Family-friendly garden for growing veges – and kids!

Chelsea Smylie did not shy away from bold design when she planted what she describes as her first real garden on Christchurch’s Port Hills.

Six years on, that confidence is paying off in the Westmorland property, which Smylie shares with her husband, Nick, and their three children, Isla, 7, Phoebe, 4 and Guy, 2.

From the magnificent banks of flax that protect the lower garden to the pretty wilderness of grasses and shrubs through which the boardwalks weave, the former art teacher has shown that her design skills were well employed in the predominantly native garden.

And those with an eye for design are not the only ones liking it. “The bellbirds swarm to the flax flowers in spring,” Smylie says, “but they don’t stick around once the nectar is all gone.”

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Pīwakawaka, kōtare , and the occasional kererū are also finding the maturing native plantings attractive. As no doubt do a host of native lizards, insects and other small creatures.

The children, too, enjoy a lot of time outdoors, Smylie says. “The slopes make them very physically able,“ she laughs.

How child-friendly is the garden?

“To be honest,” she replies, “there are a lot of fenced-off retaining walls, but the use of decking and boardwalks means it’s easy to access from upstairs, where the living areas are.”

Nonetheless, the children have influenced the garden. For them, there is a tree for climbing, a playhouse, a sandpit set among the flax, hens and a trampoline, which was placed near fruit trees.

“Now as they jump up and down, they can see the fruit growing and ripening. It’s a happy accident.”

The reserve at the bottom of the garden helped inspire the choice of natives over exotics, with the garden seamlessly merging into it.

The family makes frequent forays into the reserve. “As an activity we might head down there with the children and their friends and a wheelbarrow and gather pine cones or needles for our paths.

“I did not really know much about gardening when I began but I was really keen to get into it,” Smylie says. “Mum’s a gardener but this is my first real garden, our first home.

“I’ve been like a sponge learning the fundamentals. It’s kept me really happy while raising my kids at home in the early years.”

The gorse, broom and grass which covered their hillside section when the couple took possession was slowly but steadily dispatched with the help of a digger, a weed-whacker and much sweat.

A definitive plan for the garden design was never made, it was, “more a ‘let’s talk about it’,” says Smylie, “but it seems to work.”

Nick built some of the retaining walls before starting on the house; the remainder were built after.

“The walls have provided great structure for the garden,” Smylie said. “And Nick did really interesting curved walls. He’s really creative and has a good vision of how things will look.”

Like the retaining walls, boulders found on the property and manoeuvred into position on a bank alongside the house provided inspiration for planting.

Now, creeping muehlenbeckia wraps itself around the rocks and droops over the walls, its filigree foliage in sharp relief with the striated rushes and grasses.

This marriage of nature and artifice throughout the garden is both sophisticated and stunning.

Smylie maintains there is nothing flash about the native plants she chose. She just wanted the garden to feel like a continuation of the reserve and that texture was important to her.

Most plants came from Trees for Canterbury, a not-for-profit nursery that grows mainly locally sourced plants. It is no surprise then how well they have grown.

Nonetheless, Smylie still marvels at the height of the five-year-old mānatu (Plagianthus regius aka ribbonwood) along the back of the garden, and how little attention the garden now needs.

“I have never had too much time to spend in the garden, with the kids,” she says.

“Now, though, the native plants pretty much take care of themselves. I do shape the muehlenbeckia, but I don’t need to do as much watering as when I started.”

Natives were her first love but growing edibles soon followed, especially once Nick built her terraced vegetable beds, which are warmed from the heat reflected off the garage’s concrete wall.

“Then I started thinking about beautiful flowers and I got hooked on perennials,” she explains.

“I like to keep it natural looking but I do like the seasonal changes which flowers provide. I like their whimsy, their architectural forms and I like an organic look – like nature is happening without me being involved too much.”

She stops by small branch of pine cones nestled in by some grasses. “I love just leaving them around,” she explains. “They’re homes for insects, they look neat, and they’re really natural looking.”

Many vegetables in the Smylie garden are allowed to flower. “I love carrot flowers … and parsley flowers … and Florence fennel’s and I like to let the borage self-seed.”

Other flowers are favoured for their colour and their role as markers of seasons. These include verbena, lupin, echinacea, poppies, sunflowers and Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’. The latter exceeds its name by providing colour and form most of the year.

Come autumn, it’s the blooms’ pink colour that appeals. By winter, both the flower and the stems have turned a deep russet brown, emphasising their distinctive form against the bank of cream tussock.

While the soil is a heavy clay, Smylie loves how it seems in an original state, untouched by developers’ bulldozers, and alive with “massive native earthworms and huhu grubs.”

She likes to add the clay to her compost heaps, which are another passion. “I’m constantly thinking about compost,” she says. “I have piles behind trees everywhere, breaking down. I will forget about it, then it is a treat when I find it.”

Nothing organic or compostable leaves the property. “I’m organic and thrifty. I love finding things that don’t cost money, like the pine needles from the reserve for my paths. I always take containers to the beach to collect seaweed. Whenever we go to Willowbank (a wildlife park on the edge of Christchurch), I fill up the boot with bags of manure – $20 for five bags! It’s such good stuff.

“Mum and Dad have comfrey. They see it as a problem but I always take some home. The chickens love it. Mum and Dad live in a tree-lined street so I gather the leaves and scatter them about the run. The chickens turn it into compost and do all the work for me,” she says with infectious delight.

All cardboard entering the household is also added to her more conventional compost heaps, beside which are her barrels of compost tea, made by soaking comfrey, well-rotted compost, nettles, seaweed and manure in water.

As our tour of the property draws to an end, Smylie starts to say the garden is pretty much finished before remembering the outdoor kitchen and barbeque area Nick is in the middle of building.

Then there is an, “Oh yes, the driveway is my next focus”. The original plantings there weren’t a huge success so she is considering lining at least one side of it with rengarenga (Arthropodium cirratum) which has an ability to thrive in almost any conditions.

“Actually, we are always changing it,” she admits, revealing how the day after the photographer came to photograph her garden, she was out in it removing a bed of stones.