Summer is late. I don't think it's coming to Wellington, which is a shame because I had big plans. I was going to make a meadow, a jungle courtyard and a fernery and stumpery. I was going to take cuttings, sow seeds and sort out the front garden. There were going to be handfuls of fresh raspberries and homemade lemonade by the gallon. The weather is so bad that it's hard to find the energy to water and weed the garden, let alone get stuck into projects. The wind is unceasing, assaulting and vindictive. It's blown over most of my dill plants, broken lavatera and rose branches and blown compost, from a pile in the drive, into the house through cracks in the window. Don't get me started on the clouds. For the last two days there have been thick clouds down to shoulder level, which go sailing past the windows like boats on a lake. My raspberries have been dismal and while I have an abundance of lemons, the weather has been more suited to hot toddies then lemonade.
Driven by desperation, my son and I went on a road trip last week. We went in search of summer. We felt sure that it'd got waylaid somewhere in the north, maybe Taupo, Auckland or the Bay of Plenty. Alas, it wasn't in any of those places, which were cool and windy. Definitely not swimming weather.
We spent 3 nights at Mount Maunganui at my oldest school friend's house. She and I had taken horticulture together at high school. We liked to reminisce about growing coleuses and pinching out lateral shoots on tomato plants. I'm envious of my friend's coastal, frost-free, subtropical garden. She can grow vireyas and hibiscuses and I can't. One of the star attractions of this seasside garden was a plum tree called 'Hawera'. It looked fetching beside a Japanese maple (Acer). The plums were almost perfect; if you bit into the ripe side of the plum. The flesh was red and had just the right combination of sweetness and tartness. They had a floral aftertaste, reminiscent of the scent of roses.
I want a plum tree that fruits. I want a Japanese maple.
Hawera plum tree and Japanese maple tree (Acer), Mount Maunganui, January 2017.
Each morning we'd take the kids and dogs down to Mount Maunganui beach for a run around. Each morning we walked past this well-weeded flower garden with its dahlias and roses. It stood out against the yards with bare lawns and no-care shrubs. Here was a garden created and nutured by someone with a love of plants and an eye for beauty.
Flower garden, Mount Maunganui, January 2017.
After a year of surveying hundreds of suburban front gardens, I've concluded that well tendered gardens are a rarity. Most people seem to approach gardening with the same attitude as cleaning gutters and waterblasting pavers. Gardening, for many, is a tedious maintainence task.
Vegetable growing is fashionable again, and while lots of people talk about growing tomatoes and brussel sprouts, I don't think many of them do. Flower gardening, on the other hand, is a dying art.
I've been reading a book called 'Monet's Garden - Through the Seasons at Giverny' by Vivian Russell. I bought it as a Christmas present to myself. It's well researched and written with gardeners and art lovers in mind. The photographs, taken by the author, capture the details and seasonal changes of Monet's garden. It would take a couple of days and a whole lot of planes and trains to get to Giverny from New Zealand. The book transported me there for a fraction of the price and I didn't even have to get out of bed. The problem with reading books about great gardens, is that they inspire and depress me in equal amounts. My humble garden is overwhelmingly ordinary in comparison to Monet's. All I can see are the weeds taking over, the dessicated wind-burned flower garden, the powdery mildew and rust on my new rose bush, the lime tree being attacked by scale insects, and then there's the front garden. It's become a dumping ground for unwanted things: a dead Christmas tree, rusty chicken wire, old bits of tanalised wood, broken plastic drain pipes, broken pavers and broken deck chairs.
Monet in his garden at Giverny, France, 1925. Photographed by Therese Bonney.
