Christchurch City Art Gallery

Today I visited our art gallery for the first time in over five years. Not because I dislike it, but because it has been closed since our 2011 earthquake. The gallery has just reopened, after extensive repairs, not to the windows as might be thought, but to the foundation. This has been re-levelled (they squirt resin into the ground beneath the foundation, gradually raising it up) and base-isolated, in effect placing the building on giant rubber tyres so that the building moves with a quake rather than resists it. The building was the Civil Defence headquarters during the emergency phase of the disaster, then had to be closed as two nearby office blocks that leaned over it had to be demolished. (These blocks actually banged together during the quake, and ended up leaning against each other).

The upstairs level of the stair well. A sculpture of upside-down chairs and florescent tubes hangs from the ceiling like a chandelier

The bull on a piano has become something of a symbol of Christchurch's resilience. First exhibited outside in a post-quake wasteland, it now has pride of place in the foyer. The work is "On first looking into 'Chapman's Homer" by Michael Parekowhai.

A great view out over the surrounding streets from the upstairs foyer.

This is the view you get when you sit at the piano.

Main foyer and stairs

There are several exhibitions on here at the moment. One I particularly liked was of the work of Margaret Stoddart. One of the first New Zealand women to have a career in painting, she was an adventurous explorer of the local landscape, using the 'respectable' pastime of botanising to travel through some of the wildest country of the province. The picture above is of her homeplace of Diamond Harbour, painted in 1909.

The gallery was quite busy even early in the morning when I visited. It's great to be able to enjoy looking at art again in such an interesting building. 

Decluttering days

Hosta flowers - you can see some of the hail damage on the leaves. One of the hostas in my front garden was shredded; sadly, it will look awful for some time yet.

Now we're coming up to New Year, I've bitten the bullet and am doing some serious decluttering. It won't make a huge difference to the way the interior of the house looks - I like most of my tchotchkes and they will stay - but more to the inside of my cupboards. There is a lot of stuff that I have kept, with the best of intentions, meaning to fix or alter or repurpose them. 

Part of the decluttering process is absolute honesty. Do I really want this? Will I really use this ever again? Will I take up this hem, alter this curtain...etc. etc. I tend to keep things like old curtains, just in case I move house and the curtains will fit the new windows (they don't fit the current windows, which is why they are in storage). And duplicates of things - two (or sometimes three) of everything, in case I lose or break one. It's best to give them to charity, I think, then at least someone can use them, instead of just filling up a drawer or a cupboard. I keep ancient seed packets with ancient seeds. They will not germinate and I know this, but still I keep them. I found two brand new spanners in a box. I have no idea why I have them or when I would ever use them; I do not fix my own car or plumbing or even my bicycle myself. 

I have kept a lot of newspaper and magazine clippings, about gardening and cooking. These were yellowing and musty and I have never looked at them again after clipping them. The Internet has obviated my need to keep such stuff; if I want to know how to prune a fruit-tree, Google will tell me. And I will still keep my books, my many gardening books.

So I'll continue, and then have a big houseclean so I can go into the New Year all bright and shiny. Many cultures have this "clean before the new year" custom, but I've never bothered before. And I may not bother again!

Merry Christmas!

   This is a photo of my garden taken this evening. Southern Christmas is a summer event, which can be a bit odd; cards with reindeer and snow are a bit out of place down here. Our Santa wears red board shorts and a T-shirt and jandals (aka thongs or flip-flops) and eats salad and ice-cream and enjoys a cool beer rather than egg-nog.
   Those of us in the Southern Hemisphere have almost finished our Christmas Day now. In the Northern Hemisphere, you'll just be starting, so to both hemispheres I hope you had and have a very Merry Christmas.

