8 Gardens ep 2 Australia and New Zealand
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00I believe that a really good way to understand a culture is through its gardens.
00:07This is an extraordinary journey to visit 80 inspiring gardens from all over the world.
00:12Some are very well known, like the Taj Mahal or the Alhambra, and I'm also challenging
00:19my idea of what a garden actually is.
00:22So I'm visiting gardens that float on the Amazon, a strange fantasy in the jungle, as
00:27well as the private homes of great designers, and the desert flowering in a garden.
00:33And wherever I go, I shall be meeting people that share my own passion for gardens and
00:38my epic quest to see the world through 80 of its most fascinating and beautiful gardens.
00:56200 years ago, this was regarded as the most remote and the strangest place on the planet.
01:11And I shall be taking a journey across this vast continent, looking at its landscape and
01:16above all its gardens, to see how it's evolved from colonization to gradual use and acceptance
01:25of the native flora to become the independent modern society that it is today.
01:36My journey begins in Sydney, where the British first settled over 200 years ago.
01:40I'll then head inland to Alice Springs and a garden in the heart of the continent's vast
01:45burning desert, before I turn south to the garden city of Melbourne.
01:51Finally, I'll cross the Tasman Sea to New Zealand to look at gardens filled with their native plants.
02:02By the edge of an unremarkable beach on a huge natural bay in the southeast of the country
02:07is a very special plant.
02:10This is a Banksia, and its strangeness to British eyes and its name acknowledges the
02:15beginning of Britain's colonial occupation of this continent.
02:20The stone obelisk behind me marks the spot where Cook made his landfall after his epic voyage.
02:29And the bay that he stopped in, he called Stingray Bay because he found so many of those
02:35fish in these waters.
02:37But travelling with Cook was a young botanist called Joseph Banks, who went on to be the
02:42first curator of Kew and one of the great figures in botanical history.
02:47And Banks found so many new and extraordinary plant species here, around the edge of the
02:53bay, that Cook renamed it in his honour, and he called it Botany Bay.
03:02The Banksia is only one of the many thousands of spectacular native plants that thrive nowhere
03:08else on earth but here.
03:10It was a sheer number of unique species that made the plant's namesake, Joseph Banks, realise
03:15that this was more than a new island, this was a whole new continent.
03:27They went back home with news of this extraordinary discovery, and 18 years later the first fleet
03:32of settlers and convicts arrived.
03:35I'm arriving on the same route today, on the Manly Ferry.
03:40When the fleet landed in Botany Bay, where Cook had landed, and then they discovered
03:45there was no water, they had to decamp and move, they came up knowing there was an entrance
03:49but they didn't know what they would find, so they came in here, out of the open ocean,
03:54hopefully to find a more sheltered place to land.
04:00And 200 years later, we know this as Sydney.
04:19Unlike those first settlers, my boat docks in a large, modern metropolis.
04:24But despite the skyscrapers, Sydney's past remains close to hand, and my first Australian
04:29garden is slap in the middle of the city.
04:35Behind the Opera House are the gates to the Royal Botanic Garden.
04:46What I particularly like about this garden is that you have a juxtaposition of this fabulous
04:52natural harbour on the one side, and then on the other side, the city, right on top
04:57of the garden.
04:59And its 74 acres are packed with extraordinary plants.
05:06But this is not just a botanical reserve.
05:09It is in one of the most spectacularly beautiful urban positions in the world, and has always
05:15been at the heart of Sydney's life.
05:18It is constantly used by Sydney's citizens, either for their rather relentless exercising,
05:24or just to relax.
05:30One of the reasons that I've chosen to visit the Botanic Gardens is not just because it's
05:35beautiful and interesting, but because of its importance in the history of the entire
05:40occupation of Australia.
05:44What the first settlers needed most urgently of all was fresh water.
05:48So they came up the coast, and they found a creek fed by fresh water.
05:53And this pond is fed by that same stream.
05:58So famously, they created a small farm, nine acres of wheat.
06:03And in fact, the bay out there is still called Farm Cove to this day.
06:11The modern Botanic Garden is rich with healthy, lush plants of every variety.
06:18But it wasn't always so.
06:19In fact, life for the original settlers was almost unimaginably hard.
06:24And to clear the farmland, they had to clear wood and forest and scrub.
06:30It blunted their axes.
06:31They couldn't dig out or get rid of the trunks, so they sowed their corn in amongst them.
06:36And this is a recreation of that first crop, which is really hardly a crop at all.
06:42We're filming this on the 1st of December, the first day of summer, which is pretty much
06:45near harvest.
06:46This is what they would have had to feed them.
06:48It doesn't really look like a crop at all, but their lives depended upon it.
06:52And they had to sow into this very, very thin soil.
06:55Now, this has had 200 years of improvement, but then it was practically pure sand.
07:06But they had little choice, because any convict trying to escape the colony and its struggling
07:10crops faced almost certain death by starvation in the dense Australian bush, which was also
07:16filled with unfamiliar and sometimes dangerous creatures.
07:25The most astonishing thing for me in the botanic gardens is not a plant, but the fruit bats.
07:33They hang from the branches like sacks, and occasionally extending a vast wing, or the
07:41whole tree at times can be fluttering as they move to cool down in the sun.
07:47It's like bellows expanding and contracting.
07:50And you can imagine for the first settlers, seeing these strange animals, either vast
07:56versions of what they saw at home or completely different, must have been an extraordinary
08:02thing.
08:07As the colony developed, the farmland became the government's garden, and then in 1816,
08:11the botanic gardens were officially founded.
