Terry Dowdeswell relaxes in his Whanganui garden. Photo / Paul Brooks
The Ingestre St home of Terry and Janice Dowdeswell is renowned for its garden.
Terry is a retired horticulturalist, famous for his delphiniums, and he has made use of a small space to produce a garden both prolific and picturesque. Unlike your normal Kiwi garden, flowers out the front, veges out
the back, Terry really only had the front to play with, so that's where the veges are ... and the flowers.
They left the expanse of their rural home to move into town in 2016, and found they had to adapt to a much smaller space.
"That's why the vege garden's at the front," says Terry.
What should be the driveway is lush with sweet corn, passionfruit, sunflowers, beans, tomatoes, a profusion of herbs, scatterings of self-seeded flowers, an apple tree ...
"There's quite an array. I like growing odd things. If I'm going to grow a cabbage, I won't go to the garden centre and buy a cabbage plant, I'll see if I can find a weird one somewhere, seeds, that sort of thing."
He grows mayflower beans — they look "normal" until you pop the seeds, and they are pink and white. There's daphne, a coffee plant, which bears fruit; five different types of beans, wallflowers, calendula, violas everywhere. He uses kale as living stakes for his beans. A healthy swan plant stands near the fence.
Naturally, there are delphiniums in the garden, ones he bred at Brunswick and brought with him into town. They greet him like old friends at the gate.
