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Visiting Marjorie’s Garden

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I have a free summer afternoon in Toronto and call my dear friend, garden writer and designer Marjorie Harris. Could I come to see her and bring my camera?  Of course, says she gracefully. Thus, on a hot afternoon at the very end of July, I walk up her midtown street. It’s never difficult to find Marjorie’s house. It’s the one with the luscious green floral tapestry in front. And it’s the one with the biggest ‘Sun King’ aralia (A. cordata) I’ve ever seen. It seems to extend its golden foliage over most of the frontage, on a narrow city lot that measures 20 x 137 feet (6 x 42 metres).

It’s also the garden with rare Japanese umbrella pines (Sciadopitys verticillata) hiding in the undergrowth, along with hellebores and golden hakone grass…..

….and a tiny, jewelled ‘Hana Matoi’ Japanese maple keeping company with Japanese painted fern.

But seriously…. that aralia! I can’t think of another perennial that creates such an element of privacy as this one. However, as Marjorie reminds me, her garden soil is really rich in compost (“lashes of compost” is a favourite phrase of hers) and she has an irrigation system that targets water on plants that really need it.

Marjorie and I spend a half-hour chewing the fat on the front porch. She and I have known each other for three decades. She is a straight shooter (calls a smart woman a “dame”), well organized, energetic and very involved in the cultural heartbeat of the city. And she is still head-over-heels about the garden she created behind the Annex home she has shared with her husband, novelist Jack Batten, for over 50 years. In it, they raised their children — two each from previous marriages — and enjoy visits from their three grandchldren.

She’s just as beautiful as she was in the mid-90s, when she was the editor of Toronto Life Gardens. I wrote articles and book reviews for her in those days, like the one below on landscape designer Neal Turnbull.  It’s hard to imagine this was 23 years ago! (Click for larger versions of the photos).

Later, she became editor-in-chief of Gardening Life magazine and we worked together then, too. (Interestingly, in her Summer 2005 editorial, below, she talks about Larry Davidson of Lost Horizons Nursery, from whom she acquired many of the choice trees and shrubs in her garden.)  Sadly, most of our beautiful, glossy gardening magazines have since disappeared from the publishing landscape in Canada, which is a crying shame.  But that’s a story for another day.

She’s been an ardent feminist all her life. Once, when I was looking through old magazines in my office, I found a 1973 Vancouver Sun Weekend magazine I had saved because it contained an article on the company I worked for at the time (a jade mine… long story). But as I flipped through the pages, I also found a piece titled The Invisible Women by Marjorie Harris.  The topic was “women’s liberation”. That was the beginning of her freelance career, after time spent on staff at Maclean’s and Chatelaine,

And, of course, she’s written tons of books, including the masterful Botanica North America, (to which I contributed some images). Published in 2003, this heavy tome was a rich, encyclopedic treatment of selected naive plants of the biomes of North America.

She was the Globe & Mail‘s gardening columnist for years and does features for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), among many other gigs. As well, she has her own landscape design business, and designed four gardens on her own block. And she goes to France every winter with Jack and makes us all jealous as we shovel the snow back home!

Ah bien, let’s stop chatting on the front porch and head out to see the back garden. And “seeing the garden” is a brilliant reality at Marjorie’s house, even before you actually go outside, because of the fabulous folding glass doors that span the lowered dining room. Designed as part of a 2005 renovation by Lisa Rapaport of PLANT Architect Inc., the glass expanse opened up the view to Marjorie’s exquisite woodland — a mélange of carefully chosen shrubs and trees, many evergreen, whose architecture creates four seasons of interest.

Now let’s step outside into the garden and look back at the house through the colourful tapestry of trees and shrubs. Beside the urn is a red-leaved Japanese maple (Acer palmatum ‘Dissectum Atropurpureum’).  “It was my first expensive plant,” says Marjorie. “I paid $20 for it at Ron’s Garden Centre in the 1980s. Couldn’t believe I’d spend that much money on one plant at the time. It led to madness of course“.

At first it’s not easy to discern a path forward through the abundance, with interesting plants drawing my eye from ground-level to the leafy canopy above. That’s part of Marjorie’s design strategy. As she says: “I find that too often designers miss out on the mid layers in a garden design:  I think mainly about foliage and how leaf shapes relate to one another and then I think about the height of each plant’s maximum effect and how that relates to the whole garden.”

