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Mirador – Steel, Limestone & Design Panache in Austin

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On my recent Garden Bloggers Fling in Austin, Texas, we saw a variety of private gardens ranging from tiny, crammed-with-blossoms cottage gardens surrounding modest bungalows to expansive gardens framing large, modern homes. One that impressed me for its seamless architectural integration of house and landscape was Mirador. Both the house (designed by Jim Larue) and garden (by landscape architect Curt Arnette of Sitio Design) were finished in 2013 and are a beacon of fresh contemporary style in a neighbourhood of traditional, Mediterranean-style homes. It’s also the best example I’ve seen of using rusty Corten (COR-TEN®) weathering steel in all kinds of inventive ways in the garden. But if you read my blog on the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center which we’d visited earlier that morning, you’ll know that a lot (3 inches!) of rain had fallen by the time we trooped down the driveway to Mirador in our dripping ponchos.  My first view was of a soaked wildflower meadow spangled with blanket flower (Gaillardia pulchella) arrayed in front of massive Corten planters curved against the edge of the property and filled with agaves and yuccas.

As the rain subsided, the homeowner was able to put away her umbrella and chat with us. Though she grew up on a Nebraska farm, she’s lived in Austin for 35 years and taught herself all about gardening here.  In planning the new garden, she had a wish list, much of it inspired by her travels.  “Curt and I worked really well together, so I would tell him things I wanted incorporated and he magically made it happen.”  Given that the property is downhill from the next-door neighbour, one of the challenges had been poor drainage in heavy rains, thus a deteriorating rock retaining wall built by previous owners of the property……

…… was replaced by tiered, curved Corten steel planters filled with drought-tolerant succulents. This was the view from the end of the planters closest to the house.

Look at those knife-edge steel walls. Corten, of course, is not “just” steel, but created with specific alloys that create the weathered look, while simultaneously slowing the weathering. Historically, the trademark for COR-TEN® steel was granted to the United States Steel Corporation in 1933, but it is now made by many companies.  Note all the gravel here for drainage, and the Texas native silver ponyfoot (Dichondra argentea) making a great groundcover under the agaves and beaked yuccas (Y. rostrata).

To the left of the sloping driveway was a stately, little grove of bald cypress (Taxodium distichum), a Texas native. The meadow-like turf here and throughout the property is native Habiturf lawn (buffalo grass-blue grama-curly mesquite), developed at Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

Further down the driveway, a long limestone planter filled with statuesque century plants (Agave americana) lined the wall of the garage.  In front is a geometric planting of muhly grass just emerging in spring from last year’s hummocks.

I’m sure those agaves would have liked a little less moisture than the monsoon that had befallen them that morning.

Fortunately, the rain slowed as we got our bearings, for this was a garden to be explored carefully – even though it felt a little wrong to wander in dark clouds and drizzle through a succulent-rich garden clearly designed for sunshine. The view below is past a guest house/studio on the left with an enclosed courtyard garden, garage on the right, towards the house with all its complex and interesting roof angles.

That Corten is so perfect here, with the pale Texas limestone and stucco palette of the house and other buildings.  The tree is Texas cedar elm (Ulmus crassifolia).

Below is an airy gate leading into the courtyard garden.

The gardens are an interesting mix of natural and formal, like this little boxwood allée.  I loved the steel wall doubling as a planter…..

…… with the wood-and-stainless-steel bench in front.  That long flower spike comes from the Texas native giant false yucca (Hesperaloe funifera).

Before we go into the courtyard, let’s walk up to the front door, past this fabulous whale’s tongue agave (A. ovatifolia) and the casacading Palmer’s sedum (S. palmeri), its little yellow flowers nodding their soaked heads after the rain.

Look at those lovely slabs of cream limestone.  Notice that we’re still going downhill, via that small step (and it’s still raining a little). Later, we’ll see that the back of the house descends even further.

Now let’s step into the courtyard and head down the Corten-edged gravel stairs. The plants here are firecracker plants (Russellia equisetiformis), with tiny, tubular red flowers sure to attract the hummingbirds the homeowner wanted to invite into her garden.