08:14But that original settlement, by the shelter of Farm Bay, is still at the heart of the
08:20garden, and is the symbolic beginning of the modern Australian nation.
08:28As Sydney became established, it deliberately recreated the appearance and style of the
08:34homeland.
08:35The borders at Government House could be part of any British stately home, albeit on the
08:39other side of the world.
08:42This represents a kind of homesickness, and it's that urge to create a reminder of home
08:47that's key to the next wave of Australian gardens, further inland.
08:56The first inland town took shape here, in Mittagong, in the hills south of Sydney.
09:02Mittagong means small mountain, and has a much cooler and wetter climate, which was
09:07perfect, of course, for those early homesick settlers, who started building modest pioneer
09:12homes.
09:13Initially, all settlement was in Sydney itself, but gradually, people began to leave the city
09:23and create lives for themselves in the country.
09:35But nevertheless, despite the almost unimaginable hard work it would have involved, there would
09:41be time just to plant a little bit of colour, just a token bit of gardening, to lift the
09:47spirits of nothing else.
09:50And this modest splash of colour to relieve a brutally harsh existence in the countryside
09:55heralded a new wave of Australian gardens.
10:00By the middle of the 19th century, people in Sydney were becoming wealthy enough to
10:05consider moving out of the city during the baking summer months, and they came south
10:10here, which is much cooler, even on a summer's day like today, it's actually positively chilly,
10:15and they were buying up the simple little shacks and enlarging them and converting them
10:20into summer homes, country houses.
10:23And wherever you get a country house, sooner or later, you're going to get a country house
10:26garden.
10:33The garden at Kenilton Green began its life in a modest way in 1860, but since then, it
10:39has grown to spread over five well-tended acres, and it includes a rose garden, a tightly
10:45clipped bay tree garden, a silver birch wood, and almost inevitably, a potter's shed, all
10:50divided as a series of garden rooms centred around the original settler's cottage.
11:00Now the thing that immediately strikes me about Kenilton is that here we are, an hour
11:05or two south of Sydney, and yet this is a garden that really wouldn't feel out of place
11:12in the home counties in England.
11:15It's an English country garden.
11:26This was a deliberate thing.
11:29Apparently, the first settlers, once they'd overcome the sort of hostility of the terrain
11:34and got to the luxury of making a garden as opposed to just surviving, sent home for familiar
11:41plants, apparently violets and snowdrops.
11:45Even songbirds were shipped out so that they could recreate the gardens that they were
11:51familiar with.
11:52And it was a distinct homesickness, a nostalgia, and they built around them spaces that they
12:02could think of as home, not their new homeland, but a distant home that they would probably
12:07never see again.
12:17And you know, from this point of the garden, I can't see a single native plant.
12:25Now, it's worth stressing that Kenilton is not a historical recreation, it's a modern
12:32garden, but it illustrates so many of the tendencies of those early Australian gardens.
12:39And this area, the bay garden, shows how that with the tightly clipped bay trees, it's conquering
12:49nature.
12:50It reminds me of the 17th century French and Dutch gardens where you used formality and
12:57to show man's mastery of a hostile natural world that lay beyond the garden's edges.
13:12Kenilton is a series of garden rooms, and as you come out of the bay garden, you walk
13:18into this wood, and it's made up just of the white trunks of birch and grass.
13:27And I think it's the loveliest thing in the entire garden.
13:35Kenilton is undoubtedly a very beautiful garden, but it's a beautiful fantasy.
13:42It's an attempt to create a little piece of England in a very foreign land.
13:47And the reality, just the other side of the garden hedge, or at least just down the road,
13:51is this.
13:53This is the real Australia.
13:56It is a completely different world, which the early gardens turned their backs on.
14:02But before I leave the Sydney area, I'm going to visit a 21st century garden that celebrates
14:06its Australian roots.
14:07When I chose this garden, it was really because it was modern, and I'd heard about it, and
14:26I'd seen pictures of it, and I just thought it looked really interesting.
14:30When you walk in here, the first thing you notice are these great jagged angles of rock
14:36pushing out at you, and it's almost quite aggressive.
14:39But the way that they're balanced actually is not hostile.
14:45It's not threatening.
14:46And you start to look further and see that the plants work really well with them, with
14:51that colour.
14:53This tiny private garden in Sydney's fashionable Mossman district has been created for its
14:58owners by the Czech designer Vladimir Sitov.
15:01It nestles in the right angle of the building, and with its large sliding glass doors facing
15:05onto it, is an important part of the living space.
15:12The rock, all 33 tonnes of it, was quarried in Alice Springs, the red heart of Australia.
15:19The owners commissioned the garden to display their collection of drought-resisting succulents.
15:23However, not all the plants are Australian, although this magnificent ponytail palm, with
15:30its dangling water-storing roots, most certainly is.
15:35What is an Australian garden?
15:37Well, I wish to know.
15:39The garden is a culture concept to me, and first you have to define what the culture
15:45is.
15:46I don't think there's even a demand for creating an Australian garden.
15:50It's not...
15:51People think that when they stick Australian plants into some space that that's an Australian
15:55garden.
15:56That's a load of rubbish.
15:58There's hardly anywhere in the world that relishes being outdoors so much.
16:02Well, because you have such good weather.
16:04So you would think that it was the perfect place to make gardens that could be relished
16:09all the time?
16:10If you see the garden as a stage set for your hedonistic pursuits, absolutely.
16:16But it doesn't have to be a hedonistic pursuit.