Fittingly, I have to reach above my head and point my camera down to capture this delicious duo, a fullmoon Japanese maple (Acer shirasawanum ‘Aureum’) with colourful barberries below.

On the fence is Clematis ‘Betty Corning’, a spectacular, easy vine that Marjorie laments as being essentially unavailable in the trade.

There are few annuals allowed out here and those invited to stay must pay their rent, like purple-leaved Strobilanthes dyerianus with chartreuse ‘Margarita’ sweet potato vine.  Behind is a glaucous evergreen Marjorie bought to decorate her Christmas table at the corner jug milk store one autumn, “then out to the garden to see just how big it might get,” she recalls. “I love it“.

It’s the exquisite little touches that draw the eye, like this ‘Geisha Gone Wild’ Japanese maple and gold hosta.


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A few choice conifers lend structure and interest in Toronto’s interminable winter, like ‘Algonquin Pillar’ Swiss stone pine (Pinus cembra). “My garden looks good every day of the year except for about 10 days in early spring,” says Marjorie, “when it’s flooded and looking kind of crappy, with all the stuff I haven’t cut down for the winter being brazen enough to be obvious. That I usually clean up myself just because of the shame of it.”

She spends a lot of time looking up at her trees, a remarkable collection, especially given the size of the garden.

There is a beautiful katsura (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) with its heart-shaped leaves and burnt sugar autumn aroma…..

….. and a gorgeous Kentucky coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus), below, with its intricate compound leaves, the largest of any Canadian native tree.

It’s a favourite among her Carolinian forest natives, including tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera), sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua), fringetree (Chionanthus virginicus) and ruby-flowered Calycanthus, below.  “Oxydendron croaked on me,” she admits, “as have several others. I keep trying.”  

A pretty pink astilbe purchased from John’s Garden in Uxbridge grows in dappled shade here, too.

Walking towards the back of the garden, I reach an obelisk adorned with clematis and a nicely pruned blue falsecypress (Chamaecyparis), another one of Marjorie’s Christmas decorations.  Back in the 1980s, Marjorie’s garden featured a unique geometric checkerboard design, with half the spaces in flagstones and the other half choice plants.  In 2002, she hired Earth Inc. to design and install pergolas.  “All seemed fine,” recalls Marjorie, “until the dining room was added in 2005 and then the checkerboard just began to look too fussy.”  So a more streamlined path was substituted leading to this series of pergolas, which allowed space for a more interesting mix of woody plants.

The metal grate under the pergola covers the sump pump.  “The property is build on Seaton Pond flood plain, which rises every spring now that there are not enough trees to drain it properly,” Marjorie explains. “There is an underground stream which is an off-shoot of Taddle Creek, which comes through our garden and under the house. Hoses take the excess ground water out to the street storm sewer; and the stream is dealt with by in-house sump pumps and out through the sewage system.”

Marjorie’s pink floss tree (Albizia julibrissin), below, has now survived three winters. It’s the cultivar ‘Ernest Wilson’, purchased from Jim Lounsbery’s Vineland Nurseries and named for the famous plant explorer who found it in a Korean garden in 1918 and brought seed home to Boston’s Arnold Arboretum. He wrote about it in a 1929 bulletin.  “The origin of the plant in the Arboretum affords a good illustration of the importance of obtaining for northern gardens types which grow in the coolest regions they can withstand. The particular tree was raised from seeds collected in the garden of the Chosen Hotel at Seoul, Korea, by E. H. Wilson in 1918. It grows wild in the southern parts of the Korean peninsula but appears quite at home in the more severe climate of the central region. A few seeds only were collected and seedling plants were set out in the Arboretum when about four years old; several were killed the first winter but one came through with but slight injury and since that time has not suffered in the least. From its behavior during the last seven or eight years there seems reason to believe that this Korean type will prove a useful and valuable addition to gardens. It has a long flowering season, continuing in blossom throughout August.  Albizia is a member of a tropical tribe of the great family Leguminosae and it is astonishing that this tree should be able to withstand New England winters. Apparently it is happy in fully exposed situations, where good drainage and a sandy loam prevail.”

Shredded umbrella plant (Syneilesis aconitifolia) comes from one of Marjorie’s favourite wholesalers, Connon Nurseries, and has the most interesting flowers.

