Monthly Archives: February 2019

We Sail to Wellington

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In my last few blogs on our 2018 American Horticultural Society tour of the beautiful designed landscapes and natural areas of New Zealand, I wrote about the gardens of the Marlborough region on the South Island.  With just a few days left on the tour, we were ready to sail back to the North Island where we had begun more than two weeks earlier. As we waited for the Interislander Ferry to load, we wandered around and window-shopped in the small, picturesque town of Picton. You can see the previous ferry heading out into the Marlborough Sounds.

On board, we sailed out through the tops of green hills which form the fingers of land and islands that are the Marlborough Sounds.  If you read my blog on our spectacular overnight stay in Doubtful Sound at the southeast tip of the South Island, you’ll see the difference between these hillsides, which are often cloaked in invasive conifers referred to as ‘wilding pines’, and those on Doubtful Sound, which were cloaked in a variety of native tree ferns and evergreen trees and shrubs.

The Marlborough Sounds are known in geology as drowned river valleys. Eighty-five million years ago, New Zealand broke away from the supercontinent Gondwana, which also included Africa, India, South America, Antarctica and Australia.  This drifting body of land about the size of half of Australia, called Zealandia, subsided almost entirely into the Pacific Ocean. Thirty-five million years ago, Zealandia was less than one-third the size of modern New Zealand and occurred as an archipelago of islands, then was uplifted by volcanic activity at the junction of the Pacific and Australian plates.  These collisions raised up the hills on the east side of the north island and the mountainous backbone of most of the south island, i.e. the Southern Alps including Mount Cook, which we had hiked under four days prior.  New Zealand’s oldest rocks, from Gondwana, are sedimentary in nature and dated at 510-360 million years old. Its Greenland Group rocks are similar to those found in eastern Australia and Antarctica.

Looking down from space over the Space Shuttle Challenger you can see the Marlborough Sounds and the cloud-shrouded Cook Strait, on the shores of which lay the wonderful Paripuma garden we’d visited hours earlier.  Cook Strait connects the Tasman Sea on the east in the upper left and the Pacific Ocean to the west.

Our route this afternoon and early evening would take us down Queen Charlotte Sound and into Cook Strait…..

…..then into the protected harbour at the bottom of the North Island where the city of Wellington lies.

We passed a variety of holiday houses clinging to the slopes of Queen Charlotte Sound…..

…… and of course all the wilding pines.  I wrote about New Zealand’s effort to eradicate these trees in my earlier blog on Queenstown.

Courtesy of our knowledgeable, New Zealand-born tour host Richard Lyons, I enjoyed a Speight’s beer as the ferry sailed down the sound.  The wind was constant and in places buffeted so much that others went inside, but I decided it was too beautiful to leave.

I used my zoom lens to check out details on the shore of Queen Charlotte Sound, like these mussel lines.

The Picton-bound Interislander passed us on starboard.

As we passed Arapawa Island on our left, I could make out tiny sheep on the hills. In fact, Arapawa has a specific breed of sheep. Island ecology!

As Cook Strait came into view, the wind became relentless.

I photographed some of my tour pals being blown about as they compared images. Though Cook Strait is renowned for its rough waters…..

…… it was not terribly rough on this day, and before long we were sailing towards the sunset over the North Island.

Finally, the lights of Wellington came into view.

Not long after docking, we were comfortably ensconced in the Copthorne Hotel Oriental Bay, looking out over the boats moored in the harbour.

The next morning, the view across the bay was much brighter……

…. and we headed out for our Wellington tour. Our first stop was Government House, the home of New Zealand’s Governor-General.  Because of the nature of our tour, we were taken around the gardens, which have been named one of the Gardens of National Significance.

In 1990, they redesigned the grounds to focus on native plants like New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax) and fierce lancewood (Pseudopanax ferox) with their Dr. Seuss-like shapes.

Borders featured native grasses like toetoe (Cortaderia richardsonii) mixed with ornamentals such as hydrangea….

….. and a reflecting pool created a beautiful focal point.

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At the rear was a vast lawn for use in official ceremonies. It had a colourful border where…..

…. monarch butterflies were foraging on single dahlias.  (New Zealand’s monarch butterfly population does not migrate.)

We walked down the hillside behind Government House where a magnificent collection of colourful conifers was arrayed like a tapestry.

Our tour continued inside the building where we heard the history of the British colonial role in New Zealand, which is an independent constitutional monarchy.

I loved these official dining chairs, which featured the crests – and often the plants – of the country’s various regions.

Then it was time to head to lunch at an appropriately-named restaurant on Lyall Bay.

Afterwards, I walked across the road to get a closer look at the brand-new Lyall Bay Surf Life Saving Club, which replaced the old 1950s club.

Then we were dropped off at the stunning Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand on the edge of Lambton Harbour, fairly close to our hotel.

Our first stop was a tour of the native garden behind the museum, where various nature programs occur.

I could have spent a long time photographing in this garden, but……

…… there was so much to see inside the museum!

I loved the ecology displays, naturally.

And I could have used this display in a lot of places in the previous few weeks.

If you read my post called Bay of Islands – Māoris, Kauris and Kia Ora, you might remember the magnificent protected Kauri forest we visited. This is a piece of fossilized kauri gum (Agathis australis) with a trapped insect.

When we left to head back to our hotel, we walked between the museum and the harbour where there was a very cool native landscape…..

…. that was designed by the firm Boffa Miskell.

After walking along the ocean for a while, we came to a pretty view of Oriental Bay and our hotel at the base of the hill. At the top is St. Gerard’s Church and Monastery.

We finally arrived back at our hotel. On our last day, we’d have time to walk down Oriental Parade, the road flanking the bay. The beach here is extremely popular with fit, active Wellingtonians, including these participants in a swim race.

Putting our feet up at the hotel, we sampled a glass of the wine from the renowned vineyard that Doug did not get to visit in Marlborough…..

….. then headed out to Whitebait Restaurant on the pier across the road. It was exquisite.  This was just one dish: smoked Mount Cook alpine salmon cured in sauvignon blanc, dill and oyster cream with dilled carrots.

Then it was time to head to bed. Tomorrow we had three gardens to visit in Wellington!

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I will complete the last few entries in my NZ trip journal as soon as I return from Chile and Argentina in late March. Ciao!

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.