The Authentic Garden

There are friends whose houses you can bowl up to at all hours of the day and be assured of a warm welcome. 'Take us as you find us’ seems to be the prevailing mood, and though there may be piles if dirty dishes and  kids having tantrums, and though sometimes you may be talked to and fed , more often you will find yourself helping out with something, playing with the children or just hanging out and slobbing blissfully with a newspaper. These are the places I feel most at ease – feel part of the family.

Yet with those we know less well, there’s an unwritten rule that you wait to be invited and when you to get to visit, the house you sense, has been tidied and groomed in advance. At such places, you’ll often get a decent meal and a good conversation for the owners have set aside time to devote to you but though the level of effort by the host is undoubtedly greater, a visit to these places never nourishes the soul quite like the more chaotic first option.

As with friends, so gardens can either feel comfortable and satisfying or a bit staid and starchy leaving you with no lasting feeling of well-being.

Whether it’s politicians scooping up babies and grinning through gritted teeth or garden owners  shuffling the kids’ bikes out of sight; trying too hard to look good is always a big turn off. Flower shows are crammed with such artificial posturing. Designers at them seem more interested in strutting their eco-credentials and clever ideas than they are in providing anything of lasting enjoyment.  Fancy materials and clever shapes –tenuous connections to philosophies and half-baked sentiment lie as thick on the ground as cherry blossom in a late spring squall and therein lies the difference; while design can be such a clunky, self-conscious sort of process, nature lays out her beauty in a seemingly random and carefree manner. I can take all morning grappling with a hose trying to make my path meander in a ‘naturalistic way’ but nature flings a river into a lazy meander with effortless aplomb – perhaps this is why where the owners cherish and cultivate '‘happy accidents'’ and self seeded serendipity their gardens often feel instantly easy and comfortable. A crooked path that once traced the line of a now defunct chook house – a ramshackle hut once used as a kids playhouse and a corner where the raspberries have ‘got out of hand’; such things all tell a story and are as welcome in a garden as the timeworn patina and ancient scratches on a precious antique.

Life isn’t perfect and as reflections of life, neither should our gardens be. The Japanese, have a term for this principal of  beauty called ‘wabi sabi’ . The wabi sabi aesthetic promotes authenticity by acknowledging three simple realities of life: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. Qualities such as simplicity, asymmetry, modesty and intimacy are highly regarded in pursuit of the wabi sabi ideal; so to the Japanese a pottery bowl that is a little wonky is made unique and special by its defect. Similarly the passing moments of the year are celebrated for their transience such as leaf fall and blossom time and gardens are predominantly designed with  crookedness built in which makes them far less predictable perhaps than the textbook formality western gardens are apt to fall back on in the absence of better ideas.

I’m afraid many professionally designed gardens leave me cold looking as they do like they have been churned out by a computer. While I can marvel at the clarity of the vision –the purity of lines and the glistening newness of it all; in the end everything is just too perfect – I feel like I’m in a doctor’s waiting room or a bank lobby rather than relaxing in a little eden.

 When you are caring for an historic property the idea of authenticity is particularly pertinent and even the smallest of details can collectively, make a great deal of difference to the whole. At Sissinghurst  - an iconic English garden I had the pleasure to train at, there was heated debate over hundreds of issues. When the head gardener wanted to begin mulching flower beds with fine shredded bark there was diverging opinion about whether it would affect the look and feel of the plantings. Certainly it saved a lot of work but bark and mulching in general was not popular when Vita Sackville West would have been marching around  in her jodhpurs filling the garden with her larger than life persona. In the end it was decided that the bark could be allowed – in moderation. Vita, it was decided, was always eager to grasp new plants and techniques and would surely have approved of such a sensible, labour saving measure. At Sissinghurst, great effort is made to heighten the feel that Vita still inhabits the garden. Climbing the tower which is the centrepiece of the layout, you come across her old study – filled with the scent and sight of fresh flowers gathered in various bowls and posies. You could almost imagine she had just popped out to run an errand and would be back at any minute. Such attention to detail is certainly authentic in an historical sense but is it not also in its way a dishonest pretence? I like to think that though Vita is long gone, the fact that someone fills the vases or arranges little pots of treasures on the steps and ties a rose off a path each day, is as honest a demonstration of the love Vita had for the place as you can hope for.

Fancy cushions are rarely practical in English weather.

