Can’t see the Forrests for their trees

A lush garden in suburban Blenheim has sprung from crowbarred holes in a clay pan planted with native shrubs and trees. It’s taken Andrea and Pete Forrest two decades to create Moritaki — one of the stars of November’s Garden Marlborough event

ANDREA AND PETE FORREST are unsure why they decided to go totally native when developing a half-hectare two-section property in a new subdivision on the outskirts of Blenheim near the foothills of Wither Hills. It’s funny that they can’t recall what prompted such a big commitment. But they’ve stuck to it and, in so doing, become fond of the frailty, form and toughness of New Zealand’s unique plants.

“When we started 22 years ago, there weren’t many people with 100 per cent native gardens. We didn’t know any,” says Pete, who, like Andrea, can’t put his finger on what sparked the native-only plan. “We’d developed a lovely quarter-acre garden [about 1000 square metres] before this one, and it was a traditional rhodos-and-roses type,” says Andrea. “My mother lived in Christchurch, and her beautiful garden had a lot of ferns in it. So I was always fond of ferns; maybe that was something to do with it?”

Pete says that outings with Andrea’s family always involved pinching ferns to take home to her mother’s garden. And, talking of family, it is Pete’s family history (he grew up near Koromiko between Picton and Blenheim) and the fact that his grandmother’s large property was entirely covered by arum lilies accounts for the only non-native interloper roaming beneath the Forrests’ trees. “Arums are almost native,” they say. “Old country properties always had a clump of arums somewhere.”

The couple set out to see what they could do with natives, and their garden, Moritaki, named for the Japanese concept of a water garden, evolved one crowbarred hole after another. Yes, that’s one thing upon which Pete is very clear. They were mad not to have checked the soil before purchasing the bare flat land. “Absolutely crazy,” he says. A casual jab with a garden fork would have revealed the challenge of a clay pan beneath a thin layer of topsoil. And, despite 22 years of composting with pine needles and pea straw, grape mulch and sheep pellets, the clay still rules.

Every plant in this lush and glorious rendition of a native forest environment has its own hole especially dug for it by Pete with his crowbar. They’d better appreciate it. And every swathe of native ground cover such as leptinella or mazus (swamp musk) is meticulously hand-weeded by Andrea.

Don’t imagine, for one minute, that going native is to let the bush self-manage its own path to garden-hood. No way. And no wonder Pete (a retired accountant) is starving by morning tea time on gardening days and that Andrea is such an adept hand at morning glory muffins, their sustenance coming from a little bit of everything.

As if that wasn’t enough of a challenge, there was also the subdivision’s unattractive habit of sending runoff water into the Forrests’ lowest lying areas — one of which is Andrea’s “dry stream”. It gets wickedly full of water from time to time, requiring a small submersible pump concealed in a mini wine barrel (in a nod to another branch of the Forrest family and their skill with grapes) to return the creek to the desired dry state. Mind you, in another area, that persistent dampness has done well to keep the toes of the kahikatea trees damp, just as they like it, and that saves Pete a lot of time with his hose.

This hose habit is one Andrea finds a little too much. “But you know a man, he has his mind set on something, and you can’t change it.” On the other hand, Pete wishes a few minds would change about the coming water reform proposals, which are likely to see Blenheim residents pay for water for the first time. He fears it might spell tough times for his native plants, which have happily bathed in the spray of his generous watering over the decades.

Natives flourish with moisture, he reckons, and they look all the better for it, too. Foliage, particularly. And the foliage is the starring element in this garden and has informed how it is planted. Nothing becomes leaves more than a glistening sheen of water.

However, Blenheim’s 600-millilitre annual rainfall (falling 45 to 60 millilitres every month as regular as clockwork, notes Pete) will not be enough to keep the plants in the moistened luxury to which they’ve become accustomed. A problem yet to be solved. And don’t all gardeners know that there are always challenges ahead?

One clever aspect of Pete and Andrea’s planting is the number of forest giant species used, planted as small saplings into crowbarred holes. Neither were deterred by them being among the world’s slowest-growing trees. Initially, they planted the Hoheria populnea (native lacebark) and the non-native Cytisus proliferus (tree lucerne) as fast-growing nursery trees to shelter the slower-growing larger trees.