The peculiar affliction of gardeners’ godwottery

My apologies to those subscribers who received a draft version of this earlier. I hit “publish” instead of “preview”….

Godwottery! A friend gave me the gift of a word this morning. How can I have lived my life so far without this word?

Godwottery. A noun. “Gardening or garden design in an affected, fussily decorative, or over-elaborate style; an instance of this.” This is from the Oxford English Dictionary so it must be right. It does mention that it is an example of archaic and affected language but wot ho, jolly sir? It has only been in use since 1937 so it is but a  modern archaism at worst. So too is the second descriptor a double irony, for what could be more appropriate than an affected word to describe a garden full of affectation?

I am not deterred, I shall incorporate this word into my lexicon (or ‘my vocab’ as others less prone to archaic affectations might say). I am an experienced godwotter spotter, I tell you.

We were part of the open garden scene in the first decade of this new century when over-decorating your garden became the rage at a mass, domestic level, even amongst those who would never dream of ornamenting their interiors from the Warehouse shelves at the time. It was the Gnome Brigade exhumed from the past but on steroids and with expanded horizons. Not just Grumpy and his mates. No. Now one must add fairies, orcs, trolls, odd monster-y reinterpretations of classic grotesques and a whole lot more. Also reproduction classical statues of the armless, legless and white type. And focal points! For what is a vista or a view without a focal point? Or seats as focal points. Just a single seat painted in an eye-catching colour and placed where it is never to be sat upon but gives Yet Another Focal Point.

Godwottery goes well beyond the unrestrained approach that leads to cluttering up a garden with decoration. It takes in the “but wait! There is more” gardening syndrome where thinking that yet more points of interest, destinations, hedges, squitty garden rooms and other enclosures such as rondels, features and constructions will enhance the space.

And veneer gardening, which is what I call the DIY attempts at trompe l’oeil, garden design that emulates theatre set design and the attempts to recreate Grand Garden Design but in plywood and tanalised timber. I find it easier to accept naïve over-ornamentation (at its best it can be genuinely creative, tipping over to folk art) rather than pretentious veneer gardening.

But now I have the word. Godwottery. “He is just a pretentious godwotterer,” I may say in the future. “It is way past time they ceased godwottering.”

Just to prove that I am not alone, I give you two quotes from the OED:

1969   Guardian 18 Aug. 7/1   ‘Godwottery’, the sentimental preconception of what a garden should be, results in a very strange collection of elements.

2006   Denver Post (Nexis) 31 Mar.   If you’d like to create a godwottery of your own, you might consider ‘sundials, gnomes, fairies, plastic sculptures, fake rockery, pump-driven streams and wrought-iron furniture’.

Believe me, I have seen some godwottered gardens that have the lot detailed in that second quote. AND a giant chess set as well.

Trentham Gardens were treading a fine between enhancing the visitor experience and tipping over the edge to godwottery. Public gardens are particularly vulnerable to this trap in their attempts to pull the punters as can be seen below.

I have had to crop very heavily on these godwottery exemplars in the hope that they may remain relatively anonymous. I could have chosen many other examples. some simply appalling, but they are too readily identifiable. I would prefer to be able to cross the road without fear of being run down by a disaffected garden owner.

 

 

Semi vegetarianism. Or low meat consumers, at least.

 “We started in a small way – just the one vegetarian meal of virtue a week.”

I was quite excited to receive a short notice commission from the Sunday Star Times on Friday. I have written for various publications over the years, but never one of the Sunday national papers. The topic was our move to heavily reduce the amount of meat we eat and it had to be a tightly written piece because it was not a high word count.