Inside the courtyard garden, the Nebraska farm girl seems to have found the perfect marriage of abundant vegetable garden and French potager.  “My garden is mostly for my family and me to enjoy: vegetable picking with grandkids, sharing organic veggies with my daughter,” she says.

In early May, the Swiss chard looked healthy, along with self-seeding larkspur and violas. And probably the prettiest tomato cages I’ve ever seen (more Corten!)…

There are roses in the potager, too. As the homeowner says: “I wanted to have some cutting flowers and vegetables mixed in with roses. I never thought I would enjoy roses, but have fallen in love with antique roses”. She specified many for their fragrance. “Stopping to smell the roses is really a good thing.”  Though we missed the antique roses by about two weeks, there were still a few ‘Knock Out’ roses in bloom, below.

Looking in the other direction, the elegant, concrete water feature here reflects the sky (and I’m sure it brings lots of birds as well.) There’s phlomis and catmint here; the little multi-stemmed tree is Texas persimmon (Diospyros texana).  Beside it is an architectural scrim of horsetails (Equisetum hyemale)…..


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…. cleverly trapped in an enclosed space. (If you’ve grown horsetails, you’ll know why).

The courtyard garden has its own comfy chairs.

As I looked towards the back of the property, I caught a lovely, long rain chain doing exactly what it was meant to do, then directing the rain into appreciative bamboo below.

I hurried out of the potager area past the pineapple guava…..

….. and the pretty glass ornaments……

…..down behind the house to find the swimming pool – a welcome oasis in hot Austin summers – and an appropriate interpretation of an infinity edge…..

….. with its Corten walls.

Isn’t this sweet? Blackeyed susans from the garden.

The hot tub was nearby…..

….. and featured more beaked yuccas (Y. rostrata) against the rough-cut limestone of the house wall here.

The view from the hot tub is all green (there’s a greenbelt adjacent to the neighbourhood here), which is perfect, since Mirador means a viewpoint or vantage point in Spanish.

Alas, as our time here was running out, I missed seeing the al fresco dining area with its fig-topped arbor, but other bloggers like Gerhard Bock of Succulents and More managed to photograph it. (Be sure to have a look at his lovely blog.)  At ground level below the pool area, I found a long limestone planter filled with self-seeding larkspur and corn poppies and the blackberries the homeowner loves picking with her little grandson.

Looking out onto the meadow that she seeded with Habiturf and native wildflowers like Mexican hat (Ratibida columnifera)…..

…. I could only imagine what it must have looked like weeks earlier, before the Texas paintbrushes (Castilleja indivisa) here started setting seed. (A few weeks later, she  said, “And of course now the meadow is abloom with wildflowers!”)

And look! A peach tree in the meadow.

I circled around the other side of the house where a large but friendly-looking gorilla (inspired by the homeowner’s trip to Rwanda) kept watch over the sandbox her grandkids use.

A little further was a small, intimate garden with a pair of lightweight, cement-look, resin chairs, dark cannas and more succulents.

This side of Mirador abuts the high ground next door.. When a storm a few years back dumped 13 inches of rain in one night, “massive amounts of water coming off the neighbor’s yard” necessitated a drainage solution. Thus was the stream bed garden conceived, channeling rainwater safely away from the house.

The rain had stopped and I would gladly have waited for the sky to lighten to capture more images here, but sadly it was time to go. (To appreciate Mirador in its summery glory, be sure to visit Fling co-organizer Pam Penick’s lovely 2014 blog.)  I was so delighted to have had the chance to visit this remarkable Austin garden: a beautiful marriage of modern architecture, skillful landscape design and ecologically-sensitive gardening.

A Spring Stroll Through Denver Botanic Gardens

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I’m taking a little break from my New Zealand blog marathon (just a few gardens left, and I’ll get to them later) to jaunt on down to the high plains of Colorado and take you on a spring stroll through Denver Botanic Gardens. I was there about 10 days ago en route to Utah and then Texas, and it was a tulip extravaganza. The garden made sure everyone driving along York street got a colourful eyeful……

….. and they were planted in sunset colours at the entrance.

