Lynda Hallinan’s
field folly
Charity doesn’t always begin at home. Sometimes it begins in a grove of towering native kahikatea trees in the swampy corner of an overgrown sheep paddock, like the one that backs onto my potager vegetable garden.
With its fair share of Scotch thistles, wild parsnip, stone parsley and dock, this paddock is not a particularly winsome meadow. It gives me hayfever in late summer, when the plantain grains and Yorkshire Fog grasses give off their dusty pollen, and its peaceful, pastoral outlook is frequently disturbed by our children swooping overhead on the flying fox.
And yet, I torture my sinuses almost daily to stroll through this field, for our sheep paddock is accessed through wrought-iron gates set into a clipped hornbeam hedge, like the horticultural portal on the cover of one of my favourite children’s novels, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
There is something wonderfully romantic about stepping through a door hewn from a hedge. I collect photos of them: of pretty lilly pilly arches in Parnell streets, cobwebbed apertures through craggy macrocarpas on the Canterbury plains and, at Hobbiton in Matamata, an arbour of scented honeysuckle and prickly barberry fringing a farm gate.
It has taken three years of gentle coaxing, covert tying and artful pruning to wrestle my own hornbeam hedge (Carpinus betulus) into the makings of an arch. It now beckons at the bottom of the garden, a tantalising invitation to walk this way, to step into a private oasis or, ahem, a weedy sheep paddock.
“What this paddock needs,” I told my long-suffering husband, “is a folly, an extravagant ornament with classical virtues and no practical purpose other than to bring pure decorative pleasure when our garden is open for charity.”
I’d lost him at extravagant, but follies have a long and proud history, most notably in 18th-century French and English landscape design. Eccentric landowners with more money than sense – and often taste – installed towers and temples, faux castle facades, fallen ruins and, famously, a giant stone-clad hothouse shaped like a pineapple at Dunmore Park in Scotland.
While most of my garden features evolve slowly with a spade, a fair bit of sweat and a few seasons of natural growth, my sculptural folly began life on a computer screen as an entry in the inaugural Art in Structure competition.
This competition, conceived by Fletcher Steel, invited artists to create exhibits for a virtual sculpture park at Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter, with members of the public voting on their favourites to be fabricated in metal. The winners – Rose Petterson’s Divine Star and Becca and Ben Bolscher’s Floral Fusion – were then donated to Ronald McDonald House for a charity art auction on TradeMe.
Now I don’t know about you but
“What this paddock needs is a folly, an extravagant ornament with no practical purpose…”
“This would be a perfect spot to renew our wedding vows.”
I’m not above telling a few wee white lies when I buy something new on the sly… “This old thing? I’ve had it for ages!” I tell my husband, eyelashes aflutter. Unfortunately, a four metrehigh, two-metre wide galvanised sculpture inspired by the arching vaulted architecture of gothic cathedrals and top-coated with illuminating white paint that seems to glow at night, is rather hard to hide.
For starters, I needed to borrow my husband’s muscles to dismantle the sculpture, and his truck to transport it home. I needed his building skills to knock up a serpentine boardwalk and circular deck in the paddock. I needed his digger to carve out a trench to slot in a trailerload of frothy “Limelight” hydrangeas – quite possibly my favourite hydrangea of all – and hardy Lomandra longifolia “Verday” grasses. And, on Christmas Day, after we’d scoffed the turkey and trifle, I needed to borrow every bloke in his family to piece it back together like a threedimensional jigsaw puzzle, while my sister-in-law Sonia and I stood at a safe distance, Champagne in hand, offering wisdom, encouragement and another plate of pavlova when the job was done.
Once Divine Star was installed, we all stood silently beneath it, looking up through its intricate apex to admire the popcorn clouds peeking through the kahikatea canopy overhead. “This would be the perfect spot to stand and renew our wedding vows,” I joked to my husband, “especially that bit where you promised to honour all your responsibilities as my man.”
He ever-so-politely declined, so I’m issuing an open invitation to anyone else getting married or celebrating a wedding anniversary in February. If you’d like to pose for photographs in my fancy folly, or any other part of my Hunua garden, all you need to do is make a donation to Ronald McDonald House. Contact me by email at foggydalefarm@gmail.com if you’re interested.
Lynda’s garden at Foggydale Farm, 358 Gelling Road, Hunua, is part of the Heroic Garden Party and Festival, February 9-11. Tickets are $10 at the gate, with all proceeds to Hospice.
See heroicgardens.org.nz.