Unlike most publications I have written for in recent years, the Sunday Star Times uses professional photographers and while I loathe being photographed, it was part of the deal. The editor wanted some photos of me weighing up vegetables in one hand and steak in the other. I pointed out the photographer would need to bring the steak and, shamelessly, assumed we would be left with the meat. We are not totally vegetarian so I requested ribeye, not the cheaper rump. Nor the even more expensive fillet though I see this was labelled ‘ribeye fillet’ so I am not even sure what that is. I had a lucky escape in that it was not me that ran full length of the page pretending to chow down a raw slab of meat. It was mentioned but I have my limits and clearly they chose to use somebody much younger, less wrinkly and way more trendy than me for this lead photo.

Not just the price, the plastic packaging is a big issue, too

But I was truly shocked at the price of steak. $25.20 for three pretty small pieces. That was a revelation to me after buying very little meat for the past couple of years or more. But it tasted good that evening.

I set up a vegetable and fruit display – all home grown – which the photographer was quite impressed by.

This was the copy:

It was the dried bean mountain that tipped us over into vegetarianism. We were of the Woodstock hippie generation. Forty years later, husband Mark returned to his vegetable gardening roots. He wanted to see how far he could push self-sufficiency again. The dried soya beans, Borlottis, favas and even common Greenfeast were mounting up much faster than we were eating them.

Instead of talking about nuclear winter, the oil crisis and carless days of the 1970s, our talk was now of lowering our own personal carbon footprint, cutting out plastic and packaging and knowing what was in our food. Environmental matters remain the starting point but now driven by climate change, modern industrial farming and the pillaging of our fisheries.

At the same time, we started noticing the information recommending a lower intake of animal protein as we age. Alas, we are ageing.

I figured I could cut back our meat intake and that was preferable to giving up cheese. We started in a small way – just the one vegetarian meal of virtue a week. These were mostly based around dried beans, but one weekly meal was never going to make inroads on the bean mountain.

I cook. Mark grows vegetables and does dishes. It is a fair division of labour in our household. The vegetarian meals became more frequent and I found the recipe book ‘River Cottage Veg Every Day” by the inimitable Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Hugh will never know it but he became our soul brother across the world. His loose approach to meal planning and recipes fitted our lifestyle like a glove.

A few months down the track, most meat had gone from our diet and we didn’t miss it at all. I was now cooking a meat-based meal maybe once a fortnight and there it has stayed. What had happened was that I stopped thinking of meat as the starting point for a meal.  Instead, I start thinking from whatever vegetables we have in abundance and then add in extra protein and carbs to balance the meal. We don’t miss the meat, though we will still eat it when we are out.

We describe ourselves as “semi-vegetarian”.

I have even phased out most bacon now. Second daughter flying in from overseas for Christmas requested ham on the bone. I found what may have been the last free-range, small ham on the bone in New Plymouth. But I did not feel the need to buy any other meats for the occasion. Dried beans did not, however feature on the menu that day.

My little piece was part of a double page spread, the first of a three-part series looking at the environmental impacts of meat. I found the chart detailing the average New Zealand meat consumption interesting. Overall consumption is declining but lamb sales have collapsed. I think this is a damning indictment of the lamb industry and its failure to adapt to changing eating styles (particularly the decline of the large Sunday roast). Now that we eat so little meat, when we get the occasional craving, it is red meat we want and I try to buy lamb or free-range pork rather than beef because the environmental footprint of NZ lamb is way better. Never have either of us have felt a craving for chicken and I am sure the increasing chicken consumption is entirely to do with good marketing, the low price points and repackaging the meat as a quick-cooking convenience food. Ethically, I think the factory farming of chicken is a big issue even if its environmental impact is lower than beef.

While ethical eating is not exactly a hot button topic in rural and provincial NZ, it is interesting to see how much traction it is getting in our larger urban areas.

The link to the main feature on this topic in the Sunday Star Times is https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/food-wine/100735629/the-average-kiwi-eats-20kg-less-meat-amid-concerns-over-sustainability-of-agriculture

The garden of many colours

All the colours, bar pure red, in a cold, semi shade border in our park

Most of us garden with many colours. The advent of the strictly controlled and restricted colour palette is a recent phenomenon, though it has gained such supremacy in some circles that it is seen as the height of style.

