Bay couple's Incredible garden win

By Carly Udy
Success has been rosy for Andrew and Fiona Boylan's Katikati Tharfield Nursery for the second year in a row at the Ellerslie International Flower Show.
Their Incredible Edible Garden won gold this week in the Sunday Magazine Exhibition Gardens category. Their designers, Hannah Williamson and Sue Peachey of Katikati's Landscape Design Company, also won the coveted supreme award for design excellence.
Tharfield Nurseries, a wholesale nursery, won silver in the Hort Galore category at last year's Ellerslie Flower Show.
The Boylans bought Tharfield Nursery nine years ago and in 2000 launched the Incredible Edible brand, marketing a wide range of fruiting species, from shrubs to trees.
Speaking from Auckland, Mr Boylan told the Bay of Plenty Times the golden win "blew everyone away" and more than made up for what had been a "nightmare" 12 days of preparation, implementation and constant striving for perfection.
Mr Boylan said his "living courtyard" was entirely edible and perfectly colour co-ordinated.
More than 100 pruned and preened fruit trees of 20 different varieties, from blueberries to guava, sugar cane to two new breeds of raspberries Ebony (black) and Ivory (gold), lined the paths to the secret garden, which included french doors and an outdoor lounge.
Mr Boylan said he was ecstatic with the efforts of his two comissioned designers, who he said had done him and his wife proud.
Designer Hannah Williamson, who as a student five years ago won a national design competition create a garden for the prestigious Melbourne Flower Show, said this was her second time at Ellerslie and Ms Peachey's first.
Miss Williamson said their brief had been to create a garden to show you could still grow fruit trees in a small space and keep it attractive. She said the Incredible Edible Garden had a a "relaxing" ambience.
Both designers worked until 9pm on the Sunday before judging and then discovered on Tuesday they had been stamped with gold.
"It was a really, really nice surprise," Miss Williamson said.
Their bosses, Trish and Doug Waugh, owners of Landscape Design Company, were judges at Ellerslie this year, though not in their employees' section.
They were part of the team commissioned by Tourism New Zealand to create the New Zealand garden for the 2004 Chelsea Flower Show, which went on to win gold.
Tauranga couple Geoff and Liz Brunsden, owners of Wildflower World, also featured at this year's show. This was their 10th display garden at Ellerslie, and they had worked on it since April. In tandem with Monarch Butterfly NZ Trust, they have arranged for 50 monarch butterflies to be released into their wildflower butterfly haven each day of the flower show until Sunday.