Music to the eyes

It’s taken three decades to orchestrate a seasonal symphony in an Arrowtown garden and the result is a horticultural masterpiece. Words Gordon Collier; Photos Paul McCredie.

JANET BLAIR HAS BEEN WAITING 35 years for the architect to fix her house. “Meanwhile,” she says, “I made a garden.” The architect in question is John Blair, Queenstown’s first, to whom she is married – as she says “for better, for worse but not for lunch!”

The unfixed house in question was built in 1864 for a farming family, the McEntyrs, and subsequently inhabited by three generations of that family until the Blairs arrived in the 1980s. The garden in question lies in an open valley not far from Lake Hayes, a picturesque stretch of water left eons ago by a retreating glacier. Look south to the Remarkable Mountains standing jagged against the sky. Look north to Coronet Peak, perhaps New Zealand’s busiest ski field. The views in every direction are spectacular.

In keeping with the Blairs’ low-key approach to life, the entrance way to this much-acclaimed garden is not imposing and could easily be passed by. “I had a sense of what I wanted,” Janet says. “I wanted to make a garden embodied with a certain spirit. We came to a harsh environment. The house stood isolated amid paddocks containing generations of dock and thistle of gigantic proportions. There were no trees, no shade and no birdsong. I used the natural colours of green – the coolness of green in the heat of our summers is invaluable.”

From the outset Janet read voraciously in order to educate herself about plants, starting with Russell Page’s The Education of a Gardener. “I am always striving for perfection while knowing how elusive that is and that nature can play some cruel tricks which test the resilience and determination of the gardener. But there are also moments when one is presented with an ephemeral glimpse of sheer magic. Nothing is impossible, but thinking makes it so.”

The old house at the centre of the garden is surrounded on two sides by tightly clipped hornbeam hedges. There’s a barn built more than a century ago from local stone with a rusty corrugated iron roof and the old cowshed is still standing only because “the borer are holding hands”. A group of common elders (Sambucus nigra) gnarled in wondrous fashion flourishes and in early summer become wreathed in garlands of lacy white flowers. Some gardeners, when confronted with these tumbledown buildings and the commonest of trees, would have called in a bulldozer. But Janet had the wisdom and showed a good measure of restraint in preserving these reminders of the past.

A well-worn patch of gravel fronting open sheds where vehicles are left in casual order serves as a parking area. It is part of the planned scene, reminiscent of a French farmyard. A tidy lawn, mown five centimetres high (thus conserving moisture in dry periods) and springy to walk on stretches into the distance. It’s a big space and space is one of Janet’s particular concepts.

Behind the old stone barn Janet has created an exceptional mixed border where her ideas about colour and the garden’s relationship with the wider landscape are fully expressed. She has used purple sage (Salvia officinalis ‘Purpurascens’) and catmint in generous swathes interspersed with sword-like delphiniums, Iris ‘Lucy’s Blue Silk’ and Eryngium bourgatii as accents.

Janet loves all shades of blue. At the far end of this impressive border a massive Philadelphus ‘Frosty Morn’ is in full bloom while Clematis montana ‘Marjorie’ drapes the stone wall behind and is allowed to climb far up into a craggy elderberry. Its simplicity is a revelation. “This is the Barn Border – you have to have a name for them. I use rhythmic plantings of purple sage and iris,” Janet says. “It gives a feeling of harmony and serenity.”

She likes a natural mix of plants. “It’s really the blending of foliage and colour that makes a harmonious whole. Colour is seasonal and I like it to seem incidental as opposed to orchestrated – it’s the seamless blend. Creating a garden is like composing music; we all have access to the same notes but it is how we arrange them that makes the garden our own. From prelude to adagio, you plant for the seasons but it takes a long time to achieve. And good nutrition is important; it’s like feeding your family.”

A spread of lawn leads from the Barn Border to an area where the colour scheme is green, white, purple and grey and the predominant plant, snow-in-summer (Cerastium tomentosum), is one most gardeners would scorn. Janet has laid it out like a shag-pile carpet. Lavender, stachys and white valerian are also included, the colours echoing those of the mountains.

This border then drifts into one of green and white. The purity, simplicity and freshness of this combination are, to Janet, the essence of spring. She loves the flowers and seed-heads of both ornamental angelica and sweet cecily (Myrrhis odorata) but says they are very promiscuous and can’t be allowed to ripen and fall. “It is not in my nature to have weeds – they invade and are interlopers. I try to be weed-free.”

Janet feels the garden has now reached the point where it expresses each of the four seasons. “I didn’t get in from the garden until 10.30 last night,” she tells me. “I think death should become unfashionable; there is so much to do, we don’t have enough time, do we?”