Going in, we were impressed by the towering specimens of coral tower-of-jewels (Echium wildpretii), a show-stopper if there ever was one!

The honey bees were enjoying it too (all echiums are great pollinator plants).

We made a beeline (haha) for the Boettcher Memorial Tropical Conservatory. This is what it looks like from the far side of DBG’s outdoor UMB Bank Amphitheatre (aka best-ever-hill-rolling-for-little-kids-spot).

And this is what that roof looks like inside.

I climbed to the top to see the queen’s wreath (Petrea volubilis), which was happy in the heat and humidity.

Every time I go into a tropical glasshouse, I discover something new and fun – like this variegated clown fig (Ficus aspera ‘Parcelii’).

But it was a beautiful spring Saturday and I was eager to see the outdoor gardens, so we went past yet another little colony of Star Trek-like towers-of-jewel….

….. into Shady Lane, where people were enjoying all the different crabapples in bloom.

If they paid attention, they’d have gleaned lots of lessons in woodland underplanting, like this yellow Tulipa tarda with Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla)….

….. and red-flowered barrenwort (Epimedium x rubrum) with windflowers (Anemone blanda).

Walking on, we came to the brand-new (2016) Steppe Garden. What an undertaking this was, but a perfect choice for Denver, which sits in the high foothills of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains!  In the Central Asian Steppe, below, I loved the combination of the Fritillaria pallidiflora, native to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, Iris bucharica and Tulipa greigii.

The bumble bee below was gathering lots of pollen from the fritillaria.

Isn’t this water feature fabulous?

And look, a sweet little Iberis taurica, from Turkey, peeking out from the stacked limestone of the fountain.

I can hardly wait to come back next June (yes, my annual Garden Bloggers’ Fling is happening in mid-June 2019 right here in Denver!) to see the North American Steppe with all its native penstemons.

Water runs throughout DBG in the form of canals, formal pools, waterfalls and freeform ponds. It reflects the blue of the sky and is the perfect place to exhibit large sculpture, like Frank Swanson’s ‘Reflections’. And yes, that little girl seeing her reflection did have parents nearby watching.

Springtime at a botanical garden, before the perennials emerge and shrubs and trees leaf out – but when the crowds begin to arrive – is dependent on the early show of tulips, daffodils, tulips and other spring bulbs. When I was in the Annuals Garden & Pavilion, visitors all had their cameras and phones out…..

……to record the brilliant display of tulips and other bulbs….

……. in the area that will later feature an annuals display.

On the margins, there were also spring-blooming perennials, like this sumptuous combination of blue Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla) with purple violas.

The Ann Montague Iris & Daylily Garden was getting ready to strut its stuff. How wonderful this garden would be in late spring and early summer!

DBG’s theme gardens are very specific, which is great if you have a particular craving to see, for example, a good selection of plants in the Dwarf Conifer Garden, below.

While other botanical gardens might feature flowering bulbs in spring, DBG has flowering cacti! Not sure of the identity of the sweet thing below, with Bell’s Twinpod (Physaria bellii) in the Desert Wash Garden.

Apart from the plants of the steppe, Denver Botanic Gardens is renowned for its meandering Rock Alpine Garden.  Those purplish pools are….

…. lovely blue wooly speedwell (Veronica pectinata).

Spring adonis (A. vernalis) was lighting up the gravel, too!

A little background here: I visited DBG for the first time in 2006, and through an interesting set of circumstances my husband and I were toured around by DBG’s current Senior Curator and Director of Outreach Panayoti Kelaidis (since that bio, he’s co-authored a book titled Steppes: The Plants and Ecology of the World’s Semi-Arid Regions, Timber Press, 2015). For 90 minutes, Panayoti whisked us from one garden to another, waxing poetic on each theme and heaping praise on the talented staff who worked there.  Subsequently we met each other as plant geeks on Facebook; then in January he was the American Horticultural Society host on the New Zealand garden tour on which my husband and I visited all the fabulous gardens I’ve been blogging about for the past few months. This is Panayoti and me heading into a small boat to explore the reaches of Fiordland’s spectacular Doubtful Sound.

