Fortified planting

Noel Kingsbury meets the maker of a remarkable coastal garden that combines the use of native species with more familiar garden plants to great effect

- Noel Kingsbury

Larnach Castle, South Island, New Zealand

A SPECTACULAR location always helps and this particular garden, some 1,000ft above the fjord-like waterbody of Otago Harbour as it quests its way inland on New Zealand’s South Island, certainly has that. Not that it always has, as this view was obscured by conifers and rhododendrons until the early 1990s. Indeed, discovering lost vistas at Larnach Castle, near Dunedin, has been an important part of the garden’s development.

The Otago Peninsula was severely deforested in the late 19th century, so when William Larnach, a wealthy merchant and politician, built the castle on this windswept spot in 1871, he surrounded his new showpiece home with a shelterbelt of northern-hemisphere conifers. More were planted by another owner, Jackson Purdie, in the 1930s, who laid out an extensive rockery (a feature that was very popular in Britain at the time). Long periods of neglect, however, meant that by the time Margaret Barker and her late husband, Barry, bought the property in 1967, the 35 acres of grounds were severely overgrown, with no views out.

Larnach Castle and its gardens are now one of South Island’s leading visitor attractions, with 100,000 visitors a year (at least before the Covid-19 crisis). With colourful borders and flowering shrubs alongside an impressive plant collection, the result is a delicate balance of public entertainment with plantsmanship. Larnach is, in fact, a lot more impressive than many a more formally ‘botanic’ garden. Mrs Barker says she has never counted how many species she has— ‘thousands probably, I’m not into numbers’.

Asked what is special about New Zealand plants, Mrs Barker replies “their texture”