Hastings haven’s classic cottage garden has bucked style trends for decades

In gardening as elsewhere, fashions come and go. The strict formality of the Georgian parterres were banished by the landscape gardens of Capability Brown; the carpet bedding beloved by the Victorians gave way to Gertrude Jekyll’s Arts and Crafts gardens; nothing lasts forever.

Despite being perfectly placed to follow gardening trends, the garden of Gillian Thrum and her husband Phil Carson has always remained true to its original cottage garden design.

Hawke’s Bay gardeners will be familiar with Thrum and Carson, who were the owners of the Green Door Garden Centre in Havelock North until recently. During the 24 years the couple owned the business they watched as garden fashions came and went.

As the popularity of cottage gardens faded grasses came to the fore. Grasses were succeeded by succulents, which in turn were superseded by the no-work garden. Now gardening has come full circle and cottage gardens are in vogue again. With the return of cottage gardens comes the resurgence of colour, something that was largely missing in the garden styles of the past 20 years.

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Much of that colour comes from perennials which Thrum is pleased to see are making a comeback.

She has a long association with perennials, both as grower and seller.

During the 90s, Thrum and her mother, Alice, ran Peak Perennials Nursery, a mail order business which sold thousands of plants imported from the UK and US at the height of the cottage garden boom.

Many of these perennials are no longer available in New Zealand but importing them now is not an option. “It’s not economic to bring them in today as there are so many restrictions,” says Thrum.

Thrum and Carson’s one-and-a-half acre cottage garden was planted by Thrum and her parents, Alice and Roy, 30 years ago in what was a bare paddock. “We have the most amazing soil, lovely silty loam, and there used to be a flood plain at the bottom of the garden,” Thrum recalls.

The garden is on a slope facing northeast and is in a natural dell, so no landscaping was needed. After about 10cm of rain, the water running down the hill feeds into a small creek which goes under the bridge and into two ponds. Due to the silty soil, the ponds don’t retain water so have been developed as bog gardens.

The original planting included seven or eight different kinds of birches, mainly river birches (Betula nigra). Many rare trees imported by Top Trees Nursery were also planted.

Once the perennial nursery was established, the garden beds doubled as stock beds and were planted by colour (blue, white, yellow, red). The colour-themed beds worked so well that they kept them after the nursery closed. The beds include more than 100 roses, many David Austins, a favourite of Thrum’s.

When the trees were young, they didn’t give much shade which limited what could be grown. Thrum has always loved maples, but “the more expensive the maple the faster it died.” It took 10 years to establish enough canopy to grow maples and the big beds of hostas which the couple also love.

In fact when Carson moved over from his huge garden in New Plymouth, he brought trailerloads of hostas with him and the second pond was planted completely in hostas. Unfortunately, the late frosts in Hawkes Bay kill off some of the beautiful early hostas year after year, “but there are still heaps and we’re going to fill every gap we can find with them,” Thrum resolves.

Now, after 30 years there is almost too much shade in the garden so the gully garden has been filled with astilbes, hostas and other shade-loving plants.

The bottom of the garden has silty soil which suits the picking bed full of South African and Australian plants such as proteas and leucadendrons, and also the large asparagus bed.

The site for the house is cut into the top of the hill and the soil there is clay. Thrum is a keen vegetable grower and has created a huge raised vegetable garden here. Carson’s many fruit trees are nearby and the pair are nearly self-sufficient in vegetables and fruit.

Cottage gardening is intensive, and Thrum dates the decline of this type of gardening to the late 90s when a lack of time meant that gardeners looked for a different style of gardening that fitted in with their new lifestyle.

In 2014, Thrum and Carson went walking in the mountains of Spain for the first time and were hooked on seeing flowers in the wild that they’d grown at home.

Since then they have travelled to Italy, Kazakhstan, Morocco and elsewhere. They had planned to travel every year but Covid put a stop to that.

Covid also helped them make the decision to retire. “We want to travel a lot, get over to Europe and up in the mountains to see the alpine plants while we can still get up in the hills.”

In retirement, the couple have tentative plans to grow topiary for sale as they have noted the scarcity of topiary in garden centres and although a long-term crop, the work isn’t on a constant daily basis and would allow them to travel during the New Zealand winter when growth is minimal. And although they no longer own Green Door, Thrum and Carson will still be involved in the business in the short-term as they have offered to help the new owners of Green Door, Shaun Telford and his wife Trudy Collins.

“The Green Door ruled our lives for the past 24 years. A seven-day garden centre is a greedy beast and will take all the time you can give it. It’s been a real labour of love to bring it from the garage with the green roller door to the showroom with a covered canopy the Green Door is today, and honestly we’ve loved every week of it.”