In the lower Dunedin Botanic Garden the park benches are full. Those in shadow are a particular prize. Two women relax in one such spot, bookended so their conversation can occupy the middle ground. Elsewhere people recline directly against the massive trunk of a towering fir, embraced by its broad roots.
The garden’s little blue train dawdles past, full to capacity for the guided tour, past the new playground. There the face of a child new to walking lights up at the riotous potential for fun.
Everyone is better for being here, at Dunedin Botanic Garden. Someone, somehow, for reasons lost to the modern world, has left this memory of Eden in the heart of the city, for anyone passing.
But its apparently pristine perfection is a trick. Not one the rest of us need to dwell on particularly, but the sleight of many, many green-thumbed hands, two of which belong to Alan Matchett, outgoing Botanic Garden Manager. Outgoing after more than four decades as one of the custodians of this jewel.
However, on this particular day, as in many of the past couple of decades, Matchett is not out enjoying the hallucinogenic herbaceous borders or working in the dappled cool of the upper garden’s quiet corners. Rather, he’s in the almost comically utilitarian civil service office from which he oversees operations. Standard issue desk and a couple of marginally comfortable chairs slung too close to the carpet. What looks like a sister city souvenir hangs on one wall and there’s a small Chinese horoscope poster on another. The office is on the grounds of the botanic garden, but that’s about the best that can be said for it.
Matchett’s decked out in hard-wearing navy blue, which gives him the look of one who labours. That and the broad shoulders, those gardener’s hands and tanned skin. This latter quality might have something to do with the weekends he spends in his 340 acres at Trotters Gorge. But that’s another story.
Asked where in the botanic garden he chooses to visit, when he can escape the office, he demurs.
"There are times I haven’t got out very far at all," he says somewhat ruefully.
The time he’s had to spend indoors on the paperwork in the past 15 years, in particular, has meant losing some of that hands-on intimacy with the garden, he says.
"I’ve lost half of my knowledge around plants, about names and whatnot," he says.
Exaggeration certainly — his taxonomic Latin seems in good shape and the year before last he became a fellow of the Royal New Zealand Institute of Horticulture — but Matchett has experience of what it means to know this place down to the last detail.
"You get to know plants personally, in terms of you’re walking past them every day," he says of his earlier roles in the garden. "You’re doing something with them or you’re talking with people about them. And I’ve lost that connection in this role," he says.
This again may be overstating things.
Asked whether he can resist the opportunity to do a little weeding when walking through the garden, he confesses a recent incident.
"I was walking through one of the bush tracks and there were a lot of seedlings of a weedy coprosma," he recalls. "I almost walked past them but I came back ... and there were a couple of dozen of these things that I pulled out."
However, no good deed goes unpunished.
"My glasses fell off among some hound’s tongue ferns and they were gone," he says with a chuckle.
It’s clear that his work here is a labour of love. That and an act of shouldering responsibility for an institution thoroughly beloved of its community. These two things at once — he’s had to do the best for the garden and those who visit. It’s not always nor necessarily the same thing, as a story from a few years back illustrates in microcosm.
A training exercise for the garden apprentices involved pruning some camellias near where the Mediterranean Garden is now, Matchett says. An out of the way spot where the work might not be noticed.
"We pruned those camellias with the knowledge that you can prune them really hard and they will return and grow back again.
"This was a demonstration for the apprentices, showing ‘just don’t be afraid’," he says.
"We had a regular visitor, an elderly lady, I don’t know her name, but she was distraught about what we’d done. She was in tears. They were her favourite plants. She’d come to see them in full bloom."
In two years, they were back to their best, but it was another lesson in the minute scrutiny the garden attracts.
"People very strongly believe it’s their garden as well," he says.
The very largest proportion of those people like what they see. Dunedin Botanic Garden is always near the top, if not top, of the city council’s surveys of ratepayer satisfaction — registering north of 90% approval. And it has won and retained a six-star rating from the New Zealand Gardens Trust, so the experts agree.
Six stars means it is regarded as having the highest levels of presentation, design and plant interest through the year.
Matchett deflects the prospect of a compliment when this is pointed out, preferring a digression into the various roles different parts of the garden play for those who visit.
But such achievements are a source of pride, without question.
He himself nominates a successful bid for Dunedin Botanic Garden to host the 5th Global Botanic Garden Congress as a career highlight. That was back in 2013 when the garden was turning 150.
"It would be fair to say that was a turning point in my career and ambitions I had for Dunedin Botanic Garden to become one of the world’s best and I think we have come very close to achieving that goal."
By that time, Matchett had already been working at the garden for more than three decades. He joined the Dunedin City Council’s parks department in 1980 as a young man, after a couple of years discovering university wasn’t a best fit.
It was an interesting period of time, he says, working with Brent McKenzie, then upper garden foreman.
"We were looking at making a major change in the way the rhododendrons were positioned around the dell.
"Because the plantings were very, I’ll say haphazard. There wasn’t any particular theme around those. So what we tried to do is to put them into collections."
Another of the garden’s long-serving gardeners, now retired, Doug Thomson, carried on and extended that work.
As he moved through various roles, foreman of the upper garden then garden manager or "team leader", Matchett also weathered serial rounds of departmental reorganisation — such is the lot of the local government worker.
Some were unquestionably a good thing, he says, such as removing a parks department equipment depot from the centre of the botanic garden, others less so.
A fashion for contract-based provision of council services sometimes meant the black and white parameters of a contract placed limits on what could be achieved.
"It was me in the middle, wanting to do what I thought was best for the garden," Matchett recalls of the arrangements he had to work with.
However, the shifting sands have also led to some interesting digressions.
