Blooming great gardens against odds

NZ Gardener editor Jo McCarroll is planning an autumn roadtrip, visiting some of her favourite southern gardens.

One of the (many) great gardeners I know in the beautiful Queenstown Lakes and Central Otago regions, once told me that the first challenge faced by anyone starting a garden there was how to improve such a beautiful spot.

Look at the landscape, she pointed out. Who could compete with that?

Of course, the next challenges you faced, she went on to say, included the extreme heat in summer, cold in winter, and almost constant threat of drought.

And yet somehow, despite all that, some marvellously clever plants people have made their home in Central Otago and the Southern Lakes, and created some spectacularly beautiful gardens there.

It is one of my very favourite places in New Zealand for garden visiting; indeed I like it so much, I am planning a bit of garden touring there this autumn (it’s a group tour, so feel free to come along).

Speaking of extreme climates, among the wonderful gardens I plan to visit, is Jane Falconer’s Clachanburn, set at

487 metres above sea level, which reaches a brisk -25 degrees Celsius in winter, and baking 35C in summer, with an average annual rainfall of just 35cm.

Not an easy place to start a garden, it is fair to say, yet somehow, with decades of work and a lot of mulch, Falconer has created a wonderful, large country oasis, positively packed with plants.

It’s open to the public from September until May for a small charge, but it is truly a garden for all seasons. There is a long display of blossom (from September until November) along with bulbs in spring; and right now it will be a riot of colour and fragrance with roses and perennials in bloom.

I am hoping, on my April visit, to enjoy the brilliant autumn colours for which the region is renowned, as Falconer’s garden also includes a lot of exotic deciduous trees such as maples, poplars and willows, and shrubs such as viburnums, cornus and spireas, all of which can be relied on to colour up as it starts to cool down.

Another garden I plan to visit is Otago Polytechnic horticulture tutor Jo Wakelin’s garden near Lake Dunstan.

Again, not perhaps the most clement of situations to garden in – boasting gravelly soil, high winds, a large and hungry local rabbit population, and extremely arid conditions (Wakelin’s garden received less than 30cm of rain one year).

But keen to see what plants could thrive in such an inhospitable environment, and greatly inspired by a visit to Beth Chatto’s pioneering dry garden in the east of England, which has a zero-water policy, Wakelin decided to garden within the limits of the site, rather than fight the conditions.

The result is a water-wise garden, packed with beautiful, fragrant, droughtresistant plants from all over the world, including euphorbias, sedums, phlomis, lavenders, cistus, and even roses. (If you want roses in a dry spot, Wakelin rates Rosa ‘Mutabilis’, the Rugosa ‘Roseraie de l’Hay’ and the double white-flowered Rosa spinosissima.)

I would say it is one of New Zealand’s best examples of xeriscaping, also called water conservation gardening or dry gardening, (and if you are interested in becoming more water-wise in your own garden, Wakelin was also involved in creating a display garden that illustrates water-sensitive design on Waenga Dr, Cromwell; you can pick up a plant list from the local iSite, and buy many of the plants from the polytech’s Central Campus Student Plant Nursery).

Another garden I plan to visit is Mike and Maureen Henry’s Chantecler. Down on the flat between Queenstown and Arrowtown, they do not face quite the same climactic extremes perhaps as those of Falconer or Wakelin, but the scale of this magnificent garden is a challenge all of its own.

There are five hectares of mature gardens on the 16ha property: the English garden contains almost 1000 rhododendrons and azaleas, there is more than 300 topiaries, and hundreds of roses, not to mention a Mediterranean area, an Asian garden complete with a waterfall, wildflowers in the meadow garden and a New Zealand native area.

This is such a wonderful region for gardens to visit, that one visit simply will not let me do justice to all that is on offer.

That sounds like the perfect excuse to go again, to me.