Lynda Hallinan
Self-confessed decorating addict Lynda Hallinan makes an early New Year’s resolution not to redecorate her shepherd’s hut… again.
feels like redecorating… again
If I was a character in Aesop’s Fables, I wouldn’t be the boy who cried wolf. I’d be the girl who declared “no more paint and wallpaper” as I ever-so-quietly prised the lid off a fresh tin and dipped in my brush.
I am a decorating addict. More accurately, I am a redecorating addict. I enjoy watching paint dry and have such a fetish for ordering wallpaper online that our rural postie has given up trying to fit the long boxes into our letterbox. “Wallpapering again?” she asks, cheerily, as she hands the rolls over at my door.
Perhaps it’s in my genes. When my parents renovated our farmhouse in the 1980s, stripping the walls back to their original hessian scrim and native timber sarking, they peeled off layer upon layer of our family history, eventually uncovering the wallpaper my grandfather remembered from his nursery. It was duck-egg blue with a teddy bear print.
Should my children’s children turn out to be similarly DIY-inclined, what will they make of their grandmother’s Catholic tastes in wall coverings a century from now?
Our house is so small that it only takes two rolls to give any wall a facelift. Hence, my office is already on to its second floriferous layer of frou-frou femininity, with my original choice of hot pink English heritage roses usurped by antique magnolias. Meanwhile, our upstairs bedroom started off as teal as Air New Zealand’s original livery, then went gothic with a crop of silver primulas embossed on black, and is now overrun with a Jurassic park of dotty dinosaurs. Downstairs, our kitchen initially sported a gang of Nordic elk, then a constellation of retro starbursts before a third layer of washable white vinyl with dainty ferns and orchids went over the top.
A year ago, I painted the custombuilt shepherd’s hut in my vegetable garden a tasteful shade of greyish green (Resene Paddock) and slapped up an Arts and Crafts feature wall of Heathland pheasants and rabbits. I dubbed it my “Bric-a-Brac Shack” and filled the shelves with op-shop finds, from green-rimmed vintage enamel bowls to a collection of antique Salter kitchen scales.
“That,” I impetuously declared to my husband as I sanded green paint drops off the rustic macrocarpa sleeper deck, “is the last time I’m doing that!”
I meant it when I said it, honestly I did, but I could hardly blame him for eyeing me with suspicion. After all, in the five years since our shepherd’s hut was constructed by our friendly local builder Elvin, it has worn a coat of many colours: first charcoal, then raspberry red, electric orange, greygreen and now its current incarnation in inky blue (Resene Bullitt) with Maund wallpaper. For the price of a four-litre tin of paint, I can change the whole look and feel of my garden.
(Lest you think I’m one of those women who wouldn’t dream of stepping out of the house without colour co-ordinating my handbag to my shoes, I have to confess that every
time I repainted the hut, I also replanted the beds out front to match.)
“That,” I declared to my husband as I unveiled our shepherd’s hut’s latest look this month, “is the last time I’m doing that!”
“I’ve heard that before,” he sighed. “Your objection is academic,” I muttered, changing the subject. “Did you know this pretty blue Maund wallpaper is a collaborative creation inspired by the University of Oxford’s herbarium specimens?”
Not content to cover the hut’s walls with flowers, I’ve decided to hang them from the ceiling too, for the Brica-Brac Shack is now affectionately known, if only by me, as the Dried Flower Den. What goes around, comes around, so I’m hoping 2018 will be the year that dried flowers officially make a fashion comeback. If macrame hanging planters, homespun jerseys, beards, denim dungarees, Polaroid cameras, flip phones and cane furniture can earn the Instagram seal of approval, why not bunches of preserved daisies and cobwebby clouds of dried gypsophila?
I first predicted a renaissance in dried floral arrangements in 2011, and again in 2015, and it didn’t happen either time, but last year commercial dried flower grower, Peter Owen of Eyebright Country Store in Nelson, had a bumper year. Auckland garden designer Xanthe White bought his entire stock – every hydrangea head, statice stalk and papery helichrysum – to hang from the rafters at the trendy Auckland restaurant Amano.
My mini-me version has a comparative case of the blues, with larkspurs, delphiniums, poppy seed pods, statice, barley, wheat and clouds of sago-budded Australian native rice flowers (Ozothamnus diosmifolius) suspended from a rack cut from steel reinforcing mesh and upcycled with a lick of primer and a top coat of Annie Sloan chalk paint in Louis Blue.
On a summer’s day, the hot tin roof of my shepherd’s hut turns this cosy sanctuary into a Scandinavian sauna that’s just perfect for drying flowers out of direct sunlight. I could probably try my hand at trays of sun-dried tomatoes and homegrown “Italian” prune plums, too.
It’s such a delight to relax on the bed and look up into a blue sky of larkspurs, delphiniums and statice and, best of all, my shepherd’s hut now smells as meadowfresh as the freshly cut hay paddocks of my country childhood.