Blue House Amberley

Blue House Amberley Love for all things plantish 😊🌿
Experiments in dry gardening🌵
Friends with mycorrhizae 🍄. Specializing in naturalistic planting design.

Open November - April, $15 we provide a map and Jenny loves to talk with visitors. Blue House Amberley is an open garden in North Canterbury. It is gardened by Jenny Cooper, with able help from partner Chris Raateland. We are in the Hurunui Garden Festival, check out www.hurunuigardenfestival.com
This is a garden where strong design and a plants woman’s passion go hand in hand. It is a garden tha

t invites you to wander, explore and relax, with plenty of places to sit, and new delights around every corner. Our wide grass paths take you from intimate and cool shade gardens, to sweeps of tussocks and prairie flowers, and through Mediterranean inspired gravel gardens, featuring stunning succulents and aloes. From generous sunny borders filled with unusual and difficult to source perennials, to an iris filled damp garden. We have a gorgeous no-mow meadow, vineyard and charming and productive vegetable garden. Tiny paths meander through arched hedges and down to the creek
We also provide a map and information about our garden philosophy, honed in the difficult North Canterbury climate. This includes no-dig, bare rooting, limited feeding and encouragement of mycorrhizal fungi. Instagram: bluehouse_amberley
www.bluehouseamberley.nz for details about the garden and how to visit.

No need to say anything, the colour speaks for itself 🥰🥰🥰
10/05/2026

No need to say anything, the colour speaks for itself 🥰🥰🥰

There are some plants with so much character that they define a season. Simply by seeing each one come into flower, I kn...
10/02/2026

There are some plants with so much character that they define a season. Simply by seeing each one come into flower, I know just where I am in the year. Spring has many wonderful plants, but these autumn flowerers, they have a richness, a warmth and a robustness that the more cool brittle flowers of spring don’t seem to have.

These early autumn plants are really happy plants, or maybe they have happy associations for me…. Early autumn is my favourite time of year.

Here we have the red berries of viburnum opulus, the Guelder rose, a true 3 season plant
Clerodendrum trichotomum, Harlequin Glory Bower, yes I know it can sucker but who amongst us is perfect? Nothing worth having is without cost, and it has such an elegant form and long lasting flowers.
Hydrangea limelight which needs no introduction
Hydrangea quercifolia, Snowflake, a lovely arching double form with fabulous autumn colour
Sanguisorba officinalis, bupleurum and persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firetail’.
Here is early autumn at its characterful best. Its not alllll about the dahlia ☺️

We are open for a few more months, and the garden is full of interest and inspiration at this time of year.



I’ve been absent from here for a few weeks. It is not so much that life has got in the way. It is more that fruit has go...
10/02/2026

I’ve been absent from here for a few weeks.

It is not so much that life has got in the way. It is more that fruit has got in the way.

We have fruit in every basket, bowl and bucket, on the windowsills and compost heaps. In my hair, under my nails, we have stickiness on the bench, stickiness on every knife handle and every door k**b.

I know the photos are very romantic, but the million tiny flies not so much. Especially tiny flies in the wine 😑😑😑 and I’m so busy laying up all this healthy goodness for winter, I’ve been living on ramen noodles for a week.

As you can see, our small orchard is full of dahlia, zinnia, grasses and other lovelies. Picking fruit is quite the juggling act, but it is a lovely place to wander with a grateful wine after dinner 😊🍷😍 🍏🍇

I really struggled (well, struggled??? I mean, it took me half a cup of tea and a choc bar) to decide which photo to beg...
20/01/2026

I really struggled (well, struggled??? I mean, it took me half a cup of tea and a choc bar) to decide which photo to begin this post with.

The first two photos especially I really like.

I love most a photo that shows a path through into something half-revealed. A little journey, even a tiny insta-journey.

It really isn't about big blooms and bright colours. I like a peek at something a bit magic, a suggested journey, a hint of mystery.

What would it be like to be that bumble-bee, zooming up under the achillea? And is this a path? Where could it lead?

That is an easy gardening recipe: tiny flowers and a splash of sunlight 🥰

This is the moment, this is what I've been working planning striving for, for months, years in fact.High summer.The gard...
20/01/2026

This is the moment, this is what I've been working planning striving for, for months, years in fact.

