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World video travel guide
News • New Zealand • 2011-03-30
Kiwi garden heading to Chelsea Show
New Zealand will be back at London’s Chelsea Flower Show in May 2011 for the first time in five years - with an exotic urban garden that focuses on diversity and sustainability.
Well-known Kiwi garden designer Xanthe White, who is a silver-gilt award winner at Chelsea and has won several medals at New Zealand’s Ellerslie Flower Show, has created ‘Te maara nui o maples’ - a unique Kiwi / Japanese blend.
White says her garden design features a naturalistic mix of exotic specimens and rare New Zealand plants new to the United Kingdom, and is designed to encourage diversity.
It’s the first time since 2006 that a New Zealand garden has been selected for the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show - considered the gardening world’s equivalent of Paris Fashion Week.
Urban garden
Xanthe White, who at 35 is one of New Zealand’s most highly regarded landscape designers, was in Christchurch working on a creation for the 2011 Ellerslie Flower Show when the February 22 earthquake struck.
She has been sponsored for the Chelsea Show by Tamata, a new horticultural company based in the Waikato region of New Zealand’s North Island, which specialises in cultivating and exporting Japanese maple trees.
The maples, which White describes as "tough but beautiful like All Blacks in tutus", are one of the most sought-after trees in the gardening world, and can sell for up to £2500.
In a move that White hopes will aid conservation of rare and endangered New Zealand plants, more than 1000 New Zealand natives, or two-thirds of the plants in the garden, have been sent to the Chelsea Flower Show where they will be introduced to fashionable British gardeners.
At the end of the show the plants will be auctioned and proceeds given to the Red Cross for earthquake relief in Christchurch and Japan.
Creative design
White’s creative design will be devoid of hard landscaping and has lush green walls enclosing the garden which flow down to a green "stream" of groundcover that "tumbles" around rocks and between rich red Japanese maple trees, a key focus of the garden.
The stream will feed into a wild garden of vibrant red, plum, and apricot flowers blended with rare New Zealand ferns and mosses, complementing the seasonal colours of the maple trees which have inspired the design.
White say sustainability and diversity is the theme of the garden as it has been in her work over the past five years.
"This combination of Japanese maples, New Zealand natives and English cottage garden flowers is new.
"The garden represents, poetically, the entanglement between nature and our gardens that cannot be separated. Gardens give us the opportunity to preserve and restore the diversity of nature that we have unwittingly sent into decline through indiscriminate habitation," she says.
Green walls
Like many of White’s designs, ‘Te maara nui o maples’ has no hard landscaping, just permeable surfaces like the green walls to encourage insect life.
She says she likes the concept of mixing rare, wild plant species with "crowd pleasers" and is on a mission to get people interested in plants.
"The more complex we can make our gardens, the better it is for birdlife, insects, and human life. We have to get people interested in plants and gardens - people and bees both like the flowers and colours and the seasonality of exotics," says White.
More than 157,000 visitors attend the sell out Chelsea Flower Show each year.
The year’s show runs from 24 - 28 May with media, celebrities and royal VIPs allowed access the day before. White will start building the Kiwi garden two weeks before the show.
Background: Xanthe White
New Zealand garden designer Xanthe White was awarded a coveted silver-gilt award at the 2006 Chelsea Flower Show for her 100% Pure New Zealand garden which represented contemporary New Zealand and the relationship between design and the natural environment.
The 35-year old landscape designer has won several other awards including gold, silver and People’s Choice at New Zealand’s Ellerslie Flower Show.
Xanthe White Design, based in Auckland, specialises in sustainable design projects. Her work ranges from small private commissions to major urban projects.
In 2009 she wrote her first book, Organic Vegetable Gardening.
Her most recent project is ‘Flowers for Christchurch’, a garden tribute and fundraiser for those affected by the Christchurch earthquake. White was in Hagley Park, Christchurch, building a garden for Ellerslie Flower Show when the quake struck on 22 February.
Background: Gardens in New Zealand
Throughout New Zealand there are many internationally and nationally significant gardens with vast collections of local flora - often in natural surroundings - and exotic species.
Most New Zealand towns have large public gardens, and many privately-owned estates are open for visits. There is also a year-round calendar of world-class international, national and regional garden festival events.
