Southland
How does Christmas relate to gardening? Is there a connection between the season of goodwill and early summer in a New Zealand garden?
No plastics please. ’Tis the season to keep it real, says Robert Guyton.
Are the colours of Christmas reflected in the flowerbeds and vegetable plots we busy ourselves in?
A blanket of snow is very unlikely to fall this month and red-breasted robins would be considered an invasive organism, should they appear, so why do we still post cards to each other that feature northern European phenomena? And let’s not even mention reindeer and jolly gentlemen dressed in white fur-trimmed gowns!
I love Christmas and believe it’s important to celebrate it with friends and family, a feast and gift-giving, with music not heard at any other time of the year and all with Christmases past in mind – those of our own childhood when we woke with the weight of our Santa sacks pressing on our feet as we lay in our beds, the smell of an orange buried deep in the lower reaches of those lumpy pillowcases, stuffed, if we were lucky, with at least some the things we fervently desired.
As a grandparent – one who attracts good-hearted calls of “Hi Santa!” from passing children and sometimes their parents too during the lead up to Christmas Day – who has grandchildren passing through the Christmas-naïve phase of development, I feel a responsibility to both create the wonder I felt when I was their age and also temper that joy with the realisation that some of the habits we’ve adopted aren’t realistic or responsible – too much focus on receiving and not enough on giving, a hunger for “stuff’ in the form of toys and treats where actions that gladden the heart would be better for all, that sort of thing.
And as gardeners, how can we bring what we’ve learned and done out there amongst the rhododendrons and the cabbages into the tinsel-festooned dining rooms and make Christmas a genuinely wonderful experience for all? We could start, I believe, by getting real.
An actual tree – not a plastic replica – must surely be the benchmark for the Christmasloving gardener.
There are many options, from a surreptitiously-felled or bona fidely-bought pine with its wonderfully fragrant but carpet-covering needles, to a purpose-grown potted Norfolk pine for those who hold to the northern traditions that require a conifer to complete the Yuletide picture. Perhaps a semi-bonsaied ko¯whai or carefully selected limb of rimu, such as I employed last Christmas to satisfy the real-tree purists in my own family.
Much can be explored in your efforts to create a southern hemisphere Christmas that rings true, or at least will seem normal after a couple of generations have passed.
The tree is one thing, but the decorations are quite another.
Are plastic baubles and multicoloured aluminium tinsel really appropriate decorations for a natural tree?
How about dried fruits and flowers instead – wrinkled-but-bright crabapples and haws from European and Chinese hawthorns, shrivelled-but-glowing guelder rose berries and dehydrated apple slices… edible and fragrant must surely rate higher than glossy plastic stuff, available at all Christmas-hyping retail outlets.
Those everlasting strawflowers ( Xerochrysum bracteatum) are superbly suited to being fixed to the greenery of a natural Christmas tree that doesn’t smell of hydrocarbons. Their natural hues, ranging through butter yellows to baby-cheek pinks, speak of a more subtle Christmas beauty, one that is missed by the producers of extruded plastic decorations, $10 a box, get in quick while stocks last.
It might seem like Christmas snobbishness, recommending homegrown trees and decorations.
I don’t think so. There’s a wonderful opportunity asking to be taken by those who can – gardeners who grow their own beautiful festive materials for decorating the tree and house, and supplying the Christmas Day table with leaf, fruit, vegetable and flower that could reform what Christmas means to New Zealanders, especially our children.
Shift the celebration from a commercial to a homegrown one that we all can create using resources that we create, grow, gather and arrange, in the way we want to. Merry Christmas, gardeners. Seize the day!