Here is a closeup of those unusual flower panicles.

At the back of her garden is a raised planter filled with an eclectic collection of plants. Says Marjorie: “If a plant looks awful in a client’s garden, I will replace it and I usually bring it home and put it in the Jardin de Refusée. If I don’t want it, one of the crew will and we baby these things along and then they become a respected part of our own gardens. I’ve never sold one of these babies back to clients even though they’ve done well in my garden.  In this garden, you have to drop dead to be removed.”

I try not to take that last sentence as a metaphor as I walk back towards the house, past a young striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum), centre, and a ‘Slender Silhouette’ sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua), right. “Getting the right plant in the right place is a whole lot harder than most people understand,” notes Marjorie. “They want copies of stuff they see in magazines and online and most of the time just won’t work in our climate, our neighbourhoods.  Finding the ideal plant is always my goal, and will it work with the ecosystem I’m trying to build up to satisfy both birds and bugs I want to draw into the garden.  I cannot express how boring those so called minimal “modern” plant designs are.  They don’t work ecologically and they require huge amounts of work to keep on looking neat.  Nature is not neat.”

But gazing back past the Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’, left) and the ‘Herman’s Pillar’ barberry (Berberis thunbergii), right, below…

….. I think that this lovely paradise in the Annex represents a leafy manifestation of Marjorie’s life and career: long, rich, full of interesting things acquired with care and intent, and a joy in every season.

Finally, here’s a little taste of a mid-summer day in the garden. The birds and cicadas are a bonus. Thanks for the visit, Marjorie!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oJtmQaZTmk&feature=youtu.be

A Garden Embroidered with Myriad Threads

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Most times when we tour gardens, we arrive en masse and then we “oooh” and “aaah” and marvel at all the beautifully-grown plants and cleverly-designed components. We might say hello to the gardener, if he or she is there. Sometimes we even delve a little into the shared passion for nature that has one person judging what the other person has taken many years to achieve. But rarely do we learn much about the gardener’s other life.  So it was with great interest that I read about Carol and Randall Shinn of Fort Collins, Colorado, whose beautiful garden I visited this month with the Garden Bloggers’ Fling. They met at the University of Colorado in Boulder, then enjoyed long careers in education, Carol in visual arts, and Randall in music composition. Their careers took them across the country, and finally to Tempe, Arizona for 28 years. When they moved to Colorado from the desert, it was because “water seemed more plentiful here than in any other city in the front range”.  This was my bus window view as we pulled up in front of their home.

Carol’s artistic career has involved observing nature, photographing scenes that move her, transferring the images to fabric, then machine-stitching them to enhance the details and intensify the colours. This embroidery is as intricate and unusual an art form as her garden, which stitches together various manifestations of her interests as they evolved since moving here in 2006. Walking up the driveway, on one side is a traditional June planting of peonies, sages and bearded irises at their peak….

…. while the other side features gritty soil and a spectacular mix of colourful Colorado native penstemons, erigerons, white Astragalus angustifolius and tall yellow prince’s plume (Stanleya pinnata).

In front of the garage is a shrub we would see a lot of in the Denver area, native Apache plume (Fallugia paradoxa).

A sumptuous ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ peony flanks the walk to the front door…..

….. where a comfy wicker chair rests near the roses.

Bearded irises perform well in Carol’s garden, here with Rocky Mountain penstemon (P. strictus)…..

…. and peonies are the essence of June.  Note the compact conifers, which lend winter interest to gardens where snow can appear even in late spring, as it did this year in the front range.

A dry stream bed meanders past a lupine and presumably diverts rain water in wet weather.

The most striking feature is the crevice garden, a haven for alpine collectables and a nod to the sandstone and basalt of the hulking Rocky Mountains nearby.  I loved how it was artfully integrated into the more traditional plantings…..

…. and sections stitched together with thymes and other groundcovers.

Vertical crevice gardens are increasingly popular with alpine enthusiasts, patterned after the first iterations of this style as created by Czech rock gardeners like Zdenek Zvolánek, Ota Vlasak, Josef Halda and Vojtech Holubec, as Denver rock garden czar Panayoti Kelaidis relates in this blog. (As an aside, I have written about and photographed the massive crevice garden designed by Zvolánek for Montreal Botanical Garden’s Alpine Garden.)  Some of Carol’s crevice gardens were designed by Kenton Seth.