16:18It doesn't have to be a swimming pool or a tennis court or a barbecue.
16:21But this is what most of our gardens are here, you know, in those richer suburbs, of course.
16:28I think the garden ideally should touch you emotionally.
16:32And unfortunately, it became, in many ways, just another commodity.
16:38In terms of just making your own and creating, then I think we've just barely scratched the
16:45surface of the industry.
16:47Despite Vladimir's Middle European gloom, I think his garden is the closest that I've
16:53come so far to feeling a real spirit of Australia.
16:57And these jagged angles have a tectonic energy that I like, and which are pointing me to
17:02that burning red heart of the continent.
17:05So, that's where I'm going next, the Alps, near Alice Springs.
17:13And it couldn't be less like Sydney.
17:23It is a staggeringly harsh, grand, bright orange landscape.
17:29But I can see echoes of Cita's design immediately.
17:31And although this vast sand country is classed as desert, it's actually full of life and
17:37empty only to the untutored eye.
17:40I'm visiting a completely different type of garden, Alice Springs Desert Park, which I
17:45hope will help me to understand the outback a little better.
18:00The park opened in 1997.
18:02It was designed to introduce people to the plants, animals, and aboriginal culture of
18:07the outback.
18:09With spinifex grasses, dry creeks, sand country, and even a large salt pan, all painstakingly
18:16recreated to mimic the conditions of the outback in its true setting.
18:28It's a vast site with over 100 acres of cultivated garden and over 3,000 acres in all.
18:34I was shown around by Gary Dinnam, the curator of botany.
18:38And he explained to me how the spinifex, the spiky grass that grows in the sand country,
18:42is perfectly adapted to the conditions.
18:45It's got these very spiky leaves, which in fact used to be flat leaves, which have rolled
18:50around to try and reduce water loss.
18:52I'll tell you what, that is as beautiful a grass as any in any garden, isn't it?
18:58It's fantastic, yeah.
18:59And we're trying to get people to use them more in gardens because it's, you know, it
19:01doesn't use much water.
19:02It's very easy to manage.
19:05You'll find plants which are less suited to the desert often growing beside rivers.
19:10So the river red gum, or eucalyptus.
19:12Eucalyptus commandulensis.
19:13Right.
19:14They're very beautiful with their bark off.
19:17Look at this, it's sort of clear white.
19:23The desert doesn't really have rivers, or at least if they are, they don't run very
19:27often, do they?
19:28No, they're ephemeral rivers.
19:29It's the upside down rivers of Central Australia where the sort of sand's on the top and the
19:33water flows underneath.
19:34And it's only after the heavy rains that you'll get the river flowing.
19:39It was quite interesting with my children as they grew up here in Central Australia
19:42when we actually saw a river with water in it, they were wondering what it was.
19:48Away from the river, either underground or overground, the harsher environment of the
19:52red desert sands means that all plants have to be highly adapted.
19:56These are only very young desert oaks.
20:00They're probably eight or ten years old, very, very slow growing plants.
20:06You can see that they actually photosynthesise through the stem and that little point there
20:10is just the remnant leaf.
20:12Under cultivation that's probably six or seven years old.
20:15In the wild you'd see one of those would probably be twenty years old, but its root system's
20:20probably going down ten metres.
20:22Ten metres?
20:23Yeah.
20:24Wow.
20:25So there's a lot more under the ground than there is above the ground.
20:30Like every bit of this beautifully made garden, the park's artificially created salt pan that's
20:36completely natural.
20:39Do you get visitors assuming that this is natural landscape?
20:42Yeah, well that's one of the greatest compliments to the staff when people think that we're
20:47very fortunate to have all these habitats sitting in this small area.
20:51So we've sort of fooled them into thinking they're in the natural environment.
20:54The staff really love that, that's a great compliment to them.
20:59You've created this place, there's no other word for it, you've made it with your team.
21:04Does that make you a gardener?
21:08Well this is a fantastic garden, it's one of the best gardens you could ever create
21:11I think, and recreating the environment is an incredible challenge.
21:18It's not that easy, but I think we've managed to get it to do it here, to get it across.
21:22I think you have too.
21:34The aboriginal population cohabited with and used this flora long, long before Europeans
21:40arrived, and I've met up with one of the desert park rangers, Doug Taylor, to learn about
21:45his people's subtle relationship with the plants of the Australian outback.
21:51This one here is probably one of the most useful plants out in the desert, the common
21:54name is the mulgatree, and you could obtain food from here, tools.
22:00So the seed would be very small wouldn't it on those cones there?
22:03Yes, this one's actually lost all its seed, it would have been seeding a month or two
22:07back, but there's quite large pods and this is the seed that it produces.
22:11This could be used by our ladies, ground up into like a flour or paste, and baked into
22:17what we call damper, or bread.
22:20This tree's timber is perfect for making boomerangs too, this is a non-returning variety.
22:25Very good to bring down medium-sized kangaroo, stop an enemy with this.
22:30Really?
22:31One of the strangest of all desert plants is the grass tree, xantheria, which grows
22:36incredibly slowly, so these plants are hundreds of years old.
22:41The land and the people, traditional people, were as one, where people didn't try to control
22:47the land but live with it, and everything on the land had its place in our people's
22:53culture and had a right to be there.
22:57It was useful too, the flower spike was used to carry a glowing ember for fire making,
23:03which is fitting for a plant that will regrow after being burned.
23:09Using fire to manage and regenerate the land was perhaps the closest that Doug's people
23:13came to gardening.
