The ice queen |
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It took a fair bit of that legendary Kiwi No. 8 wire ingenuity to get Muriel Davison’s Southland garden, Maple Glen, off the ground. “Nothing will grow here,” the previous owners warned when Muriel and husband Bob bought their Wyndham farm in 1966. Not because of the spectacular snowfalls or the other-worldly hoar frosts that hang icy stalactites in the trees, but because of the sou’wester that relentlessly lashes the landscape.
Muriel was up to the challenge. She started, tentatively, with a small garden behind the ramshackle farmhouse, long since rebuilt. She rigged up shelters of manuka scrub threaded through wire – No. 8 gauge, need you ask – and grew Shirley poppies from seed. They were promptly flattened.
Muriel then cast her eyes downward, past the house to the undulating gully that gives Maple Glen its name. Apart from avoiding the wind, there was no grand plan. She simply followed the sheep tracks down the hill, creating terraced gardens along the way. “I started and just kept going,” she says of her 10-hectare garden.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Bob, from Northern Ireland, was Muriel’s childhood sweetheart, though few romance novels would cast the local dairy herd tester as the dashing hero. Bob had been in New Zealand for 23 days when he met Muriel. She was 12. He first held her hand at 16. They married when she was 22.
Creating a garden wasn’t the couple’s first priority. Reducing the mortgage was, as they milked cows and raised their son, Rob. Money was tight in the early days so they shared the only spade they could afford, alternately digging holes for farm fence posts and garden beds.
In the 1970s the cows were farewelled in favour of a flock of 700 Coopworth sheep and Muriel was freed to pursue her twin passions: plants and parrots. Visitors to Maple Glen are warned to be wary of the latter as these flighty kleptomaniacs swoop down to swipe earrings and car keys.
Muriel grew almost everything in her garden from cuttings and seeds. She ordered seeds from international growers, back in the days before biosecurity regulations largely put a stop to that, and raised trees, shrubs and choice perennials in their thousands. Overrun with seedlings, she started selling them. “The plants started paying better than the cows,” she says.
Cardiocrinum giganteum was an early success. This giant Himalayan lily, with heart-shaped leaves and towering spires of creamy blooms, seven years in the making, flowers every Christmas. “I started with a packet of seed from England that contained four seeds. They must grow much better here because each plant produces up to 20 pods at a time, with as many as 956 seeds in each.” Muriel knows because she counted them.
Himalayan lilies are now a best seller on Maple Glen’s trade list, along with meconopsis poppies, red-hot pokers and lily of the valley. Snowdrops are a specialty and “I couldn’t live without my daffodils in spring”.
Muriel has been collecting daffodils for 40 years and has tens of thousands of naturalised bulbs. She used to label each clump with a cattle eartag, but when she got to 760 named varieties she figured it was time to stop. Labelling, that is, not collecting.
Seasonal change – “just watching everything come and go and do its thing” – is Maple Glen’s most satisfying aspect. Winter is synonymous with snowdrops. September brings cherry blossoms, maple leaves and magnolia blooms. Visit in October for rhododendrons and bluebells by the lake, or November for a blaze of deciduous azaleas and the pastel tones of early perennials. The perennial borders are still going strong at the end of summer and autumn has its own famous accents, though nothing like Central Otago, adds Muriel modestly.
The climate here, 12km inland from the coast, is deceptively temperate. Misty days and cool nights are common, but hot, dry days aren’t an issue. Frosts are fairly rare and most winters they never see a snowflake, although when it does snow, it snows.
Maple Glen is magical blanketed in snow, but winter isn’t Muriel’s favourite season. “I do like the look of snow,” she concedes, “but only for about five minutes. All the plants disappear and you can’t do anything.”
From the woodlands to the wetlands – in the early days, the gully sprang a leak whenever Muriel dug deeper than a spade’s depth, hence the decision to excavate ponds – this garden is a shared labour of love. Bob does the lawns and Rob has earned the mantle of right-hand man. “He’s got the green gene too,” says Muriel.
Muriel’s much-loved birds offer constant company too. There are parrots aplenty, plus cockatiels and crimson rosellas, lorikeets and lovebirds.
The parrots also pull the cherry blossoms off in spring, but Muriel doesn’t mind the annual massacre. “We have pink trees by day and a pink lawn at night. It doesn’t do to get your knickers in a knot over such things,” she says.
The garden and nursery at Maple Glen are open daily, year round, from 9am-5pm. See mapleglen.co.nz
Story: Lynda Hallinan
Photographs: Daniel Allen and the Davison Family
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