Australia and New Zealand Around the World in 80 Gardens

I believe that a really good way

to understand a culture is through its gardens.

This is an extraordinary journey to visit 80 inspiring gardens from all over the world.

Some are very well known like the Taj Mahal or the Alhambra.

And I'm also challenging my idea of what a garden actually is.

So I'm visiting gardens that float on the Amazon a strange fantasy in the jungle.

As well as the private homes of great designers,

and the desert flowering in a garden and wherever I go,

I shall be meeting people that share my own passion for gardens

on my epic quest to see the world through 80 of its most fascinating and beautiful gardens.

200 years ago, this was regarded as the most remote and the strangest place on the planet.

And I shall be taking a journey across this vast continent,

looking at its landscape and above all its gardens,

to see how it's evolved from colonisation

to gradual use and acceptance of the native flora,

to become the independent, modern society that it is today.

My journey begins in Sydney, where the British first settled over 200 years ago.

I'll then head inland to Alice Springs and a garden in the heart

of the continent's vast burning desert,

before I turn south to the garden city of Melbourne.

Finally, I'll cross the Tasman Sea

to New Zealand to look at gardens filled with their native plants.

By the edge of an unremarkable beach on a huge natural bay in

the South East of the country, is a very special plant.

This is a banksia, and its strangeness to British eyes

and its name acknowledges the beginning of Britain's colonial occupation of this continent.

The stone obelisk behind me marks the spot where Cook made

his landfall after his epic voyage.

And the bay that he stopped in, he called "Stingray Bay"

because he found so many of those fish in these waters.

But travelling with Cook was a young botanist called Joseph Banks,

who went on to be the first curators of Kew, and one of the great figures in botanical history.

Banks found so many new and extraordinary plant species here,

around the edge of the bay, that Cook renamed it in his honour and he called it Botany Bay.

The banksia is only one of the many thousands of spectacular native plants

that thrive nowhere else on earth but here.

It was the sheer number of unique species that made the plant's namesake, Joseph Banks,

realise that this was more than a new island, this was a whole new continent.

They went back home with news of this extraordinary discovery,

and 18 years later, the first fleet of settlers and convicts arrived.

I'm arriving on the same route today on the Manley ferry.

When the fleet landed in Botany Bay, where Cook had landed,

and then they discovered there was no water, they had to decamp and move.

They came up knowing there was an entrance, but they didn't know what they would find.

So they came in here out of the open ocean, hopefully to find a more sheltered place to land.

And 200 years later, we know this as Sydney.

HOOTER BLOWS

Unlike those first settlers, my boat docks in a large modern metropolis.

But, despite the skyscrapers, Sydney's past remains close to hand,

and my first Australian garden is slap in the middle of the city.

Behind the Opera House are the gates to the Royal Botanic Garden.

What I particularly like about this garden is that you have this juxtaposition of this fabulous

natural harbour on the one side, and then on the other side, the city right on top of the garden.

And its 74 acres are packed with extraordinary plants.

But this is not just a botanical reserve.

It is in one of the most spectacularly beautiful urban positions in the world

and has always been at the heart of Sydney's life.

It is constantly used by Sydney's citizens,

either for their rather relentless exercising or just to relax.

One of the reasons that I've chosen to visit the botanic gardens is not just because it is beautiful

and interesting, but because of its importance in the history of the entire occupation of Australia.

What the first settlers needed most urgently of all was fresh water.

They came up the coast and found a creek

fed by fresh water, and this pond is fed by that same stream.

So, famously, they created a small farm nine acres of wheat.

The bay out there is still called Farm Cove to this day.

The modern botanic garden is rich with healthy lush plants

of every variety, but it wasn't always so.

In fact, life for the original settlers was almost unimaginably hard.

To clear the farm land, they had to clear wood and forest and scrub.

It blunted their axes, they couldn't dig out or get rid of the trunks,

so they sowed their corn in amongst them.

This is a recreation of that first crop.

Which is really hardly a crop at all.

We're filming this on the 1st of December, the first day of Summer, which is near harvest.

This is what they would have had to feed them.

It doesn't really look like a crop at all but their lives depended on it.

And they had to sow into this very, very thin soil.

This has had 200 years of improvement but then it was practically pure sand.

But they had little choice because any convict trying to escape the colony and its struggling crops

faced almost certain death by starvation in the dense Australian bush,

which was also filled with unfamiliar and sometimes dangerous creatures.

The most astonishing thing for me in the botanic gardens is not a plant but the fruit bats.

They hang from the branches like sacks,

occasionally extending a vast wing or the whole tree at times

can be fluttering as they move to cool down in the sun.