Over the past weeks, Tony Murrell and I have been discussing garden colour schemes – incrementally – on our Radio Live Home and Garden Show sessions of a Sunday morning. We started with the white garden, progressed to other monochromatic themed gardens, then the bi-colour options  last week. This morning we wrapped up with the multi-coloured garden.

The bottom line is that anybody who has bought an existing garden will almost certainly have a multi coloured affair. And many of those who started off with a very purist and limited approach are likely to have fallen off the wagon and grown some plants which they love but which don’t adhere strictly to the original vision. In the end, it is a lot more interesting to work with a wider range of colours. Nature, after all, is random and does not play by arbitrary rules determined by humans. It is much easier to wield the iron hand of control over static interior design than it is in a dynamic garden.

A beautiful example of cottage garden in Dorset

A colour coordinated meadow planting by Nigel Dunnett at Trentham Gardens

Cottage gardens and meadows have traditionally been a mix of all colours in together. It was interesting to see Nigel Dunnett’s meadow planting at Trentham Gardens near Stoke where he is creating colour-themed meadows in some areas. I follow Pictorial Meadows on social media and I see a lot of their seed mixes are now themed on colour so I guess there is a consumer demand for this. But if you are going to go down the mixed meadow path, there will be interlopers and competitor plants that move in and unless you are actively gardening the area all the time – which rather defeats the rationale of this particular garden genre – the purist colour theming is likely to be disrupted over time.

Predominantly pastel in Jennifer Horner’s garden, Puketarata, near Hawera

If you are nervous about throwing all colours in together, there are a few techniques you can use. The first is to go pastel. When you think about pastels, there are no clashing colours. Done well, you get a lovely soft scene of gentle colours – all very pastelle, if you know what I mean. The opposite is also true. If you want a super-vibrant look, cut out all the pastels and whites.

Lots of white and cream will tone down an otherwise very vibrant planting

Alternatively, you can tone down somewhat with plenty of white and cream flowering plants, as master gardener Keith Wiley has done in this scene. Lots of green foliage will also dilute any colour scheme.

Pure yellow is a very dominant colour in a garden and will immediately draw most people’s eyes to it

A third approach is to cut out either yellow or orange. Cutting one but not both out is a bit like putting a soft filter over a photograph – it tones the whole scene down a few notches. Be cautious of how many bright yellows and acid yellows you use – maybe less than 10% of the plantings is all you need to lift the picture. More and the yellows start to dominate. I am referring to plants like some of the euphorbias, the unabashed bright yellow alstromeria and achillea, even the bold bright yellow rhododendrons like Saffron Queen or the uncompromising yellow azaleas. They all have their place but too many, and that is what your eye will be drawn to no matter what the colour mix is.

Not exactly strictly alternating, but I am sure you know what I mean

Colour all comes down to personal taste in the end. But I would suggest that only novices and newbies plant in alternating colours like a circus tent. This applies to bedding plants and also to more permanent shrubs. Too many people have asked me about planting alternating red and white camellias as a hedge. Best not, in my view, but feel free to disagree.

In his early twenties, Mark spent many hours getting to terms with colour theory by studying the Impressionists. To this day, when we are looking at other people’s gardens and analysing planting schemes, he will pull out the colour theory. If you want to get a better understanding of how colour works, there is a whole lot more in terms of both the juxtaposition and quantity of different colours. I work instinctively but Mark is very good on coming up with what shade or colour will lift a small scene that is lacking visual impact.

Maybe analyse the relative proportions of the colours used in showy plantings

If you come across a garden that really, seriously impresses you with its use of colour, maybe take some time to stand and look and analyse. There will be transferable lessons you can take away from working out the proportions of the colours used. Which colours stand out? What proportion of the total is each colour (roughly – 30% blue or is it closer to 50%?) What is planted adjacent to that colour that makes it so distinctive? Is it a colour on the opposite side of the colour wheel and is it also used just as a highlight or in equal quantities? You have to be quite keen to do this sort of thing but I am assuming that many who read my blog also like the idea of upping their own skills’ level. Developing a better understanding of how colour is being used has increased my appreciation of the large scale plantings Dutch designer, Piet Oudolf, is doing.

