I didn’t go to my work Christmas lunch this year. I had every intention of going. I’d made a lemon cake and paid my social club fees and told everyone I’d see them there. Then an idea took a hold of me.

I’d been agonising about my Christmas blog and had left the writing and photographing of it very late. There were Christmas shopping and Christmas baking and long lists of jobs that got in the way. The problem I had was that none of my blog ideas inspired me. I thought about doing a piece about the new foliage plants in my garden or growing seeds and taking cuttings…boring.

I’m reading some of Katherine Mansfield’s New Zealand stories. All of them are set in Wellington. They were written between 1905 and 1922 and back then Wellington was a young self conscious place that called itself The Empire City. Though in reality it was more town than city. Its flimsy wooden shops and houses perched precariously on bare windswept hills, looking more like a toy town than the seat of government.

Anyway, I was on my way to my work Christmas lunch when I changed my mind and went to the Katherine Mansfield House instead. I’m glad I did or else I wouldn’t have had a Christmas blog.

Katherine Mansfield House is a museum dedicated to Katherine Mansfield. One of New Zealand’s best writers. The house was her birth place, though she didn’t live there long. When she was 4 or 5 her family moved to a bigger house in the suburb of Karori. Despite living in her birth house for such a short time the house, garden and surrounding landscape feature in a number of her New Zealand stories.

This is a Victorian era house and it has been restored to its original condition. Some of the furniture and personal affects belonged to Katherine Mansfield’s family, whereas others are original pieces from the same era. The wallpaper throughout the house is all new. It’s an exact replica of the original wallpaper, bits of which were found during the house restoration.

I don’t think there are any plants in the garden that date back to Katherine Mansfield’s time. Instead the gardeners have created an Edwardian era garden using plants that Katherine Mansfield loved and wrote about.

Here’s a quick tour through her childhood home. The house and the layout of the rooms and their contents belong to the late Victorian era. As you can see, plants and animals appear in a lot of the fabrics, wallpaper and decoration of household objects.

I was disappointed with this fake Christmas tree.

About five years ago Katherine Mansfield House put up a real Christmas tree, complete with handmade Victorian style decorations. The whole house smelt of Christmas. I understand that Katherine Mansfield House is more or less run by volunteers and probably doesn’t get the sort of funding that bigger Wellington attractions get (mores the pity). But a fake plastic tree is wrong on so many levels.

A view of the front garden can be seen through the dining room windows.

A view of the back garden from the kitchen.

These French prints line the walls of the staircase leading to the second floor.

A view of the back garden and motorway. Back in Katherine Mansfield’s time this view would be of a fern filled gully and the harbour.

Katherine Mansfield’s bedroom. It faces the front garden.

Here’s an excerpt from Katherine Mansfield’s story ‘Prelude’, published in 1917. It lists some of the plants you’d find in an Edwardian garden.

‘But on the other side of the drive there was a high box border and the paths had box edges and all of them led into a deeper and deeper tangle of flowers. The camellias were in bloom, white and crimson and pink and white striped with flashing leaves. You could not see a leaf on the syringa bushes for the white clusters. The roses were in flower - gentelmen’s buttonhole roses, little white ones, but far too full of insects to hold under anyone’s nose, pink monthly roses with a ring of fallen petals round the bushes, cabbage roses on thick stalks, moss roses, always in bud, pink smooth beauties opening curl on curl, red ones so dark they seemed to turn black as they fell, and a certain exquisite cream kind with a slender red stem and bright scarlet leaves.

There were clumps of fairy bells, and all kinds of geraniums, and there were little trees of verbena and bluish lavender bushes and a bed of pelargoniums with velvet eyes and leaves like moths’ wings. There was a bed of nothing but mignonette and another of nothing but pansies - borders of double and single daisies and all kinds of tufty plants she had never seen before.

The red-hot pokers were taller than she; the Japanese sunflowers grew in a tiny jungle.. She sat down on one of the box borders. By pressing hard at first she made a nice seat. But how dusty it was inside! Kezia bent down to look and sneezed and rubbed her nose.’

I’ll take you on a stroll around the front garden. It has a newish brown fence, replacing the old stone one which fell over in the Kaikoura earthquake in 2016. The stone wall, when it fell, destroyed parts of the garden below it.

Katherine Mansfield wrote a novel called The Aloe, which is based on the short story called ‘Prelude’. Here is an aloe plant, one like the one she wrote about in both stories.

‘Looking at it from below she could see the long sharp thorns that edged the aloe leaves, and at the sight of them her heart grew hard…She particularly like the long sharp thorns…’ (Prelude 1917)

And now for a stroll around the back garden, which used to be bigger and quieter. But thanks to the construction of the motorway, which is just behind the back fence, the roar of the traffic is deafening.

The back of the garden used to overlook a gully of ferns and bush, possibly remnants of the original forest, and out to the harbour. A sea outlook is considered desirable in 2018 but wasn’t in 1888. The garden wouldn’t have any protection from the southerly or north-westerly winds. That’s because the forest was removed to provide buildable land for the new inhabitants.

By the time I returned to the front garden the museum had closed. I photographed two of the larger trees along the driveway. The one with the blossoms might be an apple or crabapple. Then I walked along the footpath on the street to have a better look at the roses.

Here is a moss rose like the one that Katherine Mansfield wrote about in the excerpt above.

The garden at Katherine Mansfield House is a gardeners garden. Its plant selection reflects the wide variety of plants that were available in New Zealand in the late 1800s and early 1900s. As you can see from the photos there are layers and layers of plants, crammed together.

Several blocks up the road is the Wellington Botanic Garden where Katherine Mansfield set one of her short stories. Here’s an excerpt that sums up the feeling of this garden beautifully (a garden which in turn pays homage to her writing).

‘Everywhere there are clusters of china blue pansies, a mist of forget-me-nots, a tangle of anemones. Strange that these anemones - scarlet, and amethyst, and purple - vibrant with colour, always appear to me a trifle dangerous, sinister, seductive, but poisonous.’ (In The Botanical Garden, 1907)

View of Katherine Mansfield House and garden seat (to the right of the seat are some anemones).