The constant gardener

By MALCOLM BURGESS

With its meandering paths set beside low hedgerows and rhododendron bushes, skirting lush, grassy lawns, the painting just has to be of Trelinnoe Park Gardens. But no, Karl Maughan says he's never been to the botanical gardens off a long, dusty road through farming land on the highway to Napier.

Instead, the London-based painter's large works are grown from cuttings from farther-flung gardens. They loom large enough that they could be doorways into scattered colonial settlements, connected across the world and time.

At least there is some specificity in this collection. It's a tale of two distinct gardens: Hergest Croft on the border between England and Wales, and Cross Hills in Manawatu.

But which is which? There's something of a game to be played here. Maughan has made it even harder, "turning down the New Zealand light and turning up the English light", so there are no easy giveaways.

Aha, a clue: among the burning rhododendrons pokes a fern frond and there's a cabbage tree. But even these are red herrings: such plants are known to spring up in the warmer southern English climes.

Hergest Croft is one of those collector gardens pooling exotic specimens pilfered the world over, so any anachronistic growths are the result of long years of deliberate, roaming acquisition.

Hergest Croft and Cross Hills are both privately owned gardens open to the public. Hergest Croft sits on Hergest Ridge, incidentally also the name of an old Mike Oldfield album, says Maughan, apropos nothing.

The garden is said to contain some of the oldest species from China and Asia, collected during the family's dealings in China in the 19th and 20th centuries. Cross Hills, on the other hand, which is 30km north of Feilding, is an example of New Zealanders doing the English thing, he says. It was developed from virgin bush in the mid-1880s and the gardens were founded by Eric Wilson - a big name in international collector circles - in 1938.

Attempts to terraform the environment generate the intensity that fills these paintings, says Maughan. Hergest Croft caught his eye because its non-formal garden felt like a place a New Zealand family would put together. And Cross Hills, because it was a place he visited again and again as a youth.

The fact that they're both rhododendron gardens raises all sorts of twists on the theme of colonisation. With rhododendron only discovered in the 1880s and 1890s in Nepal, it didn't appear in earlier gardens. This makes talk of moves to take these gardens back to their "original states" rather weird, he says. "Where do you start?"

Yes, the constant gardener is back, holidaying in Eden, with a show that's deceptively similar to previous work he's become well known for. But then Maughan paints gardens. He's like the housebound old man in Amelie, who paints Renoir over and over: "I always find some new aspect that knocks me out."

Maughan's garden in London is small, and he can only dream of the kind of spacious spread suitable for flowerbeds stretching into the distance.

But even if it's the painterly kind, the gardening business has been good to Maughan. His work is included in the Saatchi collection.

And back at home, where he frequently exhibits, his hyper-real rhododendron studies brighten up SkyCity, even if he disapproves of the way they are hung there.

Former Elam art school lecturer Don Binney describes Maughan's works as landscapes for bumblebees and hummingbirds. So, despite his contemporary art credentials, Maughan carries on the New Zealand landscape tradition nonetheless.

Although he has been painting gardens for more than 15 years, his recent works show distinct evolution. While he's always been one of two extremes - realist from a distance and abstract up close - these paintings "play it down the line", he says, and are more detailed and intense.

His decision to make the works all the same size was a tough call, he says. "It means you have to make each work very strong in itself." Having a small studio in London also means he's never seen the works in a space the size of the Gow Langsford.

Maughan's botanical obsession could come from either of two places: the desire to stick with a sure bet, or the feeling there's so much more to discover in the one subject that he's not quite exhausted. Or, face it, both, in this modern world where money so closely shadows merit.

Says Binney: "Like it or not, the fortunes and the philosophical topsoil and bedrock of any artist has always been that of industry, commerce and societal economics - you can't separate one from the other."

Maughan hasn't yet lost his Kiwi accent, even though he's been in London for what seems like an eternity.

At the moment, he's here looking after the kids. Maybe he'll get them along to Trelinnoe Gardens after all while his wife, Emily Perkins, takes time out to write. He might even find a tunnel under a bush that takes him straight back home.

Exhibition

* What: Karl Maughan, Recent Painting

* Where and when: Gow Langsford Gallery, to April 3