Destined to be dominated by pure blues a few weeks later – Keith Wiley’s naturalistic Devon garden

The ultimate skill, in my book, is the ability to change the dominant colour scheme of a garden as the seasons progress. I have only been strongly aware of it in two gardens I have seen. The first was the upper area in Keith Wiley’s “Wildside” in Devon. We looked at it in early to mid-summer when the dominant colours were oranges, yellows and tawny shades with some judicious use of cerise and pink but we could see what was soon going to come into bloom and the whole scene was destined to be dominated by blue a few weeks later. We would have gone back to see but we weren’t in the UK for long enough.

The second example I have mentioned before – Nigel Dunnett’s garden at the Barbican in London. Again, we were looking in early to mid-summer when the dominant colours were soft yellows and tawny apricot shades with a touch or three of purple. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I saw a photo of the same garden in autumn and it was spectacularly white. We are not talking changing bedding plants like they used to at Versailles. These gardens have permanent plantings executed with such skill that the colour schemes change with the seasons. This is a new pinnacle of gardening skill in my book.

Gone by lunchtime.

There has only ever been one significant flowering

Sometimes a tree just has to go. This flowering cherry has been sitting under a death sentence for several years. Mark planted it maybe 25 years ago and while it was quite a good shape, it rarely flowered and just grew larger, casting shade over other plants that were working harder for their continued existence. It will have been a named variety but we have long since lost the name.

“I am going to cut that cherry out,” said Mark about four years ago. It was as if the tree heard him and it confounded us by suddenly producing its best ever display of 2015. But 2016 and 2017 came and it was resting on its laurels of one decent enough performance, returning to its usual pattern of just a few scattered blooms.

One of the most useful skills Mark learned in his twenties was how to use a chainsaw safely. Possibly even more importantly, he learned the limits of his skills with the chainsaw and when it is necessary to pay for outside specialists to come in and handle a tricky situation. This tree represented no such problem. He dropped it efficiently and our Lloyd moved in to do the clean-up. Any branches too thick to be fed through the mulcher were sawn into short lengths and moved to the firewood shed. We get through prodigious amounts of firewood in winter, all of it harvested off the property. The leafage and small branches were mulched on the spot.

It was, as we say in New Zealand parlance, gone by lunchtime. Literally so, in this case.

I am not sure how people manage big gardens when they can’t do their own basic chainsaw work and manage the clean-up. Expensively, I guess.

Pretty enough flowers. Once. In 2015.

The two colour garden (plus green)

Red and yellow flower board

Red and yellow tulips in a massed bedding display at Floriade in Canberra

When I put my thinking cap on about garden colours, it was clear that a two-colour garden is much more flexible than trying for the monochromatic look. Technically, a two colour garden is  three colours but we continue to regard green as colour neutral in a gardening situation. Truth be told, unless you are into massed bedding plants, the vast majority of gardens end up being predominantly green so whatever colours you add in – whether by way of flowers or coloured foliage – are highlights, not the dominant colour by mass.

Blue and yellow is a classic combination

A two-colour scheme gives so many more choices while allowing the streamlined look of restraint that some people favour. When I have played with flower boards, it is a lot more fun mixing and matching with two colours and the results are often more atmospheric. For a long time, I wanted to theme a garden on blue and yellow. It still remains one of my favourite colour combos and is one I have used on several occasions when it comes to interior decoration. It started when our eldest daughter chose a strong sunshine yellow for her bedroom and we teamed it with navy blue soft furnishings. In our current house, I chose a more subdued yellow – more like cornfield yellow teamed with French blue and I have never tired of that combination. In a garden, we can put together ALL the yellows and lemons with the whole range of blues. It is what I would call a classic combination.

