Childhood gardening

Gardening was quite important in my childhood although it is my younger sister who is the real gardener.   My mother was quite enthusiastic when we were children although I do not think she was very expert and I remember her buying plants and seeds and not ever propagating anything.  Her father was a keen gardener although his garden was small with no room for vegetables.  All New Zealand houses traditionally had a patch of land and everyone used to grow their own vegetables.  I suspect vegetable gardening was seen as men’s work.  That was certainly the case in our household. My father and his father before him, hated gardening.  My father used to say that his father used to tell him that he would have to weed the roses in the afterlife!  My paternal grandmother was a keen gardener and that trait was passed down to both my uncle and aunt and then to my younger sister.

In Hastings my father did garden but once we got to Wellington he gave up.  He grew vegetables in Hastings although never potatoes. I also have a faint ‘memory of a memory’ about Havelock North in which I am standing at the front door and looking out on a sea of lumps.  I know my parents planted potatoes to break up the ground before sowing a lawn but I can only have been about eighteen months old so have probably not got a true memory.  In Hastings the vegetable garden was divided from the flower garden by a trellis up which grew the runner beans.  I do not remember even knowing that there were other kinds of bean.  My father grew carrots which I imagine loved the sandy soil and peas plus salad items such as lettuce and spring onions.  Hastings was built on a river plain and the soil was very good.  The main problem was drought in the summer and we did have heavy frosts.  I think one or two of the shrubs had sacking put round them for winter protection.

When I was about four my mother picked out a small section of the flower garden and said that Margaret and I could have it as ours.  I remember growing mustard and cress and love-in-a-mist but that is about all. I also remember having children’s packets of mixed seeds.  I remember the ‘bulbs’ my mother grew for spring which were narcissi of various kinds, especially the ones with little flowers.  More memorable were the hyancinths because they had such a lovely scent.  Our garden in Hastings was very nice.  My parents planted roses all along one boundary – alternately Paul Scarlet and other varieties.  At the corner between the flower garden and the vegetable patch they planted a silver birch so that was the first variety of tree I knew.  The other boundary (we lived on a corner) was very shady but we had a lemon tree there and some shrubs.  We never played on that side.   We only ever used ‘blood and bone’ as a fertilizer but that seemed to be enough.  I have memories of making ‘fairy gardens’.  After my father had mowed the lawn (it was a job always done by men) we were allowed to have some of the clippings.  We used to pile these up on the ground and decorate them with flowers.  Of course they always disappeared overnight or as soon as it rained but it was a form of entertainment for us.  I am sure my paternal grandmother must have helped my father with his vegetable garden.  In theory it did not matter if you did not grow vegetables in Hastings as the town was surrounded by market gardens and orchards.  We used to go to one to buy tomatoes and the scent of tomatoes still reminds me of that place.

When we moved to Wellington the gardening situation was completely different.  Wellington is built on clay and things did not grow as they did in Hastings.  At one point my parents had a rotary clothes line installed.  The soil that we removed from the planting hole was just like the clay we modelled at school so we made things from it.   I think our garden might have been especially damp as there was a creek (tiny stream) running along the bottom boundary between us and the neighbours in the street that ran at right angles to ours.  People often say that Karori (the suburb where we lived) is very damp and full of streams.  As it is built on land that mostly consists of hillsides with the main road running down the central valley, this all makes sense.

My mother’s father retired soon after we moved to Wellington and he used to come and do the gardening.  He planted Jerusalem artichokes (again I never knew there was another kind) and they grew despite the poor soil.  Our flower garden had hydrangeas along the bed against the house.   They did not mind the acid soil. There was a small patch of garden in a corner where I think my mother grew a variety of things and then there was garden all along the boundary fence.  We had stylosis (miniature irises) growing there.  Here is a photo of my sister and me sitting on the fence. 

You can see the hydrangea bushes in the background but I have no idea of the name of the large bush growing outside the fence. I see we also had window boxes. I think they must have been planted with bright red pelargoniums (although we called them geraniums) as again, that was the only kind we knew. In New Zealand at that time the flower garden was always in front of the house and the vegetable garden behind it.  That was just the way it was and when I came to England I was surprised to find most people had their main garden behind the house.  My mother’s generation of women were mostly full-time housewives and mothers.  Gardening and dressmaking were activities you did in the afternoon after having spent the morning cleaning the house.  You had to do them and only a few women opted out.

Because everyone was a gardener the usual way of propagating plants was from cuttings and ‘slips’ given to you by friends.  It was not common to buy plants and there were certainly no garden centres.  I do not know how many children gardened.  My younger sister was always very enthusiastic but Margaret and I soon grew out of it as too many other things impinged on our lives.  When we were older and moved to another house further up the same street I used to do a little vegetable gardening but what I remember from that house is my younger sister being very keen and growing lots of different vegetables.

When I went on my last trip to New Zealand in 2008 a friend and I visited the Hastings house.  The people who were renting it were about to go out and gave us permission to walk round the outside.  This is what we saw:

This is the patch of garden that Margaret and I were allowed to use.

And this is the Queen Street frontage.  The fence has been replaced for obvious reasons (ours was just wire) and the we knew the silver birch had been removed not long after we left.  I see there is a tree fern where it used to be.  The climbers up the verandah were not there when we lived there.

My other sister has visited the house more recently and said it had changed hands and had a lot of improvements made to it.  I was quite surprised that people in NZ did not mind former residents of a house walking around it and on the same holiday I was given a guided tour of the house in the first photo.  It had also been improved and extended but some parts were the same.