For more than a decade, Matchett was also responsible for the city’s cemeteries.
He comments dryly that it was a time of fond memories and "some forgettable ones too".
Among those that were at least memorable, was the time he had to sort out a water supply easement to cemetery neighbours that ran through the middle of a proposed burial site.
There were some significant and lasting projects during that time, including renewing the crematorium’s furnaces, extending the Broad Bay cemetery, developing the Allanton cemetery and landscaping in Middlemarch.
Back at the botanic garden, Matchett and his team continued to work through a long list of initiatives.
Headliners include the Southern African Garden, the Mediterranean Garden and the new propagation and nursery facilities, additions that have been enthusiastically well received.
But in what emerges as a recurring theme, there were also developments that rubbed up against those fiercely proprietorial attitudes of the public.
Not everyone was pleased with a make-over of the rock garden that sits alongside the Leith.
"There was a lot of public criticism about how long that was taking," he recalls.
And not just criticism about the time, but also of some of the changes — regarded as failing to preserve earlier work by others.
But it comes back to what’s best for the garden, he says.
"We’ve been entrusted with a lot of faith, I guess, by people, in terms of our expertise and knowledge."
It’s expertise and knowledge built up over an extended period of time. This is, after all, the country’s oldest botanic garden.
Matchett says he has indeed felt like a custodian of that legacy.
"Totally. We haven’t done anything that has detrimentally affected what’s been done in the past. We’ve embellished what was there. It’s very much the point of difference this garden has over any other garden in New Zealand.
"What David Tannock [garden superintendent from 1903] established in his day, basically we just picked up on and extended it, reviewed it, and just really promoted what he had done in many parts, particularly the plant collections. So we’ve added to those things, if you like."
The botanic garden was in the very earliest plans for Dunedin drawn up by its Scottish settlers, he points out, part of their expectation for what a city should be.
Foresight that has stood the test of time.
"Cities need open space and parks where people can go to and relax and chill out."
Today it lends its mana to the city, to have that resource and that specialist knowledge here. There’s a lot of pride attached to it, expressed in the way locals bring visitors to show it off, he says.
Inevitably, Matchett’s time has not been all green shoots and vigorous growth. There have been foiled ambitions. Among them the proposal to realign Lovelock Ave so the garden’s Lovelock Bush might be better incorporated into the whole.
"Which still would have been the best thing to have happened," he says.
"We weren’t thinking about tomorrow. We were thinking about, you know, 50 years, 100 years down the track.
"And in terms of plants, that’s what you’ve got to think about."
Matchett would still like to see Lovelock Bush better incorporated. One option for the future might be raised walkways, he says.
He was recently in Auckland and visited the Kauri Glen treetop walkway there.
"Incredible," he says. "Big bucks. But something like that would be amazing here in Dunedin as well.
"There’s probably more, better things to do at this stage," the council manager says.
As botanic garden manger you get to travel. Within the country and beyond, making connections, networking and attending conferences, collecting plants and ideas.
Matchett’s been on collecting trips to the Chatham Islands and China. As part of the city’s sister city relationship, he’s established ties with gardens in Shanghai, while also having a role in Lan Yuan, Dunedin’s Chinese Garden.
Then there’s that other global influence blowing in on the wind, climate change.
"We’re in a phase now where we’re obviously looking towards changes in the climate, which has been incrementally happening over a number of years now, and it certainly is noticeable here, through the plants that we grow," Matchett says.
There’s upside. Warmer ambient temperatures and changing ground conditions mean some of the things that once would not have thrived in the garden are now an option.
Some Australians might now grow here, for example, he says, but also New Zealand natives from further north.
"Arthropodium, the New Zealand rengarenga lily, that’s a North Island plant. And I remember during my apprenticeship, those years we didn’t have any of those down here."
That sort of addition to the roster raises another issue though. Not a new one for botanic gardens. A plant shifted from its natural range can go a bit rogue.
"Arthropodium is one. And Anemanthele, which is the gossamer grass, is another. They’ve just seeded everywhere."
It’s all part of the wider work of managing the plant collection, which requires a sharper focus than it once did.
Importing seeds and plants has become more difficult, meaning rare items are only more precious.
"It could be the only plant left in the country of a particular species. And once it’s gone, it could be gone and never be able to be imported. So there are important things there."
But there’s no resting on the garden’s laurels in terms of the collection.
"We are upgrading our plants, if you like, where we can, so that we know where they’ve come from. We know the provenance of them."
Some plants will have come via local sources, someone’s garden, perhaps bought from a nursery, whereas others will have been sourced from the wild — wherever in the world they grow.
There’s value in having detailed information on those "wild" specimens, so donor sites can be revisited and studied, perhaps replenished, or further specimens taken.
There’s work ahead for Matchett’s replacement. Planning work under way for the garden includes the development of a master plan.
"What that will do is review everything that we have here in the garden," he says.
And there are some significant ideas for the garden floating around, including the suggestion of a demonstration garden complete with vegetable growing and fruit trees. Stalwart supporters the Friends of Dunedin Botanic Garden are fans of that one.
There’s also the opportunity to bring the design of the geographic collections in the upper garden into the 21st century, he says.
"They’re very based on a Victorian model, you know, beds with plants in them," he says. "It’s like a display shelf in a museum."
Will he be back to see how it all plays out?
It’s a surprisingly emphatic no from Matchett. He’ll have moved on. There’s that Trotters Gorge property for a start.
He’s done his time, enjoyed opportunities he may not have found elsewhere, he says.
"I do consider this, to an extent, as my garden, if you like," he admits. Which could explain the need for a clean break.
"It’s a great place."
