First a farm block, then a holiday home, now a stunning coastal garden

When you are creating a garden in the midst of a magnificent landscape, there is no point trying to compete with what nature has provided.

That is Liz Morrow’s philosophy anyway. The celebrated coastal garden she has developed on the Takatu Peninsula near Matakana, about an hour north of Auckland, has been designed to complement its surroundings.

Omaio – it means place of peace, quiet and tranquillity – has an area of established native bush on its 18 acres and finishes at the water’s edge.

For 25 years, this was where Morrow came for holidays until 2005 when she decided to make it her permanent home. By then, there was a log cabin, tennis court and lawn area on what had originally been a farm block. Once she was living there, Morrow started to plan something very different from the garden of more than 300 roses that she had left behind in the city.

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And there was a great deal of careful planning involved. “It took me seven months to lay out the boundaries of the garden,” recalls Morrow. “I did it using lengths of garden hose and sticks, anything I could lay my hands on, and every day I was out there adjusting it. Before I bought a single plant, the boundaries of the garden had to be right. It’s the most important thing when you’re starting afresh, so I had a laser focus on it.”

What Morrow created with those lengths of hose was a series of flowing, rounded shapes that reflect the contours of the waves and the coastline. “It’s soft and easy on the eye, not harsh in any way,” she says. “That took a long time to achieve but I’ve never changed the boundaries since that day.”

By the middle of 2006, she was ready to start planting. Morrow didn’t put any sort of plan down on paper. Her vision was entirely in her head, and was inspired by what she instinctively felt was appropriate for the setting.

“The planting is simple and there’s a tremendous amount of repetition,” she explains. “We’ve got a pūriri tree here that’s estimated to be 1700 years old. We’ve got kauri that are 1000 years old, and rimu and tōtara, amazing native trees, so I didn’t want to do anything that would compete or argue with those. I don’t have a particular style and haven’t been influenced by other people or books. I got all my inspiration from my surroundings.”

Morrow has planted on a large scale, using thousands of trees and perennials, and mixing up natives and exotics. She chose shade lovers for the areas protected by the existing specimen trees and there are hundreds of plant breeder Dr Keith Hammett’s clivias in orange and cream, lots of ferns, liriope and hostas, hydrangeas and varieties of ligularia.

“It’s all evergreen except for the hydrangeas which get pruned, so it’s tiered,” explains Morrow. “You’ve got these huge old trees and then plants of different heights are layered beneath them.”

The colour palette is fairly muted although Morrow does like to use lots of yellow because it contrasts so well with green, plus she finds the shade uplifting. She put in 150 of two varieties of yellow hemerocallis – ‘Stella Bella’ and ‘Pony Ride’ – and says the daylilies with their large blooms and evergreen foliage are ideal for mass planting. “They do get a little bit of rust so I cut them back once a year but otherwise they’re pretty simple to look after.”

The exotics marry well with the native plantings which include coprosmas, pōhutukawa, cordylines, pittosporums, hebes and carex grass, as well as the historic trees.

Omaio is quite a formal garden but has its playful aspects. Near the tennis court there are ball shapes that include clipped pittosporum, Indonesian wood sculptures in teak and some of corrugated iron artist Jeff Thompson’s work. “It’s as though the balls have come off the tennis court and I’ve just placed them on the lawn,” says Morrow.

This is not a garden that is tended by teams of workers. Son Johny helped with the hard landscaping and pathways at the beginning. Now, Lance Michell takes care of the lawns and Stephen Boyle looks after the heavier work.

At 76, Liz has promised her son and her daughter Jane that she won’t go haring up and down ladders anymore. However, she is the one watering with a hose over the drier summers and she does the propagating, planting, clipping and hand-pruning herself. “I’m out there for hours and hours every day,” she says.

“In summer I’m still out there at 8pm. It’s my gymnasium – it’s Pilates, it’s the golf course; I don’t need to do any of those other activities. And I find it a healthy lifestyle. It’s therapeutic and relaxing to get out in the garden each day. I don’t have a list of things that have to be done. It’s just random… where will I go today?”

Omaio was named a Garden of International Significance by the New Zealand Gardens Trust seven years ago, and it is a popular destination for visitors. Morrow, who loves sharing what she has created, also runs a bed-and-breakfast.

But there is never any last minute panic to get the property looking perfect before visitors descend. “Under normal weather conditions I don’t have to rush out and weed, because it’s always immaculate. I’m extremely particular about maintenance.”

This past summer, of course, has been far from normal with massive rainfall and cyclonic winds. Morrow’s garden was hit pretty hard in the storms, with trees down, plants burnt by the salt spray in the wind and pots in the courtyard damaged.

While it was hard to see such destruction, Morrow’s response was to train her laser focus on the cleanup. “The plant material will bounce back. I’m not worried.”

Most areas of the garden have matured and reached their potential now and Morrow isn’t planning any major change.

Then again, no garden is ever completely finished and she is busy propagating to fill gaps where plants have been lost to the weather.

“We had a shockingly wet winter and spring,” she says. “I lost hebes and some coprosma. They just got saturated in the soil, so they’ve been removed. There are little gaps like that, not that anyone would notice but I’ll look at planting again over the winter.

“We added 75 metres of Draincoil before Christmas so I think that’s going to alleviate the problem of the wet area and I can put hebes back there again.”

Morrow’s koru-shaped raised vegetable garden, made of two layers of marine ply, also had an encounter with a tree in the storms but other than that she says the ply is holding together well and the vege patch is small but productive.

When she talks about Omaio, Morrow uses words like peace and tranquillity a great deal. She says some of her visitors have been moved to tears by the garden.

“I think it might be because of the solitude, the peace, the big trees. It has a certain spirit. I sense that and a lot of other people do too. I consider it a real compliment that it moves people in that way.”

The garden is open by appointment. Go to omaio.co.nz.