Dunedin’s garden of endless blooms

When the black tulips pop their heads up above the warming spring ground, Robyn McMurray’s beatific connection with another year in the garden has started.

It’s the combination of the satin-like quality of the tulips wrapped in “fur collars” of the intermingled flannel flower (Phylica pubescens) that, to her, is visually magic.

McMurray enjoys experimenting with in her garden on the outskirts of Dunedin. Tulips are her first passion, especially ‘Queen of the Night’; other favourites include ‘Pink Impression’ and ‘White Honeymoon’ with its crystal-like edging. She also has a selection of parrot tulips she likes to use in arrangements as they remind her of the still life artworks by Dutch masters.

Creating such beauty was always in the pipeline for the 4-year-old Robyn who arrived each day at school clutching an assemblage of flowers, and became known for gifting any visitor a bunch of flowers to take home. The rituals of growing and nurturing have followed her through life, including to India, where growing plants in empty water bottles accompanied her travels, and an apartment verandah bursting with orchids in South Korea.

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To reach her dream of owning her own piece of land to develop a garden however, required patience, and that came to fruition about six years ago. McMurray had fallen for the four-acre section when it’d first come on the market, but her partner at the time considered it a nightmare. McMurray, on the other hand saw its potential for her garden dream, especially after digging her hands into the earth and rich volcanic soil crumbled lightly through her fingers.

Describing herself as a “postmodern semi-rural pioneer”, McMurray rose to her vision to create a garden from which she could sell cut flowers and floral arrangements. First, it would require clearing the site of a forest of broom, blackberry and hemlock which had taken over the unoccupied land.

It also necessitated living in the on-site cottage with no power for three and a half years. That’s a story in itself, but McMurray’s reflection of that period is succinct: “I didn’t come here for a nice house, I came here to make a garden.”

The elevated location looks to Dunedin’s northern Mount Cargill, and out along the Otago Harbour with the Otago Peninsula on the far side, and McMurray used these features as a framework to design the garden.

Her first planting was a buxus hedge, grown from cuttings, laid out in a curved path towards the cottage. By design, it honours the harbour views beyond. As soon as the hedge was planted together with one euphorbia and a flax, she had a revelation. “At that point, I thought, ‘I have a garden!’”.

With that achievement, Wildwood was born, a name that jumped out of a book McMurray was reading with her granddaughter Marion at the time.

“My big driver was to make the garden beautiful for its own sake, and if I could sell the flowers grown under that vision, then that would justify doing it in exactly the way I wanted,” McMurray explains.

The black tulips came from her previous garden that was also the source of bulbs including lilies grown for her daughter’s wedding, along with cuttings of hebe, lophomyrtus, Rhododendron ‘Fragrantissimum’ and lemons.

McMurray knew the practicalities required to achieve a vision of beauty, and made sure the land’s growing capability was at the top of that list. The fertile volcanic soil was a great starting point, and she added her own mix of fertility, bringing in more organic matter, including truckloads of leaf mulch, manure, layers of chips, lawn clippings and oat husks.

McMurray’s playful relationship with the garden continues to be fuelled by the desire to have fun with plantings that previously she wouldn’t have considered pairing, such as blue gum and lemon verbena to create a feeling of uplifting lightness.

She likes to use the personalities of plants to good effect, pointing to the enticing combination of Angelica gigas and galtonia in full bloom in late summer. She describes the angelicas as having a power in their vigorous growth that compares to the galtonia’s elegant beauty.

McMurray has also catered for her floristry need for both flowers and foliage by growing a good collection of salvia, leucadendron and euphorbia.

Last season, she also planted a new bed of statice, strawflowers and everlasting daisies to support the growing demand for dried flowers.

Her flower-growing imperative is set against a background desire for greater sustainability. While a digger was on site installing a 125m rabbit-proof fence (she quickly learnt the wee blighters have a penchant for nibbling on tulip bulbs), she took the opportunity to create a raised bed using the centuries-old German technique called hugelkultur.

This involved digging and filling a trench with old logs overlain with a mound of layers of compostable material such as grass clippings, leaf litter and garden debris. The construction is renowned for holding moisture and with an orientation to the sun raises the soil temperature by up to two degrees.

In less than a year, the hugelkultur bed is a productive haven of broccoli, beetroot, alpine strawberries and cauliflowers. A grove of lemon trees grown from cuttings is also doing well, and tamarillos on the way speak to the many microclimates available on the section.

This melding of practicality and sustainability extends to other selections for the garden, such as tree lucerne that McMurray describes as a “wonderful plant that both birds and bees love, provides great nitrogen for soil, and can easily be cut and dropped on the ground for biomass.” She adds that it’s also a dense hard wood that’s great for firewood.

McMurray originally planted the tree lucerne for the other primary residents of Wildwood, kererū, and recounts once seeing a kererū sitting on each arm of her wheelbarrow, cooing at each other.

Alongside the kererū, she delights in witnessing the return of other wildlife, including skinks, red and yellow admirals as well as and frogs.

“Being part of this is really special,” McMurray reflects on her six years as the guardian of this piece of land. What she has achieved, however, is the result of hard grunt work from day one, including moving 11 tonnes of gravel by wheelbarrow with a good friend from Auckland (who, much to Robyn’s bemusement when she left after a week later, remarked she’d had a “great time”).

“Partly, I’m feeling very thankful, but it’s also occurred to me that what I’ve achieved at my age with little more than a wheelbarrow, and very good friends, means that anyone can do it too,” McMurray says. “We can do it and we can grow our food – but we have to actually start doing it. Living a simple life and creating all this beauty is actually really nice.”