Honesty is bound up with authenticity. By honesty I’m not talking about tromp l’oiels or other playful conceits which seek to deceive us purely for amusement to evoke delighted surprise.  Instead, honesty is about being transparent – using real materials like stone and metal rather than lookalikes and expressing your personality rather than being overly concerned with fads and fashions. I particularly love Jenny Oakley’s garden in this respect in Taranaki because it is un-apologetically a work in progress and a home to a large, boisterous family and Jenny (who has four boys to look after including husband Guy.) doesn’t try to hide the fact. The tennis court is not hidden away from view and neither is the classic old rotary washing line because both are eminently useful and well used. Until recently there was a plain concrete sandpit near the kitchen window complete with rusting toys but with the kids now strapping men, Jenny has finally given it a makeover and turned into a pond. Being real doesn’t mean you have to stop making an effort it just means you don’t have a nervous break down if not everything looks like a magazine picture. Jenny loves a bit of showmanship as much as any keen gardener – she wows visitors with her burgeoning hanging baskets but you don’t imagine she is going to shut the garden and lower the flag to half mast just because her prize Poor Knights Lilly  finished flowering the day before a coach-load of garden visitors arrive. New Zealanders are incredibly practical people on the whole so I hope we don’t ever get too precious about things.

Of the gardens I’ve visited for the yellow-book scheme - a place  which impressed with its casual ease was the humblest of town sections. As well as the usual pretty borders and neat lawn, near the greenhouse, the owners had created a sort of outdoor potting shed where pots, tools and logs were all stacked high in full view along a wall. Some effort had been made to arrange things in a neat and orderly way so even the everyday had a sort of functional beauty about it but this was very much a working area where practicality came before prettiness. The owners had not tried to hide away the ‘nerve centre’ of their passion behind a rose-covered screen – instead it was unapologetically included as part of the garden. In the same way at Sissinghurst, in the orchard the hay is stacked high among the meadow flowers. These rotting heaps aren’t ‘pretty’ to look at but are part of the essential processes of the garden. Functionality has a prettiness of its own just as a sense of history has an inherent element of beauty too.

The late Christopher Lloyd was a master at being real. For every horticultural bit of showing off at Great Dixter there would be some blatant expression of the owners personality. Lloyd was never a slave to fashion and because plastic  garden chairs are light to carry in and out and comfortable then he used plastic. Weeds were not stashed away either in pretty wooden trugs or trendy rubberized containers in dayglo colours but in old painters’ buckets. A giant thistle that Lloyd particularly admired and refused to weed out – a pile of watering cans ready to use or even the old man himself basking in the grass after lunch by the pond – these were all things visitors might stumble across on a walk around the garden. The feeling was that this was a home and not a show and the fact that the owner didn’t bend over backwards to please somehow made you feel a part of the family.

 I can never quite trust those gardeners who run around folding away rotary washing lines and throwing about bright coloured scatter cushions before they feel they can let you in the gate. Prettification is a word as irritating as it sounds. In most cases it is little more than unnecessary fuss and whether it’s a tad too much mascara on a beautiful face or frilly icing messing up a perfectly respectable chocolate cake  it smacks of mutton dressed up as lamb - a sort of sweet crust covering something dark and sinister beneath. Gardeners are most often tempted to get overly fussy when it comes to planting pots, instead of allowing one fine fern or hosta make its mark and display its simple architecture we can’t resist just adding in a few annuals around about for the dreaded ‘bit of colour’ or perhaps a scattering of bulbs to ‘spread the interest’ (another overworked gesture)

Vegetable gardens are another key area where we could do with a bit more authenticity. I find a no-frills country vege garden with it’s big,no-nonsense square beds, far more honest than those frilly potagers you see with their marigolds and nasturtiums  - their purple cabbages and red lettuces too pretty to pick. Most serious vegetable growers would rather have one large unadulterated plot of land rather than a maze of boutique beds. At Ayrlies Garden in new Zealand where I worked for many years, I always liked the rose garden because it did not try to pretend to be all things for all seasons. In winter everything died down and then there was little to enjoy beyond the skeletons of the roses themselves. It didn’t need cheering up with a fancy flax or a perky evergreen; like an after-dinner mint or plum pudding at Christmas, it was a seasonal treat and the austerity of winter only served to accentuate the anticipation of all the joys to come.

So perhaps we need to have a reality check. Are we trying to create an image – striving after some imagined fashion or glossy magazine ideal or are we being ourselves? Dare we allow our friends and family to see the cracks? In all probability they will forgive you your faux pars  and love you anyway for your ability to be yourself.

10 things not to include if you want to be authentic.

·        Corinthian columns, pediments and anything that looks vaguely like it has been stolen from the acropolis in Rome.(unless you are doing it as a joke)

·        Walls and furniture painted bright colours to give the impression that you are arty.

·        Plastic water butts dressed up as terracotta

·        Scatter cushions that are neither weather proof nor comfortable.

·        Fire pits that have never seen a flicker of a flame.

·        Potagers which don’t produce useful crops of vegetables.

·        Rock gardens where there isn’t a natural slope

·        Waterfalls emanating from under rocks in the above mentioned rockery.

·        Carbon copy formal gardens where everything is symmetrical and box edged

·        Talk of your organic credentials when you know the roundup is tucked away in the shed.