The Good Life
The visual rapture of autumn in the country makes up for all the racket.
Overnight, the trees have turned. I came out one early autumn morning this week to let the chickens out and found a red and purple sunrise lighting up the garden.
The honey locust had become a golden fountain and the ornamental grape had been transformed from green into burgundy and bronze.
Our oaks, in what we grandly call Hyde Park, are turning mahogany and the avenue of golden elms and claret ash is lined with, yes, golden and claret. We didn’t really buy a house in the country; we bought hundreds of trees in the country.
Some of them are varieties we had planted in Auckland: weeping ornamental fruits, forest pansies. But they were babies, designed to counter the ghastly trend to plant only natives in what was an old garden, planned in the 1920s. It was a garden that still included outof-fashion winter cherries and big old gnarly garishly coloured rhodos – so perfect against the old volcanic rock terraces we unearthed.
We reintroduced mop-topped hydrangeas and – such heresy – flowers. We battled fiendish suckering Australian cabbage trees and the woman who carried on like a banshee when, after the tree laws were relaxed, we had a young pohutukawa cut down. It was on our gas and water lines and plonked, without thought, in the middle of the lawn; it was ugly. We had already planted an additional 20-odd trees and dozens of plants to encourage the bees.
People can be very silly about such things. The banshee, who portrayed herself as a big environmentalist, had the invasive Mexican daisy and that devil, jasmine, in her garden.
In the country you can do as you like. I could easily grow Mexican daisy and jasmine and, even worse, invading weeds in my garden, but I wouldn’t. I just happen to love deciduous trees and flowers and properly defined seasons. The seasons are one of the reasons we moved south.
We also wanted to get away from noise – and puka trees and banshees. It is very quiet in the country. No, it’s really not. This is why you read stories about townies moving to the country and calling noise control about cows lowing. Lowing is a gentle country term that means making one hell of a racket.
Sheep can be noisy. They baa, really quite loudly (I won’t go on, again, about the unholy cacophony our terrible chickens make). I make the odd bit of racket myself, talking back to the animals. I was wandering up the drive the other day and saw what appeared to be a gang of cattle taking themselves for a leisurely walk along the roadside. They were actually behind a wire but the illusion was magical. Cows! At the end of my drive! Free-ranging dude cows!
I went up to have a chat and Tony pulled up in his ute. Tony is the Heston Blumenthal of the Wairarapa. Blumenthal’s signature snail porridge has nothing on Tony’s soon-to-be-worldfamous quince cider vinegar, which is bubbling away in our tractor bay. (At least we assume it is bubbling away; we are too frightened to lift the lid for fear of being blown sky high and mistaken for an early entry in Wings Over Wairarapa.)
Tony was laughing. He often is when he encounters me. He said, “I suppose you’re giving all those cows names.” I suppose I was. He might think I’m a bit mad. I suppose I am, but I’m not the one cooking up eye of newt in a neighbour’s tractor bay.
Mad is as mad does in the country, and the delight of it is that nobody so much as blinks an eye, of newt, or anything else. And give me cows lowing over banshees shrieking any day of another glorious autumn week in the country.
I love deciduous trees and flowers and proper seasons: the seasons are one of the reasons we moved south.