Purple and orange for a tropical look

Purple and yellow with colour-toned visitors at Olympic Park in London

If you choose orange and purple, the look becomes very different – far more tropical and contemporary rather than the classic. It all comes down to personal colour preference in the end. I once contemplated the practicality of a garden in buff and pale blue – inspired by a gorgeous buff coloured rose. I wondered about using it with soft blues like the pretty nigella and the buff-brown grasses that seed down here. I realise in retrospect that my mental image did not incorporate green which would have altered the look entirely. Clearly the rose was already defoliated in my mind’s eye so that only the flowers were visible and I abandoned that idea altogether when I found that the rose was disease-prone and would need regular spraying to keep it looking anywhere near acceptable.

I recall a startling street scene in Rome, somewhere near the Vatican but I can’t find my photos of it. The buildings were all sandy gold in colour and the street trees were all burgundy (maybe copper beeches or one of the red-foliaged plum trees). It was very uniform – the buildings were all very similar and the trees were identical. There was no green. The combination of deep burgundy and sandy gold was strong and certainly had the wow factor.

Orange and bright pink on a traffic island in our local town of Waitara. Bedding plants give a massed display that are rarely seen in a home garden but can give ideas for colour combinations

Maybe look at bedding plant displays in public gardens and on traffic islands, not for the plants used, but to see the different colour combinations. Because if you are going to try the two-colour route, it is entirely personal taste as to which colours you like. There are no rules to this. Just pick a colour and move across the range of hues in that colour, rather than limiting yourself to just one shade of the colour. Gardens are never static so it is a more dynamic medium than interior design.

Hirst Cottage – the garden is a unified theme of white on green with red highlights (and black)

In New Plymouth, Judy Gopperth, opens her garden called Hirst Cottage for the annual garden festival at the beginning of November each year. Hers is one of the few places I have seen that has a totally disciplined approach to colour management in a smaller town garden. Basically, it is themed on red and white. Except it is more a case of theming on white and green (as she describes it herself) with red highlights and black as a background. The red appears mainly in small touches in the hard landscaping and the soft furnishing and it creates a bold contrast to the dominant white and green. It is a completely controlled use of colour which unites the outdoor space with the house (in her case, a very early historic cottage).

This style may appeal to people living in urban situations where outdoor space is very limited and is solely there as an extension of indoor living space. The designer look, I guess. It is unified, crisp and uncluttered. In theory, you could change the look relatively easily by swapping out all the red for another single colour.

Pink and yellow at Floriade in Canberra

The one colour combination that I personally dislike intensely is pink and yellow. I have seen it looking pretty in clear pastel pink and lemon in a tulip display in Eden Gardens in Auckland, but hideous in a display at Floriade in Canberra. It is so easy to get wrong. There are many murky shades of pink – pinks with brown or purple tones within them – which can look lovely in combination with other colours. But put them with hard yellows and I shudder. There are plenty of plants to choose from. I have seen many a murky pink with yellow variegated foliage which have managed to achieve the combination in a single plant. I am not at all keen the combination of a bright yellow kowhai and the cerise pink of a cercis that I drive by each spring in a nearby garden. Nor do I like bright yellow grasses combined with pale pink flowers. But that is entirely personal taste. If a carefully colour controlled garden is what you want and pink and yellow pleases your eye, go for it. Don’t let me put you off.

There are times in my life when I have tried using a hugely restricted colour palette but I always seem to add in another colour to give some visual oomph. Over time, it has become more a matter of deciding what colours to leave out – so a process of exclusion rather than starting with just a two or three colour palette. But that is a different approach altogether.

Blue and white at Auckland Regional Botanic Gardens

My final suggestion is that if you want to try a two-colour garden and you lack confidence, try any colour plus white. That is the safe option.

Pretty in pinks and white at Floriade