Garden outtakes

One of our favourite annual features is our Landscapes special, which we publish every February. This year, as usual, we found a fantastic range of gardens established by people with very different philosophies of gardening. Architect Pete Bossley and his partner, artist Miriam van Wezel, favour the highly considered and structured approach, which has resulted in a garden of elegant restraint at their home in the Auckland suburb of Westmere.

These photographs are by Mark Smith.

Here's a view of the garden and its pond, which also shows the clever way it borrows views of neighbouring foliage, making for a park-like outlook.


This shot shows Miriam in one of her favourite spots, a concrete bench with a view of the garden that retains solar heat, making it a warm place to sit on cooler evenings.

The garden is on a sloping site, which Pete and Miriam have carefully divided up with a series of small retaining walls that also manage the way people walk through the area. Pete is a master of moving people elegantly through spaces in his architecture, so it makes sense that he applies the same philosophy and rigour in his garden.

And I put this final shot in for Pete, who complained the other day that we didn't show enough of the oioi reeds that dominate their front yard, one of his favourite parts of the garden. We don't have a shot of the whole front yard, but most of it is covered with these reeds, which Miriam has tied up in ponytails like you can see in this photograph.

We'll run more outtakes from other gardens featured in the current issue in the coming days.