Sprucing Up the Garden

Some of us are slow on the take. I guess I fit into that category when it comes to my garden. It just dawned on me that we’re behind in our garden clean up because of two mitigating factors. One is that we’ve had the most miserable weather to be gardening in. Constant cold, winds howling or rainstorms flooding were our challenges all year. After short but chilly seasons, all four in a row, with a winter that itself seemed like a year of all of the above, we were hiding out inside and learned how to hardly accomplish anything we usually do to get the jump on Spring.  By the way, I like to capitalize Spring because it is so important to me. Contrasting that with how I type winter. Yes I want to forget how l o n g it is and harsh. But we do have an amazing pond that is more like a small lake behind our backyard to thank for it. So that’s a nice feature now that we enjoy, however the extra soppy lawns in that same area aren’t so great. We’re still sinking into certain parts of our lawns that are still inundated and no matter how many channels my husband digs for drainage, the grass is squishy and muddy.

The second and probably more interesting factor that kept us from taking better care of the burgeoning nature that is going crazy all around our sweet little cottage, is that John now has four great reasons to avoid any outside chores. Two newish Citroens to go with the old one and his pride and joy, his GTI seem to take his attention now. As I predicted it would, just as I predicted that the pristine appearance of all of our automobiles would diminish quickly over the winter outside in the muck. Right again. But even I didn’t realize that John would be under the cars or with his head under the hood as much as he is nowadays. I thought he might spend one day on the cars. What’s more likely to happen is that he might spend one day on the garden and the rest on the cars. Men.

But that’s enough of an intro for today. What I really want to talk about is my clever mate’s talents for looking at an area that needs everything since we’ve pretty much ignored every area because we were huddled near the fire inside. Ah. That’s part of the joy of rural living in breathtaking New Zealand in a vintage house. But I digress. What I really want to talk about is my mate’s ability to transform overgrown or under-tended parts of the garden and reinvent them. So today I will present photos of part one of his latest creation, the overhaul of a tricky spot in the yard overlooking the new lake. Unfortunately I didn’t take any before pictures to show you just how impossibly overgrown it was before the introduction of the chain saw into the scene. When I did come out he had destroyed big overhanging branches and taken out rather large grasses to expose a part of the plot that had been covered in weeds and tangles. All that was left was a smallish cabbage tree that we should have moved after it planted itself years ago. But we didn’t and now it’s way too big to be moved unless we want to dig down to China. And we don’t.

I got very inspired when I saw what he had accomplished and realized again that this man that I share my weird life with, who is even more eccentric than me, if that’s possible, he is a genius about fine-tuning landscape. He really has an eye for what is possible and whatever he does demonstrates this vision. All around the garden he has spent many days on diverse projects and has built, dug, sculpted, arranged, pruned and reinvented when the feeling comes over him. What a guy. I think he missed his calling. He was New Zealand’s first computer science nerd and he’s logical to a fault but when he puts his mind to playing around outside, he always does something amazing. So stay tuned for part two.

Apparently we’ll have a new entry for the narrow vegetable patch and he already moved a couple of gates to enlarge an existing area and protect it from marauding critters. Yippee.