Totara Waters - Picture Perfect

When you turn through the gates in Totara Waters’ stone walls and enter the palm-lined driveway, it’s tempting to imagine that you have somehow passed through a time-space portal and ended up in an exotic locale on the other side of the world.

 

There are the circular beds spilling over with striped, blotched and speckled bromeliads, the wonderful twisted forms of mature dragon trees, the vibrant yellow-orange candelabras of flowering aloes and the great clumping staghorn ferns hanging like trophies from the trunks of surrounding trees. There is a bed of ponytail palms, their bulbous bases striding like huge elephants’ feet towards the waters of the upper Waitemata Harbour that bound the garden, past the dramatic and spiky foliage of a collection of agaves.

There are not many gardens you can visit in the middle of winter and come away feeling inspired. But Peter and Jocelyn Coyle’s Whenuapai garden puts on a spectacular show all year round because of a unique collection of plants displayed in full theatrical fashion.

“People ask me who did the landscaping and I always tell them that no one did – it’s not a landscape, it’s a garden,” says Peter laughing.

But he has firm views about how plants should be used and what works when planning a garden.

“There’s no point dotting plants about the place,” he says. “You either treat a plant as a specimen and have one in pride of place or you plant them together in groups for impact. That’s why I’ve got a garden of different ponytail palms, one of various South African cycads, collections of aloes and agaves. It would just be a mess if I popped them in here and there all over the garden.”

Still, protests aside, the garden flows in a painterly way from one area to another. Peter says that in the early stages he imagined the garden as a series of photographs and was not shy about shifting plants around until he found the perfect position for them. His collection of old crucibles from an aluminium smelter stand like rugged sculptures throughout the garden. Beds are edged with mossy rocks because they lend a sense of age to new plantings.

Peter and Jocelyn have been working on the one-hectare garden for the past seven years but it has a surprising maturity, partly due to Peter’s penchant for providing homes for mature plants such as a massive dragon tree (Dracaena draco) and a huge staghorn fern (Platycerium superbum) that have been welcomed on to the property for a well-earned retirement. Sometimes people let Peter know about special specimens on sites that are about to be redeveloped, others call to gift precious plant collections because they are keen to safeguard their future.

As a fan of the rare and unusual, Peter has always had a fascination for plants with distinctive form or foliage. Many are seldom seen in New Zealand, such as the golden-prickled orbs of barrel cacti, the “blue” form of Agave attenuata and Strelitzia ‘Mandela’s Gold’. The sheer size of Aloe polyphylla is a curiosity, with its great limey-green spiralling rosettes of spiky foliage. Some of the more vicious agaves have been put on notice though, especially Agave stricta, which is prone to delivering painful jabs to the unwary.

Peter is a great advocate for learning about the natural growing conditions for a plant and replicating them as much as possible. Providing the most appropriate planting medium, feeding and care regime for plants is made easier because of his rule of grouping similar plants together.

The garden is open to the public and was recently judged a Garden of National Significance by the New Zealand Gardens Trust. “Visitors often remark on what a low-maintenance garden it is and I just look at them,” Peter says. “Jocelyn works so hard in the garden – it would be impossible to keep it up without her.”

As well as all the usual tasks, they have a big clean-up for three weeks in spring. The garden always looks immaculate and that means ongoing attention. And Peter is not averse to a few instant effects either. “I sometimes cheat a little bit in spring and buy orchids that are in flower. They provide a splash of colour for months on end.”

A measure of the dedication that’s required to keep the garden looking so good is obvious when it comes to the care given to the vast collection of bromeliads, which provide year-round flamboyance to the garden.

Totara Waters hosts Jack Frost on a regular basis in winter, leaving foliage damaged and the water in the plants’ central chalices frozen. Every time such cold conditions threaten, Peter and Jocelyn shroud frost-tender plants with a protective cloth covering – a two-hour late afternoon ritual that Peter describes while shaking his head at the madness of it all.

“I keep saying that we must simplify things a bit more…” he says wistfully, but somehow it seems more likely that the plants will win out and visitors will continue to enjoy the labour of love that has created such an exceptional garden.

Totara Waters is open to the public by appointment. Contact (09) 416 8272 or see www.totarawaters.co.nz.