23:17It involved a highly sophisticated relationship with the land.
23:21Each family group had a seasonal cycle of moving from one camp to another within their
23:25territory, which they would use as a base for hunting and gathering bush tucker.
23:30They would use small controlled burns to flush out game, and once they'd hunted out one campsite,
23:35then they would move on to the next.
23:37By the time we returned to this site, the burn done previous, which may be six to eight
23:43months later, but the burn would have then created regrowth and regeneration.
23:47There's an old expression in Australia here, aborigine go and walk about, which is basically
23:53talking about this type of thing, which is what our people used to do.
23:56But I like to say, aborigine went on control, seasonal movement.
24:00It sounds a lot better too.
24:04This is the shade of a desert oak, which is a good sized tree, but not vast, but it is
24:12very old.
24:13Oh yeah, very slow growing desert oak.
24:16This one's quite mature, the one we're sitting under here, and probably anything up to 400,
24:23500 years.
24:24Because these trees are so old, generations and generations of people see these trees,
24:30and the stories attached to them are, like we look at them like the old men and the old women
24:35from the past.
24:37You sit amongst the desert oaks, the light breeze comes through and it's like a
24:44and if you sit down in the quiet long enough, it sounds like you can hear voices whispering.
24:49And that's where a lot of our people believe that the old people are still
24:53with these trees and their spirits are still there.
25:00As I traveled back to Addis Springs, I thought about what Doug had told me.
25:04I could see just how perfectly the native people lived in harmony with that seemingly
25:08wholly hostile environment.
25:10And it was clear that the key factor to this, for plants as well as people,
25:13was drought and how to manage it.
25:20However, I'm not sure I expect this to be the case in my next destination, which is Melbourne.
25:26Melbourne is often referred to as Australia's garden city.
25:29And traditionally, it has a much wetter climate,
25:32thanks to its position on the southern tip of the continent.
25:35This was my first visit, and I was surprised to see European plants and trees everywhere.
25:40Its leafy green avenues and flower-filled front yards
25:44make a dramatic contrast to the parched streets of Addis Springs.
25:49And along with the skyscrapers and trams, there still survive quaint,
25:53ornate and now very select Victorian streets.
25:58During the 1880s, Melbourne was the second largest city in the British Empire,
26:02and many of the opulent homes from that period still survive.
26:06And my next garden is the pinnacle of the grand Australian establishment.
26:11And my host is Dame Elizabeth Murdoch.
26:21Got into Melbourne when it was dark last night,
26:25driven to a hotel, went to bed, got up and come out here first thing in the morning.
26:29And I have to say, it's a vast culture shock. I could be in another world.
26:39Hello, Dame Elizabeth. How nice to meet you.
26:41How are you?
26:42I'm very, very well.
26:44Nice to see you.
26:45And your beautiful garden.
26:55At 99, she and her garden are almost half as old as the nation.
27:01She's the matriarch of Australia's great media dynasty
27:04and the guiding spirit behind Cruden Farm and its 20-acre garden,
27:08which Dame Elizabeth began in the 1920s.
27:12And there can be few people on this planet
27:14that have gardened continuously in the same place for over 80 years.
27:24One of my great prides, my copper beech.
27:29I mean, it's fantastic. I think I planted that only 52 years ago.
27:34And of course, far too close to the house, but never mind, we managed.
27:38Are copper beech fairly unusual?
27:41In Melbourne, yes, yes.
27:43When we were planning to put that in, and I said to Michael, my gardener,
27:48it's ridiculous. I'll never see this, Michael, really.
27:52He said, of course you will. You've got to live forever.
27:55But part of the pleasure of planting a tree is watching it grow, isn't it?
28:01I know, wonderful.
28:02It's not necessarily the finished article.
28:05So you've created a landscape that is sort of like Capability Brown in some ways,
28:11but you've done it in a lifetime rather than over generations.
28:16Yes, well, I think you see everything grows so fast here.
28:20That's the point.
28:21In England, similar trees would take a couple of centuries to grow this big.
28:25I love the purple stems, that little purpley touch on the new stem.
28:28Yes, yes, it's lovely, isn't it? Yes, I see you've got a good eye.
28:40This is surreal for me. Here we are looking at hostas.
28:44Having practically 12 hours ago stepped on a plane in the outback,
28:50where the thought of a hosta is...
28:51I know, I know. The contrast is fabulous, isn't it?
28:56Really amazing.
28:57They look marvellous.
28:58They are beautiful. They're beautiful hostas. I love them dearly.
29:02That's a great, that's quite a young denudata. It's amazing.
29:07It's very protected in there.
29:08And you see the possums eat everything.
29:11So we put an electric fence on the roof.
29:13Oh, so they can't come across.
29:14Yes.
29:36I've never been in a garden which has reached such maturity
29:39within the life of its owner and creator.
29:42And I don't think I've ever met a gardener
29:44who has quite so much personal charm.
29:52I confess that when I walked down the drive here,
29:57I thought this is so different from Alice Springs and the outback,
30:00that there's no connection.
30:02But actually, what this garden has is a sense of place,
30:07a sense of self-confidence.
30:09So you've got your Rose Garden and you've got your Alchemillers
30:12and all the sort of English plants
30:14that might seem a bit odd here in Australia,
30:16but it also has a real sense of place and identity.
30:21It's grounded.
30:24At heart, this is a European garden,
30:27but one that is very happily married to its native landscape.
30:34However, that cross-cultural connection is under serious threat.
30:39Climate change is increasing the already serious problem
30:41of drought in Australia.
