Tag: Fountains

Garden Visit: Beverley McConnell’s 12 Acres of Eden – Gardenista

Only a handful of gardens around the globe are real must-visits for garden lovers. Ayrlies, on a large country estate near Whitford, southeast of Auckland on New Zealand’s North Island, is one.

This masterpiece was begun more than 60 years ago by Beverley and Malcolm McConnell. As a young couple, they purchased a large rolling pastoral terrain, meant for cattle, to start their family. They were amateur gardeners with big ideas. They began by turning three acres into a garden, and over the years it grew to 12 acres of heavily planted informal gardens, with several ponds and water features.

Beverley has the eye, and a natural sense of color, texture, and combinations. Her late husband, Malcolm, who headed up a large engineering and construction company, was keenly interested in water. And several years in they hired Oliver Briers, knowing it would take more than just the two of them to realize their dreams. Working by Bev’s side, he helped bring a sense of design to the property, now a lush garden of Eden.

Beverley has been called the Vita Sackville-West of our day, working with a sub-tropical palette of exotics and native plants. Building a garden like this takes a lifetime, and to have a soul it needs an artist at the helm. Now in her 80s, she is still a vital force. If creating the ornamental garden wasn’t enough, in 2000 she embarked on a 35-acre wetlands project to restore five acres of swampland that connects the garden to the Hauraki Gulf.

Photography by Ingalls Photography.

Above: The ponds and water features at Ayrlies were all created by Malcolm, who was fascinated by the effects of water in a garden. Here, tree ferns and aquatic plants create a lush scene, somehow making the pond look as if it’s been there forever.

Above: Many areas of the garden are delineated by theme, plant selection, and color. In the Lurid Border, Beverley plays with hot Gauguin-like colors: orange day lilies ‘Flaming Nora’, black-leafed castor bean, and variegated canna with striking orange blooms, underplanted with silver stachys, or lamb’s ear.

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January 28, 2026
Before & After: A Modern Courtyard Garden for a Historic Home – Gardenista

For their historic home in the enclave of Clifton in Bristol, UK, an energetic couple wanted an informal, biodiverse, and sustainable landscape where their grandchildren and dogs could romp. They called on landscape architecture firm Artisan Landscapes to come up with their dream garden, but the firm recognized that the grand Georgian-style home imposed a degree of formality on its landscape that couldn’t be ignored. As a compromise, they kept the classic formal courtyard layout and overlaid “soft, naturalistic meadow planting” to fulfill the clients’ desires for an environmentally friendly garden.

Join us for a tour.

Photography courtesy of Artisan Landscapes.

Above: “The homeowners are lucky enough to have both a front and a back garden,” say the architects, “so we could devote the entire back garden to ‘garden,’ while the front garden has a large lawn for the dogs and grandkids, a greenhouse, and informal borders of vegetables intermingled with perennials.” The back garden, they say, is a more intimate space, “although the grandchildren love whirling about the paths.”

Above: The sunken octagon is a focal point of the garden but was also one of the more challenging features to install. “There was a one-meter-thick piece of limestone bedrock located under it that had to be removed to install drainage,” say the architects.

Before

Above: The courtyard had a generous footprint, but the neglected landscape was uninspiring.

After

Above: An antique urn is a focal point in the garden. For more inspiration, see Landscaping: 8 Ideas to Add Antiques Artfully to Any Garden.

Above: A long, slim reflecting pool is one of two major water features in the project. “They have a combined volume of five thousand cubic liters,” say the architects, and both are controlled by pumps on remote-control switches.

Above: Salvia surrounds the pool. For everything you need to know about growing it, see Salvia: A Field Guide to Planting, Care & Design.

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November 8, 2024
Chelsea Flower Show: The Best Ideas From 2024’s Show Gardens

The one certainty at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show is an endless stream of covetable plants and clever ideas—this year there’s heaps of innovation as designers lead the way in rethinking materials, construction and how to create resilient, future-proof gardens. Here are a few of the ideas we took note of at the 2024 show.

Photography by Clare Coulson, except where noted.

Deconstruct your planters.

Above: Chelsea first-timer Giulio Giorgi’s inventive design—offset with beautiful silvery resilient planting—won the inaugural RHS Environmental Innovation Award. He used 3D-printed terracotta bricks to build curvaceous planters that were inspired by keyhole gardens. The pieces are simply stacked together and held in place with poles—no concrete or power tools necessary—and can be easily rebuilt when he moves it to its eventual home. Photograph by Gary Morrisroe.

Just add water.

Above: Designer Tom Bannister illustrates how much impact you can achieve in a tiny space with his Ecotherapy container garden, a sensuous and immersive space with a hanging green wall providing the backdrop to a rill and a sequence of pools crafted from hyper-tufa containers. A small bench provides a place to sit and take in the soothing scene, surrounded by lush planting with ferns, hostas, tiarella and rodgersia.

Focus on foliage first.

Above: There’s always one garden that’s almost impossible to walk away from, and Tom Stuart-Smith’s transporting design for the National Garden Scheme certainly ticks that box. A stone trough, a cleft oak building, chairs that aged in his own Hertfordshire garden for years—these elements all add to the soothing aesthetic, but it’s the nearly entirely green and white planting that immediately lowers the heart rate. Exquisite azaleas, seas of foxgloves are played off against the most beautiful foliage from Aralia cordata, Farfugium japonicum, Maianthemum and the delicate woodlander Saruma henryi—all of which are a potent reminder to focus on foliage first when planning planting schemes. (See The Maestro’s Return: Tom Stuart-Smith at the Chelsea Flower Show.)

Patchwork your paving.

Above: The spirit of Sarah Price’s trail-blazing garden from last year’s Chelsea looms large at this year’s show from plant choices (fragrant Elaeagnus, beautiful pines, painterly iris) to the focus on handcrafted details, but it’s her patchwork paving, in which irregular paved paths sit alongside deconstructed gravels, that popped up time and again. Here in Ann-Marie Powell’s Octavia Hill garden, it provides the perfect foil to an intensely colorful planting, rich with foxgloves, irises, verbascums, geums and swathes of poppies.

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May 23, 2024