sissinghurst and Great Dixter. Who didn’t grow up as a gardener reading Vita Sackville-West and Christopher Lloyd?”
But this is New Zealand, not restrained England, and the coast is rough. Davison’s land is just a few feet above sea level, on soil that is half gravel and half clay. It looks north, toward the warm sun. It is frost-free.
This is the southern hemisphere, though, and when cold comes, it comes from the Antarctic. With the Pacific Ocean on one side and high sand bluffs on the other, the garden receives peculiar amounts of rainfall.
“One year we had four inches of rain,” she says, “the next year, 22.”
She had a lot to learn about what could grow in such a place.
She chose plants native to the region, ready-adapted to unpredictable swings in conditions. Her next smart move was to borrow faraway scenery by laying out the garden along a main central axis that, in effect, extends her narrow acreage all the way across the bay and to the peak of a distant mountain, Mount Rahatia.
She chose one plant, ngaio (Myoporum laetum), as the primary architectural plant. Pronounced n-ay-oh, it is a fast-growing, evergreen shrub or small tree with small purple-dotted white flowers. She lined the main view with ngaio and then spread it out along a crossaxis until it disappeared into the gravelly beach. Its dome-shaped canopies lend graceful billows along the central path, creating the desired formality yet tempering it with soft waves.
In the centre, nicely placed as a focal point, is an old iron whaling pot that now serves the gentler purpose of an antique, rust-hued foil to the Poor Knights lily (Xeronema callistemon), a species named after its homeland, a group of nearby islands to the north. It takes up to 15 years to flower, but when it does, it produces striking red bottlebrushlike flowers. It is sensitive to frost but is otherwise a tough plant. Davison relates that a bucket of seawater dumped on it occasionally actually seems to please it.
A small border of Marlborough lilac (Heliohebe hulkeana) softens the approach to the house. This plant is an interesting one from an etymological/horticultural point of view, because it’s not a lilac at all but a relative of Veronica. It features long sprays of light lavender flowers in spring. Davison finds colour distracting and only uses it, as in the case of the Heliohebe and
Xeronema, as occasional accents within the calm repetition of evergreens.
To walk down the garden’s central avenue to the rough beach beyond and then to look back up the length of it all is to realise that Mrs Davison, in choosing plants that have as much right to be there as the rough waves and jagged cliffs, has created the perfect balance between the intended and the untamed.