How to create a rainforest effect in an urban courtyard sanctuary

If you live on a small property and you’re too busy to mow the lawn, dig it up and plant it out. That’s what plantsman Roger Milne did when he and his wife Lesley moved to their 340-square metre property in St Heliers, Auckland, in the early 2000s.

At the time, Roger was phenomenally busy running a plant supply business. At first, he planted a sea of bromeliads, but it wasn’t long before the lifelong gardener introduced other plants to the mix.

Today it’s a carefully curated subtropical urban islet of begonias, osteospermums, clivias, orchids, star jasmine, ferns, heliconias, mondo grass and other sculptural plants, along with more than 300 bromeliads.

The Milnes have also made clever use of vertical space and three walls surrounding a roofed outdoor dining area are lined from top to bottom with more than 100 pots containing a wide range of plants including bromeliads, begonias, orchids, osteospermum and ferns. The effect is like being in an enclosed rainforest.

Amidst the green foliage are bold pops of red – one of Roger’s favourite colours – from flowering begonias, iresine and syngoniums. There’s no place for pastels in this garden. (Lesley mentions how Roger only just returned an imposter Marguerite daisy to the garden centre the day before, when it deviated from the plant label and turned out to be – quelle horreur! – cardigan puce-pink instead of red!)

Roger’s love of gardening was sown in the rich volcanic soil of a South Taranaki sheep farm, where he grew up. After World War II ended, his mother, a kindergarten teacher who’d lived all her life in Wellington, found herself newly married and living on a rehab farm in the rural area. “She was lonely so she immersed herself in the garden. Then one day a man called a landscape architect turned up and did a plan for her. I can still see it on graph paper and can remember the names of many of the plants on it,” says Roger. “I went to boarding school and when you came home you had two options: you either worked on the farm with the old man or got into the garden with Mother.”

The garden, which had 80 different camellias, the names of which Roger knew by heart, ended up winning the South Taranaki garden competition in 1970.

Unsurprisingly, after years spent farming and travelling overseas, Roger’s interest in plants led to him working as a landscaper, often doing planting but also sourcing plants for clients, which was not always an easy task.

“I was planting on the side of Lake Pupuke one day and it hit me that other people were probably having trouble sourcing plants too.”

He decided to set up his own plant-supply business. “Landscapers, contractors, councils, golf courses – anyone using plants in large numbers – would come to us with their plant list, then we would give the client a price to supply all of the plants for the project. If we needed to we would go to every grower nursery to get the numbers required.” Some jobs were massive, such as sourcing 30,000 griselinia – which happens to be Roger’s least favourite plant (“it dries out in the summer and dies in abundance”) – for one project. At one stage when star jasmine (“lovely scent and flowers from Labour Weekend through to Christmas”) became the rage in landscape architects’ planting schemes, Roger bought the entire stock from a Hobsonville grower. The only order that he remembers being impossible to fill was for a client in Japan wanting 60,000 black mondo grasses. “I got onto the blower and rang everybody I knew who grew it commercially and even scouted around talking to people who had significant amounts in their garden. But then I discovered the client was actually after 60,000 a month!”

Items collected from a career in the horticulture industry are present throughout the garden, including the odd sculpture, purchased during the heady days of the Ellerslie Flower Show in the 1990s (“when it first started, the traffic blocked the southern motorway”) and vintage terracotta pots rescued from the original Palmers Garden Centre in Glen Eden when it was purchased and the land redeveloped by Brierley’s in the late 80s. “A digger was driving over the top of all these old terracotta pots and smashing them, so I salvaged a few… as you do!”

Many ideas for the garden have come from the extensive overseas travel he and Lesley have done as national and international rowing umpires. An old wooden oar that Roger painted in Auckland Rowing Club’s red and black colours is a feature in the garden. A trip to Europe changed Roger’s mind about New Guinea impatiens, which he now grows. “I’d always been scathing of them and thought they were a bit cheap but we had the good fortune to go to a couple of fantastic gardens in northern Italy, and I saw great big containers of them on a series of steps. It completely changed my attitude!” Another travel-inspired plant is a Begonia coccinea, a plant they sat next to in a restaurant in Warsaw. “When I got home I ordered a whole box of them!”

Roger seldom buys plants these days, propagating mostly from cuttings, which he freely gives to others. “If you’re generous and give things away, they come back in spades.”

He’s particularly thrilled with a red African daisy cutting which came from a local cemetery. “If you want to get the good, tough plants, that’s the kind of place where you’re going to find them.”

The idea for the plant wall came from Roger’s time supplying plants to landscape designers who were creating outdoor garden rooms. He says the key to keeping his vertical jungle looking lush is regular watering, using a simple timer. Every pot has its own emitter, which mostly is disguised by foliage and blends into the green wall behind. At the height of summer the pots are watered for one minute every 12 hours but otherwise they generally receive one minute of water a day, apart from last year when it rained for months on end.

Unlike the pampered pots, the plants in the garden bed at the back of the house have to pretty much fend for themselves when it comes to watering. “If you can’t look after yourself, find another place to live,” says Roger.

The back garden is a well-curated, complementary mix of colours and forms. Green and purple-striped Strobilanthes dyerianus are neighbours with red heliconias, a striking cycad (Cycas revoluta), firespike (Odontonema strictum), bromeliads, Iresine herbstii and a Kermadec Island nīkau.

Tūī flock to a sugar water feeder in the back garden. “I have them on speed dial when visitors come,” Roger jokes, but he loves the way they provide a dynamic element to the garden.

The tūi also visit to drink the nectar from the yellow flowers of a Pittosporum cornifolium, which Roger reckons is an underutilised native plant. “When it’s in flower, it’s so fragrant. It should be used instead of griselinia.”

In the bush it grows as an epiphyte but Roger has pruned his into an archway. “Friends would come over for a drink and say, ‘Nice garden, Rog’, but then wouldn’t explore the rest of it, so I pruned it into an archway to create an entry point.”