Jo Wakelin's half-acre garden in the Central Otago region is dominated by its surroundings: mountains that reach up to 2000m. There are no obvious boundaries, and the garden, as she notes, “may be under an acre, but I feel like I've got thousands of acres”. She feels she has “a very strong connection to the landscape, my place of standing — tūrangawaewae in Māori”.
The plants in Jo's garden blend in with their surroundings through their form (gently curved, hummocky shapes, generally organised into rounded planting borders) and their colours (muted greens, greys, fawns). The bleached grass of the pasturelands, the grey rock and the occasional dark-leafed evergreens are all echoed in the garden, the forms and colours becoming more tangible here, as if the vast landscape has been distilled…