It's like bellows expanding and contracting.

You can imagine for the first settlers

seeing these strange animals, either vast versions of what they saw at home, or completely different.

It must have been an extraordinary thing.

As the colony developed, the farmland became the Governor's garden,

and then in 1816 the Botanic Gardens were officially founded.

But that original settlement, by the shelter of Farm Bay,

is still at the heart of the garden and is the symbolic beginning of the modern Australian nation.

As Sydney became established, it deliberately recreated

the appearance and style of the homeland.

These mixed borders of Government House

could be part of any British stately home, albeit on the other side of the world.

This represents a kind of homesickness and it's that urge to create a reminder of home,

that's key to the next wave of Australian gardens further inland.

The first inland town took shape here, in Mittagong, in the hills south of Sydney.

Mittagong, means 'small mountain' and has a much cooler and wetter climate

which was perfect for those early homesick settlers, who started building modest pioneer homes.

Initially all settlements were in Sydney itself.

But, gradually people began to leave the city and create lives themselves in the country.

MUSIC: "Waltzing Matilda"

But nevertheless, despite the almost unimaginable hard work involved,

there would be time to just plant a little bit of colour.

Just a token bit of gardening to lift the spirits if nothing else.

And this modest splash of colour to relieve a brutally harsh existence

in the countryside, heralded a new wave of Australian gardens.

By the middle of the 19th-century, people in Sydney were becoming

wealthy enough to consider moving out of the city during the baking summer months.

They came south here which is much cooler

even on a summers day like today, it's positively chilly.

They were buying up the simple little shacks and enlarging them and converting them into

summer homes, country houses and wherever you get a country house,

you are gonna get a country house garden.

The garden at Kennerton Green began its life in a modest way in 1860,

but since then it has grown to spread over five well-tended acres.

It includes a rose garden, a tightly clipped Bay Tree Garden, a silver birch wood and, almost inevitably,

a "potager", all divided as a series of garden rooms,

centred around the original settler's cottage.

The thing that immediately strikes me about Kennerton,

is that here we are, an hour or two south of Sydney,

and yet this is a garden that really wouldn't feel out of place in the Home Counties in England.

It's an English country garden.

This was a deliberate thing.

Apparently the first settlers, once they had overcome the sort of hostility of their terrain,

and got to the luxury of making a garden as opposed to just surviving,

sent home for familiar plants.

Apparently violets and snowdrops, even song birds were shipped out

so they could recreate the gardens they were familiar with.

It was a distinct homesickness, a nostalgia, and they built around them spaces

that they could think of as home, not their new homeland,

but a distant home that they would probably never see again.

From this point of the garden, I can't see a single native plant.

It's worth stressing that Kennerton is not a historical recreation,

it is a modern garden, but it illustrates so many

of the tendencies of those early Australian gardens and this area, the Bay Garden,

shows how that with the tightly clipped bay trees,

it's conquering nature.

It reminds me of the 17th-century French and Dutch gardens

where you use formality and topiary

to show man's mastery of a hostile natural world that lay beyond the garden's edges.

Kennerton is a series of garden rooms

and as you come out of the Bay Garden, you walk into this wood.

It is made up just of the white trunks of birch and grass.

I think it is the loveliest thing in the entire garden.

Kennerton is undoubtedly a very beautiful garden.

But it is a beautiful fantasy.

It is an attempt to create a little piece of England in a very foreign land.

The reality just on the other side of the garden hedge, or at least just down the road is this.

This is the real Australia.

It is a completely different world which the early gardens turned their backs on.

Before I leave the Sydney area, I'm going to visit a 21st-century garden

that celebrates its Australian roots.

When I chose this garden, it was really because it was modern

and I'd heard about it, seen pictures of it .

I thought it looked really interesting.

When you walk in here, the first thing you notice are these

great jagged angles of rock pushing out at you. It's almost quite aggressive.

But the way that they're balanced, actually it's not hostile, it's not threatening.

You start to look further and see that the plants work really well with them, with that colour.

This tiny, private garden in Sydney's fashionable Mossman district

has been created for its owners by Czech designer, Vladimir Sitta.

'It nestles in the right angle of the building, and, with its large sliding glass doors facing onto it,

'is an important part of the living space.

'The rock, all 33 tonnes of it, was quarried in Alice Springs, the red heart of Australia.

'The owners commissioned the garden to display their collection of drought-resisting succulents.

'However, not all the plants are Australian although this magnificent

'ponytail palm, with its dangling water-storing roots, most certainly is.'

