30
Oct
Day 3 : Jewels in the Crown
Tupare
There are some absolute gems in Taranaki’s garden tiara and today we visited two of them. First up, on a bright and sunny morning, ‘Tupare’, the beautiful Arts and Crafts house and garden created by Sir Russell and Lady Matthews. Eighty five years ago, returning from their honeymoon in England inspired by the gardens and architecture of the ‘old country’, the Matthews set out to create their own country estate. Today Tupare features a magical Chapman-Taylor designed house set amongst beautifully landscaped heritage gardens.
We took a guided tour of the house and gardens; well worth it. The house took twelve years to build. In part because Sir Russell’s workmen did a lot of the ‘heavy lifting’ in their off-season but also because of the huge amount of hand crafting that had to be done. Exposed beams and structural timbers sawn to size from Australian jarrah and then hand-adzed to achieve the classic Chapman-Taylor look; intricate ‘linenfold’ door panelling and custom-made built in furniture. An absolute delight.
The gardens too reflect an arts and crafts theme with secluded garden rooms, elegant borders and majestic trees.
Tupare is open to visitors all year round and is free to enter. For more information on Tupare….
Te Kainga Marire
In the afternoon we visited Te Kainga Marire, described as a ‘New Zealand native garden paradise’. It certainly is; in fact so much so that it has the rare distinction of being the country’s only private native garden rated as a Garden of International Significance. David, one of TKM’s owners, spent time as a young man working as a deer culler and clearly the peace and tranquillity of our native bush had a long lasting effect.
Wandering through the paths in this garden with their moss-covered banks, lush green ferns, native climbers, shrubs and trees it’s hard to believe that this was all created out of a clay wasteland. Down one of the tracks we crouched low to enter a small glow worm tunnel; around another corner there’s an old bushmen’s hut. And the birds clearly love it, finches foraging and a tui pigging out in the feeder barely an arms length away.