Combining Home & Garden

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31412, 4 July 1967, Page 2

Combining Home & Garden

Landscape gardening is rapidly gaining popularity in Christchurch and a young woman who believes the garden is an extension of the home is busy giving gardens a new look.

She is Miss Jane WynnWilliams, who recently graduated from Lincoln College with a diploma in horticulture. Simplicity, scale, and unity are the three main principles of her profession, and the factors she considers every gardener should keep in mind. Although landscape design

is often thought of as a means of producing a showpiece Miss Wynn-Williams dsigns gardens for living. “The garden is a place to escape from the outside world; it’s to be lived in and should be pleasant and private,” said Miss Wynn-Wil-liams, who spends three days a week drawing plans. She is the only professional landscape designer employed by a garden centre in Christchurch.

Although she finds working with a ready-made garden as much a challenge as beginning with an open section, the latter is the ideal situation. Clients often ask her advice before building begins and she is then able to “place” the house in the best situation and blend the garage and any outbuildings into the general plan. Canterbury’s flat terrain offers as much scope for her talents as hillside sections and she enjoys planning for small areas.

To produce a garden which is pleasing to the eye and relaxing, Miss Wynn-Williams avoids harsh vertical and horizontal lines. To break the solid line of a backdrop of evergreen trees and shrubs she introduces deciduous varieties for colour and shade, and some grey foliage for Interest.

“We have many native plants which are very versatile and suitable for our climate which many people are not aware of,” she said. “I’m always conscious of leaf shape, it can often produce an interesting contrast.” In her opinion bedding plants are not part of landscaping but she always allows space for the home owner to plant “some favourite bits and pieces” which introduce colour.

She opposes “overloading” a garden with rock formations, which, unless much care is taken, can clash with the house structure and clutter the section.

Scree gardens, shrubbery planted among light shingle or pebbles in the Japanese style, also required much thought and skill. “They can look most attractive, but have to be planted very discreetly. Simplicity is the key,” she said.

For homemakers who dislike mowing lawns, and have problems disposing of the clippings. Miss Wynn-Wil-liams has a solution. “There are more forms of carpeting than just lawn,” she said. “Concrete, brick, pebbles, scree, concrete with surface texture, and lowgrowing plants are excellent substitutes.”