LYNDA HALLINAN:
Lynda Hallinan is starting all over again with an old cottage that’s begging for a new garden with a wildflower meadow and pretty potager.
a cottage dream comes true
Ihave been a mad-keen gardener for more than half my life. When I was a journalism student, instead of going out on pub crawls I spent my Friday nights at home watching Maggie’s Garden Show and tried to stretch my meagre student allowance to cover both instant pot noodles and potting mix.
Back then, in the mid 1990s, cottage gardening was all the rage. Even posh gardens in well-to-do suburbs featured frothy borders of oldfashioned flowers such as love-in-themist, sweet William, scented geraniums, granny’s bonnets, lady’s mantle, hollyhocks and heartsease pansies. Verandahs dripped with waterfalls of wisteria and front paths were flanked with standard ‘Iceberg’ roses underplanted with clouds of purple lavender and catmint.
No bathroom was complete without a bowl of fragrant homemade pot-pourri, no hallway lacked a basket of dried statice, and legendary Southland florist Olive Dunn’s Delights of Cottage Gardening in
New Zealand graced many a coffee table. My aunt gave me a copy for my 21st birthday.
My first garden was filled with romantic cottage flowers, but my first house was decidedly lacking in cottage charm. I took my first step onto the property ladder with the purchase of an ugly one-bedroom flat down a narrow right-of-way in a fairly insalubrious Auckland suburb, but it boasted a private backyard that backed onto a public park and felt to me like paradise.
Although the cottage garden craze was eventually usurped by native gardens – remember the rage for Easter Island-style ponga heads with coiffed carex grasses? – and striking subtropical sanctuaries filled with spiky bromeliads, I’ve always had a soft spot for feminine flower gardens.
Another defining feature of all the gardens I’ve created since then, from an inner-city courtyard with a peek of the sea and a self-sufficient urban Garden of Eden to my current expansive country garden at Foggydale Farm, is that the house has always been secondary to the soil. Consequently, I’ve gardened around fusty flats, draughty do-ups, tickytacky former state houses, fibrolite baches and ho-hum farmhouses.
I’ve never had a cute cottage to call home but, in the decade since I met my husband and moved to the Hunua Ranges, I’ve driven past one such
house every single day and not-sosecretly longed to get my green fingers on it. “Imagine what I could do with that!” I’d say to my husband.
A local landmark, this wee white cottage with its sagging red roof is set back in a sheep paddock beside the YMCA’s Camp Adair. When the cottage was last sold, during World War II, it was valued at the princely sum of £300 (annual insurance premium: £1). In 1942, it was bought by an Auckland furniture maker by the name of
William Dawn as a wartime bolt-hole for his wife Kathleen and children Bob and Barbara. In the event of a Japanese invasion, they had instructions to decamp to the country.
“If it was my cottage,” I often fantasised aloud, “I’d decamp here to grow herbs and heritage roses and fill the sheep field with daffodils. I’d hang floral curtains, put up a white picket fence and let the kids play pooh sticks along the Wairoa River out back.”
“I’d just demolish the dump,” my husband would mutter in reply, seeing only the cottage’s rusty roof, wonky porch, rotting weatherboards, floodprone paddocks and tumbledown barn. (He is a practical man who is not particularly given to flights of fancy.)
Gardeners, however, tend to be naturally optimistic dreamers. We poke sticks in the ground, praying they’ll grow roots, and sow tiny seeds in blind faith. When we look at a dormant daffodil bulb, a wizened dahlia tuber or a potato sprouting in a kitchen cupboard, we see harbingers of spring, summer bouquets and bowls of steaming Jersey Bennes, dotted with butter and sprigs of mint.
When the cottage came up for sale, I dragged my husband along to the first open home. “All I see,” he sighed, “is borer dust and hard work.”
But where my husband saw months of sweat and slog ahead, I saw the potential for a pint-sized Foggydale farmlet complete with pet sheep, free-range chooks and a house cow grazing in a wildflower meadow. I saw a formal potager out front, the beds edged with salvaged chimney bricks, a fernery on the shady south side and an orchard of heirloom fruit trees out the back. I saw an opportunity to bring beauty and bird life back to the eroded river’s edge with riparian plantings of koromiko, ka¯nuka, kahikatea, karamu, kawakawa and kohuhu.
Later, as I drove to the real estate agent’s office, offer in hand, I quoted Thomas Edison at my long-suffering husband: “To invent, all you need is a good imagination and a pile of junk.”
I’m now blessed with both, so watch this space.