Lines of Beauty

At the entrance to Paloma, Clive and Nicki Higgie’s extraordinary garden at Fordell, near Whanganui, there’s a black-painted fence where friends get to write witty and wise sayings in white paint. Clive has added one of his own – “Happy wife, happy life” – a philosophy that got him started on planting the garden almost 40 years ago.

 

 

Clive and Nicki were 20-year-olds hardly back from honeymoon when Clive decided that the surrounds of the farm cottage, where they still live today, were a little unromantic for his pretty bride. Some trees, he decided, would provide a more appealing environment and somewhere to have meals outdoors, as well as shelter from the winds that blew unhindered over the open farmland.

 

Clive had always had a finely tuned eye for beauty and that first planting made him keenly aware of how trees and bold plants can enhance a landscape. Soon he was eyeing up the contours of the land around the house, contemplating how the closely cropped ridges and gullies would look covered with lush planting.

 

 

By the time the first winter rolled round, Clive was well on the way to planting a garden and arboretum that now covers some 45ha. In the early days, planting had to be fitted in around a demanding farm schedule and the arrival of three children – Marc, Simone and Guy.

 

Clive caught the tree-collecting bug and began looking for the rare and unusual. Soon the family’s battered yellow Ford Capri was returning from specialist nurseries, often far away, loaded up with children and plants.

 

Even when Clive and Nicki headed off on two-wheeled expeditions (Clive has been a passionate motorcyclist since his teens), plant collecting was still on the schedule. On one trip Clive gathered the ripe seed of Butia capitata – the aptly named wine palm – and stuffed it into a bread bag beneath his leather jacket. The juicy seeds were soon leaking through the plastic and when he unzipped his jacket, a powerful smell of wine rose from his red-stained T-shirt. “I thought it was really funny, because Clive’s been a strict teetotaller all his life,” recalls Nicki.

 

The palm bug also bit and Clive gathered plants and raised seed. He put up a good-sized glasshouse, equipped it with lights and would head out there after dark most evenings to sow seed and pot up young plants. These days the glasshouse is hidden from the road by big palms and rare trees, but back then it was in full view of passers-by, where it managed to attract the attention of the local constabulary who’d had reports of lights on late at night and thought something illegal was being grown.

 

 

In recent years the focus has been on planting trees native to the southern hemisphere. Among them are many different species of evergreen Mexican oaks (Quercus) and a collection of Norfolk Island pine relatives (Araucaria) from New Caledonia and South America.

 

Recent projects include the Garden of Death, which consists entirely of poisonous plants, and a gigantic glasshouse put together over a 10-year period with parts from old commercial tomato houses. Clive has the ability to envisage what a project will look like before work starts as well as knowing how to achieve it.

 

There are amazing examples of this around the garden, including a 5m-tall koru-inspired concrete sculpture erected last summer. Friends thought it would prove impossible, but Clive figured out a way to pour it in one go, with the help of family and friends and an ingenious pulley system for buckets of concrete.

 

It’s this never say never approach that has made the garden so special. No obstacle stands in his way, not even his mother, who still lives on the farm. He’d been wanting to make a labyrinth, but knew there’d be lots of questions of the “Shouldn’t you be doing something more useful on the farm, Clive?” variety. So he bided his time and scheduled a start on the project to coincide with her departure for a six-week trip to Europe. It was almost finished by the time she got home and she thought it was great.