A shared vision - eventually
Over the years, food writer Annabel Langbein has shared glimpses of her life, but in her new book, Bella, she writes about her many adventures, her obsession with creating cookbooks and in this edited extract how her family discovered their Wanaka home.
‘‘TED always was a bigpicture thinker, and naturally businessminded — much more so than me. And, having spent eight years of his life skiing around the globe, working on the farm in between, he had developed a deep love for the mountains. Every winter, we would head to Wanaka to take the kids skiing. We were staying with some friends in their new holiday home in Queenstown on a cold spring day in 1996 when Ted suggested, out of the blue, that we take a drive over to Wanaka. He had something he wanted to show me and, even though he was playing it all very lowkey, I could tell he was excited.
We packed a picnic and made the hour’s drive over the hill from Queenstown to Wanaka. After a coffee stop and some mapchecking, Ted drove us another 10 minutes out of town, and down a gravel road to the shores of the lake. He parked the truck on a rough track near the water, and we bushwhacked through a dense wall of thorny rosehips, blackberry and bracken, stopping at a rickety fence at the base of a hill.
‘‘It’s somewhere about here,’’ he said, waving his arms expansively into the wilderness.
I felt mud, cold and claggy, seeping up over the top of my gumboots.
‘‘What is here?’’ My response was less than enthusiastic.
‘‘Our land!’’ he replied excitedly. ‘‘We’ve just bought this piece of land.’’
A bog on the side of a hill covered in prickles and bracken in the middle of nowhere? Well, this had never figured anywhere in my imagination of holidayhome locations. ‘‘Well, unbuy it.’’
My suggestion was met with some chinscratching and a gaze out to the furthest horizon. The deal had been done. Signed, sealed, delivered.
The bog on the hill was ours, and ours alone.
I was furious. For months, I was in a standoff with my husband. I couldn’t believe he could have done this. All our
friends were buying fancy houses in Queenstown, and we had bought this shitty bog on the side of the hill. Sure, it was 25 acres on the edge of the lake, but what the hell was the man thinking? Today it might seem that buying land in Wanaka is a nobrainer, but in 1996 it was a backwater. Most people didn’t know it even existed.
And then, on one of our visits down to Wanaka, everything changed. It was one of those lightningbolt epiphanies. Our neighbour along the bay had invited us for dinner to meet some of the locals. As we were enjoying predinner drinks, a framed newspaper clipping on the livingroom wall caught my eye. It was from back in the 1960s, in one of those big English papers, The Times or The Guardian. There was a picture of a very beautiful garden, and the headline ‘‘The Five Most Beautiful Gardens in the World’’.
‘‘Where is this garden?’’ I asked our host, Bindy.
‘‘It’s here,’’ she said. ‘‘My mother, Marsy, created that incredible garden right here. She used to carry all the water up from the lake in buckets.’’
A shiver went through me as I thought about our boggy piece of land. It had a bounty of natural spring water, so no bucketlugging was going to be needed. We had peat in the hillside, plateaus of rich loess soils windblown from the glaciers and a climate that so many wonderful plants would thrive in. Here, right under my nose, was everything we needed to create the garden of our dreams.
Never for an instant had I imagined that the vision Ted and I shared could be realised in such a seemingly inhospitable block on the side of a rough bit of hill.