Top New Zealand landscape designers showcase their home work

By William Hansby

Starting a new garden from a blank canvas is not always an advantage; in fact, it can have its own pitfalls. And If you don’t have the knowledge or experience, you may end up creating more problems than you solve.

For a start you need to spend some time in the proposed site, as everyone knows, to watch the way the sun falls, wind direction and problems that may be associated with heavy rain. Then there are other questions; is the soil fertile, what plant palette would be suitable, how will the changing seasonal patterns and climate affect how plants develop? Perhaps most of all, what theme or type of garden do I want?

Award winning garden designer Andy Hamilton says one of the main pitfalls is gardeners getting caught up in minor details.

Andy won The Registered Master Landscapers Premier Award 2023 and will be one of the top garden design experts you can meet at Auckland’s premier garden festival, Auckland Garden DesignFest in November.

Andy’s gardens are naturalistic and tending to be species diverse rather than monocultural or formal in their composition. “Everything looks kind of loose and dynamic and intermingled and I think that style can mean you need less maintenance to keep it looking perfect because there is not this obvious measure of what it is supposed to look like,” he says. This is a garden he designed in Matakana.

People can get a little too focussed on the minutiae from the outset, he says. “Like, ‘I want this particular plant’, and then they get a bit hamstrung later as they are filling in the rest of their garden because they haven’t stood back and thought about it as an entire composition.”

If you have a limited budget, start with the tree canopy and watch how the light falls over a year before underplanting with shrubs and ground covers.

“It's a little bit like you are doing some interior design at your house and you buy the cushions first and they’re really bold and you think oh crumbs how do I make this all work and you’ve built in this constraint.”

He suggests taking a step back and assessing and thinking about a plant palette or community you want to develop, including any trees that might cast shade before making any more detailed decisions.

“When I design a garden, I begin with the canopy, I then go down to the next layer, the shrubs and then groundcovers,” he says. “Because if you don’t know what the light and shade characteristics are going to be across the garden, you can’t really design the ground covers with any great confidence. A woodland plant doesn’t want to be in full sun so much.”

Reduce weeding and maintenance by covering bare ground with shrubs and groundcover, as Andy has done in this Grey Lynn garden. “If you’ve got a garden with a lot of clipped hedges it’s really clear to anyone’s eye that they haven’t had a cut in a while. Whereas with more dynamic and naturalistic planting it’s hard to say when something is needing intervention. So you can be a bit more relaxed and let things bulk up and decay depending on the season.”

His gardens tend to be quite full and rich in foliage texture and varying shades of green.

Mulch is obviously very useful and plays an important role during the establishment period but he doesn’t like to see it. So there is usually a selection of spreading groundcovers that blanket the ground, which reduces the need for maintenance and weeding.

Some species will be used as individuals throughout a scheme, others will be planted in drifts, mimicking nature.

“Certain perennials, if you don’t plant them in a big enough group, they become vulnerable during that winter dormancy to plants that are next to it that grow throughout the year. So they need a big enough scale to withstand the argy bargy of their adjacent plant species,” he says.

The Supreme Award for Best Landscape Project of the Year 2023 is a small urban courtyard garden in Point Chevalier, Auckland by Second Nature Landscapes, with design by Andy Hamilton Studio. Andy, studied Landscape Architecture at Unitec University in Auckland, New Zealand. He began practicing in 2003 working with Auckland based urban design firms before moving to the UK in 2005. Throughout the ten years Andy spent in the UK he worked as an associate of Tom Stuart-Smith Ltd, an internationally recognised landscape architecture practice based in London. During this time Andy created gardens in the UK, Europe, India, Morocco and the Caribbean.

A final tip: Buy as many of your plants as you can in one go and set up quite a big tranche so you can realise the greater composition. Or just start with the trees and large shrubs and let those mature for a year and fill in the groundcovers later if you need to save for budget reasons. Lay the plants out in your desired plan before planting.

“And if you don’t engage a designer then I strongly advocate that you go to a specialist nursery when you’re buying your plants in bulk. Specialist nurseries are really knowledgeable about plants and can help guide you in that process. They’re a great starting point - so ask a lot of questions.”

The designers selected for 2024 are:

Alex Luiten (landscape and Ecology), Amanda Warren (Garden for Wellbeing), Andy Hamilton (Andy Hamilton Studio), Claire Talbot (Sculpt Gardens), Deb Hardy (Deb Hardy Garden Design), Dominic Sudano (Russet Gardens), Garden to Table, Glenys Yeoman (Glenys Yeoman Design), Jill Pierce, Katie Battersby, Kirsten Sach (Kirsten Sach Landscapes), Louise Hanlon and Ian Henderson, Matt McIsaac (Growing Gardens), Paul Gallagher (Mace Landscape Group), Penny Milne, Richard Neville (Neville Design Studio), Brett McLennan (Robin Schafer Design), Trish Bartleet and Sebastian Bartleet (Bartleet Design Studio), Val Puxty (Val Puxty Landscape Design) Xanthe White (Xanthe White Design- two-time Chelsea Flower Show award winner).

Deb Hardy, Auckland Garden DesignFest Festival Director, says their wide-ranging work includes an artist’s garden lovingly developed to complement one of Auckland’s oldest houses; the latest in permaculture, and a showcase of the growing trend of urban forests.

“Edible, ornamental and flower gardens blend together, alongside statement-making sculptures. Enhancing tiny house or Airbnb spaces is another focus, alongside the first Garden to Table entry into the festival,” she says.

The gardens are located in Herne Bay, St Mary’s Bay, Ponsonby, Westmere, Point Chevalier, Sandringham, Mt Albert, Mt Eden, Remuera, Orakei, St Heliers, Glendowie, Castor Bay and Devonport.

Read it on Stuff:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/home-property/350395746/top-new-zealand-landscape-designers-showcase-their-home-work