Photography: Babiche Martens
Every good garden has a secret, but Nicola Guinness’s backyard more than delivers on the surprise reveal. A colourful display of roses, geraniums and delphiniums at the street front of the white two-storeyed Ponsonby villa gives a few clues as to what might be out back. But this in no way prepares you for the full attraction – a surprise meadow that is so romantic you’ll want to run through it in a flowing dress.
There are obelisks of trailing sweet peas, scarlet poppies vibrating with bumblebees, inky purple scabiosa with conical pincushion-like flowers and wispy grasses.
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Meet & greet: Nicola Guinness (textile designer), plus Pig the French bulldog and Ikey the Australian terrier.
The property: A modernised villa in Ponsonby, Auckland.
Nicola, a textile designer, had a clear vision for the inner-city garden when she and her husband bought the property. “I wanted a wild meadow in the back as opposed to a really clipped, manicured garden,” she says.
She’d been particularly inspired by the gardens she’d seen overseas by the Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf. Oudolf is generally regarded as the leader of the new perennials movement, a naturalistic gardening style that became wildly popular in the 2010s. Think lots of pink echinacea, blue sea holly, sculptural seedheads and ornamental grasses – basically the antithesis of a ‘tidy’ garden.
“Oudolf’s gardens have large blocks of colour, though,” says Nicola. “This garden is more loose and whimsical and has a really nice at-home feel. It’s very casual. I love the grasses and the airiness it gives the place.”
Curated chaos
The drifts of wildflowers and grasses in Nicola’s garden encapsulate the spirit of chaos gardening, a popular gardening trend that rejects formal planting schemes in favour of unplanned wildness.
However, rather than scattering a random selection of seeds and waiting to see what grows, as per the trend, there’s a method to Nicola’s meadow madness. This seemingly untamed floral landscape has been carefully conceptualised.
Nicola started with a blank canvas. She planted three deciduous magnolias – yellow ‘Honey Tulip’, deep purple ‘Black Tulip’ and a pale pink variety – to anchor the garden. Then she screened the garden on three sides with pleached Ficus ‘Tuffi’ hedges from Twining Valley Nurseries, to create instant green walls. “I wanted something completely ready-grown in case we sold,” says Nicola.
With the scaffolding of the garden in place, she had fun sourcing plants from nurseries that specialise in the types of old-world blooms she loves, including Emerden in Taranaki, Puriri Lane at Addenbrooke, in Bombay, Auckland, and Hands in the Dirt near Warkworth.
Nicola is grateful for the expertise of plantsman Martin Keay, who spends a morning planting and weeding in the garden once a fortnight. “He’s fantastic,” says Nicola. “He’s got a lifetime of expertise and shares that knowledge with young people with an interest in gardening.” Martin and Nicola are also both pianists who share a love of classical music. “We play Mozart sonatas to each other on the piano,” says Nicola.
Entwined passions
Nicola expresses her many interests in her hand-printed textiles, which depict illustrations of vegetables, vines, vintage ladies, violins and silverware. She’s been finessing her craft since the 1980s, when she and her sister took over Oblio’s restaurant on Ponsonby Road. They modernised it, turning it from a fine-dining establishment into a bistro. “I didn’t like all the stark-white tablecloths, so I decided to print my own,” says Nicola. “Then I sold them individually so I could cover the costs of the screens and having the tablecloths sewn.” Eventually, she began wholesaling tablecloths to the likes of Tessuti.
These days, Nicola’s studio for Front Room Fabrics (frontroomfabrics.co.nz) is based at Fernside, a century-old arts and crafts home in the Wairarapa, which she and her husband recently purchased. The 4.8-hectare property has five stars from the New Zealand Gardens Trust. The garden features mature specimen trees, lakeside walks and – another secret to discover – a Victorian sunken garden.
It provides inspiration by the wheelbarrow-load for Nicola’s screenprints, which end up on curtains, cushions, bed linen, tablecloths and tea towels. “I’m completely immersed in botanicals. I can walk around my garden and then concentrate and do my printing.”
Back in Auckland, Nicola is also inspired by what she can harvest from the garden, from flowers for filling vases to fresh produce for meals. Beds of veggies, herbs and strawberries are grown in the courtyard leading up to the garden, at a handy picking distance just metres away from the modern, engineered kitchen.
“It’s such a nice, peaceful little oasis in the middle of a busy city. Instead of everybody subdividing their back blocks, they should keep them and grow a few more trees.”
Some of Nicola’s favourite flowers
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