When don liddle and his young family first visited the 10ha of bare rural land he’d bought in Waikanae, north of Wellington, they had to hack away the thistles to spread their picnic rug. Undaunted, they built a house within a year and moved in the day before Christmas, wading knee-deep through the mud. It’s hard to imagine now, some 50 years later. The family home sits gracefully in park-like grounds and the suburbs have grown up around it. The sweeping driveway is edged with towering cedars and striking perennial borders. Past the tennis court, the rear garden is less formal – a woodland with meandering paths shaded by venerable trees, including a copper beech, liquidambar, golden elms and a 15m kauri.
Don, a fit and active 81-year-old, has planted hundreds of trees in his Kapiti Coast garden, many of which are more than 50 years old. In the early days, he was also establishing the family nursery business, Liddle Wonder, on the land. Did he have a plan – or even the time – to consider how the hectares set aside for the home garden might look?
"I started out the front," he says, matter-of-factly. "It was an old river bed; I dug out a bushel of metal and put in a bushel of soil. You have to select your trees: pohutukawa, banksias and eugenia and, on the higher levels, redwoods, cedars and silver birches.
"Initially I said no to deciduous out the front, as there would be too much time spent tidying up. I used to see [leaf fall] as mess; now I see it as a feature." At the side of the house, through big picture windows, a ginkgo tree marks the change from evergreen formality to the soft wilderness of the rear garden.
Don’s late wife Joyce was a florist who enjoyed picking the garden’s perennial blooms for her displays but the garden was Don’s domain – or, as he calls it, his relaxing hobby. "There was one stage when I wanted to extend the garden further, but I told myself no. When a hobby becomes a tedious, laborious bore, it is time to stop."
To the visitor, the garden appears immaculate. The lawns are crisply edged, the paths swept clear of leaves. Don insists it’s not. "This morning I just went around with the blower for 15 minutes and tidied up. You don’t look too hard for weeds; it’s just a passing scene, isn’t it? In a garden like this, I don’t see things being perfect all the time. I’m inclined to let a lot of things go." But he will admit to having a spruce-up before the annual Waikanae Garden Trail. For the past 13 years he has opened his garden and home for the weekend event.
Don Liddle is not the sort to blow his own trumpet. His gardening secrets are low-key: plenty of humus and well-aerated soil. In Waikanae’s mild climate, he plants in early autumn so plants are established before the height of summer.
Compost? "I just throw the leaves together; I don’t have any system as you should do. I’m a great believer in fertiliser. I throw the blood and bone around with reckless abandon."
The garden’s floral borders feature such glorious colour combinations as chocolate aeoniums and sky-blue delphiniums. Another has white impatiens, Brunnera ‘Jack Frost’ with its silvery leaves and forget-me-not-like blue flowers, bright red begonia and a broadleaf, frosty-looking cineraria. He credits it all to a former garden assistant, Amanda McCallan, who had worked in the fashion industry.
But his lifetime’s worth of knowledge as a plantsman must have come in useful too. Liddle Wonder, which closed in 2008, was one of the country’s foremost wholesale suppliers of nursery plants for more than 50 years. "Being a nurseryman is repetitive and programmed, year after year. But you can’t help but get excited about new plants coming along. It energises you."
He looks out from the dining room to the swathes of blue and purple salvias edging the terrace. "It’s given me tremendous satisfaction… You go to retirement villages and some of them are quite good at gardening and some of them aren’t. I just feel, if everyone had a little garden terrace, somewhere to relax and have a degree of privacy, it would make a difference."
