Other People's Gardens

Maria and I have a standing date each year with the Pūkaha Wairarapa Garden Tour in November, a long, greedy day of sweeping country gardens, and one we still can't wait for. But this February brought something new, and we couldn't resist: the Greytown Heritage Trust's first House and Garden Tour, one Sunday given over to the historic homes and town gardens of Greytown, raising money to restore the district's beautiful old buildings.

For someone whose passion is spending time inside other people's houses, a tour that opens both the homes and the gardens is very nearly too much happiness for one day.

Greytown makes it easy. That intact Victorian main street, the timber villas with their verandahs and their good bones, and behind them, gardens that have had a hundred years to settle into themselves. We went slowly. I took far too many photographs and filled a notebook with plant names I'll mostly mis-remember.

It's the best kind of inspiration, because it isn't a magazine. It's real dirt, real budgets, real problems solved with real cleverness. A woodpile stacked like a piece of art. Limelight hydrangeas allowed to billow where a tidier person would have cut them back. A gravel path edged in old brick, curving just so. A garden bar built into a converted shed, of all the good ideas.

The weather was kind to us right up until mid-afternoon, when it turned and went soft and damp, the way Wairarapa days do. We kept going anyway, collars up. You don't come home from a wet garden less inspired; if anything the rain makes everything greener and more forgiving.

Nothing makes you kinder about your own garden than a day spent admiring everyone else's.

I came home needing every scrap of it, because my own back garden is a mess of trenches and bare earth just now. What began as an unglamorous problem, drainage, the least romantic word in the language, and an expense we hadn't planned for, has quietly turned into the most exciting blank page I've been handed in years. The whole thing, to replant, from nothing, on purpose.

The timing, at least, is a gift: autumn is the best planting season there is, so between now and spring I get to put it all back, slowly, and let it settle over the cold months ready to wake up warm. Trenches now; a plan by autumn; hands in cold soil through winter. It should be daunting, starting a garden over from bare ground rarely isn't, but I've just spent a day watching other people be brave with theirs. A bit of damp weather never stopped anyone worth knowing.