Nestled into the gentle eastern slopes of Mt Maude, just south of Lake Hāwea in Central Otago’s Lakes District, is Crosshill, an established garden set among century-old trees. The massive native beech, birch and flowering cherry trees stand as a testament to the foresight of the property’s first gardeners.
Crosshill was established as a sheep station in one of the area’s early agricultural settlements; the original woolshed now serves as the potting shed and flower-drying area.
Between the rocky under- bed of its mountainous setting and pockets of rich, fertile soil redolent of its farming days, the range of the garden’s soil is as extreme as the Central Otago seasons. This is both the coldest and driest region of New Zealand, with hot summers and harsh winters. Early Māori primarily occupied the area seasonally by way of routes through the Nevis Valley from the south and the Clutha River from the north.
About the gardener
When Ali took an evening woodwork class in Christchurch in the early 1980s, she built a planter box. She and husband Nic had recently relocated from Australia, and to supplement their meagre student incomes Ali began growing leafy greens out the back of their flat. This was her first dabble in gardening since obtaining her Brownies gardener badge in the UK where she grew up.
Ali can trace her interest in gardening back to her grandfather, who provided food for the family, all grown on his small Luton townhouse section. It was the immediate postwar period, so his gardening was practical and very much out of necessity. He raised all his seedlings in a glasshouse that was always brimming with growth — a place of wonder for little Ali.
As well as all the vegetables they needed, her grandfather grew flowers and made compost. With no car, there was no "popping down to the garden shop", so the garden was self- sufficient — a closed system that fed the land to feed the family. The only exception was horse poo left by the milk delivery cart, which Ali’s grandmother would race out and collect with a spade to add to the garden.
Times were so tight that often the family could not afford meat, so the garden was essential to sustain the family.
She and Nic bought their first home in Invercargill — on a quarter-acre section with a glasshouse. These days, Ali is an avid reader of gardening books, but back then she slowly acquired knowledge and skills through trial and error.
Southland conditions were sympathetic though — Ali recalls that you could put anything in the ground and it would grow. In their second home, and now with two young children, Ali had less time but more reason to grow her gardening knowledge. It was here, with her children in tow, that she first implemented crop rotation in a gridded vegetable garden, and learnt about composting.
The garden wasn’t big but it was productive and had a few established fruit trees, so pruning was added to her growing skill base. Ali laid a brick path while her children played in the sandpit (when they weren’t raiding the gooseberry bushes). As the years went on, Ali grew more and more vegetables to feed her growing family, and propagated 173 roses from cuttings.
When they moved from Southland to Central Otago, Ali had her first opportunity to build a garden from scratch. Memories of her grandfather’s garden, that first wooden planter box she made, her various gardens in Southland and the growing impulse to feed her family all came together in this new garden — and for the first time Ali really felt like she knew what she was doing. She could improve the soil, care for fruit trees, produce an abundance of vegetables, and work with the local conditions and seasons.
Ali remembers collecting her daughter from the bus stop after school and spending hours in the vegetable garden with her, perched on the edge of a planter bed, grazing on fresh peas and catching up on the day’s news. They spent 12 years at this property, the children growing up among the garden spaces Ali created, and rolling their eyes at the nightly reminder that, just a moment ago, their dinner had been growing in the garden.
More of an ideology than a specific plan, Ali’s approach to gardening is practical, meditative and constantly responsive to the changing environment and needs of her family. She learns through observing and doing — gardening to the conditions rather than fighting against them. Right plant, right place. When an area Ali thought would be perfect for dahlias proved too dry, she moved them the following season. Observing that bearded irises were thriving in a certain area of the garden, she set about dividing them up and extending the path to the part where she now sells the gorgeous blooms and rhizomes at the gate. This flexible approach has guided her through the successes and challenges of gardening over the years.
Ali devours gardening books and magazines, and could watch Monty Don in Gardeners’ World for days on end. She and Nic have visited gardens around the world and always find something different in each of them: the romance of Monet’s Impressionist garden at Giverny, the gargantuan scale of Versailles, the sensory late medieval/Moorish Alhambra Palace gardens in Spain.