Rebuilding

This is the Opawa Methodist Church. The church was badly damaged during our earthquakes in 2011, and is now being rebuilt. The church building was brick with a wooden roof, quite a beautiful wooden roof, which was removed in one piece and set aside on the site while the foundation and superstructure were rebuilt. This week the old roof was popped back onto the new framing with giant cranes. All went smoothly, and now a modern church will be filled in under the roof. This is a brilliant re-use of the old with the safety of the new, and I look forward to seeing the new building take shape.

Here you can see one of the new steel stanchions that support the old roof.

SEE:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/75197869/crane-swings-20-tonne-roof-back-into-place-for-opawa-methodist-church

Post-hailstorm blues

Pot of nasturtiums -shredded

No, this is not a new laceleaf zucchini cultivar

Garlic completed flattened where the hail ponded

Some despondency today, after looking more closely at the damage done by Sunday's hailstorms. I've been at work since then, so haven't really had time (or the inclination) to do a proper inventory of the garden. Much shredded leafage, and some pitting of fruit, but since I'm not growing for export, this last won't bother me. All across the city, you can hear the lamentations and gnashing of teeth as gardeners discover their vegetables and fruits damaged. Hopefully they will stage a resurgence, (gardeners and plants) so best leave the stuff and hope for a better more clement summer from now on.

Thomas likes to sit on my kneeling pad, and gets on it every time I move off. The new non-black spot replanted.

On the bright side,this afternoon has been sunny, so I've got out and completed the redevelopment of the "black spot" I talked about in my last post. I decided to remove the lambs' ears after all, and have replanted with a row of Lebanese cucumbers (they will have a support), an odd cucurbit that self-seeded in the strawberry bed (might be a pumpkin?) and a row of chives at the front for decoration. I'll also scatter some coriander seed in the middle section of the plot, and hope for the best.

I'm also thinking about making some fruit wine this year. There's only so much jam a person can eat, and with the price of wine what it is, this would be an interesting exercise. (Although New Zealand wines get good press overseas, most of the cheap wine available here is not that good.) My dad used to make fruit wines from the garden and very nice they were too. Apricot and peach were particularly good, I remember. It's a good way of using the surplus, and even if I get only vinegar at the end, at least it will be my own vinegar!

Crazy weather

Rose "Double Delight"

Nutty weather today. Two severe hailstorms one about 3 hours after the other, plus a tornado reported out in the countryside. I was at work when the first storm came in, it was so bad a large seagull came down to rest on the lawn outside because it couldn't fly in the hail. Never seen that before. About 15 minutes after I arrived home there was a second storm, not quite so bad hail-wise but lots of loud thunder and lightening. Some of the plants in the vegetable garden are shredded. The zucchini plants are particularly bad, and one of my Purple Calabash tomatoes has been stripped right down into a stalk! Very annoying - I have been coddling these as they are not very robust anyway - and many of my seedling basils have been broken off completely. Grrr! I'm glad I'm not a commercial grower and my livelihood depends on my crops. It's the start of the cherry season here now, which is brief enough anyway, without hail damage. There'll be a lot of farmers who will be looking at their fields and shaking their heads right now. And the bloody supermarkets will be using that as a reason to put their prices for fruit and veg. up. Grrrr!

Black spots

Every garden has its black spots, and this is one of mine. It's been deteriorating for some time now, a bed of violets that has been infiltrated by twitch grass. For some reason, I haven't been able to "see" this until the last few days, so stealthy has the takeover been, but today I got into it and removed most of the weeds and violets. It is only a small patch of garden, and I have to leave the overgrown part to the right, where the lambs' ears are, because the bees love the lambs' ears flowers and I'm loath to remove the plant when it's being utilised by them. The soil is quite hard and threaded through with violet roots and the fibrous roots of the fern on the right. I don't know what I'll put here; it is quite a difficult place as it gets no sun until the late afternoon, when it bakes. Perhaps a bush cucumber or coriander? It's right outside the kitchen door - perhaps parsley, although I have a lot of that growing all over the garden.

First strawberries today, with a few raspberries thrown in. Yum!