What is an Australian garden?

I wish to know. The garden is a culture concept to me.

First you have to define what the culture is.

I don't think there is even a demand for creating an Australian garden,

it's not, people think that when they stick Australian plants into some space that it's an Australian garden.

That's a load of rubbish.

-There's hardly anywhere in the world that relishes the outdoors so much.

-Because you have such good weather..

So you would think it was the perfect place to make gardens that could be relished all the time?

If you see the garden as a stage set for your hedonistic pursuits, absolutely.

But it doesn't have to be a hedonistic pursuit.

It doesn't have to be a swimming pool, tennis court, barbecue.

But this is what most of our gardens are here.

In those richer suburbs of course.

I think the garden ideally should touch you emotionally.

Unfortunately it became, in many ways, just another commodity.

In terms of just making your own and creating,

then I think we've just barely scratched the surface in Australia.

'Despite Vladimir's middle European gloom,

'I think his garden is the closest I've come so far to feeling a real spirit of Australia.'

These jagged angles have a tectonic energy that I like,

and are pointing me to that burning red heart of the continent.

That's where I'm going next, the outback, near Alice Springs.

It couldn't be less like Sydney.

DIDGERIDOO PLAYS

It is a staggeringly harsh, grand, bright orange landscape

but I can see echoes of Sitta's design immediately.

Although this vast 'Sand Country' is classed as desert,

it is actually full of life and empty only to the untutored eye.

I'm visiting a completely different type of garden.

Alice Springs Desert Park, which I hope will help me to understand the outback a little better.

The park opened in 1997,

and is designed to introduce people to the plants, animals and aboriginal culture of the outback

with spinifex grasses, dried creeks, sand country and even a large salt pan.

All painstakingly recreated to mimic the conditions of the outback in its true setting.

It is a vast site with over 100 acres of cultivated garden and over 3,000 acres in all.

I was shown round by Gary Dinham, the Curator of Botany,

and he explained to me how the spinifex, the spiky grass that grows in the sand country,

is perfectly adapted to the conditions.

It's got these very spiky leaves which in fact used to be

flat leaves which have rolled around to try and reduce water loss.

I tell you what, that is as beautiful a grass

as in any garden, isn't it?

It's fantastic. We're trying to get people to use them more in gardens

because it doesn't use much water and it is very easy to manage.

You'll find plants which are less suited to the desert often grow beside rivers.

So the River Red Gum, is a euycalpyt, Eucalyputus camaldulensis.

They're very beautiful with their bark off.

Look at this. This sort of clear white.

The desert doesn't really have rivers or at least if there are, they don't run very often do they?

They're ephemeral rivers - the upside down rivers of Central Australia,

where the sand's on top and the water flows underneath.

It's only after the heavy rains that you'll get the river flowing.

It was interesting with my children in Central Australia,

when they saw a river with water in it they were wondering what it was!

MONTY LAUGHS

'Away from the river, either underground or overground,

'the harsher environment of the red desert sands means all plants have to be highly adapted.'

These are only very young desert oaks.

They're probably 8 or 10-years-old, very, very slow growing plants.

You can see they actually photosynthesize through the stem.

That little point there is just the remnant leaf.

Under cultivation that is probably 6 or 7-years-old.

In the wild you'd see one of those would probably be 20-years-old.

Its root system is probably going down 10 metres.

-10 metres?

-Yeah.

-Wow!

So they grow a lot more under the ground than above ground.

Like every bit of this beautifully made garden,

the park's artificially created salt pan looks completely natural.

Do you get visitors assuming this is a natural landscape?

That's one of the greatest compliments to the staff when people think that

we are very fortunate to have all these habitats sitting in this small area.

We've fooled them into thinking they're in a natural environment.

The staff really love that. That's a great compliment to them.

You've created this place, there is no other word for it.

You've made it with your team.

Does that make you a gardener?

Well, this is a fantastic garden, it's one of the best gardens you could ever create I think.

Recreating the environment, is an incredible challenge.

It's not that easy, but I think we've managed to do that here to get it across.

I think you have too.

The aboriginal population co-habited with and used this flora

long, long before Europeans arrived.

I've met up with one of the Desert Park Rangers, Doug Taylor,

to learn about his people's subtle relationship with the plants of the Australian outback.

This is one of the most useful plants - the Mogga Tree.

You could obtain food from here, tools.

So the seed would be very small, wouldn't it, on those cones?

Yes, this one's lost its seed. It would've been seeding a month back,

but there are quite large pods and this is the seed that it produces.

And this could be used by ladies ground up

into like a flour or paste and baked into what we call Damper or bread.

