Only some photos serve as a reminder of a point in time when the delight was so strong that it sparked a response that is felt physically as much as emotionally
My (very) late mother used to remark how rapidly time passes as we age and I certainly know what she meant. But even when I was younger, I could see how our perception of time changes. When we are seven, a year is a seventh of our lifetime which seems a remarkably long time. When we are seventy – not quite yet in my case but looming ever closer – a year is but a seventieth of our time spent so far on earth. And time does indeed seem to pass at an alarming rate.
A moment in time in September 2019 that seemed perfection – Magnolia Iolanthe in bloom
I find it almost beyond comprehension that we are coming to the end of the third year of the pandemic that turned our world inside out. Three years? Already? Three years in March in this country since the then deputy prime minister issued an alarming warning to New Zealanders abroad to get home now while they still could. It sounded overly dramatic at the time but within just a few days, borders started closing and flights ceased.
Thank goodness for the garden which is our anchor and our refuge.
An April experience I remember well – helianthus, Stipa gigantea and miscanthus moving in a fairly strong breeze in the Court Garden which seemed like the successful culmination of a mental vision at the time.
It was thinking about those who want to freeze time in the garden that brought Jim Croce’s song to my mind. I must have said it before, but I will say again: gardening is a process not a product that can be frozen in time. I fully understand that it is not everybody’s cup of tea. There are many things in life that are of little interest to me. Activities like golf, going to the gym or All Blacks rugby bypass me entirely. I am not a fan of mosaics and I very rarely go to the movies. I garden almost every day. I don’t garden with a view to reaching the final goal of getting the place looking exactly how I want it and expecting it to remain like that. If that is a personal goal, take up interior design instead, is my advice. It is easier to stage a scene and freeze it in time indoors.
For me, it is often the wilder areas of the garden that spark a response that goes beyond quiet satisfaction or contentment, going more into joyous end of the spectrum.
But there are moments in time when I look at the garden – sometimes a full scene or vista and sometimes just a close-up of a small section – and I sigh with joy. ‘Ah,’ I think, ‘that is just perfect.’ It is a physical reaction when I feel my heart is singing.
Late afternoon autumn light falling on the flowers of Miscanthus ‘Morning Light’
Those are times I would save in a bottle if I could. All I can do is to save them in my memory or sometimes capture the moment on camera to remind me later. Those moments are the gardener’s adrenaline, in a low-key sort of way. We know that the scene will change – very rapidly if it is dependent on a particular quality of light, a couple of weeks if it is dependent on recent garden maintenance, more slowly if it is a case of a composition of plants that works brilliantly for part of the season.
Gardening could be likened to a journey with no set destination but plenty to see along the way. If you are goal-oriented, you may be better to take up golf. Or mosaic-making.
May your gardening year have moments of utter magic, joy and contentment that you, too, wish you could bottle and save.
Postscript: We once, and only once, visited a garden that on the day we went was as close to perfection as we have ever seen. It was a private garden in the Cotswolds, UK, and it remains fresh in our memory years later. https://jury.co.nz/2017/07/31/a-perfect-garden/
January – the Scadoxus multiflorus ssp katherinae at the end of the Avenue Garden rarely fails to astound me.
Christmas is different in this land of ours at the further reaches of the southern hemisphere. With the summer solstice just a few days ago, our days are at their longest and all schools and many businesses have closed for the long summer break. The festivities many love over Christmas and New Year are intertwined with the feeling that now is the time to relax and recover, to enjoy the warmth of summer.
May you find peace and happiness in whatever way you choose to mark this time of the year wherever you are. Mark and I will likely be in the garden.
Seasons greetings and may you go well and stay safe.
Abbie
That is Kevin and Sharon, They are a family joke shared by our second daughter many years ago. Kevin has to wear a Santa hat on account of a slight accident with his antlers.
I was up the top of our tall platform ladder to get these photos – a view of the Court Garden which we do not usually see because it has been designed and planted to be immersive at ground level, with no long vistas.
I see it is exactly 364 days ago that I published a piece on deciding to establish a tussock walkway. It is entirely coincidence that I return to it today.
From a different part of the garden, that is Carex buchananii at the front with the orlaya and verbena and Carex comans behind.
