Visit our garden
Waiau Woodland World - is the name of our open garden
When we shifted into Spring Cottage after our wedding in 1995 there was one very ugly yew tree for a garden. That was it! Animals grazed up to the doors of the cottage and we had been told that the ground was unsuitable for gardening (by the couple renting the cottage, who didn't want us to evict them!!) Neither of us was too worried about not getting into the garden, we were young and we didn't want to have a large garden. We renovated the cottage and once it was liveable I knew that the finishing touch would be a few iceberg roses up the pathway to the cottage and that was all that we originally planned on. There is something about your own property that really changes things, I thought I hated gardening, but what I actually hated was "weeding my parents garden" which is what gardening meant to me as a young person. I didn't know that I'd be "bitten" by the desire to improve my own property. With the entrance to the cottage complete, I went to work on a perennial garden. I liked the idea of the cottage garden and filled it with gypsophlia, delphiniums, roses and other gorgeous cottage garden plants. I had no idea how much work I was creating for myself. And this very quickly became a nightmare to look after.
Shortly after this was complete we visited June Gardiners well known hillside rhododendron garden "Woodchester"; not far from our own property. We were both inspired by June's garden and our fences went out almost immediately. Craig wanted a rhododendron garden like June's but we didn't have a hillside, all that we had was a little slope beside the cottage, which Craig worked up ready to plant. It was our first venture into rhododendrons and we hit a steep learning curve. The little slope is a conifer garden today because of how dry it is, it makes an exceptionally great conifer garden, it was an up hill battle with the rhododendrons for us though.
Craig put a fence up around the perimeter of the cottage and designated this area as "THE GARDEN" it was small, manageable and we quickly set about to create a few more gardens. The advice we had received about rhododendrons was "not to try them" since we didn't have any established trees. We decided to give it a shot and see what would happen. We planted trees and rhododendrons at the same time and crossed our fingers.
For five years this kept us busy and then we decided to build a larger home on Spring Farm because our cottage had outgrown our little family of 3. The issue was now that we had done so much work on this garden but it wasn't going to be a part of our new home; we realised that we were going to be starting again with another garden, but so as not to completely cut ourselves off we removed the fences and created gardens to link the cottage with our new home in a way that was private for both houses, but also had a feeling of connectedness. Our new home was completed in 2000, since we were still fairly new to the landscaping realm we asked Ben McMaster to come and give us a hand, he created the gardens directly around our house. I asked Ben to create a feature from our lounge room w
indow and he designed this formal pond; Craig's broth
er Mark Shearer a very clever Engineer created the fountain for us in the middle of the pond (which had to be emptied when our twins started walking and is only just ready to be filled again now that they are just about 4 years old). Ben also designed us a lovely pergola and recommended ornamental grape vine to grow over it. We love the autumn colours and they get such a lot of wonderful comments.
Ben kept the theme around our house formal at my request. I figured that we had the country cottage theme happening in the other end of the garden, and I wanted something different around our new house. So we put in lots of buxus beds and filled them with mass plantings of heuchara, mop tops and other formal plants.
By the time we spent a few sessions with Ben we became more confident to do our own thing; we have been landscaping new areas around the house since then. Gardens are always a work in progress, but even more so when there is plenty of land and plenty of water and ideas that keep flowing.
Our gardens are low maintenance, they have to be since we are both very busy people. We have found woodland gardens to be very manageable and have opted to minimise our use of perennials because of the work that they require to keep them looking good. We use buxus to create borders and have planted plenty of trees to provide shade for the 800+ rhododendrons that live here.
We know that our garden isn't up to the standard of many open gardens yet, so it is free to walk around our garden, we are glad to share what we have. Please make an appointment to visit us and note that although you can visit our garden anytime, our nursery is closed on Saturdays.
