A Bit of a Do

“You don’t wear the same clothes all the time and the garden is the same. I love to change things around”

 

Noreen lee says she always wanted to have the kind of garden where she and her late husband Ray could hold parties. When they planned their new house and built it on a bare paddock in Bombay, south of Auckland, she imagined how the garden would look from inside the house.

 

The garden Noreen has created over the intervening years is a celebration of nature’s beauty and a tribute to her eye for form and colour. It’s also the perfect setting for a party and the couple have enjoyed hosting many an elegant gathering beneath the trees that dot the sweeping, groomed lawns.

 

“I love the calming feeling of the lawn and trees,” says Noreen. She admits that the garden was originally intended to be just half its present 0.6 hectares, but poaching a bit of paddock space from Ray – a former racehorse trainer – allowed her to plant with abandon.

 

Many of the trees pre-date the house and give the garden a wonderful feeling of solidity. Noreen points out how the plum-toned leaves of a copper beech make a striking statement against the feathery foliage of a variegated elm.

 

“That copper beech is probably one of the most expensive trees in the world,” she jokes. “It used to stand near the old house and we shifted it when we built the new one. I just couldn’t bear to cut it down. It was miserable for years afterwards but it’s come right now.”

 

The trees and buxus hedging provide a strong, green structure for Noreen’s flamboyant flower beds, which arc around the front of the house. Each bed has a strict colour palette.

 

“Blues are hard to get,” says Noreen, though she has succeeded with a beautifully delicate planting featuring delphiniums, cornflowers, echiums and love-in-the-mist (Nigella damascena). At the end of the season, she collects the seeds so that she can enjoy the same effects the next year.

 

Other beds feature pink, red and orange tones and, though Noreen has perfected the art of both striking and harmonious plant combinations, she still enjoys experimenting. “You don’t wear the same clothes all the time and the garden is the same. I love to change things around to keep things fresh and try new plants and ways of using them.”

 

A recent success has been a patch of New Zealand plant breeder Dr Keith Hammett’s new dahlia ‘Baby Doll’. “It looks wonderful, I’m just thrilled with it.”

 

Another relatively recent love for 85-year-old Noreen has been subtropicals. She has created a special garden for her collection at the side of the house. “They’re tucked away and you can’t see them at all from the main garden so that the subtropicals don’t argue with the English planting style of the rest of
the garden.”

 

She’s also discovered a special enthusiasm for vireya rhododendrons. “I didn’t much like them in the beginning but now I find collecting different varieties and propagating them so rewarding. And they seem to love me,” she says with a laugh.

 

Noreen has many different varieties of these subtropical beauties studded around the garden. A number are in hanging baskets, with the vibrant flowers cascading down over the sides. “They’re a wonderful burst of colour when nothing much else is flowering.”

 

One of the secrets for growing vireyas, which can temperamental, is to use a very friable potting mix, she says. Her own special mix is made from pumice and bark.

 

Walking around the beautifully manicured garden, Noreen talks of how, after Ray retired, the garden became a shared hobby.

 

“He had always helped by trimming all the hedges and keeping the lawns looking good. But after he retired it was something we did together,” she says.

 

“He was always a lot tidier than me so he was the best person to have around in the maintenance department.”