This rural paradise keeps changing to suit the gardener’s changing lifestyle

When you have the same garden for over three decades, it tends to change over the years to match the shifts in your lifestyle and tastes.

Noline Skeet’s country garden has journeyed through some distinct phases since she and her husband Graeme bought their bare lifestyle block in Karaka, rural south Auckland, back in 1986.

At the time they were caught up in jam-packed lives. As well as raising two children, Skeet was working full-time as a teacher and later a school principal; her husband had a career in the police service.

So, the first phase was a small and undemanding garden that occupied a 10m radius around their newly built house. “It didn’t take long before I started craving a bigger garden,” recalls Skeet. “I realised that, with my job, I really needed a hobby, something that would be a stress release for me. And having the garden meant I could still be around for family, so that’s how it started.”

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Over the years, the garden didn’t just get a little bit bigger – it now stretches over one-and-a-half acres.

Skeet had signed up to a landscaping course before mapping out the basic structure on graph paper, and she wanted a traditional cottage garden. “I’d been to the UK and fallen in love with rose gardens there, so roses were at the top of my mind.”

Early on, there was a passion for rambling roses that Skeet grew from cuttings taken from a sister-in-law’s Hawkes Bay garden. “They were rambling all the way down the fence line and round the water tank,” she says. “My husband kept complaining that he got caught by them every time he went past on the mower. Then we took down the fence and so the rambling roses had to go.”

Skeet transferred her affections to old-fashioned roses and David Austins – at one stage she had 280 roses in her garden. While there are fewer now, they have an easier life thanks to the shelterbelt of trees the couple planted which has grown high enough to protect them.

Over the years, there has also been a flirtation with a more formal garden style and the legacy of that is the low hedging that still surrounds some flowerbeds. “But formal gardens didn’t suit me or our lifestyle block,” says Skeet. “Cottage gardens give me much more pleasure. I love the blowsiness of them, the fact that they don’t have to look absolutely perfect and I love lots of colour, particularly orange, my favourite shade. Also, I like being able to pick flowers and then go inside and make flower arrangements.”

Her country garden is filled with plants that have been grown from cuttings given by family and friends. A gravel pathway meanders through a densely planted tangle of pretty flowers with lots of roses, dahlias and cosmos. At its heart is a pond built by Graeme complete with a waterfall, stepping stones and a colony of frogs living in the nearby foliage.

Hydrangeas are a more recent passion for Skeet, although her soil is so acidic that the flowers turn blue, no matter what she does. “There’s one that was a beautiful bright pink in my mother’s garden, so I took a cutting off it and the jolly thing’s gone blue,” Skeet says. “The only way I can grow a pink hydrangea is in a pot where I can control the soil.”

A rustic, shabby chic look extends to the garden furniture, pots and statues that have been aged-up with rust effect paint. Perhaps the most striking feature though is a set of rusty iron gates that lead into the paddocks. They fill a gap that was made in the fence when the couple’s daughter was married in a marquee on the property.

Rather than having a normal farm gate installed there, Skeet began searching for something special.“It took me years,” she says. “Then one day I was in Ahuriri in Hawke’s Bay having lunch with my sisters and there wasa shop there with some gates that I loved. They came from India originally and they were half price. But they were old and rusty, and I thought my husband would go berserk. So I got them transported up to my son’s place, then had him sneak them over and a friend put them up.”

Skeet says Graeme took it pretty well, considering, but then this is really her garden. While he has done the hard landscaping, it is she who gives it attention day-to-day.

Now semi-retired, she has time for another hobby that dovetails with her passion for plants. “My interest in photography has been the reason for many of the flowers grown in the garden,” explains Skeet, who particularly enjoys macro photography (close up and extremely detailed images of a small subject). “I’ve been experimenting with giving photographs a painterly look in Photoshop and printing on corrugated iron, and last year had an exhibition of my photos with two good friends, Robin Short and Leonie Richardson.”

Friends are an integral part of the garden and Skeet loves to be able to entertain them there. “In lockdown when we were only able to see people outdoors, I had garden gin parties and everyone would bring their favourite gin over so we could try them all,” she says.

Family also gathers here often. When they were younger, the couple’s six grandchildren built forts in the trees, and enjoyed creating fairy gardens and using the springy native plants as trampolines. Now they are more useful in the garden. “They’ll give me a hand in the greenhouse, growing plants and cuttings,” says Skeet. “And the older boys are able to mow the lawns and trim hedges, and are strong enough to help me with the heavy lifting.”

During her long career in education, fostering a love of nature is a priority for Skeet. Her students were taught to grow vegetables and create delicious dishes out of the produce. “They also visited my garden to take cuttings then went back to school to nurture them, then had market days to sell their plants,” she recalls.

She is still a devotee of homegrown produce, with a large vegetable plot at one end of the garden, and the overflow starting to take over a paddock on the other side.

And the journey for this garden isn’t over. Skeet is thinking of shifting the vegetable beds altogether, to give them the advantage of fresh soil. And every year she likes to keep things interesting by making changes to one area. Newer additions have included a native plants area and an orchard, and most recently a white flower garden starring ‘Limelight’ hydrangeas.

“As with everything I take on, I have to be mindful of not over-committing myself, especially as I get a tiny bit older,” says Skeet. “I think there’s no such thing as a low maintenance garden. Even with the natives, you’ve got to keep them trimmed, feed them and mulch them. Nothing is no maintenance.”