Fifty years' work has gone into Brooksdale, a splendid West Otago garden. Gillian Vine reports.
Creating an interesting garden where snow can lie for weeks and frost can strike as late as November or even December sounds daunting, but at Brooksdale, in the shadow of the Blue Mountains, Jean and Michael Metzger have succeeded splendidly.
The house and the garden around it lie above a 2ha artificial lake dug out in the 19th century by Chinese labourers.
The lake, Mrs Metzger says, reflects the dream of early landowners of creating an upper-class English lifestyle in the colony and pottering about in rowboats on summer afternoons.
Three Californian redwoods, planted 130 years ago, were sited well away from the original house, but are only a short distance from the Metzger home at the edge of the garden, and in windy weather spray the garden with debris.
"They are the only thing I've ever stood in front of and said, `Die'," Mrs Metzger says, adding, "They'd be magnificent if they weren't in my garden."
Laid out in a series of "rooms", from shrubbery to vegetable beds, the garden has a great variety of plants that give colour most of the year.
For the vegetable garden, Mr Metzger has made small, netting-covered units to protect his seedlings from the birds, and plants French marigolds to discourage bugs.
Bulbs light up Brooksdale in spring, followed by numerous clematis - the latter flowering again in late summer - and then the roses, dozens of them, although Mrs Metzger has recently reshaped part of the garden, taking out two large rose beds.
Predominantly hybrid teas, the roses are usually sprayed only when they are pruned and remain bug-free for the remainder of the year. Greenfly is never a problem, as the garden has "heaps of birds", including bellbirds, fantails and tui.
In autumn, hardy little Cyclamen hederifolium burst into bloom. These have been a feature of the garden since the 1930s, when the original corms and some Rhodohypoxis bulbs were brought to Brooksdale from the Chelsea Flower Show. In those days, bringing home bulbs from London was easy, a far cry from today's import regulations.
As well as taking out some roses, part of the garden has been raised, so the approach to Mrs Metzger's treasured shrubbery is now up some shallow steps and along a path lined with Dublin Bay roses and red cabbage trees.
The shrubbery has been planted with an inspiring selection of small trees, such as cinnamon myrtles and Tasmanian Eucryphia lucida.
Underneath them, stunning sky-blue hydrangeas echo the tones of clumps of Agapanthus and the mayapple hybrid Podophyllum "Spotty Dotty" enchants with its shapely lobed leaves, generally blotched with chocolate dots.
"I like out here. It's private and peaceful," Mrs Metzger says.
Next to the shrubbery, a cool area is dominated by a weeping copper beech, its colour reflected in the mondo grass that lines the pathway.
Tucked behind a weeping macrocarpa, a rare white Chilean bellflower (Lapageria rosea "Alba") climbs an old shed, while, nearby, flowers in a colourful mixed bed make the most of their sunny corner.
Old gates and machinery, the remains of a long-defunct fountain and bits of wrought-iron cemetery fencing, add interest but the most intriguing piece of garden "sculpture" at Brooksdale has to be the barrel-shaped block of concrete Mrs Metzger found in bush near the house.
It dates back to the days when cement was packed in wooden barrels and this one must have become damp and abandoned in the bush when it set. The barrel is long gone but hoop marks from it are still visible, frozen in time.
