The influence of Dunedin has played its part for a successful floral designer. Gillian Vine reports.
Barry Ferguson (85) attributes his love of flowers to his early years in Dunedin.
Now living in retirement in Northland, the floral designer has written a book, Flowers are my Passport, about his remarkable career, which included more than 40 years in New York.
The Dunedin connection goes back 75 years, when 10-year-old Barry came to the city with his parents and two older sisters.
The move to his mother's home town was because his father, who worked for Government Life Insurance, had been transferred from Napier.
The family lived in Hart St, Roslyn, in "an old vicarage or something but I don't know its history''.
When the Fergusons arrived, World War 2 was raging and people were making do in the face of shortages.
"My mother was an excellent gardener, like all New Zealand women of the time,'' Barry said, recalling eating gooseberries and blackcurrants from the garden.
There were flowers, too, among them dusty millers (Primula auricula) and great patches of Himalayan blue poppies (Meconopsis), self-seeding under rhododendrons.
"They are two flowers I still love [and] when you see meconopsis in the Himalayas, they take your breath away,'' Barry said.
In Northland, he has to content himself with paintings and photographs of these two favourites, as both need chilly winters to survive.
Other primulas at Hart St included candelabra types and little English primroses Barry was able to grow successfully in the woodland area at his American home, Cove House, Long Island.
Life in Dunedin included visits to Dunedin Botanic Garden, where the "quite superb'' Rhododendron Dell enchanted him.
Decades later, he brought a group of Americans to the city when the rhododendrons were at their peak.
"People on that tour could not believe how magnificent they were,'' he said.
Wartime Dunedin included free concerts at the Town Hall, "all the Ferguson family could afford''.
Primary schooling was followed by several years at Otago Boys' High School, then the family moved to Wellington when Barry was 15.
He planned to study for a BSc and enrolled at Victoria University but "ran up against the stone wall of calculus'' so, despite excellent grades in botany and zoology, he pulled out and became apprenticed to a Wellington florist.
In Dunedin, Barry and his sister Nancy had belonged to the Junior Shakespeare Club, igniting a passion for theatre that saw him heavily involved in the Wellington theatre scene, as actor, set designer and stage manager, while still training as a florist.
Although in the 1960s he was to work in theatre again, Barry had no intention of making it his career.
Instead, after three years' training and clutching his diploma from the NZ Society of Professional Florists, he was ready to move on.
In 1952, aged just 21, he was off to Christchurch to manage a flower shop, an experience that was to lead to his own floristry business in the city.
In 1962, Barry headed off on his great OE, landing in London where he worked initially at Winkfield Place, Berkshire, the domestic science school established by the great floral artist and writer Constance Spry.
Barry then managed the company's Mayfair shop.
"It was a great honour but they paid nothing,'' he said of his Spry years.
"It was the poor pay that moved me on.''
However, he was drawn to the theatre, with stints in London and Scandinavia, working with great actors such as Sir John Gielgud, Sir Laurence Olivier, Peggy Ashcroft and American movie star Gloria Swanson.
In 1969 Barry headed for New York to work for The City Gardener, a downtown garden centre.
He describes his American years in Flowers are my Passport, recalling the steep learning curve as New York's gardens were put to bed for the winter in October or November to come to life again in March.
The pace was frantic, long days and seven-day weeks, as he opened his company J. Barry Ferguson Flowers to produce floral arrangements for high-profile events and individuals, with designing and maintaining gardens also in the mix.
He was able to maintain his New Zealand connections by returning in the New York winter, judging at the Ellerslie International Flower Show in Christchurch about three years ago, bringing American tour groups here and encouraging Americans to import New Zealand peonies.
In 2002, he bought a property at Mahurangi, north of Auckland, with splendid harbour vistas.
"It's not dissimilar to [the view we had] looking down Otago Harbour from Hart St,'' he said.
It seems Barry Ferguson's remarkable world has turned full circle.
The book
Flowers are my Passport, by J. Barry Ferguson (hardback $49.99), is published by the author and distributed by Bookreps/PDL. Signed copies can be ordered at www.barryferguson.co.nz
