What was once part of a West Otago farm is, 14 years on, a splendid garden. Gillian Vine reports.
When Jennifer Beattie and her husband Jack planned a new house at Crookston, the chosen spot was barely 200m from their old farmhouse.
"It was a paddock and part of an extension of the old garden," Jennifer says.
Jack decided it had to be lower than the site of the old house.
"Everyone pooh-poohed him digging into the paddock and taking the top off but he said, 'It's for shelter. I'm not going to be blown away'," Jennifer recalls.
"And I've got such a view of my garden: who wants any other view?"
Jack made the garden walls - "They had to lie just right" - using rocks from a creek on the property.
"My husband said our son [Colin] would be mowing the lawns, so he dragged a leveller behind the bike to mark out the gardens."
Then came planting.
"Colin had Crystal Brook Nursery and there were plenty of plants available," Jennifer says.
That the emphasis is on trees is evident from the moment one turns into the drive with its line of Mendocino cypress (Cupressus pigmaea) and Jennifer says there are 500 or more trees, mainly smaller species or varieties, in the garden, whose area is 0.3ha.
The eye-catching selection below the house includes cabbage trees, magnolias, a bronze-leaved honey locust (Gleditsia Ruby Lace), Robinia pseudoacacia Lace Lady, Norway maple (Acer platinoides), A . palmatum Shirazz and a weeping mulberry (Morus alba Pendula, whose inconspicuous greenish-white spring flowers are followed by edible blackberry-like fruit.
There are also several species of Australian leatherwoods, including Eucryphia lucida from Tasmania, and a rare double-flowered form, possibly E. glutinosa. Leatherwoods show their appreciation of West Otago's climate by flowering profusely and Jennifer knows of one other double specimen on a Black Gully property.
A rare variegated dogwood (Cornus) has leaves with yellow centres and green margins, the reverse of the usual pattern and, says Jennifer, the leaves are the most beautiful golden colour in late summer, before turning red in autumn.
As she says: "It's a beautiful tree."
In front of the trees at the bottom of the garden, rhododendrons, kalmias and other smaller shrubs face the lawn that flows up to the rock wall and its diverse plantings of roses, dahlias, lilies and perennials, while close to the house the likes of Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia) and Tropicana canna lilies, neither considered especially hardy, are quite at home.
Well designed and beautifully maintained, the Beattie garden is a delight, underlining West Otago's reputation for great gardens.