Back to the Alpine Rock Garden…. The wonderful Crevice Garden, below, is the work of Mike Kintgen.

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I loved this pretty combination of Bergenia ciliata and Scilla forbesii.

The plants below are growing in “limestone cliffs” habitat.

I found this gorgeous Paeonia mascula at the edges of the Alpine Rock Garden.

And there are one or two troughs in this area as well, with tiny treasures for the most avid alpine fans.

In the shade of the Cactus & Succulent House, I found a few fritillaries, including Fritillaria acmopetala.

At the very edge of the rock gardens was a stand of western river birch (Betula occidentalis), a tree I didn’t know at all and was happy to discover.

The Gates Montane Garden contains plants that you might see in Colorado’s mountain habitats, especially in the Bear Creek Canyon where the late Charles C. Gates (to whom the garden is dedicated) once resided, like the mountain alders (Alnus incana ssp. tenuifolia) below.

And here I found wax currant (Ribes cereum) with its dainty, white flowers.

As if knowing that a montane garden is the perfect place for a Colorado native, this cottontail rabbit was busy munching grasses.

Just beyond was a perfect view of the eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis) casting a reflection on the pond in the Shofu-En Japanese Garden.

There is nothing like looking through a redbud.

Walking around the pond, I came to a spot that looked out on the exquisitely-pruned pines in the Japanese garden.

Next up was a garden that would be a treat to visit in summer, the Laura Smith Porter Plains Garden, honouring the woman who in the 1800s came as a child in a covered wagon to Denver City.  There were some interesting succulents, but prairie flowers were still weeks away. That frieze is very interesting. It’s called The Story of a Pikes Peaker and was carved in 1925 by Robert Garrison for the Midland Savings Bank.  Romanesque in style, it is decidedly western in theme and, though it might be considered insensitive some 90 years later with its one-sided version of the battles between “Pikes Peak or Bust” pioneers and native Americans, it is certainly impressive and lends a stately frontier air to this little piece of the grassy plains.

Back in the central part of the garden, there was more water and a waterfall. Do you see that little American toad?

It was doing a frog-kick.

And I couldn’t help but video the chorus of toads in this pool (I think it’s the Monet Pool.) Listen…..

Circling around the pool, we came to Le Potager. Though the rhubarb was looking fine and the lettuce under its protective mesh (mmm…. bunnies…) was ready for salads, most of the planting here was still to be done.

The Sacred Earth Garden was just waking up, but it features plants traditionally used by the more than twenty Native American tribes of the Colorado Plateau, which includes parts of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

I found Texas madrone (Arbutus xalapensis) with its pretty white flowers in the Dryland Mesa Garden here……

Flanking the pool on the side of the conservatory, I discovered the Plant Select Demonstration Garden, featuring plants especially chosen, grown and marketed as ideal for low-water areas with extremes of winter and summer temperatures. The program, now 21 years old, was launched with the help of Panayoti Kelaidis. You can hear him talking about plants like the ice plant below Delosperma ‘P001S’, aka Fire Spinner, in this video.

This little Plant Select native Clematis hirsutissima var. scottii or Scott’s Sugarbowls caught my eye.

Doing a wide swing and heading back into the garden, we walked over to the Science Pyramid, below, but time was running out.

We gazed up the length of the El Pomar Waterway. In a month or so, those containers will be filled with succulents and ornamental grasses will swish along the canal.

At The Ellipse in Honor of Nancy Schotters, the gardeners had done a splendid job of matching up tulips in the shape and colours of the Dale Chihuly sculpture in the centre of the pool.

We passed by the Schlessmann Plaza…..

…. and the water wall at the York Street end of the El Pomar Waterway.

The O’Fallon Perennial Walk was just waking up, the perennials poking out of the ground, …….

….. but my memories of it in June from my 2006 visit, below, will help you understand how gorgeous this will be later.

