CLASSICAL STUDIES
Lynne and Rob Hammond have created a glorious garden full of sphinxes, gods and goddesses at home in Marlborough
MYTHOLOGICAL CREATURES LIVE HARMONIOUSLY IN A FUN-BUT-FORMAL ITALIANATE GARDEN CREATED BY A PILLAR OF THE COMMUNITY
LYNNE HAMMOND DIDN’T bat an eyelid when Garden Marlborough asked her to host 400 people on her lawn during its annual festival. Her formal garden, Longfield, on the outskirts of Blenheim, echoes with merriment. The garden’s bricked walls bounce her vivacious laugh around, making ripples in the water features and bringing cheeky smiles to the sphinx statues. “I love people and parties,” she says.
Later, she wore a fabulous baby-blue pants suit and white sneakers when greeting bus-loads of guests who visited during the festival’s garden tours (a further 300 guests). Her candy flosscoloured topknot was seen bouncing around the grounds as she made a point of trying to talk to everyone there. “So much fun,” gasped the guests as they returned to the bus.
Parties are this social bunny’s natural habitat, but she did not enjoy being kept in a hutch during lockdown. In the first weeks under Level 4, she and her husband Rob turned their eyes from the garden and set them firmly on the hills behind their house. The sun shining through the doughy Wither Hills range backing their Blenheim home and surrounding vineyard offered some reassurance during the uncertainty. If only the good weather would hold. In the scramble to keep New Zealand safe, the rules around essential businesses were unclear on the first day of lockdown - 25 March. The Hammonds were unsure if their sauvignon blanc grapes — sweetening by the hour on the vines — could be harvested. “Grape growing is a whole year’s work. The wine industry was nervous because if the government had said we weren’t allowed to harvest, then all that work would have been gone in the blink of an eye,” she says.
Rob’s family has been farming in Fairhall, about five kilometres from Blenheim, since the 1870s, producing sheep and crops such as peas, sweetcorn and wheat. He has ridden the industry’s ups and downs, surviving the wool price crash of the 1980s, which saw wool go from being a third of the family’s annual income to only five per cent. The Hammonds, who now grow grapes for Villa Maria, Sacred Hill, Wither Hills and Whitehaven, planted their first vines in 1999. Rob just sees it as another form of farming.
“A lot of people think wine growing is a romantic industry, but it’s the same as any crop; the weather governs you. If there’s a storm near the harvest, the year’s work and profit could rot.”
Luckily, Bacchus smiled on Marlborough during Level 4, and the rain clouds stayed away. The industry could work, but physical distancing meant the grape harvest was slow, and equipment had to be cleaned more regularly. At Villa Maria, just up the road from the Hammonds, 85 motorhomes housed winery staff working in shifts while living away from their families.
“Everything took three times as long because of social distancing. It just goes to show that even under the most difficult circumstances, Kiwis can get things done,” says Rob.