Carol Shinn, left, explains the process to Garden Design owner Jim Peterson and his wife Valerie.


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Look at all those tiny treasures, each in its own space, protected against incursion of other plants by mighty rock walls.

The path to the back garden leads under an arched gate…..

…. behind which is wreathed a tangle of clematis.

Roses and irises continue the June show here, along with chives…..

….. and I do love bronze bearded irises.

In a far corner is the vegetable garden and….

…. beyond that, a series of no-nonsense compost bins.

And surprise, surprise! more rock garden in the back, this time horizontal crevices with the sweetest hens-and-chicks (Sempervivum).

There is water back here, too. This bird-friendly waterfall and pond makes a lovely splash near the house….

….. and mounted on the fence is this very cool Corten and concrete wall fountain.

The iconic bluestem joint fir (Ephedra equestina) looks happy in front of a colour-coordinated wall in a well-contained niche to prevent it from colonizing….

… while a striped amaryllis lights up the dappled shade under a conifer.

What a diverse, beautiful garden – all “embroidered” together with skill and love.

Designing with Peonies

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It’s June, lovely June and gardens are filled with the romantic perennials of late spring and early summer. The weeds are still manageable (sort of) and the heat hasn’t yet arrived to fry the blossoms. And there are peonies…. the sentimental favourites of a lot of gardeners, especially beginners, who long to grow the perennials they remember from a grandmother’s garden or a farmhouse field. And who doesn’t love peonies, in all their luscious hues from white to deepest red….

….. with many in coral and salmon.

Throw in the Itoh hybrids, and you’ve got beautiful yellows too!

And who doesn’t love peonies in vases?  I made this dinner party arrangement with snowball viburnums.

For my daughter’s wedding shower, I added lupines, which tend to swoon curvaceously.

But mostly, we love them in our gardens. Peonies are beautiful in single-plant collections, of course, but they are wonderful actors in ensemble casts, too. Over the years, I’ve photographed peonies in countless gardens; these are some of my favourite combinations.  Where I have a cultivar name, I’ve added it – but mostly it’s to get a sense of the design possibilities for pairing plants with peonies. Let’s start with some compositions from the Toronto Botanical Garden (TBG). This is the yellow hybrid Baptisia ‘Solar Flare’ with pink and white peonies.

Native Baptisia australis, blue false indigo, is a classic June peony partner.

This is a nice, crisp combination in the Piet Oudolf-designed entry border: Paeonia ‘Krinkled White’ with willowleaf bluestar (Amsonia tabernaomantana var. salicifolia).

In another garden at the TBG, Paeonia ‘Krinkled White’ looks beautiful with catminit (Nepeta racemosa ‘Walker’s Low’) and Allium cristophii.

This is Paeonia lactiflora ‘Edulis Superba’ with Ozark bluestar (Amsonia illustris).

I loved this combination of the Itoh Hybrid peony ‘Morning Lilac’ with catmint (Nepeta racemosa ‘Walker’s Low’).

Sicilian honey lily (Allium siculum) made a nice statement with white-and-green Paeonia lactiflora ‘Green Halo’.

Allium siculum is a great pollinator plant, too!

Isn’t this the perfect June vignette? It features Salvia  x sylvestris ‘Summer Snow’ and camint (Nepeta sp.) with a pink peony.

Foxglove penstemon (Penstemon digitalis), is one of my favourite perennenials. A June-blooming native that is drought-tolerant and adaptable to so many soil situations (at my cottage, it grows in gravel), it also makes a charming companion to peonies, especially a glamour star like ‘Bowl of Beauty’, below.

A single-petaled peony (possibly ‘Sea Shell’?) pairs with the spiderwort Tradescantia ‘Concord Grape’.

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I’ve always loved this bold combination in the Oudolf entry border: Paeonia ‘Buckeye Bell’ with meadow sage, Salvia nemorosa ‘Mainacht’ (‘May Night’).

Salvia nemorosa ‘Mainacht’ also looks wonderful with the unusually-coloured Itoh Hybrid ‘Kopper Kettle’.