Since we had started our day in Toronto at 4:30 in the morning, I was too tired to head across York Street to visit the Children’s Garden and opted to return to the hotel before dinner (and a next-morning flight to Utah). But that omission (and all those gardens that feature summer plants) will be remedied in June 2019, when I return to Denver Botanic Gardens with my Garden Blogger friends!

The Garden at Akaunui

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Day 14 of our New Zealand tour took us out of Aoraki Mount Cook National Park and down onto the Canterbury Plains with its patchwork of agricultural fields. Here’s a bus window look at the descent.

In late morning we drove into Akaunui Farm Homestead in the countryside near Ashburton. As we walked down the long, hedge-lined driveway, we were greeted politely by the two family dogs.

The brick house was lovely, with its generous verandahs and covered balcony. Built in 1905 for Edward Grigg, a son of one of Canterbury’s pioneering colonial farmers, John Grigg, first president of the New Zealand Agricultural Society and a large-scale sheep and cropping farmer, it was originally part of the Grigg family’s massive Longbeach estate. But it has long been in the family of our host and hostess today, Di and Ian Mackenzie.

Di and Ian, below, share that farming pedigree with their predecessors.  Though their grown son now farms Akaunui’s 600 hectares (1500 acres) in vegetable and grain seed and sheep and dairy cattle, Ian has previously served as the national grain and seed chair of the Federated Farmers of New Zealand.

Di Mackenzie does all the gardening on a property whose landscape was designed originally by Alfred William Buxton (1872-1950). As the New Zealand government historical entry says, “Buxton’s landscape designs were typified by curved entrance drives, perimeter plantings of forest trees, water.…”  We saw that all here at Akaunui, the curved entrance drive and perimeter plantings of forest trees. ……

…… ….. a sinuous pond….

….. and a bog garden……

……with Gunnera manicata, among many other choice plants.

The pond curved around past Di’s vast collection of trees and shrubs, including bottlebrush buckeye (Aesculus parviflora) …..

…..and presented the most spectacular reflective view of the house.

There was a lovely tranquility about this pond, with its little rowboat.

I liked this combination, of a hybrid of native Phormium tenax with Verbena bonariensis.

Many of the specimen trees are very old, like this southern magnolia (M. grandiflora)…..

….. which was still putting out shimmering blossoms in mid-summer.

The lawns alone take Di Mackenzie 15 hours a week on her sitting mower, and clearly they had just been done before our arrival.

The beds around the house feature roses and perennials…..

…. and Di’s exquisite sense of colour is on display here, like this buff peach rose with Phygelius capensis.

There is a sweet parterre along an outbuilding wall.

Rain showers started as I made my way from the lovely swimming pool……

……(Canterbury’s summers can be hot and very dry)…..

…….. to the enclosed garden……..


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….with its espaliered apple allée  and stunning focal point.

Outside, there were pears…..

….. and peaches…..

…..and figs……

……and more apples.

Di’s vegetable garden produces an abundance of produce…..

……which she uses for family meals. What’s left over gets preserved for winter.

I loved this flower border, with its pretty white-and-blue theme including Ammi majus and love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena).

And I liked the way Di mixes perennials with roses, making the roses earn their keep instead of segregating them in a rose garden.

We were walked up to the newest part of the garden: the 4 hectare (10 acre) native-rich designed wetland. Paradoxically, when John Grigg bought his 32,000 acre estate here in 1864, the property was said to be mostly “impassable swamp”. But for Di and Ian, turning part of it back into a designed wetland with a meandering, marshy swale……

….. bordered by native flaxes (and also some colourful Phormium tenax cultivars, below)  and grasses…….

….. like Cortaderia richardsonii, a New Zealand cousin to pampas grass…….

…. and native hebe,below, with a foraging bumble bee,…….

…. offered more than an embrace of modern ecological sensibilities. There are also family golf matches in this area, where the water hazards are clearly abundant.

Perhaps the dog has been trained to retrieve lost balls? Or maybe he just likes a dip.

