A group of gardening enthusiasts are trying to save a largely unknown Whanganui garden, home to world-renowned iris breeders.
Jean Stevens and her husband Wally cultivated an incredible number of iris varieties on the Bastia Hill property and won the American Iris Society's hybridisers'medal in 1955.
Karen Wrigglesworth, who has a family connection to the garden, initiated the Blooms on Bastia group in a bid to raise $1.5 million to establish a trust and purchase the land.
Wrigglesworth is the niece of the property's last owner, Ian Bell and his wife Jocelyn, who inherited it from Jean and Wally Stevens.
"I began as a child really not knowing anything much about Jean but there was a photograph in my grandmother's house of Jean and Wally and the family meeting the Queen Mother when she visited in 1966.
"And I've been reflecting on it, I never actually saw an iris until just recently when I've started to grow my own."
Jean Stevens with her irises, 1955. Photo: Supplied
Initially, Jean and Wally had set up their own little nursery in Bulls but moved to Whanganui for the better climate and soil conditions, Wrigglesworth says.
"It was six hectares on Bastia Hill, back in the country in those days, in the mid '40s and, as you can see from the images, it was a farmhouse on a paddock basically."
After Jean died in '67, the iris part of the business was sold and the land subdivided, with just one hectare left now.
"What I keep saying to people is it has always been a garden but don't expect it to be a pleasure garden, so it's not got fountains and statues and beautiful shrubbery and things … it's a business.
"So that's what I guess has kept drawing me into it, is the heritage.
"We often think about heritage being beautiful buildings and our cultural and social heritage, this is our gardening horticultural heritage in a nutshell really."
The garden is witness to the experimental work of Jean, with two plants being rediscovered recently, she says.
"One is a calcoreia from Colombia medicinal plant and is a bit threatened in its home turf.
"We have this sense of wanting to protect the panda bear because it's cute and cuddly but what about these plants that are endangered in their own habitats where they came from and that's part of what the garden has to offer."
Wally and Jean in particular had a knack for knowing which plants had potential to be crossed over, and they developed the red gem leucadendron in 1960.
Leucadendron 'Safari Sunset' by Ian Bell Photo: Colin Ogle
Then their apprentice Ian, Wrigglesworth's uncle, was able to develop the safari sunset form from the two parent plants, she says.
"There were several different developments out of that cross and it was the first time that those two plants had been crossed before."
She's hoping to use her uncle's legacy, as well as the former owners', for a brighter future for the garden.
"[Safari sunset] sells in excess of 40 million stems on the international cut flower market.
"To this day, half of all the proteas that is sold internationally as cut flowers, half of that is safari sunset from that one plant that he developed.
"So it has some economic potential and I think coming back to what we're trying to do with the garden going forward is to develop this potential. You know, it's all well and good to have heritage but heritage has limits if you don't then develop it into something for the future."
The goal is to turn it into a place for the wider community, she says.
"We want to fill the garden with children again and people who have a yearning to get their hand in the ground, to learn about plants, where everything comes from.
"Everything originates from plants and we tend to take that for granted and forget that. It's not just food security, it's not just the cotton in our T-shirts, it's everything.
"But in addition to that, what we get from gardening is the additional life skills around wellbeing so resilience and nurturing and patience, learning acceptance around when things do or don't go well."
The project to resurrect the garden has had wide-ranging support from similar initiatives overseas – the Eden Garden and The Lost Gardens of Heligan – as well as the local mayor, but Wrigglesworth says they're still looking to raise money to buy enough time to set up a trust.
The group has a Givealitte page, and require $135,000 for their deposit.