Monet was as passionate about gardening as he was about painting. For over 40 years he created a garden that was a living version of his paintings. He painted with light, plants and the changes of seasons. He loved experimenting with new plants, poured over nursery catalogues, visited garden shows and swapped plants with friends. Crates of plants were always travelling by train to and from Giverny. Monet had, as you'd expect from a genius painter, an eye for the way light impacted on form and colour. He loved big blocks of red and yellow tulips like daubs of paint on an earthy canvas. He believed that the blue and purple irises looked most beautiful in the light-shade of deciduous trees. His greatest achievment was his waterlily pond, which was bordered by willows, maples, azaleas and flowers, and criss-crossed by wooden bridges. The pond with its reflections, shadows and bursts of light brought a kaleidoscope of moods and atomospheres. He created a world of fleeting ambiguities, which he captured in paint. At Monet's funeral on December 8, 1926, Monet had instructed his gardeners to be his pallbearers. They lifted his coffin onto the local cart and followed it on its circuit of the village and then onto the graveyard.
My flower garden in the gloaming, January 16, 2017.
The gloaming, that special bronze light that sometimes appears at twilight, turned my windswept flower garden into an ethereal impressionistic scene.
The black and white photograph of Monet below, shows him standing on his famous Japanese Bridge, framed by wisteria vines. He is wearing a black armband in rememberance of his step-daughter who'd recently died. It is this photo that inspired me to plant wisteria in my garden in late spring last year.
Monet on the Japanese Bridge in his Giverny Garden, 1925. Photograph by Therese Bonney.
Wisteria floribunda 'Ed's Blue Dragon'
In my usual impulsive manner I bought my wisteria plant without doing any research. Everything I know, which isn't much, I found out after I dug it into the ground. 'Ed's Blue Dragon' produces violet-blue scented flowers. and likes its head in the sun and feet in moist shade. My wisteria is a Japanese species which twines in a clockwise direction. Chinese wisteria W. sinensis twines in an anti-clockwise direction. I never knew that wisterias had these peculiar obsessive habits. Because it's a strong twiner, I'll need to train its branches along strong wire supports. As you can see I haven't made it to the hardware shop yet. I read that wisteria needs to be pruned twice a year: once in summer and again in winter. I have no idea what part I'm supposed to prune or how much of it to chop off so I've left it alone.
Sick looking wisteria leaf.
I recently discovered these sick looking wisteria leaves on my plant. My heart sank. A new rose planted in front of it is also ailing. It has powdery mildew and rust, which appeared within weeks of me planting it. As for the wisteria, I googled its problems. The yellow leaves could be an iron deficiency, soggy soil, a wood boring beetle or tobacco mosaic virus. Then again it could be something else. I planted the wisteria in the exact spot where an old pittosporum tree had grown a month earlier. I'd had the tree chopped and its stump grinded. I was lazy when I planted the wisteria and only added a little compost. I should've dug an enormous hole and put the waste soil somewhere else. In autumn I'll dig up the wisteria and the soil around it, then I'll replant it with fresh compost and lots of mulch. The moral of this story is that impulsive lazy gardeners kill plants.
The summer holidays are over and I haven't achieved much. But even if Wellington had had a perfect summer with stinking hot days and water restrictions I still wouldn't have got through a third of my list of things to do. Gardening is one third reading about gardening, one third dreaming about gardening and one third actually doing it. If thirds came in fours and not threes then I'd name a third, 'fretting.'
In the end, it's the small things that are so uplifting. Monet knew this well. Despite having a team of gardeners and spending over 40 years worrying about his plants, it was the simple acts of nature that he captured in paint. The different shades of purple in the shadows, the bright white flecks of sun shimmering on the sruface of the pond, the apricot clouds reflected in the water, the deep-green weeping branches of the willow.
Every year I have cornflowers that self-seed in the flower garden, usually in the wrong spots, blocking out shorter fussier plants. It's easy to overlook a plant that grows so easily, so freely. It wasn't until I cut some cornflowers and put them in a vase that I realised how pretty they were. The more I looked at them the more they reminded me of summer. Blue skies, blue seas, swimming pools, and hot still days. Summer did arrive in my garden, I was looking for it in all the wrong places.
Cornflowers