GARDEN DELIGHT
Gratitude for plenitude at hidden gem in rural Manawatu
Adusty gravel road at the back of Colyton leads you to Vivian Gandar and Susan Hawes’ property. A tree-lined driveway curves to their home. But it’s the walk down to Waiata Gardens that is the real journey.
The air seems to get warmer as you descend into a sheltered hollow, the tui get a bit louder and the senses seem to jump up a notch too.
There is a lot to take in and people often pause at this point.
That’s because below is an astounding view. An oasis of plentiful fruit and vegetables that almost hums with good health. In the middle are long, wide beds offering up their bounty: squash, pumpkins, corn, courgettes, beans of many varieties, tomatoes, kumara, melons, peppers, basil, peas and more.
To the sides, fruit trees laden with plums of different hues and taste, peaches, pears, apples hanging like heavy bells on their branches. Even kiwifruit preside here and macadamia trees cradle their exotic-looking bunches proudly.
Each plant, tree, garden bed and path has a story that Gandar is glad to tell and his own story, embedded in this dirt, began long before his garden.
He is from here. This dusty gravel road leads also to a childhood spent on his parents’ farm, sold now, with this piece of land retained and the memories held within it. Gandar is from here, has left here, but has always come back.
He was interested in growing things way back when, getting involved in his school’s gardening competitions, never winning, but always learning. He watched and he wondered and he helped out on the farm before going to boarding school.
And this is where his understanding of the need for good, fresh food became consolidated.
‘‘I was hungry all the time. I was going through a growth spurt – we all were and we were starving. Right at the time that we needed a lot of good food, we didn’t get it. I jokingly say now that I suffer from post traumatic stress disorder.’’ In his 20s he began to really understand that growing things was important to him. He sought out knowledge, he read, he figured things out and he met people. This seeking led him on a spiritual journey to America and, after ‘‘a series of coincidences’’, he found himself working as a gardener and farmer in West Virginia for four years. He met his partner Hawes there and he learnt about intensive gardening, a different way of living and biodynamics.
He came home eventually to manage the farm. His father Les Gandar had represented the Manawatu¯ electorate as its National MP for 12 years and the farm really needed his son’s help. ‘‘It was a long process,’’ says Gandar, ‘‘and although I got the farm to be certified organic during that time I became physically and mentally burnt out.’’
The farm was sold in 2004 and that’s when Gandar recouped his energy, gathered his magpie-acquired knowledge and directed it back into the patch of land that they kept. His garden had begun.
The raised beds around the house went in first and then, when Gandar says he started to get concerned about the way the world was heading financially, his plans got bigger.
‘‘I could see that things could really get nasty and I was interested in becoming more selfcontained and seeing how much food security I could make here.’’
The oasis of a garden that is in the bottom half of the property was formerly part of a holding paddock – ‘‘a pretty shabby piece of ground’’ – so 18 months was put into getting it up to scratch.
Gandar rotary-hoed and planted green manure crops such as lupins and oats.
‘‘I was building up organic matter and getting carbon back into the soil and once that was under way I started planting.’’
How to grow protein was something Gandar became interested in and he went into the kitchen pantry and searched out black beans and lima beans. Into a saucer on the window sill they went and the legacy of those first germinated beans lives on in his current towering rows. This summer, an unbelievable summer, says Gandar, the bean plants have become jurassic, climbing as far as they could on the support before climbing back down the other side. In fact, everything has been more prolific than usual this year. ‘‘It is a joy to see.’’ He says ‘‘thank you’’ to his plants and trees all the time, often becoming so overwhelmed by his gratitude that arms flung open, he says it loudly for them all to hear.
‘‘One of the biggest considerations for me is one’s attitude. I have never seen a leprechaun or a green diva or anything like that hanging around the garden. I don’t know if the spirits are out there, but what I can do is say thank you, why not say thank you?’’
He believes the connection between us and plants is not that distant. He says you can feel it when you stand barefoot on the ground and he says, laughing, that perhaps that recognition is what ‘‘makes my vegetables taste so good’’.
Because they really do. His bumper crop of tomatoes is so sweet no sugar needs to be added to Hawes’ sauce.
His plums demand silence to fully appreciate how much better they taste than shop-bought ones and the scent of his uncut cantaloupe melons promise a burst of flavour that carries memories of the sun.
They have too much. This summer has been one of unrivalled growth in their garden and visitors never go empty-handed, or more likely empty-armed. Hawes says she would be happy to have her huge table full of hungry people to feed every night.
Gandar and Hawes are not only sustaining themselves, but they could probably survive an apocalypse as well.
Gandar’s days of boarding school suffering are over and up a gravel road, along an arching driveway and down a grassy hill is a garden full of such bounty that all its creator has left to say is ‘‘thank you’’.