Easter happiness

   I've said it before and I'll say it again, I love autumn! Especially Easter, because it's such a relaxed holiday, a real holiday, unlike Christmas with its focused panic and consumer madness. 
   Here in New Zealand, the Easter holiday is also a time to get the autumn cleanup started in the garden. And it's the time of plant sales, as garden centres and nurseries get rid of tired and damaged stock for the winter. I am a bit of an addict for plant sales; show me your tired and sad plants and I'll be in to rescue them, especially if they are only $1.99 each! This is my car boot, filled to the brim with bargains. Some treasures - Anemone pulsatilla, a giant cowslip, white primroses, dwarf pale yellow foxgloves. And also a few things that I have a sneaking feeling that might be invasive and I'll be cursing them a few years down the track.

My foraging basket, full of walnuts, a little catnip (good for relaxing tea and for sad cat) and one solitary quince.

After getting hot and cross in the garden, have a hot cross bun. (Rereading Mapp and Lucia - good fun)

Cleanup in progress; the Baroque bed gets re-defined.

Walnuts drying out. Picking these up always reminds me of my childhood. We had three huge walnut trees in neighbouring properties, which used to rain walnuts into our garden every year.

And in other news, we get to keep our flag! The referendum on flag change has decided that we will keep our current flag, which, altho' it's not the best flag in the world, has been ours for some time. The really good thing is that this is one in the eye for our appalling Prime Minister, who wanted a new flag as his "legacy project" (and because he was always being wrongly seated under the Australian flag at international diplomatic shindigs, because the rest of the world can't tell the difference). Reading the comments in The Guardian about this was quite an eyeopener for me; people in the rest of the world are colossally ignorant about my little country. One person asked why we even need a flag, because we're "not a proper country"! Yes we are. We have a parliament and a democratic process and everything. Other commentators bemoaned the fact that we had decided to retain the British flag as part of our own, neglecting the chance to "shake off the yoke of their colonialist oppressors". There's very little colonial oppression going on here now; most of the oppression is from our very own democratically elected neo-Liberal government.

Rant over. May the spirit of Easter fill you with peace and hope and chocolate.

Reconnecting: The autumn garden

Today I spent most of the day gardening, reconnecting with my garden, seeing what needs cutting back, what has died, and what has thrived. This nerine is a spectacular one; I found it hidden under a pentstemon. The picture doesn't do justice to the flower, as it has a glittering quality when the petals are viewed close up, as if real golden glitter had been stuck to it. 

My autumn favourite, the white Japanese anemone (Anemone hupehensis) is coming to an end now. If I chose an flower as my personal emblem, it would probably be this. It is graceful, sophisticated and airy, and tough as boots when established, needing little in the way of water or fertiliser. A great filler for shady areas, it can be a bully in the garden, albeit a beautiful bully. The clump in the front garden in particularly huge, and looks wonderful against the autumn colours of the Azalea behind it. I did have the double pink version too, but it didn't prove to be as hardy and has now disappeared.

I spent quite some time cutting back and pulling out aluminium plant (some sort of Lamium?) which has gone crazy and threatens several plants with extinction. I planted crocus in the pear tree bed with paper-white jonquils which will look nice against the rough bark of the pear tree. 

Easter is a big gardening weekend for us in New Zealand. The autumn clean up starts, with the bulb planting, the planting of the winter vegetable garden, and more harvesting too - the late harvest, cranberries and crab apples, quinces and walnuts and chestnuts. "The days that make us happy make us wise"

Self-seeding

Rained pretty much all day today, so I did what gardeners do and read books about gardening instead.

This book, "Cultivating chaos; how to enrich landscapes with self-seeding plants" is very attractive and thought-provoking. The aesthetic of the self-seeded garden does take some getting used to, mostly getting used to leaving seed heads and dead stuff on plants. We have become so used to a certain kind of tidiness in our gardens, that leaving things to seed and die seems to shout "A slacker lives here!" to our neighbours.