30:43And this means that the classic English flowers
30:46and lush greenery just won't thrive
30:49and the situation can only get worse.
30:53But having seen how the tough Aussie native plants
30:56thrive in the outback,
30:58I wonder if they are the key to Australia's gardening future.
31:06My next garden could answer that question.
31:09It's the Garden Vineyard, created by Di Johnson
31:12and now extended by her daughter, Jenny.
31:15The garden is set amongst vineyards
31:17in the gently rolling countryside south of Melbourne.
31:20It began just 11 years ago,
31:22but already it is one of Australia's most exciting gardens
31:27because it is a fusion of traditional English design and planting
31:31with a contemporary use of native Australian species.
31:35It's a story which started out
31:37with an attempt to make an exact copy of a very English garden
31:41until Di was confronted with the inescapable realities of the climate.
31:45I think that's a perfect example of how one has to adapt
31:49because I love that little geranium.
31:51I've tried to grow it here for three years.
31:52It looks fabulous in winter
31:55and I should give up
31:57because look how wonderful the sedum by comparison looks.
32:00Just beautiful.
32:02We went to a brickyard in North Melbourne
32:06and these are convict bricks
32:07and there's a thumbprint in one of those bricks.
32:09Every 1,000 bricks, they had to mark it with a thumbprint.
32:13Every 10,000, I think it was, were two thumbprints.
32:16But these bricks were all handmade by convicts.
32:20No doubt those convicts were from England.
32:22I'm sure they were.
32:23The next stage of the garden shows the true scale of Di's ambition.
32:30The first thing that strikes me, these are socking great borders.
32:33You know, I mean, it's great.
32:35I'll probably never be able to sell it.
32:37Oh, well, that's another matter.
32:39Nobody wants this much work.
32:41The giant borders mark the very first introduction
32:44of Australian native plants to the garden.
32:46They're not native plants.
32:48They're not native plants.
32:49The giant borders mark the very first introduction
32:52of Australian natives into Di's garden.
32:54Tightly clipped green pillars of the gloriously named lilypilly,
32:58which she uses for structure in the border,
33:00much as we might use you at home.
33:03The lilypillies came in at what stage?
33:06Well, pretty early on.
33:07Not straight away.
33:08No, about the second...
33:10Was that your first venture into sort of indigenous planting?
33:12Yes, absolutely.
33:14I think the thing is they take the heat as well as the dryness.
33:19Follow the path round the corner,
33:21and there is a quantum leap away from the traditional English garden.
33:25It's a composition of tightly clipped native shrubs
33:28in balls and billows
33:30set around the peeling white trunks of lemon-scented eucalypts.
33:35It looks fantastic.
33:36And it's a bit English, but it's got a lot more Australian feel about it.
33:41This ragodea is a brilliant thing.
33:43I know this is looking a little drab
33:44because we've just had to severely prune it, but it comes back.
33:48But it's totally drought-tolerant, and it grows in sun or shade,
33:53and we've used it all over the garden.
34:03After that cool modernism,
34:05there's a return to a European heritage
34:07with a much more formal and rather grand Italianic garden,
34:12using clipped coppery lilypilly lollipops.
34:15I've been dying to say that.
34:16Underplanted with a sea of agapanthus and heliotropes.
34:47Go through a gate and on down a set of steps,
34:50and you arrive at the place where everything comes together.
34:54This is a dramatic and brave part of the garden,
34:57made by Jenny, critically with Dye's support,
35:00using only native plants.
35:03So this, in a sort of rather simplistic way,
35:05is the evolution of the garden,
35:08and maybe the future of Australian gardening.
35:11Yeah, I think it started off with not too much thought,
35:15behind it, it started off as a passion of mine, and...
35:19And a bit of plonking. Oh, no, but then...
35:21But plonking is the secret of good gardening.
35:23Yeah. I tried to work with the colour and texture of plants,
35:27and I tried to arrange plants in beds
35:30that were blended with each other
35:32in terms of foliage texture and colour.
35:35But I don't think that's that important now.
35:37I guess being inspired by the natural bush.
35:40I've always loved the natural stands of eucalyptus.
35:44Things that aren't too fiddled with and...
35:47How do you feel about that?
35:49Well, I have realised
35:52that Jenny has been a source of great wisdom for me.
36:14I'll be honest with you, when I walked in here
36:17and saw the Walled English Garden, I thought,
36:19oh, no, this is beautiful,
36:21but I didn't need to cross the world to see it.
36:23I've seen lots of gardens like that,
36:25although not many have done as well as that.
36:27But as I walked round,
36:28I realised something special was happening here,
36:30and that a garden was evolving,
36:32not just through the process of the gardener, but through place.
36:36And then, really, most interestingly,
36:39I realised that there was something special about this garden.
36:42And then, really most interesting of all,
36:45through time and generations,
36:47as the children of the household grew up and got interested,
36:50and they were Australian, and this was their background,
36:53and this was their home,
36:54they started to evolve a style of gardening
36:57that was truly indigenous.
36:59It belongs to the place.
37:02The result is something genuinely new and beautiful,
37:05and, most importantly, sustainable
37:07in the changing Australian climate.
37:10But now it's time to leave Australia
37:12and move on for the second phase of my Antipodean adventure.
37:16So I travelled 1,200 miles south-east of Australia to New Zealand
37:20and land in its biggest city, Auckland.
37:30Well, I popped on a plane and came over here to New Zealand.
37:34And although it's just a three-hour journey,
37:37and I'm about as far away from home as it's possible to be,
37:41it's all instantly familiar.
