Words from the wise: Jill Simpson
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As my garden visits always feel consumed by chasing the light around with my camera, I prefer instead, to come home and compile questions to email the gardener. This is helped by hours spent editing and sifting through material, throwing up questions that might fill in the gaps from information I can otherwise find on the gardens website.
T and I visited Fisherman’s Bay from 6.30 am to 1 pm. An hour or two was spent eating and chatting around the table with Jill and Richard, picking their brains with a million questions.
There are many outstanding gardens in New Zealand, but Jill is one of a handful that has found international notoriety - she runs a terrific instagram account!
I thank her for her generosity of time, endless knowledge and support as I go along on my own fledgling gardening adventure.
The answers below are as written as her personal account, in response to my emailed questions.
Ju xo
About Fisherman’s Bay
We are not exactly sure of the exact garden size but its about 2 hectares, with some of it just quite wild and not gardened. It is on the eastern side of Banks Peninsula where the sun rises out of the Pacific ocean in front of the house and is one of the first inhabited places in the world to see a new day after the east coast of the the North Island.
This is a garden built over a steep slope with most areas needing to be formed by building terraces and paths into the hillside. Plantings cover steep slopes, which in wet years, make planting and maintenance challenging.
While we are almost frost-free, it still can be cold with bitter winter winds. As we are a New Zealand garden wind, is a fairly constant companion. Other than macrocapas and black wattles as farm shelter when we arrived, there were very few other mature trees here. I’m waiting for trees I have planted to grow to protect the garden, but even with them gradually increasing the strength and depth of shelter I can not imagine not having the height and hardiness of macrocarpas. I often say to visitors that the garden wouldn’t exist without them! In reality, it would just be a very different garden, given that at times, early on in our years here, roses were snapped off at their base and young totaras were blown over.
Wind damage is still is a significant factor in gardening here.
There were almost no large deciduous trees and only native trees seeding here from the bush below the house. The type of shade and shelter provided by these trees meant plant choices were initially very challenging as they create rain shadows close to them and wind protection only extends a limited distance on a hill. My solution initially was the use of hardy natives and plants adapted to this situation.
The soils in the garden vary with the zig-zag in the naturalistic area having deep moist soil to the dry rocky thin soils in other areas. Each part of the garden is surprisingly different. Each area was developed at a different time in the slow evolution of the garden from being just around the house to the extensive areas gardened now.
Very little of the initial garden around the 1907 house remain, most being sacrificed to house and deck extension when we came here to live 18 years ago. I have extended out from the house year after year to what it is now. Each new area reflects a time in my gardening evolution and the soils and shelter available provided challenges and opportunities dictating what could be grown and what I could manage to maintain. All new gardens present a gardener with much more of a challenge while they establish.
I have also really enjoyed the “building” of the garden. After the digger, there is always the need for steps and walls. The making of these has given me huge satisfaction and I have always had Richard providing rocks from the farm and an endless supply of railway sleepers.
Jill’s background and the progression of the garden
I have loved gardens and the natural world all of my life. From spending more time on making a moss garden around my dolls house than the house itself, to making gardens in flats here and in Australia when I was young and traveling.
But my other love was art.
I spent time doing part of a fine arts degree before the traditional OE. On returning I studied art history while this subject was in its infancy at Canterbury University. Eventually finishing this degree, while my children were little.
I went on to do a polytechnic course on landscape design and some landscape architecture papers at Lincoln, working as a self employed designer while I raised my children, as I had separated from my husband at that time.
This was a really busy but hugely creative part of my life. My children grew up visiting nurseries helping me measure gardens and with a drawing board in part of the living room.
When Richard and I became a couple, Fisherman’s Bay became, after our families, the focus of our lives. Initially, in the first years, we travelled back and forth from Christchurch. sometimes preparing food at Fisherman’s Bay to put on the table in town for hungry teens. School holidays were spent exploring and working in the garden on the peninsula.
We came to live here after we married 18 years ago. With our children grown, we could begin life at Fishermans Bay. As a designer it was time to work on a garden of my own!
