You have to travel there and spend quite a bit of time
researching. I think the culture is as important as,
say, the plant palette and climate. I think the climate
you can clock pretty easily, and the plant palette I’ll
come to later, but the cultural appreciation of garden-
ing, of nature, is to me the key to being able to make
that shift from one place to another. The cultural vari-
ances between New Zealand and the UK are quite
pronounced, insofar as you have to grapple with
totally different traditions and expectations of
gardens. In the tropical parts of India, nature just,
well, takes over. Where I was working in Kerala,
during the monsoon season the plants grow at a rate
that is almost intimidating and the clients said, “We
want plants pushed back away from the house, they
are too overwhelming.” And at the same time I was
making a little winter garden inside a house in
London where I was using the same sort of plants, and
the client was desperate for them to grow over their
walls and be right in their house. So that cultural shift
is one that is quite important to understand as much
as the tradition of gardening in a particular place.
To be more specific about plant palettes: I natu-
rally lean toward using a mostly endemic palette,
whether that be in New Zealand, Europe or the
tropics. That’s not to say I wouldn’t use exotics in
among them ... but [using endemics] was an opportu-
nity to study a new palette of plants. So I would begin
by researching local plant palettes. But really, the
most important thing if you’re going to do a garden of
any scale or significance is to find great nurseries and
see what they have. You can come up with an amazing
list but if it isn’t being produced it’s a wasted exercise.
In India we brought a few plants from Andhra
Pradesh, which is to the north of Kerala, but most of
what we planted around the house and buildings was
propagated from on site. The idea of the garden was
not to [make it] feel resort-like or too “gardened,” but
rather, just like you’ve “civilized” what’s naturally
occurring ... editing the existing planting and propa-
gating more of what we liked. Whereas in Morocco,
the exotic garden we planted was an illustration
of what people romanticize about planting in that
part of the world. To borrow a phrase from Tom, it was
a bit of a postcolonial horticultural knees-up, of
all the wonderful things you can plant in the
Mediterranean climate. We were fortunate enough to
meet a nurseryman called Sadek Tazi, who had a
nursery in Marrakech and Casablanca. I would often
go around to his nursery just to look at what he was
growing. One of the great things about working in
different climates is that you can challenge your own
rules and assumptions of planting design.You’re now back in Auckland and your practice is
about a year old. I’m interested in the New Zealand“... the most
important thing if
you’re going to do a
garden of any scale or
significance is to find
great nurseries and
see what they have.”INTERVIEW
2 358 MAY 2017 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AUSTRALIA