'This tree's timber is perfect for making boomerangs too.

'This is a non-returning variety!'

Very good to bring down a medium-sized kangaroo, stop an emu with this.

Really?

One of the strangest of all desert plants

is the grass tree, Xanthorrhoea, which grows incredibly slowly.

These plants are hundreds of years old.

The land and the people, the traditional people were as one.

Where our people

didn't try to control the land, but live with it, and everything on the land had its place -

in our people's culture

and had a right to be there.

It was useful too.

The flower spike was used to carry a glowing ember for fire-making

which is fitting for a plant that will regrow after being burned.

Using fire to manage and regenerate the land

was perhaps the closest that Doug's people came to gardening.

It involved a highly sophisticated relationship with the land.

Each family group had a seasonal cycle of moving from one camp

to another within their territory, which they would use as a base for hunting and gathering bush tucker.

They would use small controlled burns to flush out game and once

they had hunted out one campsite, they would then move on to the next.

By the time they return to this site, the burn done previous which

may be 6-8 months' later say, but the burn would have then created regrowth and regeneration.

Old expression in Australia here - aborigine going walking about,

which was basically talking about this type of thing which is what our people used to do.

I like to say, "Aborigine went on controlled seasonal movement."

MONTY LAUGHS Sounds a lot better too!

Now this is the shade of a desert oak which is a good size tree, but not vast, but it is very old.

Oh, yeah. Very slow growing, desert oak, this one's quite mature, the one we're sitting under here.

Probably anything up to 400, 500 years.

Because these trees are so old, generations to generations of

people see these trees and the stories attached to them.

It's like looking at the old men and old women from the past.

You sit amongst the desert oaks, and a light breeze comes through and it's like a...

HE BLOWS

If you sit down in the quiet long enough it sounds like you can hear voices whispering.

That's where a lot of our people believe that the old people are still

with these trees, and their spirit's still there.

As I travel back to Alice Springs, I thought about what Doug had told me.

I can see just how perfectly the native people lived in

harmony with that seemingly wholly hostile environment.

It was clear that the key factor to this, for plants as well as people, was drought and how to manage it.

However, I am not sure I expect this to be the case in my next destination, which is Melbourne.

Melbourne is often referred to as Australia's Garden City

and it has a much wetter climate thanks to its position on the southern tip of the continent.

This was my first visit and I was surprised to see European plants and trees everywhere.

Its leafy, green avenues and flower-filled yards

make a dramatic contrast to the parched streets of Alice Springs.

Along with the skyscrapers and trams, there still survive quaint,

ornate and now very select, Victorian streets.

During the 1880s, Melbourne was the second largest city in the British Empire

and many of the opulent homes from that period still survive.

My next garden is the pinnacle of the grand Australian establishment,

and my host is Dame Elizabeth Murdoch.

Got into Melbourne when it was dark last night.

Driven to a hotel, went to bed, got up, and come out here first

thing in the morning, and I have to say it is a vast culture shock, I could be in another world.

Hello, Dame Elisabeth, how nice to meet you.

-How are you?

-I'm very, very well.

-Good, how nice to see you.

-And with your beautiful garden..

-It's looking not bad.

At 99, she and her garden are almost half as old as the nation.

She's the matriarch of Australia's great media dynasty, and the guiding

spirit behind Cruden Farm and its 20-acre garden, which Dame Elisabeth began in the 1920s.

There can be few people on this planet that have gardened

continuously in the same place for over 80 years.

That's one of my great prides, my copper beach.

I mean, it's fantastic to think I planted that only 52 years ago.

Of course far too close to the house, but never mind, we manage.

Are copper beach fairly unusual in Melbourne?

In Melbourne, yes.

When we were planning to put that in,

I said to Michael my gardener, "It's ridiculous, I'll never see this Michael really."

He said, "Of course you will, you're gonna live forever!"

But part of the pleasure of planting a tree is watching it grow.

-I know, wonderful.

-It's not necessarily the finished article.

So you've created a landscape,

that is sort of like Capability Brown in some ways.

You've done it in a lifetime rather than over generations.

Yes, well I think you see everything grows so fast here.

'That's the point. In England similar trees would take a couple of centuries to grow this big.'

I love the purple stems - the purple touch on the stems.

It's lovely, isn't it?

I see you've got a good eye.

This is surreal for me, here we are looking at hostas, having 12 hours ago

stepped on a plane in the outback where the thought of a hosta is...

I know, the contrast is fabulous, isn't it?

-Really amazing.

-It looks marvellous.

