A growing recovery in a challenging Taranaki garden

When conifer specialist David Sampson dropped like a felled Pinus radiata last year, the New Plymouth man refused to stay down. Virginia Winder reports.

David Sampson was heading into the Bell Block Hall to play indoor bowls when he tripped over concrete kerbing.

‘‘My tendon ripped off my right knee and I collapsed and broke the fibula on my left leg.’’

So, he and wife Noeline, known as the conifer couple or by others as Taranaki’s Mr and Mrs Christmas, had to withdraw Frog Lodge, their 3-acre (1.2ha) garden, from last year’s garden festival.

This year, they are back for the Centuria Taranaki Garden Festival, on from October 28 to November 6, which runs in partnership with the Taranaki Arts Trail and Taranaki Sustainable Backyards Trail.

Both David and the property are in fine form, even though those recovery months were tough for the ever-active man.

‘‘For six weeks I couldn’t even stand up.’’

He had two months in hospital and was then skittled by an infection that led to more time in hospital, a torrent of tests and effective treatment.

‘‘When I got home, I was actually buggered – I had no petrol in the tank,’’ the 86-year-old says.

Even walking from the lounge to the kitchen felt too much. Meanwhile, Noeline was, and still is, being treated for heart problems.

‘‘The two of us were a couple of cot cases,’’ David says.

But the former owners of Cedar Lodge Nurseries have been content in their convalescence.

‘‘It was actually lovely to be here,’’ he says.

The ‘‘here’’ is the Bishop Rd property, which features a long drive to a lake, plantings of magnolias, camellias and other species, a grove of Pinus radiata, a wide variety of rare and favourite conifers, a new pathed area featuring native plants, a deck fringed with Cedrus atlantica ‘‘Glauca Pendula’’ and the original Egmont Rd train station restored by David.

The garden continues to be David’s day-to-day therapy for mind and body. ‘‘I’m going to get on top of this – I’m going to beat it.’’

He could be talking about either garden or legs, or both.

‘‘I basically decided through the disappointment of missing out on the first [2021] festival, come hell or high water I was going to do it. There wasn’t a question that I would do it and that’s still driving me.’’

David and Noeline will have extra help during the 10-day festival, but he’s not keen on having assistance to prepare Frog Lodge.

‘‘It’s my garden.’’

To learn about the name of the garden, the Sampsons’ love of conifers and the background to the train station, we must leap back in time.

Let’s start with the plants. ‘‘I’ve always loved them,’’ Noeline says. ‘‘They take very little care and if they are planted in the right position for their size, they put on a really good display.’’ David says there are so many different forms of foliage, but he has a particular love of the true miniature conifers, especially Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Takaka’, the alpine native ‘‘Cockayne’s Blue’’ and the Japanese Hinoki cypress.

‘‘A lot of plants have been lost overseas, so I’m trying to preserve some of these plants,’’ he says.

Many are no longer available through nurseries, and David himself doesn’t graft. But if someone is extra-keen on a particular conifer, he will grow it from a cutting.

His own conifer conversion began with something simple.

‘‘There was a five-second incident that changed my life,’’ David says.

When they married in 1959, David and Noeline took over the family dairy farm and wanted to plant shelter trees.

One day, they took the farm truck to Taranaki’s renowned nursery, Duncan & Davies, which often employed retired farmers, including David’s dad, Jack.

‘‘He [dad] bent down, picked up a tree from the packing shed floor and said,

‘you go home and plant this, because it’s going to get thrown out’.’’

That plant – a yellow lawsoniana – grew, and David took a liking to it, and even more so when a friend mentioned it could be grown from cuttings.

‘‘He showed me how to do it and the damn thing grew roots. It was successful and it went from there.’’

David went around gathering conifer cuttings from anywhere he could, leading to the birth of Cedar Lodge Nursery.

‘‘We thought we’d just stick to conifers, but what we didn’t realise was that conifers are the largest family of plants in the world.’’

Included in that whānau are ‘‘three magnificent native trees’’ – kauri, rimu and totara.

Meanwhile, the parents of three sons sold the dairy cows and ran a dry stock farm on the land where David was born.

On a hilly part of the farm, he planted a grove of pine trees for timber production and was set to thin them in September when Noeline stopped him, saying: ‘‘Why don’t you wait until December and sell them as Christmas trees?’’

He laughs: ‘‘I thought that was a stupid idea.’’

But they sold for $5 each, even though David thought they were terrible trees. ‘‘The fact that someone paid money for them, I became interested.’’ Eventually, the Sampsons began planting paddocks with rows of wellspaced Christmas trees and delighted in watching families wrangle over choosing festive trees.

Then came the Christmas Shop idea, starting with temporary premises in town over eight or nine years until moving to the hayshed on their Egmont Rd property from 1998 to 2005. Finally, they had a purpose-built Christmas Shop erected on site.

They have since sold up and, 13 years ago, moved to ‘‘Tipperary’’, the family’s nickname for the furthest part of the farm from the original house.

Finally, they had a home away from work – they had always lived in the middle of both the farm and nursery business.

‘‘We never went home,’’ he says. At Frog Lodge they have found peace. ‘‘Back when I was a little tacker living at 63 Egmont Rd, further up the road was a pond that had frogs in it. They kicked up a hell of a noise – I’ve never heard such a din since.’’

The family called the old pond Frog Lodge, which David and Noeline adopted as the official name for their garden, although their lake was an overgrown swamp when they started.

On the lawn below the house sits the old Egmont Rd train station, which David bought for $5. It was moved three times until its final resting spot.

‘‘It was absolutely abused and started to fall apart. The floor and walls parted company ... anyone else would have got rid of it.’’

But it was steeped in memories of David’s childhood.

‘‘As a kid I spend hours and hours playing in that railway station, watching the steam trains.’’

Not only is the structure made from 95% of the original rimu, but it’s also painted in heritage hues from Resene. The body is painted with ‘‘Flesh’’ and the trim is ‘‘Copper Rust’’.

David has been researching the history of steam trains in Taranaki, so the station interior features displays of photos, copies of old timetables and a timeline of the building’s restoration. He and Noeline are both life-long learners, always seeking fresh knowledge. ‘‘If you don’t have a challenge in life, what do you have?’’ David says.

‘‘I’m going to get on top of this – I’m going to beat it.’’