Rukuhia’s Graeme Burton and Valerie ‘Val’ Glenn have turned their respective talents into separate businesses that successfully standalone but often intersect. Viv Posselt spoke to them.
Val Glenn and Graeme Burton. Photo: Viv Posselt
Graeme Burton is a skilled landscaper and topiarist. He trims foliage into geometric shapes that seem visually at odds with the natural contours of the rural property he shares with wife Val.
The living sculptures he provides through Rukuhia Homestead Landscaping have added definition and character to many Waikato homes and businesses. His own roots are deeply embedded in the horticultural history of this region. His father John Burton was a leading plant retailer from the 1970s onwards (Burton Garden Centres), and Graeme has been actively involved in the industry for 50 years.
Val, on the other hand, casts her creative spell in another direction. The business she runs from their home, Cleverdesign Ltd, is centred on designing and theming a host of events, from elaborate balls, parties and weddings to classy business functions and award nights.
Part of the evocative setting Val Glenn created at last year’s launch of ‘Ellen of Denniston’ in Ōhaupō. Photo: Viv Posselt
She was responsible last November for turning the Ōhaupō School Hall into an environment that replicated the gritty setting of the Denniston coal-mining settlement for the launch of Val Millington’s book, Ellen of Denniston.
Years earlier, while studying home sciences at Otago, she realised she preferred design, so changed direction and returned to the Waikato to pursue her creative side. It was in 1990 while she was studying at Wintec that she met Val Millington, who was then CEO at National Fieldays. As they collaborated on Fieldays expo sites, the two Vals unwittingly launched a working relationship that has lasted for years.
A shared interest in creative expression also brought Graeme Burton and Val Glenn together.
Graeme Burton with topiary. Photo: Viv Posselt
Spacecraft
Graeme, who had followed the family line into horticulture and landscaping, invited Val to work with him on creating a display for the Ellerslie International Flower Show, an otherworldly promotion for InPlants, highlighting 13 new plants in a ‘War of the Worlds’ setting complete with silver bug-eyed aliens, fog, mystical music and a 3m high spaceship now standing proud outside the Space Centre in Kihikihi.
Val won the Judge’s Supreme Award for the Best Landscaping site at that 2006 Ellerslie International Flower Show, and a new working partnership was forged.
Val Glenn in the shed. Photo: Viv Posselt
The couple married in 2006, by which stage Graeme was doing topiary in earnest. He already understood the craft through his own father having had a topiary nursery in Tauranga in the 1980s, but eager to seek inspiration further afield they headed for Europe. They visited the once-every-decade Floriade Horticultural World Expo in Holland, the Chelsea Flower Show in England, Claude Monet’s famous garden in Giverney in France, the world-famous Garden of Versailles outside Paris, and a host of other grand gardens.
Re-energised, they returned to the Waikato where a growing market was ready for their ideas. Both work from the stately old property that has been in Val’s family for many decades, and both have taken their skills to other parts of the country whenever required.
Graeme has thousands of topiaries in various stages of development – globes, clouds, standards, columns – some wired, all fastidiously clipped.
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- Ellerslie
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- Undersea
“Not any old plant will do for topiary,” Graeme said. “You have to use a plant that doesn’t mind being controlled. Some of them take up to 10 years to get right.”
Val helps out, either with the topiary or in the relaxing picking garden they have developed on a disused tennis court. Otherwise, she is deep in her treasure-chest of an old shed, which is filled with the props and paraphernalia she uses to theme events.
“I have a team of part-time ladies who help when we have something on,” she said. “It would be impossible for me to do it on my own.”
The pair often work together, using their multiple talents to make whatever they’re doing as punchy and transformative as possible.
Val Glenn and Graeme Burton enjoying their homestead garden, with some of Graeme’s topiaries in the background. Photo: Viv Posselt
