The Good Life: Gardens are about hope and hard work
I am in a panic. I often am. I sometimes think I would like to be one of those laid-back people who somehow cruise through life in a superior, shrugging sort of way. No I wouldn’t. Those sorts of people are, invariably, boring.
My current panic is, I must admit, fairly boring. It is that a very large box arrived here at Lush Places. This was pretty much a complete surprise to me. I do have some memory of ordering gladioli: green, deep purple and something called tiramisu. I appear to have ordered 45 bulbs. Tiramisu? What was I thinking? Where was I going to put them? And why did I order them?
I have failed to grow gladioli in the past. I’m not even sure I much like them. They do have that indelible whiff of Dame Edna about them. Still, they must now be planted. As must the 11 dahlia tubers I appear to have ordered. I don’t need any more dahlias.
It is a distinct possibility that I pushed the ordering button too many times. I do have form. I once somehow ordered something like 24 packs of chicken thighs while doing the online supermarket shopping. And there were those six dozen eggs.
Gardens are about hope. So the 45 bulbs might be evidence of that. You look out of the window in the depths of winter and see all of those spaces that you can cram with yet more dahlias come summer. Gardens are also about hard work.
We have what seems like acres of garden here at Lush Places. That is a lot of garden. I have creakily arthritic knees that need replacements. These stupid knees that lead me to limp about shouting and swearing and frightening the sheep, are apt to give in at any given moment. I can barely garden. I moved here to garden. I feel like a failure.
I certainly don’t want my gardening friends to come and look at my weeds. Kerry Carman, who gardened here in the Wairarapa and who for years wrote a gardening column for the Listener, used to lament that because of her chronically bad back there were bits of her garden she couldn’t get to and hence there were weeds. She would generously allow people to come and look at her garden and pleaded with them not to mention the weeds. Surely garden visitors would not be so rude. Gardeners are nice people. Ha. My advice if you should let people into your garden is to check their handbags for secateurs before letting them through the gate.
Decades ago, I pinched a pocketful of purple and lilac-striped opium poppies from Gordon Collier’s Pukeiti garden in Taranaki. I grew them in the garden I had in Balmoral in Auckland and they self-seeded happily. I went out into the garden one morning and they were all gone. They had been pinched in the night. Served me right, said Collier when, years later, I interviewed him. That is probably fair enough.
There is also this about gardens: they don’t need the sort of gardener whose plants are rigidly drilled and whose plants all stand up straight as soldiers, as ordered by a drill sergeant. Even before the arrival of my stupid knees I was never that sort of gardener. I like my plants to be like my cats: contrary, wayward and given to completely ignoring instruction. I have let anything willing to self-seed to go for it. These are my bohemian plants.
We have swathes of that most obliging of self-sowers, the aquilegia, everywhere. They cross-pollinate so we get new surprises every spring. Our gravel garden, which I pretend I planned, is my favourite part of the garden, not least because I don’t have to garden it. There is self-seeded euphoria, nigella, poppies, forget-me-knots, verbena, lychnis. It encroaches. We may eventually not be able to get up the driveway to get to the garage. I don’t care. I’m laid back. And I don’t much care for going out. I like to stay home and avoid looking at my weeds.
