Green-Fingered

My mum always said that her fingers were as green as they looked. Despite her best efforts (and the chivvying of her husband and children to do the same) our family garden looked, at best, tidy, at worst overgrown and weedy. Her gardening DNA strand runs through me like a buttercup root runs through a lawn, mine in particular.

When we bought our Ohakune house we admired the beautiful pink and white roses that bloomed amongst neatly trimmed topiary but knew they wouldn’t stay. I love roses, as did my mother, and they always make me think of her. But this was to be a holiday home, visited on the occasions we wanted to enjoy the greater outdoors without having to maintain the immediate version.

I mentioned to a new neighbour that we would dig out the roses. She was horrified, as were others, stopping as they passed to tell us the roses were beautiful and brightened the street. It was sacrilege to even think of replacing them with easy-care natives. One neighbour offered to look after them so, with some trepidation, we left them.

Over the last decade the garden has had various helpers, most of them paid, and a few changes. The neat hedges did nothing but suck up valuable water and even more valuable time when paid gardeners seemed to forget that they needed trimming almost weekly in summer, or would turn overnight into unkempt and ugly beasts. We pulled them up, ignoring cries of foul from locals.

Besides my lack of aptitude, Neil can’t tell the difference between a weed and a valued plant. In Sheffield he ran around the house once to tell me a poppy – one of my favourite flowers – was blooming in the front garden. I wandered around, sceptical, as I hadn’t planted any poppies and hadn’t seen any evidence of them when I’d last weeded. A bright red tulip was springing from its bud.

The soil here is excellent, the result of being in the shadow of a large volcano that has deposited its emissions all around the area. We are the root vegetable capital of New Zealand and the carrots grown here are the best in the world (I know this because everywhere else I’ve eaten them they disappoint me). This is good news for growing healthy strong plants. But plants include weeds and, I have no idea why, weeds grow better than anything you may ever put into the soil and want to nurture. The only time weeds grow with less haste is during the colder months, of which we have a fair few in Ohakune.

Over the years we’ve done bits in the garden but, as we now consider Ohakune our main home and spend most of our time here, we decided we should get off our arses and start looking after it ourselves. I say we. Similar to how Mum used to assign tasks to Dad, Neil has to be persuaded to maintain a garden. He’s happy to trim the tall hedge alongside the drive a few times a year as it means he can wield a power tool, but he suddenly finds something else that needs doing urgently if there are weeds to be pulled. And freshly cut grass triggers eye-running and sneezing so he can’t mow lawns. I don’t mind the latter, much preferring mowing to vacuuming, but I get bored of pulling weeds within minutes.

An unplanned multi-week trip to our native land and a spell of bad weather before that meant this year the garden was neglected even before winter arrived. When we returned daffodils – a harbinger of spring although it was still freezing – were sniffing the air, some with bent stalks and yellow heads, and weeds were already rampant. Even the roses and hydrangeas were showing new shoots, the latter alongside the grey papery heads of last year’s blooms. Bark that should have been suppressing weeds was scattered over much of the lawn waiting to hobble the lawnmower. I don’t have a gun, but if I did and could aim straight there would be four and twenty of a certain bird heading into a dish to be covered with pastry.

It seems that every time I look out of the window there is something to be done. A patch brown and weedless as I pull the curtains at night is stuffed with straggly green the next morning. One day the lawn had pink-petal snow mixed in with the bark, the result of a vicious overnight gale that had even lopped off a few full blooms from the much-admired roses, which need regular spraying or leaves turn black with spots (I try to leave insect control to the birds) along with dead-heading almost every day. Being old varieties – hence the gorgeous scent – their thorns are large and sharp; it is impossible to do anything with them without requiring subsequent first aid.

Despite my grumbling I admit to enjoying the benefits of a nice garden. I like seeing the roses through my windows, along with some pansies I’ve planted this year, the hydrangea a vivid blue, the colour Mum loved but could never achieve (I know, it’s something to do with the soil, although no one can tell me why the plant at the other end of the garden is pink). In warmer months we sit outside surrounded by colour and the humming of bees. One lunch a bold silvereye spent minutes feasting on the greenfly on a rose right by my shoulder, not even pausing when Neil got up to fetch his camera, an act that normally clears a kilometre-square area of anything with feathers. On rare windless days the scent of them suffuses the air. So we’ll keep the roses (and the first aid kit handy) and I’ll keep persisting with other ideas. I’ve just put in some fuchsias – I’ve heard they’re easy to care for.