I have no idea if other countries talk about tussock or tussockland. Overseas readers may like to enlighten me. Maybe it is our term and other countries have prairies, steppes and grasslands? Our tussock areas are our native grasslands and I am not even sure that many New Zealanders realise that our native grasses are not only largely unique to us but also varied and interesting with many good garden candidates. Contrary to what some think, a tussock is not a specific grass, it is a term for the growth habit of a number of grasses that include our chionochloa, poa, festuca and – sometimes – carex.
Not exactly well furnished yet but on the way
I opted for carex in this area, specifically Carex buchananii and Carex comans ‘Bronze” because I had them to hand. I will admit that they got off to a slow start because I shifted them, divided and replanted in high summer. While well watered-in, they had to endure a long, dry summer and autumn and not all of them lasted the distance. But it will not matter. They are seeding down with great gusto, on a scale I had not expected. Not only do I anticipate it being a fully clothed tussock area by this time next year, I think I will have to thin them. Most of these look to be the more upright C.buchananii at this stage but I am hoping for some of the fountaining C.comans as well.
That is a whole lot of self-seeding happening in a short space of time
The purity of vision with which I started – that of a rippling grassland of bronze tussock with no defined paths – has been watered down a little. When we broke up the two concrete paths that defined the site of the old propagation house that formerly filled most of this space, I made the call to get Lloyd to lay some crazy paved stepping stones through it and that may be a good call in terms of keeping some clear pathways, given the dense seeding of the plants.
Adding native celmisia to the Carex buchananii
Next Mark asked me, “What are you going to do to add some seasonal interest and colour?” And those words are the death knell of pure visions. I added some celmisias – our native mountain daisy – and I really like the look of those with the carex. There were some legacy plants that survived the removal of the propagation house and I feel Cordyline stricta can stay, even though it is Australian. Another tropical-looking cordyline has popped up and it may or may not be C.petiolaris. A bit of seed is blowing in and I will have to manage Verbena bonariensis and the white nicotiana because, while a few plants are charming enough, we don’t want them everywhere and they seem to want to be everywhere. And I admit I planted a swag of dwarf narcissi. For spring interest, you understand.
An Australian interoper – the blue flowered Cordyline stricta (not Ralph)
Zach refers to this area as ‘the prairie’, albeit a very small prairie. I shall keep referring to it as the tussock walkway because the grasses at least will remain the dominant plant and they are native tussocks.
First published in the November issue of Woman magazine. Ironically, two weeks after writing this (which, with magazine deadlines, was in September), I realised that we were done with opening the garden to the public. That was why we then announced that the garden festival just passed would be our last.
The Rimu Avenue
We do great spring gardens in Aotearoa New Zealand. Notwithstanding the usual moaning about the weather, this is a country with a mild, temperate climate, lacking extremes of temperature. We drift so gradually between seasons that our spring season extends to a long period. Magnolias, flowering cherries, daffodils, irises, early roses and much, much more – our springs are a froth of bloom. It is no coincidence that spring is the main season for garden festivals and garden visiting.
Maybe you have been thinking you would like to open your garden, to share the results of your dedicated efforts.
The summer borders in spring
There are various reasons for opening your garden but making money is not likely to be a viable option, at least not in Aotearoa. We simply don’t have high enough visitor numbers. Most open gardens in this country will get numbers in the low hundreds to the low thousands. To be financially viable, you would need to be in the high tens of thousands and that is a whole different ball game.
Location affects visitor numbers a great deal and gardens on the tourist circuit will get higher numbers but that is also dependent on good access, excellent signage and convenient parking.
Gardens with added attractions appeal to wider cross section of the potential visitor market. Not many of us can manage a castle in a spectacular setting (here’s looking at you, Larnach’s Castle). A café or plant nursery helps but it is rare to find a place where the café or other attraction and the garden are of equally high standard.
Hosting events can be be quite high stress, especially if it is dependent on the rain holding off for long enough. There is nothing like tracking the hourly weather forecast to lift anxiety levels.
There are plenty of gardens that host events in an effort to build visitor numbers and generate income but this is not a track we have chosen to go down. My gardening and life partner, Mark, has never wanted a bar of events. As far as he is concerned, he only welcomes visitors if they want to see the garden, not because it is a venue. I flirted with a few weddings while Mark hid out of sight in his vegetable garden, quietly pretending there was nothing going on. Encountering not one but two Bridezillas put me off for life. I remember thinking of one, “Lady, you are not paying me anywhere near enough to treat me like the hired help in my own garden while you pose for wedding photographs in front of my house.”
