There are perfect moments in the garden in spring. My favourite bit of the garden is one that I had no part in making. This is the gravel garden, on the drive in front of the house. I didn’t know I wanted a gravel garden. I certainly didn’t plan to grow a gravel garden. It grows itself. A gravel garden is a marvellous thing. You don’t have to feed it, you scarcely have to weed it or water it, and the best thing about it is that it hasn’t cost you a cent. It is perfect for miserly gardeners.
When I was an Auckland gardener, I was a spendthrift gardener. Which is another name for a show-off, control-freak sort of gardener. Now, I just let annuals and perennials from the so-called “tended” (not very) beds which border the drive, and anywhere else that takes their fancy, self-seed where they decide they want to live.
Just now, we have masses of aquilegias running wild. In gardening lingo they are sports. They are wildly promiscuous and will hook up with any nearby charmer, resulting in surprising offspring. I now have a collection of varieties, some of which I have spent years, and many dollars and much cursing, attempting to grow from seed. There is William Guinness, which is almost black with a white frill and presumably named after that most Irish of gargles, a Nora Barlow with little pink rosettes (bred by botanist Nora Barlow, a granddaughter of Charles Darwin) and a white Barlow, with a flower-like tiny Edwardian ruff.
There is a creeping carpet of golden sedum. White lychnis and pansies. There are purple and lilac striped opium poppies. I first grew these in Auckland. I had pinched a seed head from that genius gardener Gordon Collier’s celebrated Titoki Point garden. They mysteriously disappeared from my Balmoral garden one night. Or not so mysteriously. A mate of mine, a frequent visitor, was shacked up with a junkie who lived a few doors down.
There is no science, or botany, and certainly no thought given to my sort of non-gardening. It is certainly not landscaping. I don’t have the sort of mind for landscaping. It involves measurements, which is maths. I was so dumb at maths that I wasn’t allowed to sit School C maths. Instead, I was made to sit something called Manukau maths. Is this true? My memories of my time at Otahuhu College are as muddled as my attendance record.
As are most memories of childhood. There is an idea, a trope, that we remember our childhoods through a filter of summer – every day is that perfect, sunshiny day, where we ran through sprinklers on the lawn, squealing with joy. Every day, if you had a modicum of luck, was a perfect day. How many perfect days can you count on having as a grown-up, as you become ever more creaky and cynical?
We went to Lake Ferry. If you take the pretty route through narrow country roads with the rolling hills and lovely avenues of trees framing your drive, it is about an hour from Lush Places. We saw a gossip of turkeys, who had perhaps escaped because they had heard that Christmas was coming. We saw goats and lambs and cattle beasts with big curved horns. We stopped at Pirinoa at the Land Girl cafe, which has the best cheese (and spinach) scones. We went for a walk on the wild beach that is Palliser Bay. On a rare fine and perfect day you trudge through stones, over rough sand and massive mounds of driftwood to sit and see one of the wildest coasts in the country. There are warning signs: you can’t swim here.
Usually, there are winds as wild as the landscape. But on the rare and still day we chanced upon, we could see snow on the tops of the Kaikōura Ranges. There is something ineffably magical about seeing the South Island when you are sitting on logs of wood at the very end of the North Island.
The sea was turquoise, then deep dark green and, when it met the horizon, black. You could see the curvature of the Earth. We had fish and chips at the Lake Ferry Hotel. They were perfect.
