Old newspaper reports help Gillian Vine build a picture of a North Otago garden in its heyday.
Tracing the history of old gardens can be fascinating - and frustrating. Bev and Peter Rodwell, who own Elderslie, in North Otago, would love to know if their garden was laid out by two men trained by Joseph Paxton, as local legend claims, but have been unable to verify this.
Whether Paxton had trained the landscapers may never be known, but the creator of London's Crystal Palace could not have been directly involved, as he died in 1865, the year John Reid (1835-1912) began buying land in North Otago.
A Scots migrant, Reid came to North Otago from Melbourne, and work on the garden began two years before the house was built. The house - built of kauri because Reid's wife, Agnes, was terrified of earthquakes and wouldn't have it constructed in Oamaru stone - burned down in the 1950s. Fortunately, many old glass plates of the house are held by the North Otago Museum, while other photos, some taken by a daughter of John and Agnes, were published in the Otago Witness.
The Rodwells live in what was the coach house, built of stone for the Reids' coaches and coach horses.
The garden was laid out in the style of an English park, with nine gardeners employed in the early stages.
"When it gets very dry here, we can see where the garden paths were," Bev says, indicating the paddock beyond the site of the house. A handful of massive trees - "we've not got many original trees," Bev says - also help trace the lines of the garden, for which no plans are known.
The size of Elderslie's gardens is clear, though, from a North Otago Times account of a Sunday school outing in December 1878, when more than 500 adults and children from St Paul's Presbyterian Church, Oamaru, "walked through the garden on to the beautiful lawn behind the house" and later the children played in the "fine paddock adjoining the lake at the entrance to the grounds". That number was topped during celebrations for Queen Victoria's jubilee, when 7000 people visited the gardens.
Such events took place in the public areas, more utilitarian parts of the garden being kept out of sight. John Reid went so far as to have the circular garden of soft fruit and vegetables surrounded by hedges, while other edibles, including pineapples, were grown under glass in the walled garden. A massive hailstorm in 1928 destroyed the glass, Bev says, but the walls give shelter to her vegetables, grown where Agnes once had her favourite flowers, violets and lily-of-the-valley.
North Otago Horticultural Society show reports give a glimpse of some of what was being grown. In March 1876, two years after John and Agnes moved permanently to Elderslie, the Reids' entries were to the fore with "a fine double white [petunia] sent from Elderslie being especially admired", the North Otago Times' reporter enthused. At the same show, Elderslie won prizes for cut flowers (12 varieties per entry), zonal geraniums, fuchsias, vegetable marrows and red beet, and a display of "new or rare plants", frustratingly not listed in the report.
An Otago Witness report (February 7, 1880) gives an overview of "large plantations flourishing, and with the growth of foliage and the ornamental water he [John Reid] has formed, Elderslie will in a few years be a most beautiful spot".
The plantings were not just decorative. By March 27, 1907, the Otago Witness was able to report: "In the orchard at Elderslie due consideration has been given to the varieties planted, and in no private orchard could a better selection be found. This orchard in the Waiareka Valley is 190ft above sea level, and the soil is of a friable, loamy nature, in which the trees do well. Shelter is afforded by plantations of pines and other trees, and this tends to the well-doing of the fruit trees."
The writer went on to list the 25 apple varieties, including Ribston Pippin ("I never saw a better crop or a finer sample of fruit than that on the Elderslie trees"), Reinette du Canada (described as an American apple), Gravenstein, Winter Majeun, Royal Russet and Beauty of Kent.
The following year, the same writer raved (OW, 13.2.1907) about Elderslie's roses and carnations outdoors, and the greenhouses' "blaze of flowers" - gloxinias, Primula obconica, fuchsias, pelargoniums and streptocarpus, interspersed with asparagus, coleus, palms, and adiantum ferns.
The Rodwells have no aspirations to re-create Elderslie's grand Victorian garden but are fascinated by its history, saying confirmation of the Paxton connection would make it even more special.