37:43It even smells like England.
37:45But although much seems to be reassuringly similar,
37:49there is a spectacular plant growing nearby,
37:52which reminds me that New Zealand is actually very, very different from home.
37:57For all its instant familiarity,
38:00New Zealand is full of very curious things indeed.
38:03And this is the pahutukawa,
38:05or the New Zealand Christmas tree,
38:07which is just coming into flower now as we approach Christmas.
38:13There is nothing that can prepare you for New Zealand
38:16because it's quite unlike anywhere else in the world.
38:19Before Westerners came, it was the nearest thing to an earthly paradise,
38:23with a very distinctive flora and fauna.
38:25This means that gardens here, with a little imagination and resources,
38:29can also be unique.
38:31This is Aireleys, and it's the first garden I'm visiting in New Zealand,
38:35simply because I've been told it's one of the very best gardens
38:39in the whole of the Southern Hemisphere.
39:01Aireleys is a garden with a dreamlike intensity.
39:05It's very large, with 12 acres of dense planting
39:09and mature trees around the house,
39:12surrounded by another 30 acres of planted woodland and fields
39:16that run down to the sea.
39:22But magnificent as the setting is,
39:25it is the planting that overwhelms it.
39:28This is a garden that submerses the visitor in plants,
39:31so you wallow in their colour, texture, shape and scent.
39:37And yet incredibly, I know that only 40 years ago,
39:40this was all just a series of grass paddocks.
39:47The effect of the tree ferns and the sound
39:51and the general intensity of the planting
39:54makes one think of a sort of lush, lush forest.
39:58But actually, just a few yards from here, if you come back...
40:03..you come through the planting...
40:08..and it just stops.
40:10And you realise that we're back to the fields
40:13that were grazed by the dairy herd 40 years ago.
40:16And although all the trees you can see were planted,
40:20the garden is made out of a field.
40:23Every little bit of it.
40:26I'm shown round the garden by its creator, Bev McConnell,
40:30the celebrated doyenne of New Zealand gardening.
40:33I mean, this is quite dramatic here. Yeah, it is.
40:36It's quite a wow.
40:37And I shouldn't be able to grow the Moesii rose,
40:40but I do, and I grow that for the hips.
40:42They're absolutely complementary colours, aren't they,
40:45the red and the green? Wonderful.
40:47And that one, I mean, it's very yellow,
40:49but it was born in the garden, so that will be Eerlie's gold.
40:52How many plants do you have named after the garden?
40:55Oh, only about five, I think.
40:57Five more than most people.
40:59I don't know. Have you not got any yet?
41:01I think there's a...
41:03Oh, look, you're very young.
41:05You're very sweet to say it. It will come.
41:08You have to be really old to have plants named after you.
41:13You don't mind me interviewing you, do you?
41:15I'm enjoying it, and you're very good at it.
41:18But you can tell me about your pool, though,
41:20isn't that interesting? Yes.
41:22When did you plant the palms?
41:24Oh, 15 years ago.
41:26Really? As recently as that?
41:42I was just astonished at the planting at Eerlie's.
41:47It has the widest and most ecstatic range of plants
41:50in one garden that I've ever seen.
41:53So how did one person create so much in such a short space of time?
41:58And did you come out knowing you wanted to make a garden?
42:01Yes, I did. I had it on paper, the first three acres.
42:05I married a man who thought big.
42:07Probably it was a fault that both of us did.
42:10But it had its good points too,
42:12otherwise you'd end up with really nothing.
42:15There were a lot of farmers in those days.
42:18Farmers would say to their wives, if they wanted to build a garden,
42:22what do you want to do that for?
42:24Just like that.
42:25But my husband would say, why not?
42:28Let's have a look at it.
42:29So you planted these trees?
42:31Every one.
42:32There was nothing here.
42:34It was a good dairy farmer's paddock for a stop.
42:46MUSIC
42:54Bev's greatest ally is the climate.
42:57There are 365 growing days a year here.
43:01The weather is never too cold, never too hot,
43:04there is nearly 50 inches of rain a year,
43:06and there's much more light.
43:15MUSIC
43:24I think that Aireleys is a masterpiece.
43:27I've never seen such a wide range of plants together in one garden.
43:31But that mixture depends on a lot of exotic and introduced plants
43:35as well as natives.
43:37And in the light of my Australian experience,
43:39I wonder if this best represents the past
43:42or the future of New Zealand gardens.
43:45To try and answer that, I need to go back in history and on with my journey.
43:50I'm going to drive from Aireleys, just outside Auckland,
43:53south and west to New Plymouth,
43:55a journey which should take me into New Zealand's wild green heart
43:59and give me a taste of its original human culture too.
44:04When I make my first stop out in the country to look at the landscape,
44:08there's no sign of New Zealand anywhere.
44:14This is a confusing country because the scenery is so like England,
44:20with its green grass and buttercups and daisies
44:24and trees and cows and all the flowers on the verges of the roads.
44:30But you look a bit closer and then there are these oddities,
44:35like these marvellous supercharged hydrangeas that we've found here.
44:39And then you have to realise that everything you're looking at is introduced.
44:42This is not the natural flora of the country.
44:46Every single element of it is artificial.
44:50And that includes the grass, the trees, the flowers and the shrubs.
44:54Everything you can see.
44:58So, back into the van and on deeper into the hills
45:01until finally I find something native.
45:05A Maori garden of formulas on New Zealand flax.