Some level of catering, perhaps? Been there, done that. It added extra work and stress but was generally manageable until the rise to prominence of not just vegetarian options but also vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, keto and goodness knows what else. The general public have become awfully picky eaters in recent times.
It only takes one group eating lunch in the garden to turn your formerly well-behaved dog into a shameless beggar. Few are better at working a crowd than our Dudley.
Some people open for charity and that is a laudable position, given how much work it takes to get a garden to opening standard. Some open to support an event or festival. Some may be driven by ego alone but, let’s be honest, we all want visitors to come and enjoy our place, to admire our efforts, maybe to be impressed by what we are doing, certainly to share the pleasure we find in our own garden. It can be a very affirming experience and that is the main reason we still open.
In the summer gardens
We first opened 35 years ago, which seems like an eternity. Initially we kept it to the 10 days of what was then called the Taranaki Rhododendron Festival (now the Centuria Taranaki Garden Festival and currently going stronger than ever). They were different times – simpler, more amateurish and visitor expectations were a lot lower than they are today. Mind you, most garden visitors expected free entry, too.
Bowing to pressure, we gradually extended our open times to eight months of the year.
Festival is the only time of the year when I regret not owning a clothes drier. Washing on the line is a no-no.
It changes the way you look at your garden. You start looking more critically, as though through the eyes of the garden visitor. It also changes the way you manage a garden, trying to keep standards up all the time but without the staff that maintain publicly owned gardens. It even affects when you can peg your washing on the line (never in busy times or when tours are booked – at least not if you have a prominent washing line, as we do). When you are a private garden, it is not just the garden you are opening; there is a certain amount of presentation of a desirable lifestyle that goes with it. I have noticed a growing tendency in recent years to ‘dress’ or stage gardens in the manner of staging real estate.
It is common now to see a certain level of staging or dressing a garden – best when it is witty as here at Bev McConnell’s garden ‘Ayrlies’.
After 25 years we had had enough and visitor numbers had fallen away, except for the 10 day festival period. We closed the garden entirely for 7 years, using that time to carry out major work and to fall in love with our own place again. We didn’t garden less, we just gardened differently.
Leading a garden tour around the park
Nowadays we only open for the garden festival. That is our half way compromise. It still governs how we garden for maybe half the year but the other half is ours, all ours. As an aside, it takes almost as much work to prepare a garden for a single tour group or a one-day event as it does to open for a more extended period. Do not be lulled into the thought that it will be much easier if the time length is short.
I am not sorry to have left scanning or signing-in behind.
When we re-opened in November 2020, we were not sure how we would feel and we certainly did not anticipate the impact of being in a Covid-free country with closed borders and a population suffering from cabin fever. Visitor numbers were three times higher than we expected.
Last year’s festival threatened to be a huge disappointment as Auckland and large parts of the Waikato went into lockdown and tour groups cancelled left, right and centre but numbers held at a reasonable level, given the extraordinary situation. Opening in Covid times has certainly added layers of challenge.
The day of the poocalypse was certainly a memorable occasion
When we reopened, friends came to help. I joked that for once Mark and I would be able to swan around, being gracious hosts. Ha! Chance would be a fine thing. All I can say is that I seem to spend a lot of my time worrying about carparking and clean toilets and much less time being the gracious host. You haven’t lived until the septic tank servicing the loos fails on a day when you have over 450 visitors on the property. I am hoping not to repeat that experience. A poocalypse, we called it at the time.
Carparking is a challenge. However, we have found that we can park 54 – or was it 57 – vehicles on our property before having to park visitors on the road but it takes careful management by two people and not too much rain beforehand.
Don’t even ask about carparking. I know more about the vagaries of drivers and parking than I need to. We still laugh, however, at the benighted but not de-knighted former Cabinet minister who visited. “It is just like Sissinghurst,” he declared as he entered. Having been to Sissinghurst ourselves, we knew that he was referring to the challenge of finding a carpark at a busy time.
