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The Alpine Garden Queenstown by Paul Bangay
In this extract from his latest book, Big Garden Design, celebrated landscape designer Paul Bangay details the key elements of a considered country retreat in New Zealand.
In the city, the challenge of space, scale and soil capacity often leads to gardens that are too often viewed only from inside the house. Country gardens, by contrast, are places to explore, to be lived in and to occupy your time and energy. With more space to wander, the element of intrigue can entice someone to seek out hidden sections of the garden.
Contemplating what can’t be seen from the house draws a person out into the garden with a sense of wonderment. Scale is one of the greatest luxuries a country garden gives us, not only for the potential for exploration but also in allowing for experimentation. You can afford to make many more mistakes in a country garden than you can in a smaller city garden, where one small thing out of place can ruin its entire appearance.
Sitting under the snow-covered peaks of the [Southern] Alps on the South Island of New Zealand near Queenstown, this garden is dominated by the mountains. Ever present, they provide an interesting backdrop to its modern sculpture and avenues of trees.
The garden had largely been well laid out when I first arrived and required enhancement rather than a major redesign. This came in the form of soft landscaping and some minimal level changing to the main lawn, which sloped towards an ancillary driveway that cut through to a guesthouse. Raising the lawn on either side of this drive meant it could no longer be seen from the main house and also lengthened the vista.
Scale is one of the greatest luxuries a country garden gives us, not only for the potential for exploration but also in allowing for experimentation.
At the end of the vista, I placed a curved stone wall and a contemporary sculpture. To each side of the lawn, I planted plane trees sitting in square cushions of clipped English buxus, which directed the view towards the sculpture and the mountain range beyond.
The cold winters and mild, dry summers of the South Island provide the perfect climate for flowering herbaceous perennials. A long gravel walk bordered one side of the main lawn; into its existing beds I planted Salvia, lavenders, Nepeta and roses, which flower from early spring into autumn. A modern Corten steel sculpture was placed as a focal point midway in this garden.
Immediately adjacent to the main house was a terrace for outdoor dining and relaxing. As it didn’t have any shading, I planted pollarded plane trees, bare trunked up high to allow a view to the lawn and alps beyond. One more space existed between this terrace and the main lawn; a simple square of lawn, to which I added two heights of English buxus hedge, deep enough to be in proportion to the vast space of the lawn.
The accommodation for the property consisted of a grouping of stone buildings, laid out in a fashion reminiscent of an old village that had evolved over centuries, with some being perpendicular to each other and others deliberately at an odd angle. This made for a very interesting garden design as the spaces between the buildings were of varying shapes. Each building had its own terrace and was linked by stone paths, some solid and others with grass or ground cover between slabs of stone. The inclusion of the ground cover and paving areas helped relieve the mass of the paving but still made it easy for people to walk through the area. We replanted wide beds with buxus spheres, hydrangeas and lavender, which nestle the buildings into the landscape.
We added a monumental stone outdoor fireplace to the terrace next to one of the guesthouses. I include one into all the gardens I create in New Zealand; a favourite pastime of the locals seems to be sitting by a fire outdoors and looking at the view.