Along the entry driveway at the TBG, the Oudolf border features Paeonia ‘Bowl of Beauty’ with graceful llittle flowers of the white form of mourning widow cranesbill (Geranium phaeum ‘Album’), backed by the lilac-purple spires of Phlomis tuberosa ‘Amazone’.

Geranium ’Rozanne’ looks great with everything, but is especially effective with the Itoh Hybrid peony ‘Sequestered Sunshine’.

Let’s head further south in Toronto to the lovely four-square potager of Spadina House Museum. This is what you can expect on a perfect morning in June: a romantic melange of Russell Hybrid lupines, heritage bearded irises and peonies, among other June-bloomers.

Here’s a beautiful and classic combination: pink and purple Russell Hybrid lupines with peonies.

The heirloom French peony Jules Elie’ teams up boldly with old-fashioned yellow loosestrife (Lysimachia punctata) here.

And ‘Jules Elie’ also looks great nestled into variegated maiden grass (Miscanthus sinensis ‘Variegatus’).

Spadina House contrasts the shimmering white flowers of Paeonia ‘Duchess de Nemours’ against a sober backdrop of blue false indigo (Baptisia australis).

Beside the vegetable garden, mauve Allium cristophii makes an airy companion to pink and white peonies.

Later-flowering alliums, of course, are perfect companions for peonies. Out west at Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Garden, Allium ‘Globemaster’ combines with a late-season single pink peony.

I’ve made notes of effective peony combinations on various garden tours through the years, too. In a beautiful country garden north of Toronto, I found fern-leaved dropwort (Filipendula vulgaris) consorting with a pink peony.

Another classic peony partner is Oriental poppy; this is Papaver orientale ‘Victoria Louse’.

To finish, I give you the prettiest street garden ever, a generous gesture from a Toronto gardener on one of the TBG’s annual tours years ago: yellow flag iris (Iris pseudacorus) with a dark purple bearded iris and luscious pink Paeonia ‘Jules Elie’.

And for all you gardeners who wouldn’t dream of planting something that pollinators don’t enjoy, rest easy. Provided you plant single or semi-double peonies with lots of pollen-rich stamens exposed, you can usually have your peonies and let bees eat ‘em too!

A South Island Farewell at Upton Oaks

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Having travelled through the gardens of New Zealand’s North Island for 6 days, followed by 11 days on the South Island, we were about to visit our last South Island garden before taking the inter-island ferry from Picton to Wellington for our final 3 days. After the morning spent at Marlborough’s Barewood Garden followed by Paripuma on the shores of Cook Strait, we pulled up to a welcoming sign that gave a hint at the formal bones of this garden in the village of Rapaura just northwest of Blenheim……

….. and peeked over the fence at a charming 1911 house framed by foliage.

Owner Sue Monahan was waiting to greet us all and explain a little about her garden, which she has designed as a series of hedge-enclosed ‘rooms’,…..

….. then we were free to wander. I walked in front of the house, with its ‘Burgundy Iceberg’ roses and Auratum lilies wafting perfume….

…..near the welcoming front veranda.

Nearby was the first section of Sue’s formal garden where we walked among four hedged parterres…..

…… each segmented into either square or diamond patterns. (As with all our Marlborough gardens on this day, the bright sun created too much contrast for good photography, but I tried my best.)

Sue had organized the sections loosely by colour, including reds….

….. and whites. I like this mid-summer (January in New Zealand) combination of dahlia and phlox.

Sue used loads of dahlias in lovely colours in these beds….

…. and the singles were attracting bees.

Dahlias are such good workhorses when they’re grown well, and Sue had paired this luscious deep-pink…..

….. with thalictrum, one of the best see-through plants.

Adding its own purple punch was cardoon (Cynara cardunculus).

The adjacent garden room featured lawn and four flower beds with a central formal pool.  The shade beds contained hydrangeas and agapanthus….

…. and the circular pool featured water lilies and a fountain.

I loved this impressive spiral topiary.


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It was a hot afternoon, and Sue had set chairs out in the shade.

I could only imagine how welcoming this swimming pool would be in New Zealand’s warm summers…..

….. or the hammocks hanging in the leafy shade of the olive grove.

There was even a dovecote with a flock of white pigeons!

At the back of the property was a lovely little garden…..