That bridge above, in fact, was where Ian Mackenzie showed us something he’s very proud of, something that for him seems to have made the return of the wetland all worth it. Have a look at these, below. They’re Canterbury mudfish (Neochanna burrowsius), an amphibious species that can survive long periods without water by burrowing into the mud. And they’ve been making a big comeback here at Akaunui.

We returned to the picnic tables via the previously overgrown woodland, which Di has started to clear in order to plant rhododendrons and lots of shade-loving plants.

We were offered a luscious home-cooked lunch with delicious beets and greens, courtesy of Di’s garden.  Oh, and the best rhubarb cake ever!

And there was a little wine (actually a lot of wine!)

As we made our departure from this beautiful farm, I stopped to watch the dogs’ tails move through a big field of something green. Looking closer, I realized it was another of the Mackenzie family businesses: radishes on their way to ripening seed.  I read later that New Zealand supplies almost 50% of the world’s hybrid radish, carrot and beet seed. Next time you slice a radish for a summer salad, consider for a moment that it might have started its journey in Ian & Di Mackenzie’s pretty field in Canterbury.

 

A Lunch at Ostler Wine’s Vineyard

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One of the logistical tasks for a tour guide in a country where the attractions are far-flung is to find a place to feed the tour members lunch. In New Zealand, our guide Richard Lyon accomplished this necessary detail with great panache. We had eaten lunch in some of the most beautiful gardens in the country, so we were excited as we drove from Oamaru through the Waitaki River Valley, past the power plant at Waitaki Lake……


….. to arrive moments later at the beautiful vineyard of Ostler Wine……


….. and the home of Jim and Ann Jerram, where we would have the opportunity to sample delicious wines……

…… and lunch on a catered feast, including this beautiful rice salad…..

……. with pretty bouquets of fresh garden flowers…….

….. while gazing at a spectacular new garden filled with native plants. What could be better?

We listened to Jim Jerram, a retired physician, discuss his mission to create memorable wines from the ‘heartbreak grape’, Pinot Noir.  As the Ostler Wine website says, twenty years ago he and Ann’s brother, winemaker and viticulturist Jeff Sinnott, went looking for a place in the Waitaki Valley near Oamaru where they could grow wine grapes.

Though the region had not featured vineyards to that point, the men “discovered a site Sinnott believed encapsulated the essential parameters for growing premium cool climate wine grapes; a north-facing limestone-influenced slope on an escarpment overlooking the braided river. It reminded him of the famous slopes of Burgundy.”

Indeed, the Waitaki Valley limestone seam not only imparts its characteristic minerality to the terroir, it also yields fossils that hint at the fact that this region was once a warm, shallow sea. That fossil shell embedded in limestone forms the logo for the Ostler family of wines.

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We enjoyed our tasting as Jim poured, telling us a little about the Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris we were sampling.  (For me, some of our Lake Ontario limestone-clay Pinot Noirs have more of the ‘licked stone’ minerality taste than the Ostler Wines,)

And though it’s not in the photo below, the utterly delicious Gewürztraminer we would buy from Ostler that day would be our afternoon reward for hiking the Hooker Valley Track at Aoraki Mount Cook the next day.

Outside, some of our group enjoyed sitting in the Jerrams’ kitchen garden…..

…. while others on the patio on the west side of the house inspected the native plants that had now become familiar to us, the various tussock grasses and tortured shrubs (I think the one below is Corokia cotoneaster).

There was rock daisy (Pachystegia insignis)…..

….. and the strange-looking toothed lancewood or horoeka (Pseudopanax ferox) that protects its gawky, Dr. Seuss-like juvenile form with fierce spines until it attains sufficient height and girth to assume a more traditional tree-like habit.

We made our purchases, with some in the group ordering wine to be delivered back in the U.S.  As always, Panayoti Kelaidis of Denver Botanic Garden offered gracious thanks to Jim Jerram on behalf of all of us and the American Horticultural Society, words he managed to tailor eloquently to each host on our New Zealand tour. And then it was time to drive on to mighty Aoraki Mount Cook.

