Most rural NSW gardeners do it tough. Droughts, flooding rains, the pitiless blue sky are our lot and when we’re not moving hoses we’re throwing out mulch or praying a late frost won’t wreck our roses. A recent visit to New Zealand, though, pulled me up short and made me wonder if Australians really do face bigger challenges than gardeners elsewhere.
My first brush with Kiwi reality was literally a bump in the night. I woke from deep sleep to an express train roaring through my Blenheim hotel bedroom and the bed bucking and heaving like a ship in a Force 9 gale: OMG it’s an earthquake.
I woke from deep sleep to an express train roaring through my Blenheim hotel bedroom and the bed bucking and heaving like a ship in a Force 9 gale.
Shivering under my doona, I tried to remember the quake instructions helpfully provided by the hotel but then the noise and heaving suddenly stopped, though aftershocks recurred intermittently for the rest of the night. In the morning I learnt Kaikoura, our next destination, was completely cut off and we’d have to reroute our tour via the west coast and then back to Christchurch.
Luckily all was calm in Blenheim and we were warmly welcomed by three incredibly stoic lady gardeners.
Sue Monahan at Upton Oaks, Margaret Herd at Woodend and Huguette Michel at Hortensia House all have large gardens with formal and semi-formal areas and had all been up since dawn tidying up from the night’s damage to be ready for us.
All were philosophical about living in a landscape that’s regularly reshaped by earth’s tectonic plates, but fallen statues, fissures in the ground and collapsing rock walls were scary reminders of how close we’d been to the epicentre of a major quake.
Ferocious winds are another challenge for Kiwi gardeners. The entire South Island and the lower part of the North are located in the Roaring Forties, a belt of powerful westerlies that blow round the Southern Hemisphere between latitudes of 40 and 50 degrees.
The wind thunders across South Island’s Canterbury Plains from the western mountains and no Kiwi gardener stands a chance without a decent windbreak. Trees are better than walls as they act as filters, but with something destined to become a long-term, dominating landscape feature you need to choose the right tree. With all respect to the Kiwis they didn’t always get this right. Monterey Cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) is their windbreak tree of choice, but few trees could be worse, for like all cypresses (Cupressus) species, it never breaks from bare wood and becomes increasingly ugly with age. To me, though, the biggest challenge facing New Zealand gardeners is where do you start? In a world where you can grow anything, how do you narrow it down? Yet the Kiwis succeed magnificently. Their New Zealand Gardens Trust (www.gardens.org.nz/) lists over 100 gardens open by appointment and in terms of design and plantsmanship they’re right up there – and can take the occasional shake up with it.
Fiona is a tour leader for Renaissance Tours (www.renaissancetours.com.au/) Huguette Michel’s country garden at Hortensia House, 134 O’Dwyers Road, Blenheim is open by appointment (www.hortensiahouse.co.nz/ phone 64 (0)21 504 207).
