About Phillip and Pat Hosking and Maddisons Garden Art.

We specialise in handmade metal garden art .

Maddison - Maddie - was our beloved cat and gardening 'mate' for 21 years and we named our business after her .

We design and handcraft all our pieces ourselves, we also custom make bespoke pieces to order. Our garden and homeware pieces are both unique and of a high quality. Phillip did his apprenticeship in sheet metal work many years ago and for over 40 years we owned a successful metalwork manufacturing company.

Now semi-retired, Maddisons Garden Art evolved as we combined our love of gardening with Phillip’s skills in welding and metalwork.

Phillip makes, Pat promotes and together we sell.

We work together on the varied aspects of our business from the initial design, sourcing materials, visiting farriers to collect shoes then Phillip makes, Pat packs for the couriers and replies to online enquiries. We both talk with our customers to ensure they are really happy with their choice. We enjoy meeting and chatting with people whether they are purchasing or browsing our products. We meet lovely people through Maddisons Garden Art, a real bonus, gardeners are such creative, friendly people, always happy to share. We especially like hearing of the enjoyment people get from our art in their gardens. It’s a real thrill to receive photos from them and seeing our art in their garden settings and sometimes displayed in a new different way.

Our oldest customer ( that we know of ) is an 85 year old lady who brought a Lotus Flower because she loved it so much! We have just sold a set of Seed Pods that is to be a 60th Wedding Anniversary Gift .. how special! The couple are in their late 80s and still enjoy gardening their half acre. There are 7 families giving the gift and with 7 individual pods to a set they loved the idea of one pod representing each family.

We have sold our art pieces to both private gardeners and businesses all over NZ. The photo at the top of this page is of two Horse Shoe Balls framing the entrance to Villa Margarita, a Corporate Hosting Venue in Wellington.

Our art is displayed at gardens that are open to the public - A La Fois, Coatesville, Auckland. Mana Lodge Equestrian, Havelock North, Hawkes Bay. Our work has been displayed in garden tours and shows, recently at Silvermist, Garden Marlborough in the South Island. The Heroic Garden Festival and The NZ Flower and Garden Show both in Auckland.

Some of Our Favourite Garden Quotes

- “Gardens are the result of a collaboration between art and nature" ....  Penelope Hobhouse

 - “To some, gardening is therapy for the mind. Art is therapy for my soul" .... Reno

- “I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I work in the garden" .... John Erskine  

- "Art is as natural as sunshine and as vital as nourishment." …. MaryAnn F. Kohl

- "The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies" .... Gertrude Jekyll

- "Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful,' and sitting in the shade" .... Rudyard Kipling

humph !! ... Phillip says the last quote epitomises Pat! - She says, only thing missing .. a wine !!  

Wabi-Sabi : The Japanese Art of Impermanence

Often in our world of mass-produced goods and machine-like cities, we strive for perfection, or in the case of modern process improvement techniques, near-perfection achieved by minimizing errors to within a prespecified amount. Coupled with this perfectionism is a tendency to toss away goods once they become marked on the surface or begin to show other signs of aging.

This quest for perfection and newness doesn’t stop with just our smartphones and sports cars. It creeps into every aspect of our lives, and eventually shuts us off from a natural world that resists being standardized. However, by ignoring perfection and embracing all that is worn or asymmetrical, you can begin to see the world differently. This, says Leonard Koren, will open you up to “the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things and the pleasure we get from freedom of things.”

This welcoming of imperfection into your life is at the heart of Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which means “impermanent, imperfect and incomplete.” The word comes from two separate words. “Wabi” describes the creation of perfect beauty through the inclusion of just the right kind of imperfection, such as an asymmetry in a handmade ceramic bowl (contrasted with the precision of a machine-made bowl). “Sabi” reflects the kind of beauty that develops with age, such as that which occurs with the oxidation of the surface of a bronze statue.

Often wabi-sabi is applied to design principles, such as creating living spaces that eschew the sterile formal living rooms of the 1940s or ‘50s, the cookie-cutter approach to houses, or the bland designs of corporate logos. This includes focusing on the types of asymmetry you would find in nature—handmade wooden chairs, the natural drooping of a flower head in a vase or a worn leather bag that is well-traveled.

But not all wabi-sabi is intentional. Nature is the best source of wabi-sabi aesthetics. And when you are attuned to the world, you begin to see wabi-sabi in the most unlikely places. The cracks in tree bark, a sign of healthy maturity; or the cracks in our own faces as we age, as we gain wisdom along the way. Krishnamurti goes deeper, saying that our souls are all made of the same paper; our uniqueness, though, comes from the creases in that paper from the folding and unfolding of our experiences.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There’s a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

~ Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”