 

Oamaru Public Gardens

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It’s a measure of the depth of the gardening tradition in New Zealand that one of the most charming gardens I visited during our 3-week tour was not even on our itinerary.  It just happened to be behind a pair of iron gates a few of us spotted along the road as we drove into the town of Oamaru, less than a 90-minute drive north of Dunedin, en route to our  2-night stay at Aoraki Mount Cook.

As the bus pulled into the Oamaru town centre with its boutiques and art galleries, a handful of us doubled back the 3 or 4 blocks to the entrance of the Oamaru Public Gardens. A map was posted showing the features of the garden, arrayed like a long strip of green between residential neighbourhoods. The water meandering throughout is the Oamaru Creek, which charges various ponds and spills down splashing rills and small waterfalls.

We began to walk along the road, conscious of our limited time to visit.  Look at these gorgeous hydrangeas with agapanthus and dahlias.

I must admit I was a little worried when I saw the Craig Fountain and its surrounding beds, below, which looked a little Victorian ‘bedding-out’ for my informal taste. But the thing is the gardens are Victorian.  They were established in 1876 on 13.7 hectares (34 acres) set aside as public reserve, thus making them one of the oldest public gardens in New Zealand (Dunedin, Christchurch and Auckland are older).

We walked under this arch, which led to the famous ‘Wonderland’ statue which, of course, I missed.

But I loved what I found a little further along: this verdant scene with tree ferns, hydrangeas, Japanese maples and a small waterfall and pond.

A view of the water feature.

More hydrangeas.

We walked on and came upon the Display House. Enchanting!

The bromeliads, begonias, ferns and other hothouse plants were grown to perfection.

Look at these beautiful vrieseas.

The aviary featured an assortment of fancy birds. (I tried “Polly want a cracker?” in my best Kiwi accent, but no dice.)

I believe this was Mirror Lake (or possibly “top pond”)…. there is so little pictorial guidance of the features of the garden on the web.

We wandered through the Native Plants garden. So strong is the native plant ethos in New Zealand that in 2015 one of the unused glasshouses at Oamaru Public Gardens was loaned to native plant enthusiasts as a permanent propagation nursery for endemic natives.

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We saw New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax) and one of the many native sedges.

There were strange plants I needed help from my Plant Idents group on Facebook to identify, like New Zealand myrtle (Lophomyrtus bullata), or what the Māori call ramama….

…. and one we thought likely to be snow totara (Podocarpus nivalis).

A shady path led to the fabulous Fernery.  (I included this little section in my previous blog on New Zealand ferns.)

We walked through quickly. enjoying the allure of the towering tree ferns.

Then it was on to the large Chinese Garden where the impressive ceramic entrance mural was done by Christine Black. There is a lovely story online of how,  thanks to the persistence of a woman named Yvonne Cox, both the mural and the garden itself came to be here in 1988 as “a symbol of the friendship between Oamaru and the large Chinese community in the Waitaki district, most of them descendants of the Central Otago gold miners”.

There’s a handsome water feature…….

…… and numerous Chinese shrubs and trees, like Gingko biloba…..

….and, of course, a zig-zag bridge to keep the evil spirits away.

We left the Chinese garden via another nod to Asia, the red Japanese bridge overlooking the Oamaru Creek.

The morning was marching and it was time to head back to the bus to continue our journey to Aoraki Mount Cook.  We strolled towards the entrance past more spectacular mophead hydrangeas…..

….. and Acanthus hungaricus, which grows as well in New Zealand as in cold Canada.

And we chatted for a minute with one of the gardeners, who cheerfully answered a question or two for me.  Beautiful gardens like Oamaru (which was free to enter, like Dunedin Botanic Garden and all the civic public gardens we visited in New Zealand) are crafted and sustained in equal parts by good design; healthy, interesting plants; and hard work. So here’s to Matthew Simpson, a “real Kiwi” as he put it, and all the dedicated employees of public gardens in New Zealand and throughout the world. Thumbs up to you all!