Who needs a garden with this outlook?
Virginia Pawsey might live in North Canterbury, but her hill-country farm and garden story has resonance in any southern rural community.
She shared her garden’s beauty and bounty in books co-written with old schoolmate and inner-city gardener Janice Marriott, and their joint endeavours have featured on this website, but in stories produced through phone interviews without the benefit of a personal encounter.
A trip north finally offered that opportunity, but too late to visit Virginia and husband Harry on the farm at Double Tops, for they have sold and moved on to semi-retirement on a smaller block.
Not, however, to the dream home by the sea Virginia wrote about so often while battling with frost and dreaming of a future where tomatoes would grow in abundance.
In fact the Pawseys’ new house is only 6 kilometres from their former home, but on a warmer hillside site, where after long delays in building their home, the landscaping is still a work in progress.
It’s assuredly the warmest spot on that hillside, says Harry, as identified by the preferred resting place of one very large cow – a cow named Janice, giving writing-partner Janice a nice role in this new enterprise.
Where frost dictated gardening at Double Tops, the slope here generates a katabatic wind effect with a downhill draught.
Virginia can look down in frost-free satisfaction on frozen paddocks below.
However it is very windy with no shelter, a fact given extreme emphasis in last week’s gales.
“I’m definitely going to have concrete furniture,” she says, very firmly.
Techniques perfected at Double Tops will still be needed here – like weighting seedlings down with bricks to protect them.
The wind might not blow plants directly out of the ground, but could twirl them around to the same effect, she explains.
The other challenge is the heavy clay soil, requiring setting aside what she describes (only half-jokingly) as “philosophical objections” to water- hungry raised beds.
It’s not just that they’re environmentally unfriendly, for in drought conditions the garden must always come second to stock.
Two of just three beds are in place, and partially planted, with the emphasis to be on food crops, but also a cutting garden of annuals – a rotation of the likes of daffodils, tulips, Iceland poppies, stocks and little dahlias.
With a love of hellebores, Virginia has set herself the challenge of creating a shade garden, featuring the few plants brought along from Double Tops.
A glasshouse is “absolutely a must”, firmly tied down, for cocktail tomatoes – and here an unashamed plug for Kings Heritage seeds – hopefully aubergines, and early strawberries. But there will be no perennial or shrubbery borders (as much as Virginia feels sorry for nurseries as these fall out of favour), and no roses except for a hardy yellow rugosa as a backdrop to the vege beds.
For at the stage of life many farm women of an earlier generation pushed out the fences and enlarged their gardens, Virginia is choosing to do the opposite.
“You’ve got to be mindful when getting older and not create a huge garden,” she says.
Harry’s continuing lack of expressed enthusiasm for gardening may also be a factor – he originally wanted to fence off and just have sheep, she reports.
Harry’s opinions on gardening pepper a conversation as much as they do Virginia’s writing, and in person he’s equally skilled at keeping his actual views veiled by mischievous humour.
Certainly he has co-operated on major projects, but there’s potential double meaning in pronouncements such as: “Harry says you must be able to get at all parts of the garden with a tractor.”
But their views coincide in how the new house should appear on approach up the hill, sitting in a natural landscape setting of green paddock with a swathe of native plantings.
But given the amazing views from every window and the deck across the spread of the Amuri Valley to the mountains, and the magnificent skyscapes – especially at sunrise according to Virginia – a garden seems almost redundant.
Virginia and Janice (who has also moved on to a new phase of life) are still writing to each other, and publishing a regular column in House and Garden magazine.
HarperCollins has brought out a lavishly illustrated hardback compilation of their two books, Common Ground and Common Table, this time entitled Common Lives.
All are warmly recommended for lovers of garden books and good writing.
Story suggestions or feedback on this page are welcome at timesgardening@gmail.com.
– © Fairfax NZ News
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