They are beautiful, they are beautiful hostas. I love them dearly.

That's quite a young denudatus, it's amazing.

It's very protected in there. You see the possums eat everything, so we've put an electric fence on the roof.

So they can't come across.

-Mind the bump.

-Right.

-It's rather lovely, isn't it?

-Beautiful.

'I have never been in a garden which has reached such maturity within the life of its owner and creator.

'I don't think I have ever met a gardener who has quite so much personal charm.'

I confess that when I walked down the drive here,

I thought this is so different from Alice Springs and the outback that there's no connection.

But actually what this garden has is a sense of place, a sense of self-confidence.

So you've got your rose garden, you've got your alchemillas and all the sort of English plants

that might seem a bit odd here in Australia, but it also has a real sense of place and identity.

It's grounded.

At heart this is a European garden,

but one that is very happily married to its native landscape.

However, that cross cultural connection is under serious threat.

Climate change is increasing the already serious problems of drought in Australia.

This means that the classic English flowers and lush greenery just won't thrive.

The situation can only get worse.

But having seen how the tough Aussie native plants thrive in the outback,

I wonder if they are the key to Australia's gardening future?

My next garden could answer that question.

It is the Garden Vineyard,

created by Di Johnson and now extended by her daughter Jenny.

The garden is set amongst vineyards in the gently rolling countryside south of Melbourne.

It began just 11 years ago, but already, it is one of

Australia's most exciting gardens because it is a fusion

of traditional English design and planting, with a contemporary use of native Australian species.

It's a story which started out with an attempt to make an exact copy

of a very English garden until Di was confronted with the inescapable realities of the climate.

I think that's a perfect example

of how one has to adapt, because I love that little geranium.

I've tried to grow it for three years, it looks fabulous in winter.

I should give up, because look how wonderful the sedum by comparison looks.

We went to a brick yard in North Melbourne,

and these are convict bricks - there's a thumb print in one.

Every 1,000 bricks they had to mark with a thumb print,

every 10,000 I think it was with two thumb prints.

But these bricks were all hand made by convicts.

-No doubt those convicts were from England.

-I'm sure they were.

The next stage of the garden shows the true scale of Di's ambition.

The first thing that strikes me, these are socking great borders.

-It's great!

-I'll probably never be able to sell it.

Well, that's another matter..

Nobody wants this much work.

The giant borders mark the very first introduction of Australian natives into Di's garden.

Tightly clipped green pillars of the gloriously named lillypilly,

which she uses for structure in the border much as we might use yew at home.

The lilypillies came in at what stage?

-Pretty early on.

-Not straight away.

-About the second.

Was it your first entry into indigenous planting?

Yes, absolutely. I think the thing is they take the heat as well as the dryness.

Follow the path round the corner and there is a quantum leap away from the traditional English garden.

It's a composition of tightly clipped native shrubs in balls and

billows set around the peeling white trunks of lemon-scented eucalypts.

It looks fantastic.

It's a bit English, but it's got a lot more Australian feel about it.

This rhagodia is a brilliant thing. I know it is looking a little drab

because we have just had to severely prune it, but it comes back, and it is totally drought tolerant.

It grows in the sun or shade and we've used it all over the garden.

After that cool modernism,

there is a return to a European heritage with a much more formal

and rather grand Italianate garden,

using clipped coppery lillipilli lollipops - I've been dying to say that -

under-planted with a sea of agapanthus and heliotropes.

MUSIC: "The Flower Duet" by Delibes

Go through a gate and on down a set of steps and you arrive at the place where everything comes together.

This is a dramatic and brave part of the garden, made by Jenny,

critically with Di's support using only native plants.

So this is the evolution of the garden,

maybe the future of Australian gardening.

Yeah, I think it started off with not too much thought

behind it. It started off as a passion of mine.

And a bit of plonking!

But plonking is the secret of good gardening!

I tried to work with the colour and texture of plants

and I tried to arrange plants that were blended with each other

in terms of foliage, texture and colour.

But, I don't think that is that important now.

I guess being inspired by the natural bush.

I've always loved the natural stance of eucalypts

and things that aren't too fiddled with and manipulated.

-How do you feel about that?

-Well, I have realised that Jenny

has been a source of great wisdom for me.

I'll be honest with you, when I walked in here and saw the walled English garden,

I thought, "Oh, no, this is beautiful. But I didn't need to cross the world to see it."

I've seen lots of gardens like that although not many done as well as that.

But as I walked round, I realised something special was happening here.

That a garden was evolving, not just through the process of the gardener, but through place and then,

really most interestingly of all, through time and generations as the children of the household grew up

and got interested, they were Australian and this was their background and this was their home.

