A Fragrance Garden: Floresta Fragrant Gardens
(Page 2 of 3)
December/January 1994
By Portia Meares
Despite the garden’s unstudied appearance, it reflects an artist’s eye for mixing colors, textures, and heights of the plants. Garden furniture and carefully placed statuary enhance the effect. Birds have their houses, a bath, and feeders. Old urns are filled to the brim with sedums and herbs. Walking down one of those narrow paths, we came upon a thyme-covered bench placed to catch the late afternoon sun. The rest of the day, it is almost hidden in the shade of an arbor of white clematis.
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All seems to sing out, “Welcome! Feast your eyes, touch, feel, smell, hear.”
Olive Dunn has been surrounded by flowers and fragrance throughout her life. Her family were florists, and she herself spent thirty years as a floral designer. Since she retired, she has devoted most of her time to this garden. Olive is an active member of a local herb society and has worked to promote and encourage the growth of herb groups in New Zealand. She is also a writer; in 1989, she wrote Delights of a Fragrant Garden in New Zealand, published by Random Century and now out of print.
Olive, an elderly woman who wears her age well, has a sparkle in her eye and a tendency to giggle. She is softspoken, calm, and confident, and she clearly loves what she’s doing. She welcomed us with buoyant cheer and an evident pride in her garden.
Olive believes that gardens should be planted with “aromatic herbs to purify the air immediately around us.” Hers stimulates and relaxes her at the same time, and she wonders, “How can people get tired and bored when they’ve got all these lovely things?” Gardening is more than the work that goes into it, she says: it is a therapeutic and spiritual process that is always evolving, never completed.
Much of this garden’s sensuous appeal comes from the emphasis on fragrance and Olive’s choice of herbs and shrubs. In addition to varieties of thyme, we found fragrant dianthuses, lemon verbena, marjorams, lavenders, rosemaries in both upright and prostrate forms, several sages, monardas, fennel, scented geraniums, as well as shrub borders containing daphnes, balm of gilead, flowering cherries, boronia, viburnums, honeysuckles, and roses that were at their peak of bloom.
A private driveway running from the street side of Floresta to a house fronting the next street, where Olive’s brother lives, is a further excuse for filling edges with more shrubs and flowers. Olive plants with an eye to upkeep, steering clear of demanding, labor-intensive plantings.