No time flat
By Sarah Foy - Taranaki Daily News
Joyce Young on the blue seat near the "cool" garden.
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Gardening & Lifestyle
It began with red. A showy hot garden took its cue from the cheery colour on the garage door. But flamboyant foliage and flowers were not to dominate the whole garden.
Down the side was the cool garden: a long curvy patch notable for its blues, whites and yellows. It leads to a royal blue seat sheltered by ponga and brushwood. In turn, the "shelter" hid the productive vege patch and a corner housing bits and bobs: the pottery planters, the squat bird sculptures, a small shed and an old wheelbarrow bursting with strawberries.
Its creator is no incidental gardener. Joyce Young - potter, floral artist and long-time rhodo festival gardener - moved from her property in Oakura just over 18 months ago. Out there, she owned three-quarters of an acre. In town, she has downsized to 480 square metres and a brick unit. In that year and a half, she's transformed her "bit of dirt" from flat, mediocre section to fabulous, floral-filled wonder.
Joyce opened her Oakura garden gates to the public for 20 successive years. This year, she was back in the festival with her transformed town patch. It's an inspirational makeover. I live nearby and when plants began appearing on the roadside, and a peek through the fence revealed lush growth and organised garden beds, it was clear this person possessed great horticultural nous. It was no surprise to discover Joyce, 79, was the new owner, She's a jolly person to interview. She chats easily, shares much detail, flits from subject to subject, and gladly gives opinions.
"One comes to an age and I had a medical condition - my hip was out, my bones were out, I must be getting a little older, I thought. I decided I'd better downsize and look for a bit of land."
She did nursing training in New Plymouth in 1949, so coming back to town was like coming full circle. But she's not a Taranaki girl. She grew up in Tauranga, the eldest of seven children. Her father farmed and ran a market garden. Along with Charlie Cameron, the Tauranga Borough council gardener, Joyce's father started the primary school garden competitions for town and country schools.
"That's where we evolved and developed our garden skills," she recalls. "There's a border out there [in my garden] that in 1939, Charlie Cameron gave me the original of."
The border is feverfew, also known by its botanical name of Pyrethrum parthenium. Delicate lime leaves sit below daisy-like flowers; Joyce grows it as a low hedge, clipping it with scissors and replanting it afresh every year.
"That has followed me everywhere - it's one of my childhood memories. And I've always had a vege garden."
When Joyce and her late husband, Stan Young, were married, the couple farmed near Opunake. In 1969, they bought a beekeeping business in the coastal township. After 10 years, they shifted the beekeeping venture and themselves to Oakura, where Joyce remained for 30 years.
They built a two-storey house, a honey shed and the garden, which developed into a semiformal delight. In between a job as "apprentice girl" to her husband, the beekeeper, she built up a flourishing pottery business and was active in floral art clubs. Floristry began as a hobby in the 1950s.
"I used to belong to the New Plymouth Floral Art Club and from there, I formed one in Opunake."
Often she travelled around the lower North Island conducting demonstrations and by the mid-'60s was an Interflora florist, arranging for flowers to be dispatched around the world.
"I used to do posies at school. I was taught how to make a wreath for the headmaster's mother when she died. That early flower arranging has formed me. I like to have my flowers, like to have something to pick in the garden."
What also formed her creative streak was a prize at a Hawera horticultural show.
"I won a points prize and a pot from a local potter. His wife was demonstrating pottery at the spring show and all the way home I kept saying to myself, I'm going to be a potter.
"All you could get for floral arrangements was black and white Crown Lynn vases that leaked. I wanted something else.
"I went to the library and read lots of books and met up with a lady in Hawera who did pottery, but I'm pretty well self-taught."
For many years she tutored pottery at Opunake High School to school students and night-class adults.
Her first kiln was built from the fire bricks salvaged from old dairy factories around the coast. These days, those same bricks form borders around her garden beds and her kiln is a modern model in a small shed near the front door of her new home. She sells pottery from her conservatory. She's been dubbed the pukeko lady, but many birds - tui, morepork, herons, silvereyes, mynahs - provide inspiration. Visitors to her festival garden this year cleaned out the shop shelves, so she's busy firing more stock. She also paints.
Being back in the festival was satisfying, Joyce says.
"I want to help people, show what you can do it after downsizing from a large property. This was really done in about four months."
She moved in March 2008 and got to work straight away. Among the early tasks was sowing mustard seed to provide a green crop to feed the garden. She also added extra height to her fence by securing oriental fence panels to the top of the existing timber. That provided more space for clematis to scramble up. The fence, two new pergolas and other timber rails were painted a deep green.
Joyce also sprayed the front lawn: Three doses of Roundup were needed to eradicate the rampant kikuyu grass. "It was weed, it was weed, it was weed," she emphasises.
Five shrubs - two griselinia, a pseudopanax, a yellow rhododendron and a vitrea - were kept in the garden. The rest went.
Then work was curtailed for some months while Joyce recovered from a hip operation. (Still, two days before the June op, she was out digging postholes. "The neighbours will tell you," she says with a laugh.)
However, before Joyce moved to New Plymouth, garden plans were already fermenting. While her Oakura house was on the market, she visited her Australian-based daughter. In that six- week holiday, she drew up rough garden plans, transposing them on top of black and white photos of her house to be.
"I wondered what I could do to make my bit of dirt a bit different. It started with the red door of the carshed. From there I decided to have hot colours out front."
That vibrant garden surrounds the small lawn - now soft and fine. The kiln shed is disguised behind a ponga wall that also separates the front from the back garden.
The back is dominated by the curving colour of the cool garden and no space is wasted. Under the eaves near the front, Joyce has planted a garden of succulents and bromeliads. Out back, valuable shade is snatched by hostas, arisaema and liriope. Joyce retained the existing raised vege garden at the property's rear, but added a second productive patch where once there were weeds. Pavers interspersed with mondo grass separate the two gardens.
Even fruit trees have found a spot in her compact section, A columnar Ballerina apple rears up near broccoli and a Splendour apple will be espaliered across the back fence. There's also a bay tree in a pot.
Swapping a country for a town garden means being selective. At Oakura, Joyce boasted many clematis, hostas and spring bulbs.
"People say they can see I'm an artist, a potter. It comes together without you realising how you have done it."