….. that belonged to Upton Oak’s guest cottage……

…….named Laurella, after the Monahans’ daughters. There is a wonderful story about how this cottage, which can be rented as a Bed-and-Breakfast with a minimum 2-night stay, came to be moved to Upton Oaks, where Dave Monahan, a well-known woodworker, refurbished it.

This is the wedding gazebo in front of Laurella….

…. and when we were there, Dave was building a new cottage on the site….

…. which will complement Laurella.

On the way to the dining terrace for lunch, I walked through a little orchard and passed a brick wall espaliered with fruit trees.

Nearby was a potager bursting with edibles.

Before sitting down to lunch, I visited the washroom, where Sue had made a lovely bouquet of flowers from her abundant garden.

Then it was time to find a seat on the terrace…..

….. and enjoy our catered lunch. It reminded me that we had been so privileged to dine al fresco in some of the most outstanding gardens in New Zealand during our tour thus far – a great testament to our NZ-born, Pennsylvania-based tour leader Richard Lyon’s expansive network of gardeners.

We bade farewell to Sue and Dave Monahan…….

……then proceeded towards the little town of Picton and the Interislander ferry terminal for our afternoon sail to Wellington and the North Island.

A Grand Vision at Paripuma

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Cloudy Bay.  If you’re a wine-lover, that name calls up a memory of one of the finest vintages of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, a label we all wished we could afford, back in the early 1990s, when the world was discovering the allure of the green-skinned Bordeaux grape that the Kiwis grew and bottled to perfection in the Marlborough Region at the tip of the South Island. We drank our Kim Crawford and Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blancs, yes, but really wished we were sipping a glass of premium Cloudy Bay.  So the only disappointment my wine-collecting husband felt in our entire NZ garden tour was at NOT stopping for a tasting at Cloudy Bay Wines on our way through Marlborough. We certainly saw our share of vineyards in the region, en route to and from our stay in the Marlborough Vintners Hotel, some draped with netting to prevent bird damage…..

…… some newly planted…..

…… and some growing in their verdant, geometric patterns up the hillsides.

But Cloudy Bay is also a place on the map, and our destination this morning following our first stop at Barewood Garden was a spectacular property on the shore of the bay that Captain James Cook first named in English in 1770 for the cloudiness of its water, a result of the constant churning of the waves over the stony soil washed into what became known as Cook Strait, between the North and South Islands.  Cloudy Bay is now called by its Māori name, Te Koko-o-Kupe/Cloudy Bay, and we were about to visit award-winning Paripuma, a remarkable native plant garden on its shores.

We gathered in a courtyard behind a whitewashed house with simple lines…..

…. and listened to the owner and garden designer, Rosa Davison, talk a little about the property’s history and her own. Having grown up on a farm in the Waihopai Valley in a family that came to the region in the 1840s, she was drawn to the coast near the Marlborough Sounds where she’d spent idyllic childhood vacations.   Two decades ago, she and her husband Michael bought the property less than a half-hour south of Blenheim and moved there with three teenagers. Rosa called it Paripuma (Māori for “white cliffs’) for the famous bluffs nearby, and proceeded to plan her garden on barren paddock that ran to the sea.

We walked through the house onto the pergola terrace enclosed in vines….

…..and sheltered from the sun by gauzy, white shade canopies using dowels hooked to slide-wires. I loved this idea.

There were shells that told the story of life at the seashore: spiny murex, ostrich foot shell, starfish and others.

Seen from the bottom of the stairs leading to the garden, there is a simplicity and pleasing geometric balance to the house framed by the enclosing beds of native shrubs and trees, and a lushness to the palette of green and white.

Rosa had set up “before” photos of the property, and they added to the drama of what we were about to see. This celebratory picnic in 1999 (I love the carpet) heralded the beginning of her creative journey….

…and what stretched out before us with Cook Strait in the distance was its spectacular culmination.  It was as if André LeNôtre’s little bosquets at Versailles had drifted gently down onto this beachfront property under the Antipodean sun. But here at Paripuma, the formal placement of the gardens flanking the 300-metre (980-foot) central allée fulfills a rigorous ecological imperative: to grow a fairly restricted roster of native shrubs and small trees in order to encourage and sustain native wildlife. And though LeNôtre had gardeners to plant his bosques, Rosa Davison planted everything here herself.

The Google satellite view below shows how the garden’s formal central axis almost parallels the shore of Cook Strait, rather than approaching it on the perpendicular, as I’d imagined it had.

