Located in Hillcrest, Auckland, this garden blends Aotearoa and Asian influences – evolving and transforming since Wayne and Rama first bought the property in the early 1990s.
For more than thirty years, Wayne Webster has shaped and reshaped the small Hillcrest garden he calls ‘Whistling Green’. What began as bare clay and lawn has become a layered, semi-tropical space, where ferns, topiary and pots gathered from Bali and Auckland’s old villas sit together. It’s open for visits as part of the Secret Gardens network, but for Wayne it’s simply home – a place built slowly by hand and instinct.
When he first moved here, the section offered little inspiration. “I think the penny dropped when we arrived here and there was literally nothing,” he says. “I couldn’t stand living here in the summer without something nice.” Since then the garden has had many versions – pittosporums planted and removed, pongas tried, borders rebuilt – until it found a sense of balance that felt right to him.
That idea of balance runs deep. Time spent in Bali for business influenced how Wayne thinks about space and planting. “Everything in the Balinese lifestyle is balanced – yin and yang,” he says. “Even how they walk through the garden, always anticlockwise for balance.” He didn’t want to copy the look, but the philosophy stayed with him.
Wayne’s 150 square metre section is dense and vertical, layered with staghorn ferns, buxus topiary and pots of every size. Some of the staghorns are forty years old – their first pups taken from his mother’s garden up the road. The Asplenium bulbiferum (native hen and chicken fern) is another favourite. “We started with four plants and propagated the whole garden from their little chickens,” he says.
Years of composting and leaf mould have softened the heavy clay beneath. “This was swamp plain before the houses were built,” Wayne says. “I dug sump holes and filled them with bricks and scoria for drainage. I never clear leaves off the garden – I let them rot down.”
Wayne’s approach is practical and curious. A neighbour once told him to feed his staghorns with banana peels and milk for the bromeliads. “Then I started mixing tea bags into the potting mix for geraniums. They just bolted,” he says. “These are the things that are the intriguing parts of gardening.”
Birds are part of the garden’s life too. “Wildlife can feel if things are in balance,” he says. “They know.” A thrush named Mr Pickwick used to sit on his knee each morning. Kererū rest overnight in the bottlebrush; wax-eyes (tauhou) pick seeds from the magnolia.
Wayne paints when he’s not in the garden, seeing a link between the two. “The garden is like a painting,” he says. “You start with a blank canvas and keep adding until it feels right. And you never know when to finish.”
He admits he’ll never call it done. Pots are moved, pavers lifted, ideas tested. “I like the fact I haven’t finished,” he says. “That’s important. There’s always something new to try.”
Whistling Green is part of Secret Gardens.
To visit this garden, book a visit at: www.secretgardens.co.nz