They started to evolve a style of gardening that was truly indigenous.

It belongs to the place.

The result is something genuinely new and beautiful

and most importantly, sustainable in the changing Australian climate.

But now it's time to leave Australia

and move on for the second phase of my antipodean adventure.

I travel 1,200 hundred miles south east of Australia to New Zealand,

and land in its biggest city, Auckland.

Well, I popped on a plane, and came over her to New Zealand

and although it's just a three-hour journey,

and I'm about as far away from home as it's possible to be, it's all instantly familiar.

It even smells like England.

But although much seems to be reassuringly similar, there is a spectacular plant growing nearby

which reminds me that New Zealand is actually very, very different from home.

For all its instant familiarity, New Zealand is full of very curious things indeed.

This is the pohutukawa or the New Zealand Christmas tree,

which is just coming into flower now as we approach Christmas.

There is nothing that can prepare you for New Zealand

because it is quite unlike anywhere else in the world.

Before Westerners came, it was the nearest thing to an earthly paradise

with a very distinctive flora and fauna.

This means that gardens here with a little imagination and resources can also be unique.

This is Ayrlies, and it's the first garden I'm visiting in New Zealand,

simply because I have been told it's one of the very best Gardens in the whole of the Southern Hemisphere.

Ayrlies is a garden with a dream-like intensity.

It's very large, with 12 acres of dense planting and mature trees around the house surrounded by

another 30 acres of planted woodland and fields that run down to the sea.

But, magnificent as the setting is, it is the planting that overwhelms you.

This is a garden that submerges the visitor in plants,

so you wallow in their colour, texture, shape and scent.

Yet incredibly, I know that only 40 years ago, this was all just a series of grass paddocks.

The effect of the tree ferns and the sound and the general intensity of the planting,

makes one think of a sort of lush,

lush forest, but actually just a few yards from here, if you come back,

you come through the planting...

It just stops and you realise that we're back

to the fields that were grazed by the dairy herd 40 years ago.

Although all the trees you can see were planted,

the garden is made out of a field,

every little bit of it.

I'm shown round the garden by its creator, Bev McConnell,

the celebrated doyenne of New Zealand gardening.

This is quite dramatic here, it is quite a wow, and I shouldn't be able

to grow the Lewisia rose, but I do and I grow that for the hips.

They are absolutely complimentary colours aren't they, the red and the green? Wonderful.

And that one is very yellow, but it was born in the garden, so that will be Ayrlies Gold.

How many plants do you have named after the garden?

About five I think.

That's still five more than most people.

Have you not got any yet?

-I think...

-Oh, look. You are very young!

-You're very sweet to say it.

-It'll come, it'll come.

You have to be really old to have plants named after you.

-You don't mind me interviewing you do you?

-I'm enjoying it, and you're very good at it,

but you can tell me about your pool, cos I can't answer that.

-Isn't that interesting, yes.

-When did you plant the palms?

Oh, 15 years ago.

Really? As recently as that.

I was just astonished at the planting at Ayrlies.

It has the widest and most ecstatic range of plants in one garden I have ever seen.

So how did one person create so much in such a short time?

Did you come out knowing you wanted to make a garden?

Yes, I did, I had it on paper, the first three acres.

I married a man who thought big, probably it was a fault that both of us did,

but it had its good points too, otherwise you'd end up with really nothing.

Cos a lot of farmers in those days, farmers would say to their wives if

they wanted to build a garden, "What do you want to do that for"

just like that, but my husband would say, "Why not. Let's have a look at it."

So you planted these trees?

Every one, there was nothing here, it was a good dairy farmers paddock for his stock.

Bev's greatest ally is the climate.

There are 365 growing days a year here.

The weather is never too cold, never too hot, there is nearly

50 inches of rain a year, and there is much more light.

I think that Ayrlies is a masterpiece.

I have never seen such a wide range of plants together in one garden.

But that mixture depends on a lot of exotic and introduced plants as well as natives,

and in the light of my Australian experience,

I wonder if this best represents the past or the future of New Zealand gardens?

To try and answer that I need to go back in history and on with my journey.

I'm going to drive from Ayrlies, just outside Auckland,

south and west to New Plymouth, a journey which should take me

into New Zealand's wild green heart and give me a taste of its original human culture too.

But when I make my first stop out in the country to look at the landscape,

there's no sign of New Zealand anywhere.

This is a confusing country because the scenery is so like England,

with its green grass and buttercups and daisies

and trees and cows and all the flowers on the verges of the roads.

