Beverley points to a garland of jasmine in full bloom framing the garage doors — “I know we’re not supposed to be growing it, but it’s not doing any harm there”. The winter bloom of the azalea and magnolia studs the immediate periphery. A nearby carpet of daffodils is just about to explode and begonias are carefully placed at her front door for their splash of winter colour.
Ayrlies is the result of a lifetime’s work by Beverley who, in 1964, started to push the garden boundaries into the surrounding paddocks. She was up against a mindset which said that cultivating a large ornamental garden was taking valuable land out of farming production.
“But I married the right man,” she says of her husband, the late Malcolm, co-founder of engineering and construction company McConnell Dowell.
“I wanted to push the boundaries and he supported me. I was given the opportunity to build the garden. I didn’t need any medals, I just wanted to promote gardening from the word go.”
However, her efforts were rewarded with a Queen’s Service Medal (QSM) in this year’s Queen’s Birthday honours for her services to horticulture. “They gave me the QSM but it recognised horticulture,” she says. “I didn’t need it, but New Zealand horticulture needs it. I have had people writing me letters and I feel like they are talking about somebody else.”
For the past five years, Beverley has been an assessor for the New Zealand Gardens Trust, set up by the New Zealand Institute of Horticulture to promote great Kiwi gardens to an international audience through its website.
“This has raised the bar,” she says. “People understand the gardens have been assessed by someone who is not the owner. Tourism New Zealand is supporting it and the programme is starting to work. An enormous number of people want a garden experience when they come here.”
“We have an Oceanic climate, not like Europe. And we produce such a diversity of gardens from the tropics at the top of the country to the tussocks of the south. We also have water in abundance. Not a lot of the world does.”
The QSM, she says, set her to thinking about why she started the gardening project. “I went to England years ago. It was cold and I used to get into a hired mini and travel around visiting gardens. I carried a notebook and paced out areas, noted the types and structures of plants because I knew I would have to have a substitute.
These days, Beverley employs a professional gardening company headed by a fellow trust assessor Kerei Thompson for the day-to-day management of the 4.5 hectares at Ayrlies. But she is still hands-on in plant selection, and garden planning and preparation.
“The bird life is fantastic. We have mallards, paradise ducks are abounding, and the Canadian geese come and go. We have four scaup [native black teal diving ducks] babies. They are gorgeous. And we have maternity boxes for the grey teal.”
Dominating the wetlands is a cranky black swan called Darth Vader, named after the Star Wars character, and his wife Leah. Last year, he tried to evict two white swans Beverley introduced.
“He’s a pain in the neck. But he’s better now that he’s had another lot of five signets.”
One of the special winter joys of the garden, Beverley says, is the magnolia tree immediately outside the living room window. “I can set the annual time clock by that. It comes into full bloom the first week of August every year. My mother and my husband’s mother used to sit here and watch the tree in the winter. I’m enjoying it now.”
She has never had a favourite part of the garden — “I used to go to the part that needed me most” — but sometimes she goes to its west side at the end of the day, to the “sitooterie”, a Scottish word meaning a place to “sit oot” in.
“You can’t just build something and forget it like men do. You need to come back and look carefully at that shrub outside the laundry door and see if you are getting value from it. You need to re-do the bits that are tired.
“It has been my life, although my children are still my greatest achievement. I’m thrilled I have five children who are so supportive and want to carry on the garden. Gardening is increasingly costly. It will never pay for itself and we will have to find the funds somewhere else.”