45:08Whereas I'm familiar with them as UK garden plants,
45:11for the Maori, the native people of New Zealand,
45:13these plants were a vital source of fibre for clothes and mats.
45:1787-year-old digger Te Kanawa, a Maori weaver, shows me how they're used.
45:23This is the stripping you have to go through.
45:27And you turn it over on the dull side.
45:31About halfway.
45:34So you score it through but don't cut it through?
45:37No.
45:38Now I've got to split them.
45:40And this is the tool.
45:41A muscle shell.
45:42A muscle shell.
45:44And you get a little bit out like that and make a loop like that.
45:48Then you pull.
45:52And that's your muka.
45:57And you do what you call the middle.
45:59The middle, this is a twining.
46:01I see, yeah.
46:03Easy, eh?
46:04No, you make it look very easy.
46:06I can see it's hard.
46:08Her flax threads end up as beautiful ceremonial cloaks
46:12decorated with feathers.
46:13Part of digger's heritage is a Maori, a Polynesian people,
46:16who settled here more than 600 years ago.
46:19Up there is a photo of the collection.
46:23That's the whole family?
46:25That's the whole family.
46:26Yeah, Mum's made a cloak for each of us.
46:30Can I touch this?
46:31Can I just feel it?
46:33Because it's very soft, isn't it?
46:35It's not a sort of thing you can make in a month or so
46:41because it's a mood thing.
46:43If you don't feel like it, leave it alone.
46:45And are these mats that we're walking on, are these all flax too?
46:49Yes.
46:50Now I think I'm too old to get down on the floor.
46:54But I want to teach others.
46:56Yes.
46:57And just on the other side of her land, we touch on Maori spiritual life
47:02because there's a sacred tree at the end of her drive.
47:05When we were kids they said it was very taboo
47:08and you mustn't go near it and all that sort of thing
47:11and they were scared stiff of it.
47:15Having had a glimpse of some of the native culture,
47:18just beyond Digger's Home, I get my first sight of New Zealand's native beauty.
47:26Things are getting stranger as we go farther away from Auckland
47:29because in amongst the tractors and the long grass and the wonderful flowers
47:33are tree ferns.
47:36And this is distinctly exotic.
47:40It might look exotic to my English eye, but these plants are indigenous here.
47:46Yeah, turn round.
47:48Oh, there's an English meadow.
47:53It's just like Alice in Wonderland.
47:55That's what it's like. It's a dream world.
48:01Thanks to its mild climate and high rainfall,
48:04much of New Zealand was once covered in temperate rainforest,
48:07which is a cooler and much gentler sister
48:10of the more famous rainforest of the tropics, like the Amazon.
48:13It's every bit as beautiful.
48:23As I continue deeper into the mountains,
48:25it really feels like I've finally found what I set out to see.
48:30This is a primary forest
48:33and almost all of New Zealand would have been covered in this,
48:38with these giant podocarp smothered with epiphytes
48:41and the tree ferns underneath.
48:44And it's very sobering when you drive through
48:47and see mile upon mile of landscape,
48:50cleared and just with a monoculture of grass,
48:53knowing that it was this that had to be removed
48:56in order to feed a few sheep and cattle.
49:12Just step a few yards into the forest
49:15and immediately you're surrounded.
49:17You could be anywhere.
49:19And unlike the tropical rainforest,
49:21this temperate rainforest is a cool, unthreatening place
49:27with this magical green sort of stained-glass light
49:31filtering through.
49:36It's a very benign place.
49:39This is New Zealand's heart,
49:41a green, cool, song-filled heaven
49:45spilling over with beautiful plants.
49:47Thank goodness a little bit of it was spared
49:50and allowed to remain for people like us to treasure.
49:53But can this ancient botanical paradise
49:56be the inspiration for New Zealand's gardens of the future?
50:00I've finally reached New Plymouth,
50:02ready to visit the last garden of this trip.
50:05And rather than turning its back on its natural heritage,
50:08this is a garden famous for taking it as its inspiration.
50:14This, slightly surprisingly, in a quiet suburb of New Plymouth,
50:18is my journey's end.
50:20And I've come here because it's a place
50:23that I've always wanted to visit.
50:26This is my journey's end.
50:28And I've come here because it's a garden
50:31which seems pretty ordinary from the outside,
50:34but which I know is comprised entirely of native New Zealand plants.
50:43Te Kanga Mareri, which is Maori for peaceful encampment,
50:47is one of New Zealand's very first and best native gardens.
50:51It was begun 35 years ago by Valda Paletti and her husband Dave,
50:55and is relatively modest in scale, is crammed with plants and features.
51:00There's a tree fern alley, a distressed mountain shed,
51:04an alpine zone and even a glowworm cave.
51:08Rather surprisingly, all created by someone
51:11who's very proud of her colonial past.
51:14Your great-grandparents were settlers?
51:17Yeah, they arrived here in 1842
51:22and they sailed from Plymouth Harbour from Somerset.
51:25So they, Simon and Jane, set up home, farm.
51:29They survived the land wars.
51:33And a great-great-grandmother had stood there with her children behind her,
51:38defying the Maori that was threatening to burn her little house down.
51:43That story is a dramatic contrast to this garden,
51:47which is clearly in such harmony with its native land.
51:51Columbecia complexa, the wire netting plant.
51:54You could actually jump up and down on that or sleep on it, you know, as a bed.
51:58It's tempting to try. Yeah, you can do that.
52:00Fabulous. I can do that. I will do that.
52:02You can leap, lie down, have a rest.
52:05You see, I'm quite squashy. Comfortable?