Before we came to live here full time, any planting was designed to be easy care because we were time poor given the three-hour return trip from Christchurch and a farm to run. Because we were passionate about the wonderful natural heritage of the farm, with its remnants of the original native podocarp forests. we chose to plant natives. Not just any natives, but only those found here naturally. Eventually, once we were living here, my interest in hebes led to a large collection as well as native plants from every part of New Zealand.
I had a hope that in using native plants, particularly hebes for their flowers, it would be possible to create our version of a flowering garden to evoke the same feelings of being surrounded by a meadow or prairie planting. I never really achieved this. It’s difficult creating a planting that can only succeed after years of growth depending on nothing untoward happening to any component of that planting which would leave an unsightly hole!
Perhaps, with the experience I have gained, I could come closer to this vision now, but I have become more interested in planting natives with other non-native plants. This thinking is still evolving and experiencing firstly a drought a year ago and this year the opposite, with rain and yet more rain, I can see there are no easy answers.
One of the joys of gardening is that one is always learning.
There had always been another type of plant that I have enjoyed for a lifetime - the perennial.
From my early design days with creating cottage gardens, to my current interest in naturalistic perennial plantings, perennials have always had a captivation for me.
When I was considering going to Lincoln College (now University), before having children, I worked for Zeniths Nursery and was encouraged to learn the botanical name of plants I saw while biking to work. So many were perennials. I was also fascinated by the very small suppliers of plants, often passionate plants people, who arrived with their boxes of interesting plants, both perennials, and in those days, alpines.
I have never again seen the variety of plants available in small numbers as I saw then in nurseries.
At that time, indoor plants were incredibly fashionable as well. I took so many home to look after or that I couldn’t resist buying, that time watering became a problem especially once my first child was born. These are only now back in the shops. The circle of fashion has swung back after a lifetime, to what it was in my early twenties.
In the early days, so many of the perennials I use now were unknown in cultivation or very rare and impossible to find. I am still the beneficiary of plants given to me by Alan Trott who was able to bring them into New Zealand, early in his gardening career. It is still difficult to find some plants in New Zealand, especially in numbers.
Moving on from cottage gardening, after experimenting as a designer with the then fashionable Italian and more formal gardens, I became influenced by the New Perennial Movement. Particularly inspired by Piet Oudolf and his planting as demonstrated in many books written by Noel Kingsbury.
The plantings they described combined perennials and grasses, using long-lived plants often selected by European nurseries for their ability to thrive in plantings amongst similarly competitive plants. They would both flower together and in succession, continuing to have a presence in the garden even after flowering. They were to look good throughout the year, being cut to the ground in late winter.
I am still learning how to plant combinations of these plants. I will probably always be learning.
They vary, as all plants do, in different situations, and every now and then, a new plant becomes part of the palette. I will keep a large perennial planting in the garden striving to create a garden that is largely able to continue on year by year without too much intervention but retaining the seasonal interest and colour.
Now my new interest is the combining of native and non-native plants and the replanting, with more knowledge, of hebes in conjunction with other plants of similar growth habits and needs. This is moving on from largely herbaceous plants to our New Zealand response in the interest of choosing plants for dryer and harsher environments. This concept is influenced by Europeans such Olivier Filippi, and realising, like Australia, New Zealand is a nation of trees and shrublands without the huge range of herbaceous perennials of Europe Asia and the America’s.
As I write this it’s pouring with rain and I’m worrying about the half fixed road above us, and about how many more plants might give up the ghost and die from the wet this year. But last year was a drought. So the challenge is to find plants able to do both. Probably many will be native.
Most of all the garden gives me a wonderfully complex and challenging way to express the creativity that I think lies within my personality. I love the planning and the searching for new and interesting plants and ideas. I love the making and the weeding and am at my happiest working outside in the garden. Then there is the deep satisfaction and joy I feel when all of the things that make gardens happen, nature, the weather, a burst of inspiration, chance in the form of a seedling, come together successfully to be experienced by me by Richard and by the visitors to the garden.
Read the full feature on Fisherman’s Bay here, enjoying a short film walking around the garden at dawn.
