Passing on some Sunday knowledge
In Carly Thomas’ series on taming her unruly Manawatu¯ garden, she explains a strange occurrence that is happening often.
Ihave an old wisteria hedge that long ago decided it wanted to try to possess the entire world, starting with my garden. It travels underground, pushing its way inch by tendril-pointing inch further and further. It then pops up in peculiar and incredibly distance-covering places – in the middle of the tennis court, under the ancient floorboards of the house and even in the horse paddock.
If it turned up in China – my kids tell me you could dig to it if you really wanted to – I wouldn’t be surprised.
And I applaud it, give it credit and tell the leafy offering it is cunning before ripping off its proud new head. I will never, ever tame it.
My column is nowhere near as farreaching as my worldly wisteria, but it is creating a funny little phenomenon in my life I am noticing more and more. I chat to a lot of people, like my wisteria. I talk to strangers regularly. Yes, I am that woman in the supermarket queue.
So lately I have been getting lots of light-switching-on moments from people when they exclaim halfway through a yarn: ‘‘Oh, you are the lady with the garden.’’ It’s hilarious and I love it because the conversations that grow out of their realisation give me the green growth of gardening secrets shared, the budding blooms of bright laughter and the welcome shade of a like-minded soul.
Gardeners are a wonderful bunch and when you click that the person you have just met is one, well, the sun comes out. It’s like we share something special that makes people happy. And there is nothing us gardeners love more, apart from being knee deep in a bed of lavender, than a good old gardening natter.
It happened the other day. A man, who although not a stranger, is someone I know in a different realm and I would never have thought he donned gardening gloves. He sought me out and said in a mysterious low voice: ‘‘You must know about Sunday knowledge.’’
Well, no, actually, I didn’t, but nosy old me was intrigued. So here it is for those of you, who like me, rather liked the sound of ‘‘Sunday knowledge’’.
Sundays, the man with the dramatic stage whisper told me, when he was a child, were the days you had to sit through church and Sunday school.
In his Sunday best clothes and invariably in summer, he would slowly melt uncomfortably in the heat. But once endured, his hand would be slipped into his mother’s and around the garden they would go, with a chatter of other gardeners in tow.
They would talk about the garden, what was thriving, what wasn’t and why. Successes were noted, failures were a chance to extend knowledge and in this way the next generation learnt the ways of the gardener – Sunday knowledge.
And do you now garden? I asked the man. ‘‘Oh, yes,’’ he told me and a flash of recognition, a tendril unfurling and the bud of future natterings on a mutually beloved subject reached for the light. Not all the way to China, no, but far enough.