Better days are on their way
Summer makes me feel many things but melancholic sure ain’t one of them. Summer makes me perky with possibility and pleasure, for who could possibly feel glum with a garden full of glorious dahlias, gladioli, tomatoes, basil, blackberries, beans, peaches and plums on the go?
After the wettest winter on record and a lacklustre spring, summer has hit like a sledgehammer. One week our soil was soggy underfoot; the next it had cracked like the dry crust of an overdone chocolate cake. On the plus side, I already have an enviable singletand-shorts tan, but even four coats of nail polish can’t cover the ingrained dirt under my toenails from gardening in jandals.
If I was (a slightly grubby) Snow White and summer was the Seven Dwarfs, they’d be Sweaty, Scratchy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Sunburned, Singleminded and Serotonin. Unfortunately, those same neurotransmitters that sing happy songs to my soul in summer also make my muscles scream, for ‘tis the season of hard slog at my house.
In 49 days, my garden at Foggydale Farm in Hunua is open to the public. Am I crazy? Almost certainly, but it’s all for a good cause. We’re raising funds for Hospice as part of the Heroic Garden Festival on February 9-11. (For the perfect Santa stocking stuffer, tickets are available now from heroicgardens.org.nz.)
There’s much to be done. There are seedlings to plant and pamper. There’s a meadow to sow and another to mow. There’s a half-dead lawn that looks more like a hay paddock than a bowling green. There are fences to fix, hedges to shear, gravel to rake, gates to hang, trees to limb up and ivy to pull down.
When I handed my husband his annual to-do list, he suggested I find a new fella. ‘‘Can’t you just hire someone to help you?’’ he sighed. ‘‘No dear,’’ I said. ‘‘Me, Jane. You, Tarzan.’’
Let it be said that I didn’t marry my man for his scholarly prose on politics, philosophy or the intricacies of interpersonal communication. I married him because he had swagger, an impressive pair of biceps and a fleet of diggers. My husband can shift a cubic metre of organic compost in the time it takes me to say ‘‘when that’s done, there’s a trailer load of weeds to dispatch and six free-range chooks to catch’’.
This summer, my son Lucas’ spring chickens have come of age. His Ag Day pets, raised by hand from day-old balls of bum fluff, are now laying doubleyolkers. But even though they have 22 hectares in which to fulfil their every fowl thought and desire, their favourite place to chillax (and crap) is in our lounge.
A small part of me admires their anarchistic impenitence, for those chooks have gone to war with my husband. Despite his every attempt to rein them in with chicken wire and steel waratahs, every day they flick the bird at him by escaping our chook run. When he clipped their wings, they learned to base jump off the hen house roof. Every morning when I wake up, they’re all waiting at the lounge window, having completed their morning ablutions on our doorstep. The feminist struggle is real: they won’t be fenced in my any man, especially mine.
2017 hasn’t been the best of years. I’ve lost good friends, horticultural compatriots and two much-loved geriatric, but aggressively incontinent, cats. (Two down, two to go.) But summer – especially summer in a garden – reminds me that there are always better days to come.
A few years ago, at the age of 70, the self-described holistic health guru Dr Andrew Weil wrote an essay for Huffington Post in which he declared a New Year’s resolution: to garden.
He wrote, ‘‘My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish, or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide :a microcosm of a just and beautiful society. In the world at large, people are rewarded or punished in ways that are often utterly random. In the garden, cause and effect, labour and reward, are recoupled. Gardening makes sense in a senseless world.’’
I didn't marry my man for his scholarly prose on politics or philosophy. I married him because he had swagger, an impressive pair of biceps and a fleet of diggers.