I have often said that 99 out of every 100 garden visitors are perfectly pleasant, courteous and appreciative people. The 100th is not. In discussion here, we agreed that it is more like one in 500 who is not. When garden openers gather after an event, conversation often turns to the 500th visitor. We all remember them. In fact, we sometimes compare notes to see if it is the very same person. Years later, we still remember them – which is probably an indicator of how few unpleasant garden visitors there are. But if you are out and about visiting gardens, don’t be the 500th visitor. Maybe stay home instead of wilfully ruining somebody else’s day.
The borders, as we refer to them here
It should also go without saying that visitor books are solely there for garden visitors to write something positive, or at least pleasant. Manners matter, m’dear. If you have nothing nice to say, then don’t say anything at all – at least not in the visitor book and probably not in on-line reviews, unless you have already made your complaint or criticism in person to the garden owner. I am all for keeping standards, decorum and courtesy in the somewhat rarefied world of garden visiting.
The definitive word comes from my Mark who, when we were considering reopening, said, “You don’t garden on this scale without wanting to share it with others”. At least we agree that ten days a year is quite enough for us now.
Gardening a cyclic affair. I see I write about foxgloves every few years at this time of the season and here we are. It is this time of the year, I get around the garden to pull out the nasty pink ones.
There are about 20 different species of foxglove and we have tried a few of the different ones, particularly in honey and soft yellow shades but really, it is only the common Digitalis purpurea which lasts the distance. The other species are much pickier and won’t naturalise for us.
It is the shade of pink, I think, that bothers me so much I won’t even tolerate them in wilder areas of the garden
What is it I dislike so much about the pink form? It really is the colour and the status of the plant as a countryside weed, though I think I would be less worried about the weed aspect if it was a prettier colour. I do, after all, grow wild fennel in the summer gardens. That murky, hard pink is just not a colour I like. I like it even less in a garden situation because I feel it lacks any refinement or charm.
Whites and pastels gently seeding in the gravel heap. They were a little more impressive earlier in the season before the rains came in the last week.
The whites and pastels are no less thug-like in their growth habits but I like the height and the flower form and I am fine with letting them seed around in a gentle sort of way. We have a patch of self-sown seedlings growing in a small gravel heap – the contents of the capillary beds back in the days when we had a nursery on site. It is quite handy having a stash of fine gravel to use in some situations and it is not doing any harm where we stockpiled it. The foxgloves are happy to grow in straight gravel.
Red ribs to the left are meant to mean pink flowers but no, this is not always the case. Green ribs to the right, however, usually indicate white flowers
I can categorically state that this plant has white flowers with a few red freckles inside, despite those clear red ribs on the foliage
It is because I keep track of that patch, that I have worked out that the advice to cull any seedlings that have red ribs to the leaves if you want to get rid of the pink ones and keep the whites and pales is not in fact accurate. It may be true that all dark pink ones have red ribbing on the foliage but it is not true the other way round – so, too, can some of the whites and pales. For a brief while, I thought that only the white foxgloves with freckles or spots inside the thimble flowers had red ribs but no, so too do some of the all whites with no freckles.
All white forms in the Iolanthe garden where their thuggish and wild ways are fine
The white foxgloves are simply a variant of the same species, Digitalis purpurea, but the dominant gene is clearly pink so if you are not vigilant on weeding out the stronger pink forms, you will end up with a dwindling number of white seedlings. You have to pull the plants out and remove them from the site as soon as the colour is obvious. If you leave them to flower, the bees which constantly work these blooms will transfer the pollen from one to another so the genes in the seed will not stay the more desirable white.
The common pink to the right is not acceptable to me; the second from the left opens white but matures to the same pink tones I dislike so must also be removed in its prime
I also pull out plants which are clearly pastel forms of the same pink parent rather than the peachy hues of some I have and I pull those plants that think they can outwit me by opening white and then changing colour to pink as the flowers mature. Were I truly dedicated to the genus, I might start selecting for different habits – more compact or with larger sized thimbles for example – but I don’t love them enough for that. I am fine with keeping to pure whites in the Iolanthe garden and pastel peach in the Court Garden.
If I lived in a drier climate, I might expend the same random energy on lupins – another plant that hovers on the margins between being a delightful garden plant, wildflower or even noxious weed. But lupins don’t like our high rainfall, high humidity conditions so I must make do with foxgloves.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 