But, look a bit closer and then there are these oddities.

Like this marvellous super-charged hydrangeas that we found here,

and then you have to realise that everything you are looking at is introduced.

This is not the natural flora of the country.

Every single element of it is artificial.

That includes the grass, the trees, the flowers and the shrubs.

Everything you can see.

So back in to the van

and on deeper into the hills, until finally I find something native,

a Maori garden of phormiums, or New Zealand Flax.

Whereas I am familiar with them as UK garden plants, for the Maori, the native people,

these plants were a vital source of fibre for clothes and mats.

87-year-old Digger Te Kanawa, a Maori weaver, shows me how they are used.

-This is the stripping you have to go through.

-Right.

You have to turn it over on the dull side, and about halfway.

-Now...

-So you score it through but don't cut it through?

-No. So, I've got to split it and this is the tool.

-A mussel shell?

A mussel shell...

and you get a little bit out, and make a loop like that, and then you pull. There you are...

-There it is.

-And that's your muka.

And you do what you call a miro, this is a twining.

I see, yeah.

Easy, eh?

No, you make it look very easy, I can see it's hard.

Her flax threads end up as beautiful ceremonial cloaks, decorated with feathers, part of Digger's heritage

as a Maori, a Polynesian people who settled here more than 600 hundred years ago.

Up there is a photo of the collection.

-That's the whole family?

-That's the whole family.

Mum's made a cloak for each of us.

Can I touch this, can I just feel it?

Because it is very soft, isn't it?

It's not the sort of thing you can make in a month or so,

because it's a mood thing, if you don't feel like it, leave it alone.

And are these mats we're walking on, are these all flax too?

Yes, now I think I'm too old to get down on the floor...

But I want to teach others.

And just on the other side of her land, we touch on Maori spiritual life,

because there's a sacred tree at the end of her drive.

When we were kids, they said it was very taboo, and you mustn't go near it and all that sort of thing.

They were scared stiff of it.

Having had a glimpse of some of the native culture, just beyond Digger's home

I get my first sight of New Zealand's native beauty.

Now things are getting stranger as we go farther away from Auckland

cos in amongst the tractors, the long grass, and wonderful flowers,

are tree ferns, this is distinctly exotic.

It might look exotic to my English eye, but these plants are indigenous here.

Yet I turn around and "Oh, there's an English meadow."

It's just like Alice In Wonderland, that's what it's like. It's a dream world.

Thanks to its mild climate and high rainfall, much of New Zealand

was once covered in temperate rainforest, a cooler and much

gentler sister of the more famous rainforests of the tropics like the Amazon, but every bit as beautiful.

As I continue deeper into the mountains it really feels like I've finally found what I set out to see.

This is primary forest and

almost of New Zealand would have been covered in this with these giant podocarps,

smothered with epiphytes and the tree ferns underneath.

And it's very sobering when you drive through and see mile upon mile

of landscape cleared and just with a monoculture of

grass knowing that it was this that had to be removed in order to feed a few sheep and cattle.

Just step a few yards into the forest and immediately you're surrounded

and you could be anywhere, and unlike the tropical rain forests, this temperate rain forest

is a cool unthreatening place

with this magical green sort of stained glass light filtering through.

It's a very benign place.

This is New Zealand's heart.

A green, cool, song-filled heaven, spilling over with beautiful plants.

Thank goodness a little bit of it was spared and allowed to remain for people like us to treasure.

But can this ancient botanical paradise be the inspiration for New Zealand's gardens of the future?

I finally reach New Plymouth, ready to visit the last garden of this trip,

and rather than turning its back on its natural heritage,

this is a garden famous for taking it as its inspiration.

This is, surprisingly, in a quiet suburb of New Plymouth, is my journey's end,

and I've come here because it's a garden which seems

pretty ordinary from the outside,

but which I know is comprised entirely of native New Zealand plants.

Te Kainga Marire, which is Maori for "peaceful encampment",

is one of New Zealand's very first, and best native gardens.

It was begun 35 ago by Valda Poletti and her husband Dave,

and although relatively modest in scale, is crammed with plants and features.

There's a tree fern alley, a distressed mountain shed, an alpine zone

and even a glow worm cave,

rather surprisingly all created by someone who's very proud of her colonial past.

-Your great grandparents were settlers?

-Yes, they arrived here in 1842.

And they sailed here from Plymouth harbour from Somerset.

So they, Simon and Jane set up home, farm,

and survived the land wars

and great great grandmother had stood there with her children

behind her to find the Maori that was threatening to burn her little house down.

