FLOWER-LOVING FARMER

Bert Kennington, Sterling Brook, Seddon

Circa 1927–1959

In the late 1920s, it took Bert Kennington and his brother Bill four years to turn a rugged, isolated piece of marlborough land into the beginnings of a highly productive working farm. The property was tucked into the base of a craggy range, between Seddon and Ward in the Awatere Valley. When Bert married, the brothers divided the land up and Bert named his portion of the farm ‘Sterling Brook’, after the stream that ran along the front of the place. I was privileged to meet Bert Kennington’s daughter Alison Cull recently at her local garden club, where she has been an active member for over 40 years.

“I enjoy our monthly garden meetings,” Alison says. “We talk about plants – how to propagate, grow and identify them – and we share vegetable and flower knowledge every chance we get. Sometimes we have competitions to see who can grow the best seedlings in an allotted space of time, and through it all we are there to support each other. For me, that is a good, old-fashioned garden club worth belonging to.”

Alison likes to think she inherited her love of flower gardening from her dad. Along with running the family farm, he grew rows of flowers in gardens around the family home and created a forest of trees on the rugged hills of the farm. She recalls how, over the extremely hot summers, he would water his much-loved wattle trees by hand from the creek using a bucket. He also propagated native and exotic trees, keeping a record of his plantings in a diary.

“Life at Seddon was not what people would call ‘easy’ today. I remember our draft horse ‘Brownie’ pulling a trailer through the paddocks, with Dad guiding the reins, while my siblings and I spent hours picking up and throwing hundreds of stones onto the tray. That stony land took years of challenging work to tame into paddocks suitable for stock, but tame it Dad did, and over the years, Sterling Brook was stocked with cattle and Corriedale sheep.”

As a child, Alison says she took the hard physical work her dad did for granted but looking back, she can see how incredibly dedicated he was and how he worked hard to create a productive farm to provide for his family and save for his children’s boarding school education.

“I loved how he spent his ‘spare time’ growing and tending to his precious flowers and trees. He was a strong, hard-working man with a gentle side who could always appreciate the beauty of a flower garden – or three.”

The family had to be self-sufficient in vegetables, fruit and meat, so the farm and garden needed to produce all year round. That was not always easy, especially during the hottest months of the year, when marlborough’s weather has a reputation for being extremely dry.

“The compost that Dad made from just the lawn clippings and household green waste certainly helped to keep the soil in the garden full of goodness and moist in the summer. Our soil got so dry, water was treated like gold during the hot season, and still Dad grew every vegetable you can think of in spades. Our leeks, parsnips and carrots were always super-sized and I remember picking fruit and helping mum bottle greengage plums, blackcurrants, gooseberries and raspberries.”

In 1950, due to a healthy increase in the sale price of Corriedale wool, Bert could afford to get electricity put into the family home; to get it there, he first had to pay for the poles that carried the electricity lines from the neighbour’s property – about a kilometre away on Waterfall Road.

“There were so many challenges on the land and in our daily lives, but mum and Dad took it all on the chin,” Alison says. “Today, my childhood might be regarded as tough, but it was a wonderful way to live and learn

– I have some great memories of growing up. I can still see the pink broom bushes (Carmichaelia glabrescens) growing on the rocky outcrops above our farm and the gorgeous, very hardy marlborough rock daisies (Pachystegia) that covered the area with white flowers and greyish foliage in late spring. Thinking of them reminds me of how much my Dad loved flowers and trees and how proud I am of his achievements in what were truly challenging times.”