One Out of the Box

Disciplined planting of exotic trees brings European formality to this grand garden and historic home in the Wairarapa.

Words: Pam Neville  Photographs: Hamish Trounson

THE FIRST TOWN CLERK of Carterton enjoyed a touch of formal splendour, hosting gracious social occasions and decorous tennis parties at the villa he built in the Wairarapa town in the 1880s. But he could never have foreseen the grandeur that was to come. Today the house built by Henry Wolters is close to being a stately home and the grounds are a green and tranquil pleasure garden reminiscent of those of 16th-century Italy.

The masterpiece that is Richmond Garden is the work of Melanie Greenwood (below right), self-taught garden designer and hands-on plantswoman, ably and actively assisted by her husband and her brother. Richmond is adjudged a Garden of National Significance by the New Zealand Gardens Trust, one of fewer than 20 private gardens to be awarded this top honour. But Melanie, like Henry Wolters a century before her, was aiming more for a fabulous family environment than national honours when she embarked on the project 15 years ago. “I wanted a paradise to live in,” she says. “In the old days people entertained themselves within the confines of home and garden. I wanted to make a place to live where we never felt the need to leave.”

The garden came first, before the complete renovation of the house. From an ordinary Carterton street, visitors enter through a curved driveway edged with hedges of cherry laurel. Revealed at the end is a four-hectare formal, classical, green garden. The design came out of Melanie’s head after visits to formal gardens in Europe (notably Italy), fuelled by her previous experience of creating two semi-formal gardens in Wellington.

She knew what she wanted, drew a plan and wrote a 10-year programme. There are just two basic elements to the design she explains: multiple planting of the same species and symmetry. Buxus sempervirens is planted as hedging and as topiary; English beech is used in hedging and as mature trees; linden limes are pleached and also grow freely as individual trees; hornbeam is pleached and hedged; and English yew, “extraordinarily difficult to grow in the Wairarapa”, is used as formal topiary. Add water for tranquillity, a magnificent Italian bronze fountain, perfect lawns, the endless patience and skill of Melanie, with brother Richard and husband John as pruners and trimmers, and you have Richmond. It has been a 15-year labour and the garden remains a full-time job for Melanie and Richard while John continues his law practice in Wellington.

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