Alone in a Garden

"It is a consoling thought that gardens and their laws of birth and death endure, while political crises and panaceas appear only to vanish." - Vida D. Scudder, "The Privilege of Age."

And so it is in the abandoned gardens of the Christchurch earthquake red zones.

As the powers-that-be in this broken city, bicker and fuss over "exciting future plans," once immaculately kept suburban gardens are bursting free of their restraints and cascading over walls and fences. 

Until they're bulldozed clear that is.

Once neatly-trimmed front lawns have taken on a life of their own and are welcoming back the small wild animals - the rabbits, ducks, the mice and hedgehogs - to live among their tall, wavering grasses.

Seed heads are tickling window panes; roses and pretty perennials are competing with thistles and dandelions on an equal footing; and front paths have vanished under the layers of foliage.

I've always loved gardens and gardening but in regularly visiting these now-abandoned neighbourhoods in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes, I have developed a new appreciation for the fact that we are only custodians of our spaces, not owners - that the living things in our gardens can only ever be 'managed.' And that once free of those managing hands, plants can show us a new and different beauty as they sprint away from our control.

As I walk these silent, lonely streets watching the demolition of homes and the destruction of gardens and family histories, I wonder why I keep coming back -- and back and back. I think it's because even in their dishevelment, or perhaps because of their dishevelment, the gardens still offer what they always did - a place to appreciate nature, to witness 'the passing of time,' a place to get lost in the reverie of suspended thought. 

I celebrate the freedom of the plants.

I delight in roses tumbling, unchallenged, across lawns and fences.

I like the sway of long grasses and their return to a 'grassland' state.

It's a form of natural anarchy.

And in a broken city bursting with new rules, regulations and prohibitions, I find that anarchy charming and freeing. I find solace and beauty in these overgrown places and I wish they could stay, unchallenged, to decline or to flourish in their own time.

But humans don't tolerate the unruliness of Nature very well.

They want to clip it, cut it, snip it, trim it, harness it, control it.

But Nature always fights back.

As Christchurch has discovered.

Hedge History

When it comes to gardens – and I’ve written about hundreds of them – I’m a bit of a free-form, free-spirited sort of girl myself. I like a garden that is left to develop its own character in a loose, abandoned kind of way. I like a garden that isn’t too perfect – one with a weed or three poking up through the greenery, one with daisies in the lawn and creepers looping through the hedges. At the same time though, I do admire the commitment, the labour and the energy that goes into creating the perfect formal garden. I sometimes think the plants in these sorts of gardens are probably too terrified to twitch a leaf for fear of having it lopped off by a gardener with an obsession for order, but there is also a compelling beauty in this sort of rigid formality. I visited one of these large formal gardens just last week – on a cold, grey, drizzly day that heightened the vibrant greens and set my camera a-clicking.

What struck me most about this property, were the hedges – the DOZENS of huge, lush, perfectly manicured, cleverly-interlocking hedges. No surprises there for anyone who follows this blog. I’ve been rabbitting on about hedges for years. There isn’t a hedge I’ve seen and haven’t loved whether for its size, shape, colour, rigidity or rampant neglect. But this garden left me speechless – not for the size and beauty of it – but for the sheer bounty of its hedges. There were hundreds of metres of large macrocarpa hedges defining the precise garden beds; there were boundary hedges, little decorative hedges, espaliered hedges, hedges in numerous plant varieties and most spectacular of all, an intricate weaving of tiny buxus hedges that made up a series of unforgettable knot gardens. I could hardly contain myself and before I knew it I was spilling out a stream of unnecessary, clichéd superlatives like ‘marvellous’ ‘beautiful’ and ‘amazing’ until I was even boring myself. All this got me to thinking about hedges and their history – something you can’t really avoid when you start writing about the tradition of knot gardens and parterres that became fashionable in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Turns out the first hedges were created right back in the Neolithic Age, 4000-6000 years ago, when someone (probably very hairy) planted them to enclose cereal crops. Others have been recorded in the Bronze age, 2000-4000 years ago and a good number of hedges created during the medieval period are still alive and growing well in the United Kingdom - in Cornwall in particular, which is rich in historic hedges; three quarters of them several hundreds of years old. I take comfort from all of this. It lends weight to the fact that I am not alone in what some have called my “unnatural passion” for hedges.

Perfection!

Poppy. Nov. 2008. Ajr

I visited a stunning garden this morning - a small miracle of colour, texture, colour and fragrance that I could happily adopt as my own. I can't give you the where and the who because I'm writing about the garden for a magazine, but I do just want to share this amazing poppy centre with stamens so perfect. I'm always slightly overwhelmed when my tiny little Panasonic Lumix delivers such unexpectedly lovely photographs - so naturally I take fifty shots when one would have been sufficient!

Hedge Heaven

North Canterbury Garden. Nov. 2008. Ajr

It's early summer and garden story time.

And I'm in hedge heaven!

Every garden I've visited in the last few weeks

Has had not one but several hedges.

To see more of my HEDGE HISTORY click on

HEDGES

in the label line below

Willows and a Lake

Private Garden, McLeans Island, Christchurch. Oct.2008.Ajr

It was a garden interview day yesterday and I wandered through a private paradise marvelling all over again at the dedication and commitment so many people have to their gardens. And I'm not talking small city gardens here - more like 7-8acres of unfolding herbaceous surprises. In this case, the surprises included almost two acres of man-made lake surrounded by willows - all fresh mint green and drifting across the turquoise water. Exquisite, tranquil, enviable.