Winning effort

Last summer, Bev Hamilton won a national gardening contest. Sarah Foy takes a tour around her Inglewood garden a year on to check if gardening stardom has changed the way she plants and plans.

For Bev Hamilton, finding out about her win in the nationwide Housing New Zealand Garden Awards was a bit like finding - and opening - a Christmas present before you're supposed to.

She was announced the grand winner in early April after a nationwide contest over the summer to find top gardens created by state housing tenants. But the unofficial word got to her before the official one did.

"That was funny," Bev recalls with her trademark throaty laugh. "A woman out at Opunake rang me up and said, It's so good you have won it. I got second in Taranaki. I said, That's nice. I came first - you know, in Taranaki. And she said, No, you've won the whole thing. It had come over the radio and she'd heard it."

Bev remembers lots of yelling and screaming - on her part. That was 8am. About 9am, the New Plymouth office of Housing NZ rang to tell her the good news.

"I had to pretend I hadn't heard, but I was still over the moon, so it wasn't hard to be excited."

Bev's win last year earned her a $500 Mitre 10 voucher, and she invested much of the money in expensive stuff: garden sprays, tools and fertiliser.

Some time later, she got a call from gardening personality Maggie Barry, the head judge in the competition, which is run biennially.

"She made me feel right at ease. She said to me, Go for it and enjoy it because then it's over."

Maggie didn't pass on any advice, but during their natter, Bev says they agreed that tiring of the garden was perfectly normal.

"Sometimes I won't touch it for three or four weeks . . . but in spring and the beginning of summer, I spend a long time out there - up to about four hours each day."

Once she found a gift card in her letterbox containing a $25 Palmers Gardenworld voucher. It came from an anonymous donor involved with the nationwide Palmers group. The woman had driven past and been so impressed with the standard of garden that she wanted to acknowledge its owner.

"I wanted to write and thank her, but she didn't want me to know her name, so I bought a rose and I call it Mystery Lady."

Despite her off days, there's nothing lackadaisical about Bev's approach to gardening.

She's a small person who laughs a lot, sometimes doubling over in hilarity. Her capacity for hard work is obvious, given the size and development of her section and her worn hands.

Bev has lived in her home 11-and-a-half years. It's a modest, semi-detached weatherboard house: cream exterior, blue window trim and a new tin roof. Her section is big in comparison to her house and slopes away at the front, allowing her to gaze from the living room down to the roadside.

The view from the front at any angle is - overwhelmingly - one of colour and flower. Busy, cottage-style garden beds curve around the elongated front lawn. In the middle, a mass of blue bog sage flowers towers up from a circle enclosed by box hedging.

Trees provide height and structure. At the back, it's easy care, with more grass and shrubbery than blossoming garden border.

But when she moved in, after shifting back to Taranaki to be closer to family, the section was bare and featureless. Not only that, much of the soil was clay.

"I had not done a lot of gardening . . . I was learning.

"My sister-in-law has green fingers. She's gardened all her life and she advised me and guided me a lot. You have to give credit where credit is due."

In the early days, rain, frosts and the clay soil conspired against Bev.

"I would plant something like pansies and then I'd go out and they would have disappeared - they'd been washed away. I used to have little rivers running down [the garden] after three days of rain."

Her sister-in-law suggested the laying of concrete paths, so using pieces broken up in the reconstruction of her driveway, Bev made half-a-dozen paths. They served a dual purpose. Bev was able to access the garden beds she was slowly planting and the hard surfaces helped stabilise the soil. However, before the paths were laid, a friend rotary-hoed the garden. Bev was left with a section covered in grass sods.

"It did look funny. It took me a month to break up the sods and I sort of started from there."

The vast majority of her plants are freebies.

"I have been given so much stuff, or I've taken cuttings from friends. Over time, everything just multiplied."

Many of her plants are perennials - sedums, anemones, granny's bonnets, salvias, irises, canna lilies, Michaelmas daisies and phlox. She's broken them up and redistributed them among the various beds.

What she has forked out money for has been the trees. Initially, Bev crammed them into the front because she wanted privacy and shelter.

"When I came here, I couldn't get used to being so open [to the street], so I planted trees - boy, did I plant trees. But in winter, you lose a lot of sun in this part of Inglewood, so then I realised it was the trees."

In a corner nearest to her living room, a lavish cherry once spread its limbs. It looked beautiful in springtime but nothing grew under it, Bev says.

"It was shade, all shade, so I got it taken out and, wow, it was a shock when I came home and saw how bare it was."

All up, seven trees got the heave-ho. Her garden is so full, it's hard to imagine where seven trees would have fitted in.

These days the trees range from the small umbrella-shaped weeping silver pear to larger specimens like maple, flowering cherries and an unidentified burgundy-leaved example that could be an acacia.

"It's taken eight years to actually get it right," Bev says. "To be honest, the first six or seven years, you had a lot of ups and downs - things were dying and I had to learn what to plant where."

She learned, for example, that pansies were no good for damp ground near the front, where all the water drained. Instead, she planted bullrushes and grass-like shrubs.

One of her success stories has been a bougainvillea that snakes along the front wall of her house, throwing out gorgeously garish flowers. When Bev bought it, she dug the plant into the ground still encased in its plastic pot. There it stayed. Incredibly, the medium pot supports a web of branches and flowers that sit on nails or twine through a trellis. (Housing NZ rules state that no plants can be attached to the house).

The back of her property is flatter than the front.

"It only takes me half a day to get round here," says Bev, explaining the easy-care nature of this area. A group of native shrubs, such as korokia, are tucked into one corner. Silverbeet and rhubarb - the only veges she grows - are on the same side as a hedge of hydrangeas. Opposite, a mature buddleia tree lures the butterflies. There are also a pittosporum, a pyramid-shaped holly tree and two viburnum, fashioned attractively into small standard trees. Bev is renovating the area underneath the viburnum.

"Originally I was going to have box hedging here, but that costs a fortune - I think I'll put it back into lawn, so those two [standards] will stand out. If I don't like it, I'll just change it again," she says with a chuckle.

Winning the New Zealand contest hasn't made Bev hungry for more. She's already ruled out a 2011 entry, saying someone else should get a chance. A burst of fame in the gardening world has left her unaltered. But her garden still shines, proof that a clever creator is at work.

Nearly 2000 gardens were entered in the 2008-2009 Housing NZ awards. Housing NZ aims to recognise pride and effort tenants put into taking care of properties. Bev won the general garden section of the Taranaki competition, where 173 entries were received, as well as being named the overall winner. Sarah Foy was one of the judges for Taranaki.

- © Fairfax NZ News