Garden full of character

A garden which is normally showcased in spring, has plenty of interest year round,  Louise Frampton finds.

Barry and Michelle Gillan’s town garden in Alexandra is designed to be slowly savoured.

Located in the aptly named Cherry Grove, it has featured in the Alexandra Blossom Festival garden tours, where its many flowering cherries, trilliums and hundreds of spring bulbs put on a magnificent display.

But it also provides year-round interest due to the combination of Michelle’s design skills and Barry’s artwork.

The garden is shaded from the searing Central Otago heat by a leafy canopy of flowering cherry trees and a large gleditsia, creating a tranquil space that has been designed for outdoor living.

The low, curving raised beds that wrap around the perimeter of the 780sqm property have been painstakingly assembled by Barry and Michelle with schist stone, mirroring the natural Central Otago environment.

The couple say the beds were raised to give different lines in the garden.

‘‘It’s all about the structure, and how the garden is framed, Michelle says.

‘‘Nature doesn’t have any straight lines.’’

The couple are no strangers to hard work, having created the 4500sqm Glenbrae garden in Balclutha between 1991 and 2002, which also featured schist walls.

‘‘We wore out three wheelbarrows and also wore out one husband,’’ Michelle says.

So when creating the Alexandra garden in 2008, they learnt from experience and Barry — who Michelle refers to as the bionic man, due to his fused neck, wrists and feet — made a wheelbarrow with extra wheels, so he didn’t have to pick it up at the back.

Unfortunately, that didn’t help Michelle who one wet day was in a rush to shift more stone and ended up injuring her shoulder, needing a reconstruction.

Despite their injuries, their hard work has paid off and they now have a garden they both enjoy spending time in.

It’s not just plants that are eye-catching. Rustic mining memorabilia such as a sharpening stone, horseshoes, an old railway lantern and a collection of sculptures and bird baths made by Barry make it a garden to be explored.

Taking pride of place at the front door is a dog Barry carved out of Oamaru stone, which was once part of a larger sculpture at their Balclutha property.

Along from that, a small gold mining scene sits on a table. It features a miner panning for gold outside his schist cottage. The attention to detail is remarkable. There’s an axe on a chopping block beside cut firewood and inside there are bookshelves, a bible and a bed and there are clothes hanging on the line at the back.

Barry, who as a 13-year-old, started out in the same art class as Grahame Sydney, also brings the garden alive with sculptures of birds and animals.

He has created kiwi ‘‘feeding’’ on the forest floor and a tūī, bellbird, saddleback and magpie sit in the trees.

There are also ‘‘characters’’ scattered around the garden such as Jiminy Cricket, three blind mice and Monty the mouse.

Barry makes his creations by soldering wire together, before adding wire netting; then he shapes it with a concrete plaster.

‘‘You just hand-mould them after that.’’

‘‘It takes a long time. There’s a lot of layers,’’ Barry says.

There’s also a bright-green gecko in a tree.

‘‘We haven’t had a possum since he’s been there.’’

But the piece de resistance is a life-sized sculpture of a deer nestled among the plantings.

‘‘Oh, what a job we had getting him in there.

‘‘He’s hollow, but he’s about 300lbs [136kg].’’

The focal point of the garden is a red-painted working waterwheel in the goldfish pond and a red Japanese lantern, that although it looks wooden, is actually made from Oamaru stone.

Hostas grow lush around the garden borders along with black Monodo grass. Highlights of colour are added in pots, such as geraniums, roses and zantedeschia, also known as calla lilies.

As well as the flowering cherries and trilliums, the garden is full of michelia, eucryphias, camellias, rhododendrons and peonies. There are also flowering almonds which have a dark pinky-purple blossom.

‘‘I’ve got Glad McArthur’s [columnist for Central Otago’s The News community newspaper for almost 40 years] original peonies from a friend of mine. She had one of each given to her by Glad.’’

Barry says there’s much to see in the garden because of the different textures.

‘‘There’s so many different types of foliage in here. You don’t actually need to have a whole blousy colour garden,’’ he says.

‘‘Even in winter,’’ Michelle adds. ‘‘There’s still interest because of the evergreens.’’

There’s also plenty of vantage points to admire the garden from. A path leads up higher at the back of the garden, behind the gleditsia, leading to a covered ‘‘nook’’ which offers a comfortable retreat to relax with a ‘‘cuppa’’ or a book.

Over the years they have brought in plenty of compost and have added pine needles as a mulch.

They have an irrigation system in the summer and in the winter they put frost cloth over the trilliums and the ferns.

Michelle also keeps raised rings around the trilliums so she doesn’t lose them as they can rot if they get too much soil over the top of them.

Michelle knows what type of garden she wants if they ever have to leave Cherry Grove.

‘‘I want a courtyard with pergola and a small hill with one tree and just rock, trilliums and little treasures.’’

A bit like this one really, just on a smaller scale.