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Coastal grandeur

Spectacular views, masses of native New Zealand treasures and dreamy drifts of blooms set the scene in this garden festival stalwart.

STORY: ROSEMARY BARRACLOUGH • PHOTOS: JULIET NICHOLAS

Rosa Davison flings open her verandah doors to reveal a dramatic vista – wide, velvety lawns are flanked by banks of richly textured native planting, which lead the eye out to the stony coastline and over the sea to Marlborough’s Cloudy Bay. Visitors are silenced by the spectacular view, the odd one even sheds a tear, and Rosa enjoys watching their reactions. “They don’t expect to see that. I like giving people a bit of a surprise,” she says of her attitude to garden design.

Also unexpected is the fact that this grand garden was initially created almost entirely from New Zealand natives. When Rosa and her husband, Michael, came to Paripuma in 1999, the site was bare and “ferociously windy”. Rosa loved the formal gardens of Europe, but this was obviously not the place for oaks and roses.

“It occurred to me – why not use natives, but use them in a formal style?”

She started by planting 2000 ngaio to create shelter. The gales were so wicked that shingle was thrown up against the windows of their new home and “every now and then you’d see a little ngaio blowing across the lawn like tumbleweed,” Rosa recalls.

But slowly the ngaio took hold and Rosa was able to start “making pictures with plants”, composing drifts that play with different textures, foliage and shades of green. Mass planting works well. “Your eye is not interrupted by too much detail, but floats over the planting towards a focal point” – such as the ancient try-pot once used by whalers, which now sits in the middle of the lawn, surrounded by flame-red spears of Poor Knight’s lily (Xeronema callistemon).

Slowly, the ngaio took hold and Rosa Davison was able to start “making pictures with plants”, composing drifts that play with different textures, foliage and shades of green.

BLENHEIM

en-nz

2022-11-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-11-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

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