My parade’s been poured on
As a topic of conversation, Oscar Wilde declared the weather to be the last refuge of the unimaginative. But quite frankly, the weather has been so rotten of late that whingeing about it seems the only logical sanitysaving course of action left. (Either that or I could take to my bed with a bottle of gin and a good book and not get up again until autumn.)
So much for summer: in just six weeks, we’ve had more than a third of our average annual rainfall. Last weekend, when I hosted Mercy Hospice’s annual Heroic Garden Party at my home in Hunua, instead of floral frocks and fascinators, the guests wore raincoats and gumboots and brought their own brollies.
After 10 weeks of sweat, slog and sunburn, pimping and preparing my garden for public critique and compliment, you’d think the weather could have cut us a break, surely? Like Goldilocks taste-testing stolen oats, all I’d asked for was three days of mildmannered meteorology: not too hot, not too cold, just right.
But it didn’t just rain on my parade, it poured. It was, as Donald Trump might tweet, a constantly negative covfefe.
It bucketed down, dragging the delphiniums and towering dill down with it. My dahlia blooms rotted like balls of sob-soaked tissues, the white cosmos daisies collapsed and my bedraggled lemon bergamot, boasting pretty whorls of candyfloss pink and lime, sank slowly to its knees. Our carpark – the neighbour’s front sheep paddock – rapidly turned into a quagmire while the lawn I have spent months trying to resow and revive soon resembled a Glastonbury mosh pit.
There was nothing I could do, either, aside from shaking my fists, stamping my feet and swearing at the gloomy skies, cursing that leaking cumulonimbus.
I tried to look on the bright side, quoting from Oh Say Can you Say ,Dr Seuss’s book of tongue-twisters: ‘‘The storm starts when the drops start dropping; When the drops stop dropping then the storm starts stopping.’’ Except it didn’t stop.
As the weekend progressed, the weather only worsened. The rain turned from gentle Friday drizzle to a spouting-suffocating Sunday downpour, cranking up from mildly temperamental at morning tea to a fully-blown Shakespearean Tempest by midday, when the Hospice volunteers declared defeat and went home.
Disappointment doesn’t begin to describe it, but on the plus side:
❚ I can say with absolute certainty that the most popular plant in my garden is Pennisetum glaucum, Purple Majesty, an annual variety of pearl millet with striking dark foliage and gothic poker flowers. If I was asked its name once, I was asked a hundred times. The lawn in front of it took a beating as visitors paused in the boggy conditions to photograph it in all its soggy glory, mass-planted under purple-leafed Red Emperor Japanese maples. The other tell-tale muddy patch, ironically, was in front of the bronze-foliaged Alstroemeria Indian Summer.
❚ The sacred lotus in my pond lapped up all the praise and precipitation thrown at it. And every time I looked at its elegant blooms, I did feel a tiny bit more Zen.
❚ My Sugar Belle watermelons are swelling up like basketballs!
❚ If the Queen wasn’t so preoccupied sorting out Harry and Meghan’s guest list, I’d formally nominate my mother Marjorie for a QSM for services to scone baking. She churned out 365 fluffy scones in three hours, while the ladies from the newly anointed Hunua Women’s Institute served every single one with a cheerful hurrah.
❚ I haven’t had to drag the hose around my garden all week, allowing me to binge-watch every trashy episode of the latest series of Married at First Sight Australia.
❚ I’ve got a new list of potential DIY projects for my husband: umbrella holder, boot rack, raincoat hooks, an ark.
And at least no-one would have noticed my surly disposition, for in one of those fortuitous miracles of PR timing, a courier turned up to drop off a box of complimentary cosmetics just before the first visitors arrived.
‘‘Dear Lynda,’’ went the enclosed letter. ‘‘Ageing is inevitable, but ageing gracefully is now easier than ever.’’
And so it was that, despite the weather, my smile never once slipped. It couldn’t: it was pinned to my game face by an invisible film of collagensupporting, skin-tightening peptides, hibiscus seed and Indian guggul extracts and moisture-boosting phytosphingosine (whatever that is), better known as Elizabeth Ardern’s new Ceramide Lift and Firm Sculpting Gel.
My dahlia blooms rotted like balls of sob-soaked tissues.