Ali’s favourite gardens are ones in which she can feel the gardener guiding her through the spaces they have created. An interest in history, especially social history, inspires her garden pilgrimages, as well as informing her wider gardening interests. She is driven by the idea of gardening the "old way" — her grandfather is always on her shoulder, whispering practical advice, connecting her to her family history and reminding her why she does what she does — to feed her family.
About the garden
Crosshill is an eclectic garden that includes the original rose garden, an orchard that is being transformed into a food forest, a newly created woodland garden, a propagation and potting shed, a picking garden for the roadside flower stall, a tea garden and an extensive vegetable garden.
It’s quite a new project for Ali — she and Nic bought Crosshill in 2020 — and her vision is still evolving, guided by her interest in history and observations of the site. She takes time to be in the garden, to notice what is growing where, and to plan from there. Nic is always on hand — often with his tractor, "Blue" — prepared to drop whatever he’s doing to help Ali realise her vision. They have banned sprays and replaced much of the grass with productive plants to feed the soil and their family.
The original double-gabled homestead was built around 1910. A century on, deteriorated beyond repair, it was provided to the local fire brigade to be burnt to the ground in a training exercise. At the same time the surrounding gardens were largely cleared, with the exception of a rose garden at the front of the house and the magnificent mature trees planted by the home’s first owners. The native beech, copper beech, elderberry and liquidambar, as well as heritage plums, apples and cherries, survived to provide a sense of grandeur and structure for Ali’s new vision for Crosshill. She suspects the rose garden was planted around the same time as the trees, and its original paved walkway connects her to these gardeners of long ago.
The hot, dry Central Otago summers facilitate a vegetable-growing season that is short, sharp and productive. Ever-passionate about growing food, Ali’s vegetable garden and adjacent propagation and potting shed are central to Crosshill. She grows what she and Nic like to eat — brassica, peas, cavolo nero (which grows exceptionally well), silverbeet, potatoes, leeks and carrots. The vegetable beds are fed with Ali’s own compost and dotted around the garden are small fencing-wire bins for collecting weeds as she works. These self- compost in situ and the contents are returned to the soil over time.
The property’s varied terrain contributes to the contrasting environments — dry, wet, sun-drenched, cool — leading to a wide variety of planting opportunities, and sometimes new discoveries. One of these has been xeriscaping, a method of dry landscaping developed in Denver, Colorado, in response to increasing droughts.
The premise is to design plantings that require little or no watering. Ali has been researching extensively — and mulching heavily! Like all new methods, it’s a process of trial and error, she says. She is looking at xeriscaping with both natives and exotics, and has realised that a lot of plants already in her garden, once well-established and mulched, support her xeriscaping model.
The original orchard is being transformed into a five-layer permaculture food forest, its clipped lawns and sprayed edges replaced by luscious underplantings of comfrey, garlic chives, peas, lemon balm and other herbs. The deep taproot of comfrey brings up nutrients from the soil and makes them more accessible to the fruit trees, and its leaves are harvested for compost and for laying underneath potatoes when planting. Ali is planning to add grapevines, which will ramble through the branches of the existing fruit trees — apples, pears, apricots, peaches, feijoas and a much- loved quince.
Excavating a contained patch of Spanish bluebells, Ali discovered a deep trench of bulbs packed shoulder to shoulder. After careful lifting, dividing and replanting, these bluebells now line the woodland paths. In a clearing, a table enclosed in a halo of rhododendrons serves as a venue for family get togethers and garden parties.
The many gardens of Crosshill are connected by the mature trees that form its bones, and Ali’s overarching meditative gardening approach. The garden is a space for careful observation of all the elements that contribute to its magic — the seasons, soil conditions, wind direction, orientation of the sun and, most importantly, what likes to grow where. The constant conversation between garden and gardener is how each part of Ali’s garden comes alive.
The book
Secret Gardens of Aotearoa, by Jane Mahoney & Sophie Bannan (published by Allen & Unwin NZ, RRP $49.99)