I made the decision to turn right to see some of Rosa’s small, enclosed gardens en route to the beach, so I could later approach the house via the big garden.  With a view of the Pacific Ocean in the distance, I walked under tree boughs…..

….. into a formal potager overflowing with leafy vegetables, squash, onions, herbs and berries.

Turning towards the sound of the ocean, I walked through a flower garden filled with familiar perennials – all good pollinator plants in my own meadows and grown here to attract monarch butterflies, which arrived naturally in New Zealand in the 1870s and are thus considered native.

Before long, I was standing at the water’s edge, gazing towards those cliffs that inspired the garden’s name, and the crashing waves that inspired Captain Cook to call it Cloudy Bay.  That’s all still South Island in the distance, with the Tasman Sea out of sight behind.
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But gazing the other way, I looked straight out toward the Pacific Ocean.

Looking down at my feet, I saw the smooth, wave-tumbled rocks that give a “shingle beach” its name. Shingles can range from fairly large cobbles to small stones, and are usually a mélange of different types of rocks.

As I looked back over the shore plants towards the house, it was difficult to imagine how barren this was just two decades ago.

Rosa is also planting natives between the garden and the shore, like this young kākābeak (Clianthus puniceus). And though she welcomes all animals into the garden, including rabbits, young plants are protected with sleeves to give them a fair head start.

Then it was time to explore the main garden.

Mown paths guide visitors between the various beds and invite close inspection of the natives, like the tall harakeke or New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax) and carex species.

A few New Zealand Christmas trees or pōhutukawa (Metrosideros excelsa) were still in flower.

And of course there was native hebe or koromiko (H. salicifolia), among many other plants in the various beds, including ngaio (Myoporum laetum), ake ake (Dodonaea viscosa), puka (Meryta sinclairii), coprosmas, cabbage trees or tī kōuka  (Cordyline australis), Nikau palms (Rhopalostylis sapida) and wire vine (Muehlenbeckia sp.)    She also grows the extremely rare, critically endangered Three Kings Kaikomako (Pennantia baylisiana), which I was able to see the next day at Otari-Wilton’s Bush Native Garden in Wellington.

I came to a small pond surrounded by plants…..

….. with a charming sign that describes its seasonal habitation by one of the many wildlife species that have made Rosa’s garden their own. With all the frogs in the pond, I can only imagine the night music at Paripuma.

Circling the pond, I came to the perfect little dock with one perfect little chair – and only wished we had more time so I could sit here for a moment to take it all in. Notice the view lines right across the central allée to the far side.

Wandering back toward the central path, I took a closer look at the big garden’s simple focal point, set in a small bed of poor knight’s lily (Xeronema callistemon) that had already flowered.

It is an antique whale pot once used at nearby Port Underwood for rendering down whale oil during New Zealand’s notorious whaling era. When the pots were in active use, mostly in the 19th century (including American and Australian whalers), the nation saw its native whales – especially southern rights, humpbacks, sperms – hunted to near decimation. In the years 1911-1964, not far from Paripuma on a headland in the Marlborough Sounds that flows into Cook Strait, 4200 whales were caught at one shore station alone, including the last whale ever killed in the country. Since 1978, whales in New Zealand’s 200-mile offshore waters have been protected under the Marine Mammals Protection Act. As a wildlife-lover and conservationist who supports the New Zealand Whale and Dolphin Trust, Rosa Davison’s whale pot is an evocative and stark reminder of those days, and of the threat that international whaling continues to pose to the country’s whales outside its protective waters.

I headed back up the stairs to the house, taking another look at a photo of Paripuma before the garden was made.

And then I gazed out over this truly amazing landscape once more. New Zealand’s Gardens Trust has named Paripuma a 5-star Garden of National Significance, but it is more than that. It is one woman’s vision fully realized: planned, designed, planted and opened for visitors to explore,  and enjoy.

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Planning a trip to New Zealand? There could be no better way to enjoy the scenery and wines of Marlborough than to return ‘home’ each night to one of the region’s most beautiful gardens. Paripuma is available to rent as a bed-and-breakfast, with varying rates based on the accommodation chosen. If we ever get back to Cloudy Bay to taste our favourite Sauvignon Blanc, staying here would be the first order of business.