Garden Visit: Beverley McConnell’s 12 Acres of Eden

Garden visit beverley. A brief context to set expectations.

Garden visit beverley: Quick notes

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.

Garden visit beverley comes up here to connect ideas for clarity.

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.