Fletcher House's gardener has retired after 23 years on the job. Gillian Vine reports.
One of the first houses James Fletcher built after his arrival from Scotland in 1908 was a wooden villa for the Broad Bay storekeeper. It was to remain a family home for more than 80 years, when Fletcher Challenge bought the 1909 house and restored it.
The restored house was opened to the public in 1991 and in 1992 Herbie Perks was appointed gardener.
''How I came to get the job was my wife came past [Fletcher House] on a walk and was chatting over the fence. They said, 'We're looking for a gardener. Do you know anyone?' and she suggested me,'' Herbie explains.
''So they said, 'We'll take him on and see how he goes'.''
He never expected to be there as long as he did but when he retired at the end of last week, he had clocked up 23 years.
The garden had been laid out by Alice Fitts, of the Dunedin Botanic Garden, the year before he started work but there had been no gardener in the interim, so ''it was getting a bit ragged''.
Some old trees had been retained, among them an apple, a pear and a large native beech. The fruit trees are still there, plus others Herbie has planted, so the orchard area now has plums, a quince and more apples.
He worries about one of the original apple trees, as a limb has died back, and hopes it will survive. His concern is understandable, given the fate of the beech, which succumbed to disease - ''It was eaten by borer'' - 10 years ago and had to be removed. The replacement ''looks a bit sad'', Herbie says.
He has made some changes, the most significant of which was to take out the shrubbery at the back above an old ''dunny'' and dig four small vegetable beds, an idea worth copying to get good crop rotation. Herbie supplied the vegetable plants and when he moved from Broad Bay to a smaller Dunedin property, he was able to harvest some of the vegetables for his own use.
The shrubs displaced were replanted elsewhere, supplementing existing ones, including rhododendrons almost as old as the house and venerable snowball trees (Viburnum opulus sterile), which not only have white balls of flowers in spring but also good autumn foliage colour. More rhododendrons and camellias have been added, while bear's breeches (Acanthus mollis), regarded by some as a weed, has been used with Solomon's seal (Polygonatum) and the Madeira geranium (G. maderense) to cover a once-bare and difficult area under the shrubs.
Herbie explains that this geranium is the largest member of its family, growing to 1m by 1m. It flowers in its second year and self-seeds freely, so the Fletcher House garden always has a good stock of the shiny-leafed plants, each of which produces a late spring bouquet of dozens of soft pink flowers on a single stem.
Also allowed free rein are the cinerarias, which pop up year after year, while perennials such as delphiniums and penstemons, geraniums and hollyhocks, as well as lilies, help ensure colour for much of the year.
Roses add their charm, too. Herbie loves the shrub rose Red Cap but admits it grows ''very very tall'', so is not for every garden. Although there are some newer varieties, many of the roses would have been familiar to the Greens, Fletcher House's original owners, as Herbie's line-up includes 19th-century beauties such as apricot-coloured polyantha Perle d'Or and Agnes, a pale yellow rugosa.
A new rose frame was added last year. A 1990s pergola was of manuka but the base of the stems rotted and ''it was like the leaning tower of Pisa with only the roses holding it up,'' Herbie says.
Manuka was replaced with ''a great iron monstrosity'', then the present cream-painted wooden arch installed last year to reflect the period, when scenes for a movie, The Light Between Oceans, was filmed at Fletcher House.
''It was done last November and they were here four or five days. The garden was really lovely at that time,'' Herbie says.
''They took down the fence and I wasn't allowed to cut the lawn, so it looked the way it would when lawns were cut with sickles or scythes. I had [to have] a helluva big clean-up afterwards.''
He admits that he's itching to see the film, due for release later this year, although more exciting for him was being presented five years ago with a certificate from Keep Dunedin Beautiful for his work ''keeping beautiful the grounds of Fletcher House''.
What he achieved in just five hours, one day a week, made that award no less than he deserved.
