Love Blooms |
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A young bride from England, a farmer’s son and an old farmhouse in the rugged New Zealand countryside. It’s the happy-ever-after stuff of romantic novels but it’s also a familiar story in our farming history.
The Frasers’ front door is framed by an arch of ‘City of York’ roses above a gate made of totara rails and posts.
Kathrine Fraser admits she wasn’t the pioneering sort when she married farmer Hugh and left “the soft, rolling countryside of Devon” to live on 600ha of precipitous sheep and cattle country on Banks Peninsula.
“I’d been nannying in New York for six years and loving it,” she says. “Then my parents said they’d pay for me to come home for Christmas, so I did, and that’s when I met Hugh who was staying in Devon with mutual friends.”
Kathrine and Hugh Fraser with much-loved cat Marmite who, sadly, was run over and is now at rest with Hugh’s favourite dog beneath a ‘Peasgood’s Nonsuch’ apple tree.
Coombe Farm, Kathrine’s new home at the head of the Takamatua Valley, was like nothing she had seen before – as different from England or New York as could be imagined. The original farmhouse burned to ashes – the sad fate of many an old homestead in the days of candles and kerosene lamps – and the “new” two-storey replacement, built around 1900, was Hugh’s family home until his parents retired.
When the couple moved in, it had been empty for quite a while and needed repairs. “Seventeen buckets under the roof to catch the leaks that first winter – not to mention the sleeping possums!” Kathrine remembers.
Kathrine doesn’t like pine trees but they have sheltered the classic colonial-style house and garden for more than a century; a Teucrium fruticans hedge defines plantings on the edge of the drive that began as a silver and white garden with a silver weeping pear (Pyrus salicifolia ‘Pendula’), white roses, phlox, marguerite daisies and apple mint, but were soon infiltrated by wandering purple sage and pink roses.
That was more than 20 years ago and a lot of water has since flowed through the property’s deep, boulder-strewn streams.
Repiled, insulated, redecorated and much loved, the pale grey homestead sits comfortably against a backdrop of bush-clad hills. (“This is one of the few valleys on the peninsula where there was never a sawmill, so there’s bush all the way up,” says Kathrine.) Built of pit-sawn timber and roofed with corrugated iron, the house is a true colonial but its lack of frills gives it an elegant, almost Georgian simplicity. What brings it to life, however, is Kathrine and the gentle, flowery garden she has created around it.
Kathrine planted catmint (Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’) beside this peony, a remnant of an earlier garden.
It took a while but, once she started gardening, she couldn’t stop. “Hugh calls me ‘the constant gardener’. My family can’t believe it but I suppose it was lurking in the genes. My mother was a gardener and would still be out there at 10 o’clock at night, but it was a very different sort of gardening. She came to visit a few years ago – I was probably building stone walls at the time – and when she left she shook her head and said, ‘I don’t envy you, dear’.”
Hugh’s father had planted sheltering trees and the overgrown lines of an old garden were still discernible. Wisely, Kathrine worked primarily within these lines. Unlike many farmers’ wives who extend out to the paddocks in their enthusiasm, she kept the garden close to the house so that each enhances the other.
At the end of a winding drive, house and garden appear as a period set piece. Beneath a gabled arch heavy with pale roses, stone steps layered with moss and fallen petals ascend to a lawn that runs uninterrupted to a wide front verandah.
On the lower level on either side of the arch there’s a delicious secret garden with a medley of old-fashioned roses and cottagey plants – acanthus (bear’s breeches), foxgloves, phlox, lavender, sweet William, even twin miniature lawns, each complete with a seat beneath a flowering cherry. All this is hidden from the house by a hedge of escallonia, pohutukawa, hypericum and box – unlikely companions clipped together into a hedge and infiltrated with trailing fuchsias, peppermint geraniums and luscious old pink and purple roses. Kathrine says it all happened because she couldn’t make up her mind, but it’s a clever device that delights the eye with rambling Victorian prettiness before the comparative formality of bare lawns.
Dramatic delphinium spikes surround the soft white petals of the David Austin rose ‘Fair Bianca’.
The verandah is quirkily comfortable, with its old sideboard, rusty iron candelabra and Adirondack chairs made by Hugh: “The internet’s great – even says how many screws you need”. The big totara table in the sunny dining nook is Hugh’s work too.
Climbing and bush roses are everywhere here. With head-high delphiniums in pinks and mauve, stately artichokes and masses of lower-growing plants, they lean against the bay windows of a sitting room, cover pergolas and froth over paths. Although Kathrine loves roses in all shades of pink – ‘Constance Spry’ and ‘Madame Sancy de Parabère’ are favourites – she is careful to include touches of pale yellow to illuminate the groups of plants.
“I love things that float,” she says, looking ruefully at banks of love-in-a-mist (nigella), with its ferny leaves and airy blue flowers – flattened because her little nieces like rolling in it. “And I love marigolds and little blue speedwells. They make me smile. I can’t make up my mind and I move things around but if a plant’s happy I’m inclined to leave it there. My silver and white garden has pink in it now.”
It’s not just about looking good – the garden has its practical aspects too. There are thriving plots of herbs and vegetables bright with banks of purple sage and marigolds (calendula). Old concrete tubs full of water and comfrey leaves are a tonic for young plants.
There isn’t a hard line in the garden, nothing ramrod straight. It’s soft, blowsy, a bit wayward – just the way Kathrine likes it.
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Story: Barbara Lea Taylor
Photographs: Juliet Nicholas
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