That story is a dramatic contrast to this garden which is clearly in such harmony with its native land.

The Muehlenbeckia complexa, the wire-netting plant, you could

actually jump up and down on sleep on that as a bed.

It's tempting to try.

Yeah, you can do that.

I can do that, I will do that.

Leap, lie down, have a rest.

You see,

-I'm quite squashy.

-Comfortable?

-I would sleep on this willingly.

-You would?

-Yeah. one of the things I like about...

if you're in Australia, you would know there would be some noxious spider or snake or something in

here waiting to get you, whereas in New Zealand, you are pretty sure...

-You're safe as...

-Yeah.

-You could sleep sweetly and soundly.

This is the first garden where I've been invited to leap on the plants.

Yeah, leap on the plants, it's Monty proof! SHE LAUGHS

What's that?

I need my glasses for this, which I haven't got on me they are in my bag.

I'll go get a hand lens.

Monty Don,

I have for you the secret weapon, the hand lens.

Because I can't see without my glasses.

-You're nearly blind, now this is gardening beneath your knees.

-Can I hold the lens please?

-You're being bossy.

-I'm being bossy, I'm a control freak, you know?

All gardeners are control freaks, all good gardeners

are completely control...

-He said I'm a good gardener.

-Well, you are.

Look at that.

This little pansea grows up in the central plateau around the fumaroles, around the sulphur vents.

I have never been shown around a garden via a hand lens before.

-Really, truly?

-So within the space of a minute I have leapt on your plants and looked in minute detail.

And over here, just by your knees, don't get up, is our lobelia.

And again it is a little darling, it's got like half a flower.

It is lovely, I could do the whole tour like this

I could crawl the whole way on my hands and knees...

Look at this!

Look at this down here.

Look at that.

Look at that.

Do you know I've never done this before, this is fantastic.

-He's converted.

-I am, you know.

-Good, born again.

-I don't normally deal with intense detail.

-Oh, don't you?

You wait, there's better to come.

So this is the fernery?

-That's right.

-Some of these ferns are how old?

That's 30 ft... So you planted these in 1972?

-Some of them planted in '72.

-And that is a whopper!

And this is the fern house here, you call it the Faanui.

Here we go... and this Monty is a glow-worm tunnel.

-Do you get glow-worms?

-We do, we've got about six.

It's cool and cold and dark.

It is sort of like dying and emerging and coming out again into the light.

-It's a birthing ceremony.

-A birthing channel - didn't want you to clock onto that.

You are born again...

and oh, look, here's a sign of new life,

the pattern of his unfurling crosier.

-And now your vegetables. I'm keen on vegetables.

-So am I.

So there we go - vegetables...

-Pretty organic.

-This is a real culinary...

This is a working vegetable garden, feeds the family, you know, it's really important.

Now this to an extent is what your great grandparents would have done when they came here,

they would've cleared some soil and planted the things they were used to growing at home.

Yep, the first things they did was to get a garden established because without it, the only food they had

were the rations off the other boats that came out like the flour.

And they obviously got brought stock and did animal husbandry and raised stock to slaughter.

But, if the crops failed then they had trouble surviving in the colonies in those early, early days.

After the veg garden it was time to dive down into the alpines.

Do you know what it's like?

-It's like snorkelling over a coral reef.

-Mmm.

-That's exactly what it's like.

-It is.

A hidden reef of flower reached through a magnifying glass!

Do you think that the next generation

of gardeners will be moving in the direction you've created?

I do, younger people are much, much more open to the flora.

They've got over the fact that gardens are flower gardens, and I think

there is a greater appreciation and awareness now of the flora

of New Zealand and the beauty of the landscapes.

I think it's a coming of age for New Zealand.

What a good and hopeful thought that is!

And Te Kainga Marire is a visual celebration of New Zealand's future.

So I've reached the end of this particular journey, sitting on the lawn

in a smallish garden, in a smallish suburb

of a smallish town in New Zealand and it seems right and proper to me,

having sampled the size and scale of Australia

and come down through the North Island of New Zealand, that

it should end up on this domestic level cos that's what gardens are, they're about people's back gardens.

But what a journey I've had, from the very first Australian garden

and its failing crops in Sydney, to homesick recreations and wonderful flights of fantasy.

I've seen a series of amazing gardens in dynamic, young countries.

But it's the final step that the gardens have made which I believe holds the key to the future.

It's all about working with the land and not about fighting it.

And that's a simple but powerful message that

the indigenous people and plants could have told us all along.

Join me next time as I make my first visit to India.

As I set off to visit some of the most sensual

and opulent gardens in the world.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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