I visited a most interesting private garden in Auckland earlier this month. Industrial, urban chic, I would call it.
I wrote about hedging ideas after my visit to the Kelliher Estate on Puketutu Island but I didn’t name the gardener at the time because I hadn’t asked him if he wanted to be identified. It is Grahame Dawson, and as I walked around the Kelliher garden, I asked my companion what Grahame’s own garden was like. What made me curious was that his approach to gardening at the Kelliher showed a flair that is unusual in a public garden (or a trust garden) and I felt sure that I was looking at somebody who had large garden instincts. My companion took me in to meet Grahame in his home garden.
It was very different to the Kelliher Estate garden and I loved it. It is not that I want to emulate it myself. I just thought it was very different, quirky, characterful, self-indulgent even, but not naff and goodness, that is a fine line to tread.
I loved the hanging curtain of tillandsia growing through weighted chains (top photo) and the disco ball echoes of the rounded mounds (threaded through hanging baskets suspended upside down). Yes there was a lot of tillandsia – three main types in the hanging mode, I think Grahame said. Tillandsias, or air plants as they are often referred to, have a huge a family of well over 700 different species and are in the bromeliad group. These ones contributed to the curious phenomenon of a predominantly grey garden. I was viewing it on a grey, cool spring day and I didn’t find it in the least bit dreary, in case you are wondering.
I liked the bold juxtaposition of the almost stark seating area to one side, with the plantings opposite on the site.
The undercover display of specialist orchids were arrayed in the manner of an auricula theatre and that is natural light casting an ethereal glow in the mid afternoon light.
The pool resembled a shrine to my eyes. The little figure, Grahame told me, is Narcissus.
For those who want ideas, Grahame has a natural flair for managing multiple pots without looking messy or cottage-y. The simplest of terracotta pots painted grey made the row a feature with or without the orchid selection they house.
Back at the Kelliher Garden, I had photographed the pots along the front terrace. Alternating square and round pots, he had filled them all with Aloe plicatilis. The very simplicity gave it a formality while softening the scene with thoroughly practical foliage.
People visit gardens for many reasons and goodness knows, with two decades of opening our own garden behind us, we have heard many of those reasons over the years. Too often, a garden is judged – and I use the word ‘judged’ deliberately – on whether the visitor can imagine themselves owning the garden. I didn’t want to own Grahame’s garden – industrial chic is not my style – but it is rare to come across a place that I would describe as genuinely original, combining both wit and skill. This was one.
It may be a surprise to you, as it was to me, to learn that “say it with flowers” did not orginate as Interflora’s slogan but was in fact a 1934 British musical film. Faced by the many memes associated with the Red Peak flag in New Zealand, I felt I could reinterpret it with flowers. First up was the one in the style of floral clocks, perhaps.
When all is said and done, we’d have had a lot more fun with the wild card, Lazer Kiwi though I feel this may be better rendered in the style of a vegetable animal, such as our children used to create for the annual Show Day at primary school.
The latest natural garden feature arrived last week as the dead Pinus radiata we refer to as 
I am pretty sure that the next tree in the row is developing a bigger lean and will likely fall sooner rather than later, but Mark is unconvinced. I like to remind him that 
We went to the North Island daffodil show last Saturday. There is a larger album of photos posted on our 
Nothing to do with gardening, but I still have a strong mental image of an acquaintance many years ago, earnestly crocheting aqua coloured edges to white face cloths. “I think it is nice for guests to have special face cloths,” she said with a high degree of self-satisfaction. I looked around her home – a large and cavernous turn-of-last-century villa which had been cut in pieces and relocated but not restored. The walls were scrim, the facilities and decor still more or less original. It was truly grim. And I thought to myself, you poor woman. You think guests won’t notice the surrounds if they have new face cloths? It was all so evocative of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, where the rituals of civilisation are all that keeps the chaotic universe at bay and without those, what is left is “the horror, the horror”. It had the makings of a short story, but instead I became a garden writer.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 