This garden is a film set. I visited it with my son in January 2021. It was a hot day. A really really hot day. The kind of heat which sends you running for the shade and reaching for a cool glass of water. It was summer and we were on holiday. The borders were still closed so there weren’t many tourists. We pretty much had the entire garden to ourselves. Although technically we were part of a small tour group, we tried our best to lose them.
Like I said, this garden was a film set but now it’s just a garden that’s gardened. I used to live in a nearby town as a kid, so the rolling hills and big skies were familiar. This place is called Hobbiton. The setting for the ‘The Shire’, the hobbit village, in the movie ‘Lord of the Rings’. It’s in Matamata in the Waikato.
I’m writing this as another storm is rolling in to the Kapiti Coast. It’s winter. The shortest day of the year is in 9 days. It’s started to rain, the wind is picking up and there are rumbles of thunder. There are heavy rain warnings, gale force wind warnings, thunder and lightning warnings and big sea swells. There might be a few localised tornadoes as well. There were last week - just up the road. So the worst is yet to come.
And the best thing to do is to runaway. To escape to a quintessential cottage garden on a grand scale. I wonder if that’s an oxymoron.
A while back I listened to an audio book about J. R. R. Tolkien (John) and C. S. Lewis (Clive). I’ve forgotten most of the details, but a few things stood out. Both men fought in WW1. That was a bloody war. A master class in the many ways that humans destroy and mutilate other humans. Their experience of this war was at the heart of their writing. You could say, that on one level, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit and the Narnia series were autobiographical.
The two men were close friends and both lived in Oxford and taught at the university. Both lost their parents as children and preferred to look backwards in history rather than forward.
Having walked and cycled all around Oxford with my family, I can say, hand-on-heart, it has some of the most idyllic countryside in England. Little wonder that John and Clive sort refuge there, among its villages and meadows, when the modern world started to self destruct. The Shire and Narnia were idealistic long-ago simple places, populated by good people, under immense threat from evil. While these mythical places have their roots in Oxford they symbolise every happy place remembered in childhood.
I often think that we gardeners are creating our own Narnia, our own Shire. The rest of the world might be going to hell in a hand basket but we’re fighting back. We’re looking after the birds and butterflies and moths and frogs and pollinators…and the soil. The earth.
My uncle died last Sunday. He was my father’s brother. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. He and my dad (when my dad was alive) were close. They lived in Wales during the war. They lived in my nana’s family home in a small village called Tregynon. My nana had 13 brothers and sisters and most of them were around in those years. So were all the cousins. And together they had so many adventures.
My dad and my uncle loved this time in their lives. And while it only spanned 7 or 8 years they relived it regularly for the next 60. They loved the countryside of Mid-Wales. The rolling fields, the hedgerows, the woods, the meandering brooks, the squirrels, the foxes, the hawks and larks and robins. And grass snakes - rarely spotted but often talked about. And criss-crossing this human-sized world were miles and miles of railway tracks. And chugging along these tracks at a leisurely pace were steam trains. It was a paradise for my dad and uncle. The stuff of fairytales.
I love the fences, gates and letterboxes.
My dad was a glider pilot. He flew these very skies and knew these very hills. When I was a kid it seemed like every weekend he was off flying. Returning with a sunburnt face and falling asleep in front of the tellie. He loved this part of New Zealand. It must’ve reminded him of his England, his Wales.
This blog is dedicated to Peter and Roy….see you next Sunday.