Rhododendron venture just keeps growing

BY JON MORGAN

Rhododendrons have usurped sheep and cattle as the big earners at New Zealand's first private gardens to open to the public. Jon Morgan reports from Kimbolton.

Rodney Wilson recalls the day his parents opened the family garden to the public for the first time. It was 1970 and no-one had tried anything like it before.

"The first people started arriving pretty early in the day and within a couple of hours the road was chock- a-block with cars. There must have been 500 to 600 people.

"My brother Graham and I were on the gate and, boy, did we get abused when we held out our hands for 50c. Those townies in their Humber 80s, Vauxhall Vivas and Minis had driven all that way and some of them thought they should get in for nothing."

But the family survived the chaos of that first experience and opened again the next year at Labour Weekend, better prepared for the influx of visitors.

In the almost 40 years since, the rhododendron gardens at Cross Hills, Kimbolton, have grown to encompass more than seven hectares and 2000 varieties of the tree-sized shrubs, the colours ranging from translucent whites and creams, to yellows, mauves, oranges, pinks and rich deep reds.

What was a sheep and beef farm with a pretty garden has become a garden, nursery, cafe and mail order plant business with a farm attached. Add in offshoot businesses selling patented aluminum labels and an innovative way to tackle thrips and the Wilson family's income is two- thirds from rhododendrons and tourism and one-third from sheep and cattle. It is exactly what Rodney's parents, Eric and Merle, had envisaged.

Eric bought the farm in 1938 and then met Merle, whose family owned land that later became part of Cross Hills. In 1951, they built a new home and included rhododendrons in the garden.

The big flowering shrubs, which originated in the Central Asian mountains, thrived in the cool damp Kimbolton climate 540 metres above sea level.

In 1968, Eric returned from a trip to England and Europe enthusing about the public gardens he had seen.

"Dad came home and said, 'Wool's falling away, farming's not going to be good for ever - let's diversify'," Rodney remembers. "That was him - always thinking ahead."

They had already sampled the tourism business when they joined with two other farms in the mid-60s as New Zealand's first home-stays, hosting a busload of visitors at a time. They decided to become the first private garden to open to the public. That first day, the crowds wandered around the home garden and a newly established garden created by pulling out an old orchard and carting in hundreds of cubic metres of soil to form hills and valleys.

Visitors gazed at 150 resplendent rhododendrons and other native and exotic trees and shrubs. They returned in bigger numbers the next year and it was decided to plant a large collection. Opening times were extended to a week to cater for the growing numbers and extra land was taken from the farm to add to the gardens.

With a dearth of flat land on the farm, a small property nearby was bought to house a nursery. Rhododendrons were bought through the New Zealand Rhododendron Society and raised from seed. Many varieties were imported from Britain, Germany, the United States and Canada.

Eric and Rodney taught themselves how to grow and care for their plants, experimenting with propagation techniques and designing new ways to circumvent the problems they encountered. A method of grafting invented by Eric 25 years ago is still used to produce what are believed to be the world's only standard rhododendrons.

The mid-80s to the mid-90s were boom years and visitor numbers peaked at 12,000 a year. They opened the still-expanding gardens at the end of September and did not close till the end of May. At the October- November peak the queues of cars grew and parking moved from the roadside to inside the farm.

By then Rodney and his wife, Faith, had taken over the business, though Eric and Merle could be often found in the gardens planting plants, weeding or deadheading the spent blooms and chatting to visitors. As the visitors asked about the shrubs they had seen, the Wilsons began to grow them for sale. By the mid-90s sales had risen to 8000 plants a year and a big mail-order business had grown.

But so had the bookwork. The first sales were jotted down in notebooks and then extended to a system of card files. When Rodney and Faith began taking hundreds of loose cards to sort into order while on holiday they realised there had to be a better way.

It was a computer. In 1984, an IBM was bought. It cost $18,000, the average annual take-home pay in those days, and boasted 256 kilobytes of memory. They persevered with it through various upgrades for 10 years before buying a new one. Now, the business has six computers to cope with a variety of tasks.

With the advent of six-day and then seven-day shopping, visitor numbers and plant orders have fallen away. They still open from September to May and queues of cars still turn up at Labour Weekend. These days, the $10 entry fee is handed over without demur.

The gardens have continued to grow. Azaleas and conifers have been given their own areas, a waterfall with ornamental pools has been created and a maze using 1000 camellia bushes with 30 varieties, has been built. The latest attraction was a Country Fair held in November, featuring 65 stalls selling a wide range of home-made produce, that drew 1700 people.

Four families are supported by the business. Rodney and Faith's son Scott, who has trained as a nurseryman, has returned to the farm and he and his wife, Angela, have a year- old son, Henry. Two other workers share office and gardening work.

The gardens' busiest time in October-November dovetails with the wider farm work. By then, docking and shearing has been completed. The farm's busiest time in January-February, with weaning and haymaking, coincides with the gardens' quiet period.

On the farm, texels have gradually taken over from romneys as the Wilsons have looked to move to hardier, meatier, easy-care sheep. The lambing percentage has lifted 10 per cent to 120 per cent, which Rodney says is enough for the farm's exposed steep hills.

Only 40ha of the 240ha farm is cultivatable but they manage to finish the male lambs by the end of April and grow 700 females through winter on a swede crop before selling 250. The other 450 are kept as replacements, with half being mated as hoggets. One hundred angus steers are bought each year, with two-thirds being finished on the farm.

Rodney is interested in alternative fertilisers and what they can do to release the huge amount of phosphate he feels is locked up in the soil and to return clover to the pastures. He is experimenting with Probitas, the lime and silica-based soil conditioner developed by Waihi farmer Ewan Campbell.

The farm's next phase is to mill some of the trees that have reached maturity. Rodney has bought a portable mill and it is a task he is looking forward to. All the buildings on the farm and in the gardens have been made from macrocarpa timber, cut and milled on the farm.

"There's nothing more satisfying than to build something from a tree you've planted and cut down," he says. Conservationists might find it a strange comment from someone with such an obvious love of gardening, but he says simply: "You can always plant another."

At 60, about the age his father was when he began the gardens, he isn't ready to retire yet.

"I'm a time and motion man," he says. "I'm always looking for ways to do things more efficiently."

He takes after Eric in that regard. Eric invented a revolving platform to make treating ewes with footrot easier, an adjustable drenching race and mothering-on pens which were sold at A&P Shows, among other gadgets. Not to be outdone, Rodney came up with a double swinging gate that won an award at the second National Fieldays in 1969.

On the farm are two hay sheds that are a monument to the ingenuity of both father and son. One is a rickety old thing hanging over the edge of a cliff. Eric had the idea of, instead of baling the hay, sweeping it into the shed and letting it fall in a heap to the lower level.

The design has been repeated by Rodney nearby, using more modern materials. The hay is swept into the shed and stacks on itself over a height of 15 metres.

From the top it is fed out into racks to waiting cattle. Together, the two barns store the equivalent of 2000 bales in this way, saving on baling machinery and labour. It is an idea Rodney thinks is an original.

With Scott taking over the farm work, Rodney wants to spend more time on artistic endeavours. He has a hankering to be a sculptor. His workshop is a muddle of scraps of wood and metal, power tools and Eric's old saws and planes.

Projects, such as a galvanized metal foot for fences that he and Scott invented, are yet to see the light of day.

Even though the shed is tucked away among other storage, admin and packing buildings it has a strange magnetic quality. "It's not unusual to find the odd bloke nosing around in there while his wife is outside viewing the gardens. How they sniff it out is a mystery known only to men," he says with a smile.

- © Fairfax NZ News