"Gardening for a lifetime" by Sydney Eddison explores another part of my thoughts on gardening. As I get older and creakier, the garden needs to become easier to manage. I don't have money to spend on help in the garden, so must garden smarter, doing smaller projects for shorter periods of time. I'm not a fan of the "just pave the whole lot and put in a few shrubs" type of garden. These fill me with visual boredom.

"Making a wildflower meadow" is a lovely practical book, explaining how the authors restored and re-sowed their small-holding in Dorset to highlight meadow flowers. Much of the detail is not applicable in New Zealand, as our natural indigenous groundcover tends to be grasses and tussocks. Our real flowering meadowfields are in the sub-alpine regions, and many of those plants require very specific conditions that are not replicable in a suburban lowland garden. It is still a fascinating book; the authors were so dedicated to creating a meadow that they stripped the fertile soil (achieved by years of grazing and fallowing) right off part of the farm to provide the necessary impoverished sub-soil for meadow plants. The creation of this garden as a "natural" garden seems a little counter-intuitive to me; it is still gardening, of quite an intensive kind, not just standing back and seeing what germinates. Which is probably one of my preferred garden management styles; the spectacular show of California poppies in the top photograph was one of the highlights of the early summer garden here.

Into autumn

Now we are moving into autumn here. Today was quite cold, sunny but with a touch of cold wind that says "autumn is coming". I found this leaf on the concrete and photographed the shadow, as pretty as the leaf itself. Leaf-lace.

And the big thing about autumn, apart from leaves, is bulb-buying. Once again, as every year, I just can't resist investing in the spring blooms. Today I bought crocus, narcissus and ranunculus. I'm going to plant the ranunculus in the vegetable garden, they seem to do better there. The vegetable garden has been a failure this year; iffy weather early in the season meant that plants were quite delayed and grew very poorly. I've taken out some bush beans that were over, and some eggplant plants that have no show of bearing anything this late in the season. Even the zucchini did poorly. I had three plants, and two succumbed to some kind of virus. I'm thinking that I have to get a lot more compost and manure into the soil in my vege plot, I think the soil is not very fertile now and I have been lax about replenishing it.

I have just finished bottling the last of the plums. Tomorrow I'll have a go at pear ginger with the last of the pears. The pears were not very good this year, either; there was a lot of codlin moth in them. I hope the apples will not be the same. Ah, gardening. You win some, you lose some, but you've always got a new season coming up to try again. Hope springs eternal in the gardener's breast, with great visions of the wonderful garden you will have next year!

Days of plums and roses

"Big time" continues, with plums, roses, pears. A time of all flowers and all fruits. At last we have hot weather, just as we move into early autumn. I went outside early in the day yesterday, and there was that autumnal smell in the air, sweet and slightly sad. I picked these "Superbowl" roses ( is there any uglier name for a rose? to associate it with thuggish American football?) but it has a wonderful fragrance, even though for me the colour leaves something to be desired.

Trachelospermum jasminoides has been flowering for a long time this year. The fragrance sends me to Italy every time I smell it. I stayed in a little hotel in Galzignano when I walked the Euganean Hills. They gave me a wonderful room that looked out on a huge arbour covered with Trachelospermum in flower. The day was rainy; I spent the morning lying in bed with Italian Vogue magazines, then a wonderful Sunday lunch in the restaurant. A family and friends were celebrating  a boy's first communion. It was all very civilised. No one got drunk, as they would have in New Zealand, and no one made fun of the boy. It was all perfectly serious, but perfectly light-hearted as well; very Italian.

My Cinzano bottle, brought all the way from Sansepolcro, with a sprig of Trachelospermum and a blue paperweight from the West Coast of New Zealand.

I'm re-reading Marlena de Blasi's "A thousand days in Venice" at the moment, recounting her romance and marriage with a Venetian man, Francesco. She has an interesting way of writing, and her books make me so hungry! She is a great advocate of the good life, how to get enjoyment from small things, especially food. It's wonderful escapist reading. She threw over her whole life to go to Venice and start again with a new man in a new place. Sometimes I long for a new life too, though not with a new man (or woman, come to that), but a new life means ditching the old, and I don't think I'm ready for that. I would rather add to my existing life than turn it over completely for a new one. So many things to think about, the mind gets quite tired!