DIANA MADGIN wanders through the golden ages of the Tai Tapu homestead.
To anyone with a passion for heritage, it’s welcome news that Otahuna, the former home of Sir Heaton and Lady Jessie Rhodes at Tai Tapu, has been restored. The 1895 mansion now operates as a lodge, and the continued restoration and maintenance of the property is funded through the accommodation.
Directors Miles Refo and Hall Cannon took up residence a year ago. Although substantial restoration had been done in previous years, it has been non-stop work, inside and out, since the pair arrived. Getting the house and garden up to the required standard has taken a team of six gardeners outside, under the direction of Steve Marcham and Dave Kilday, as well as many specialist builders, electricians, painters and plumbers within.
The name Otahuna, The Place of the Sandbank, describes the site of the house: a high sandy mound at the base of the Port Hills surrounded, at the turn of the 19th century, by swamplands. Today, windbreaks and boundaries in high willow, poplar, macrocarpa, toitoi and flax define the landscape, and each local farmhouse is enhanced by gardens and trees.
When Otahuna was built, the Canterbury Plains and the amphitheatre of hills surrounding the house were bare save for some pine plantations on the slopes. The house was shielded from cold southerlies and easterlies by the hills, and now also by a great exuberance of trees.
The original head gardener, John Joyce, and his successor A. E. Lowe, had the job of levelling the hills, forming roads and making terraces, besides planting many thousands of trees and shrubs. The swampy flats, filled with remnants of native forest, had to be cleared and drained.
The original terraces survive, and the garden today has undergone a dramatic reshaping, referring back to the original natural landscape style propounded by English garden architect William Robinson. Trees and shrubs have been thinned out so that the main vista from the house looks down the gently staggered lawns to the original small lake in the middle distance. Heroic work has gone into restoring this water feature, and a Buxton-style bridge once again arches over one end. On the far side of the pond is Rhodes’s famous daffodil field.
Rhodes had a passionate affair with the genus Narcissus. Thelma Strongman, in her history of Canterbury’s gardens suggests he was perhaps the first person in the province to advocate the planting of daffodils in grass. In his day, he clothed hill paddocks in daffodils as well as the fields by the lake.
Ninety-eight-year-old gardener Ivor Young, of St Martins, remembers the friendship his father enjoyed with Rhodes. Both were serious competitors in the Horticultural Society shows, and both were keen, hands-on daffodil breeders. Rhodes’s successes included Heart of Gold (egg-yellow with red cup), Silver Plane and Otahuna Sunshine. He had nursery beds near the stables from which surplus bulbs were moved out to the fields. In 1929, visiting Irish daffodil expert Guy Wilson found old-world specimens in the hillside plantings: Ariadne, Waterwitch, Peach, Citron, W. P. Milner and “the exquisite Cernuus forms”. Primroses and bluebells grew in the woodlands, and snowdrops naturalised in gullies.
Rhodes was elected president of the Canterbury Horticultural Society in 1899. His parliamentary career began the same year. As member for Ellesmere, he held numerous cabinet posts and was later appointed to the Legislative Council and knighted. He served in South Africa after the Boer War and in the Middle East during World War 1. And he was the founder and director of St John Ambulance in New Zealand. Despite his wish that a man with more time be given the position, he was still president of the CHS in 1956 when he died aged 95.
Otahuna’s new owners, Miles Refo and Hall Cannon, from America’s East Coast, had visited and enjoyed New Zealand for some years, even staying at Otahuna before it came up for sale. Both have a strong commitment to this heritage, upper-class English colonial settler’s home and garden.
Surrounding the house, gardens clothe the slopes that lead down to the pond and daffodil field. To the east and south of the house, a large, tree-filled glade and shrubbery is interlaced with walkways, one leading to a formal circular Dutch garden dissected by low box hedging. The bones of Otahuna’s original Dutch garden were still there in the undergrowth a year ago. Fashionably Victorian, the Dutch garden had its impetus from the French Renaissance garden style.
Out in the sunshine, the formal rose garden and the old orchard are restored, also the original stone-wall kitchen garden behind the stable, now ready to supply fresh vegetables to the chef’s kitchen.
The first Horticultural Society’s Daffodil Day at Otahuna in 1919 was for members only. By 1927, however, it had become a popular open day for the public, with a band playing and afternoon teas on the lawn after one had admired the host of golden daffodils. Rhodes’s death brought these special community picnic days to a temporary end. In recent years the 12ha of grounds have reopened to the public for a day, with entertainment, refreshments, and a portion of the takings going to the Cancer Society.
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