Green-fingered gifts something to give thanks for

As I’ve admitted before, I am, like Woody Allen, ‘‘at two with nature’’. Or at least the kind of nature that needs me to plant it and then keep it alive by weeding, pruning, watering, fertilising and sheltering it.

Believe me, maintaining myself is challenge enough, without the relentless chore of keeping a garden fed, watered and wellgroomed as well. Gardening only adds to the burden of selfmaintenance by wedging dirt under your fingernails, lacerating your skin, while weather-beating you and giving you backache into the bargain.

If one believes the claims of American writer Zora Neale Hurston, there’s yet another deterrent to gardening: ‘‘trees and plants’’ she claims ‘‘always look like the people they live with’’.

If I need to know how I look, I’d and many other fruit in Nelson’s parks.

Nelmac staff, clad in their David Attenborough-ish outfits go quietly about their gardening activities all over the city.

Queen’s Garden is probably the most publicly obvious example of their handiwork. Here, they maintain a living encyclopaedia of plants and trees which reflect the Victorian’s zeal for collecting and classifying plants, and which entirely obscures the site’s gory origin as an abattoir. ( The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert is an enthralling fictional plunge into this particular passion of the Victorians).

Nelmac gardeners foster an entirely different aesthetic in Miyazu Garden. Here, they prune bamboo, flowering cherry trees and a bonsaied pine, rake sand, and maintain gravel paths that lead to hump-backed bridges over reflective ponds crammed with rushes and water lilies.

No other art is as seasonal as gardening: the pleasure afforded by gardens is ephemeral and all the more precious for that.

Magnolia trees line the street I