52:08It's very nice. I would sleep on this willingly.
52:10You would? Yeah.
52:12And you see, one of the things I like about...
52:14If you were in Australia, you would know there would be
52:17a spider or snake or something in here to get you,
52:21whereas in New Zealand, you're pretty sure.
52:23Yeah, you're safe as. Yeah.
52:25You could sleep sweetly and soundly.
52:27I have to say, this is the first garden I've ever visited
52:29where I've been invited to leap on the plants.
52:31Yeah, leap on the plants. It's Monty-proof.
52:36Now, what's that?
52:38I need my glasses for this, which I haven't got on me.
52:41They're in my bag. You could get a hand lens.
52:44Monty Don, I have for you the secret weapon, the hand lens.
52:50Because I can't see without my glasses anyway.
52:52No, you're nearly blind. Now, this is gardening beneath your knees.
52:55Can I hold my own lens, please? You can hold your own lens.
52:57You're being bossy. There you go. I'm bossy.
52:59I'm a control freak, you know.
53:01All gardeners are control freaks. All good gardeners...
53:04Oh, good! ...are completely...
53:07He said I'm a good gardener. Well, you are.
53:10Look at that. Isn't it perfect?
53:12This little kanzia grows up on the central plateau
53:15around the fumaroles, around the sulphur vents.
53:18I have never been shown round a garden via a hand lens before.
53:22Really, truly.
53:23So within the space of a minute, I've leapt on your plants
53:26and looked in minute detail.
53:28And over here, just by your knees, you can't get up, is our lobelia.
53:33Again, it's a little darling. It's got, like, half a flower.
53:37It is lovely. I could do the whole tour like this.
53:40We could just crawl around on our hands and knees.
53:43I'm on drugs!
53:45Look at this down here.
53:47Look at that. Look at that.
53:51I've never done this before. This is fantastic.
53:55He's converted. I am, you know.
53:57Good, born again!
53:58I don't normally deal with intense detail.
54:00Oh, don't you? You wait. There's better to come.
54:11So this is the fernery. That's right.
54:13And some of these ferns, I mean, that must be...
54:16Look how high this is. Yeah, that's 30 foot.
54:19So you planted these in 1972? Some of them planted in 72.
54:23Well, that is a wata.
54:28And this is the fern house here? Yep.
54:30You call it the foranui? Yep. OK.
54:41And this, Monty, is a glowworm tunnel.
54:44Do you get glowworms? We do. We've got about six.
54:47Right. And it's cool and cold and dark.
54:49And it's like, you know, it's sort of dying and emerging
54:52and coming out again into the light.
54:54It's a birthing channel. It is. It's a birthing channel.
54:57I didn't want you to clock on to that.
54:59So you're born again.
55:01And, oh, look, here's a sign of new life.
55:03The para. Right.
55:05And he's unfurling crozia.
55:07And now vegetables. I'm rather keen on vegetables.
55:09So am I. Yeah.
55:11So there we go, vegetables.
55:13Pretty organic.
55:15This is a real culinary...
55:17This is a working vegetable garden. Right.
55:19It feeds the family. Yeah.
55:21You know, it's really important.
55:23Now, this, to an extent, is what...
55:27..your great-grandparents would have done when they came here.
55:30They would have cleared some soil and planted the sort of things
55:33that they were used to growing at home.
55:35What they did was to get a garden established,
55:37because without it, the only food they had
55:39was the rations off the other boats that came out,
55:41like the flour. Yeah.
55:43And they obviously bought stock and, you know,
55:45did animal husbandry and raised stock to slaughter.
55:49But if the crops failed,
55:51then they had trouble surviving in the colonies
55:54in those early, early days.
55:56After the veg garden,
55:58it was time to dive down into the alpines.
56:06I tell you, this is just... Do you know what it's like?
56:09It's like snorkelling over a coral reef.
56:11Mmm! Mmm! That's exactly what it's like.
56:13It does. Yeah.
56:16A hidden reef of flour reached through a magnifying glass.
56:22Do you think that the next generation of gardeners
56:25will be moving in the direction that you've created?
56:27I do. Younger people are much, much more open to the flora.
56:32They've got over the fact that gardens are flower gardens.
56:36And, um...
56:38I think there's a greater appreciation and awareness now
56:41of the flora within New Zealand and the beauty of the landscapes.
56:45You know, I think it's a coming of age for New Zealand.
56:51What a good and hopeful thought that is.
56:54And Te Kanga Marere is a visual celebration of New Zealand's future.
57:03So, I've reached the end of this particular journey,
57:08sitting on the lawn in a smallish garden,
57:14in a smallish suburb of a smallish town in New Zealand.
57:18And it seemed right and proper to me,
57:21having sampled the size and scale of Australia
57:27and come down through the North Island of New Zealand
57:30that it should end up on this domestic level,
57:32because that's what gardens are.
57:34They're about people's backyards.
57:37But what a journey I've had.
57:39From the very first Australian garden and its failing crops in Sydney
57:44to homesick recreations and wonderful flights of fantasy,
57:48I've seen a series of amazing girls in dynamic young countries.
57:53But it's the final step that the gardens have made here,
57:56which I believe holds the key to the future.
57:58It's all about working with the land and not fighting it.
58:01And that's a simple but powerful message
58:04that the indigenous people and plants could have told us all along.
58:18Join me next time as I make my first visit to India.
58:23As I set off to visit some of the most beautiful places in the world,
58:27as I set off to visit some of the most sensual and opulent gardens in the world.
58:57.