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Angela and Bruce Spooner’s garden in Coatesville, around 30km north-west of Auckland’s CBD, has been listed as one of national significance, but Angela insists that it’s “just part of our home”. It seems a very modest assessment for a garden that clearly stands out from the crowd.
Angela says the garden, which they have called Mincher – a family name and also the name of an impressive kennel, more closely resembling a house, where they breed their beloved Cavalier King Charles spaniels – has “just evolved”. But the carefully cultivated twin herbaceous borders, the series of ponds and the rhododendron and walled gardens, among other features, indicate otherwise.
“I juggle with ideas for months. I do fantasy drawings and, in the early days, I got some professional help translating my dreams into reality,” says Angela. “Now I just sit down with our head gardener and we tweak ideas till they’re right. I now know that, when I get a bright idea, it’s eventually going to mean doing a lot of work.”
The couple bought the land in 1992 and finished building their Georgian-style home in 1994; work on the 5ha garden began in earnest in the spring of 1995. Angela is still bursting with energy for new projects and, though she says Bruce would rather go trout fishing, he has also been captivated by the long process of creating a major garden.
 English-born Angela met Bruce in London while he was on his OE and they married after a “whirlwind courtship”. Though she’s lived in New Zealand for 40 years now, she has incorporated many features of her homeland’s country gardens at Mincher. The red brick walls of the kitchen garden are a case in point: they enclose a charming vegetable garden with espaliered fruit trees and raised beds brimming with heritage edibles.
“I’m an Essex girl so I had to have a walled garden. You rarely see them in New Zealand. And, of course, once we’d finished that, we had to build the gardener’s cottage because traditionally that’s close by the kitchen garden.”
Two Edwardian-style glasshouses soon followed, taking advantage of the heat-holding properties of the garden’s walls. They’re the best place to work on a cold winter’s day, according to Angela.
A distinctive feature of Mincher is the stream that winds past the house – home to crested ducks and grey teal. The couple has harnessed this feature to create a series of ponds. New Zealand natives have been showcased around them, though Angela admits the plantings still have a European lean. “I’m a northern hemisphere girl and I can’t do without my deciduous trees.”
Story: Sarah Beresford
Photographs: Sally Tagg
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