High summer.

The garden is full up and brimming over.

Time to sit and enjoy.

This is getting a bit ridiculous: not that anyone is judging, but I've done 4 instagram posts in 2 days, with more to co...
16/01/2026

This is getting a bit ridiculous: not that anyone is judging, but I've done 4 instagram posts in 2 days, with more to come.

Anyone from the South Island of New Zealand will know why: RAIN.

Finally, two days of lovely deep wetting rain, keeping me trapped inside.

(Internal dialogue: for a so-called dry gardener, I seem to mention water an awful lot. Obsessed much?)

I’ve been watching this weather system moving towards us for 10 days. As a mark of faith in MetService New Zealand , I emptied out and scrubbed all 6 rainwater butts with their rather interesting algal blooms. The water butts are now overflowing with fresh clean water. Thank you MetService New Zealand for delivering on this one.

To celebrate two days inside, instead of cleaning the windows (that will definitely get done at some point in 2026) or actually doing any paid work (novel thought!) I'm dealing with such a backlog of garden photos that I have completely confused myself. So I’ll just call this post Dry Garden Joy.

In praise of aeonium, helichrysum italicum, succulents, pennisetum villosum (thank you again Studio Home Gardening ) and all dry-loving heroes.

If I’m going to deal with the next folder, unhelpfully labelled ‘Good stuff’ I think I’m going to need at least a wine, a good cheese and a week more rain. 😬🥰🍷🤣

An unexpected mist wandered through the garden at 6am one morning. Having promised myself: no photography this morning, ...
15/01/2026

An unexpected mist wandered through the garden at 6am one morning. Having promised myself: no photography this morning, I had to dash inside for the camera.
It made everything glow, even a prosaic tea cup.
I think these are my most romantic shed door photos ever, and that's not a sentence I ever expected to write 😂

Here are some of the plants that get my Three-Thumbs-Up for resilience and beauty, through a very dry summer. I'd tell y...
15/01/2026

Here are some of the plants that get my Three-Thumbs-Up for resilience and beauty, through a very dry summer. I'd tell you our monthly rainfall totals, except they are so low it would upset you.

The star of the summer garden is eriogonum giganteum, St Catherine's Lace, from Seaflowers Nursery.
This plant needs its own post, it is in every second photo here!

I love my first ever dorychnium hirsutum kindly gifted to me from Margaret Long of Frensham Garden.
It is a robust, silvery, furry gem, in the legume family which you can tell from the pea like flowers.

Also kangaroo paws, anigozanthos. They are repeat flower in our garden with the strong flowers held well above the foliage and such great colours. I definitely need more of these great plants.

Plus santolina Lime Fizz, cotyledon orbiculata and of course verbena bonariensis and poa cita which I couldn't do without.

All these plants have done really well with no water, but they all get some shade, which keeps them looking fresh. I think if they were growing in an irrigated garden, they'd prefer full sun, otherwise they might flop, or maybe even rot away.

I'm so lucky to have soil lean and well drained enough to grow these lovely plants.

An awful lot has happened since I took these photos in mid-December…. Christmas, visitors, lots of good food and wine, a...
30/12/2025

An awful lot has happened since I took these photos in mid-December…. Christmas, visitors, lots of good food and wine, an awful lot of cleaning, dishes, Christmas lists written and ‘Jobs to do’ crossed off.
Plus lots of great times with friends and family, not quite enough solitary wanders around the garden, and waaaaay too little rain.

That sort of sums up a very busy month. There are more recent photos to come but…..we are so dry!

I’m missing 400 mm of rain over 2 years. I promised not to bang on about the rain chart but, did I mention the dry?
These bright greens of mid-spring are already turning into the tawny golds of high summer.

It is raining now, has the drought broken?

Just by the way, a few of these photos contain little bright crimson blobs floating above the gardens, if you look closely. That is dianthus cruentus, my new favourite little dry-lover. All seed-grown from a plant I got from Welton House two years ago. Such a sweetheart 🥰🤸‍♂️🏋️‍♂️🌵🌵🌵

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35 Willowside Place
Amberley

Telephone

+64212589511

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