Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 53
Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds
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| Frances Jill Studd's artist garden |
This
is the artist, Frances Jill Studd’s flower garden, pictured at the end of Spring.
It has affinities to an English cottage garden (Jill was born and spent her
childhood in England), but significant differences and these are worth
ferreting out. And while this may seem to have little to do with the life of a dune
lake swamp, a little reflection will reveal the connection, for it involves how
we see ourselves in relation to the world in which we live.
The
original garden was established on a sand dune and it dates back to the late
1970’s. A retired farming couple from North Canterbury formed and then tended
it for thirty years. They placed this area (pictured) as a female centre to the
garden, but Jill transformed this from its original formal ambitions as a
garden to be gazed at from afar. The vegetable garden next to it, is its
opposite –burly and voluble, it is typically male and utilitarian, a garden ordered
into rows - then worked in to harvest
crops from. The small size of this veggie plot means that this is
primarily for pleasure and not profit –though it retains the sly allusion, that
it could be paying its way.
The
female centre to this garden originally featured shrubs fashionable in their time, miniature conifers, azaleas and
native hebe. There are also three mature camelia on the property, one sited at
the back left of the photo. The salt breeze burns their leaves; but
nevertheless they flourish in this sand dune country bringing a soft glow of
pink and red into winter as they flower through June to August. They also provide
nesting sites for blackbird families in spring and summer which indicates how a
garden will integrate itself into a wider ecology despite its owners separatist
intentions. The shrubs are purchased at a local nursery and while they indicate
the gardeners personal taste and pleasure, they don’t have any deeper
connection with them.
Another
survivor from that original garden is the broom to the left of it. This lights
the garden yellow in early spring but like citrus, it is vulnerable to local stem
borer which will finally kill it off. This insect is a native and Jill won’t use
sprays, so adopts a policy of strategic pruning and then replacement as the
infestation kills the plant.
The native plants that she fosters also indicate how the world has changed in 50
years when natives were viewed as colourless inferiors to exotics. These
include, 6 kowhai trees (to attract tui, and other honey easters),
ringaringa, 2 cabbage trees, 4 manuka, a native fuchsia, hoheria (lacebark),
and a native hibiscus.
These
hibiscus aren’t originally native, but were brought to New Zealand from the
South Pacific islands by Maori around the 13th Century. I well remember
being chastised by a botanist friend, when I suggested that perhaps the seed arrived
accidentally with the soil around the kumara (sweet potato). -Why would you assume that? was
his phlegmatic response. In fact Maori were as keen on their gardens as the
rest of humanity and this explains why pohutukawa (the NZ Christmas tree) were
flourishing in Te Arawa country on the shores of Lake Rotorua in the central North
Island when Cook first arrived in 1769.
Jill
progressively remade this central garden in an English cottage style, but it has
none of the formal structure of such gardens. Here different plant species were
planted in beds beside each other -the stocks separate from the marigolds which
were separated from the roses
which usually had beds of their own (indicating status), all of which was part
and parcel of the way a post-war NZ ordered its suburban garden décor (and its suburban lives). To a
large degree it still is. Her annuals coexist however, in the manner of a pasture
of wild flowers. She brings an artist’s mettle to this planting, so nothing is either
simple or unsurprising or sequenced, and yet everything is meticulously
placed to grow into itself. As such it is a design that evolves from year to year.
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| Tararua Foxglove |
And
these plants include those with a significant personal history. Her mother’s
daffodils –her mother-in-law’s wintersweet - an elderly friend’s yellow daisy
-her school chum’s Canterbury Bells -the lavender from her first flat in Devonport
Auckland. And much else has been ‘requisitioned’
from public gardens and elsewhere (Garden theft is an honest art practiced by all). This includes a rose from the Cook’s Beach
memorial (where Capt Cook observed the Transit of Mercury in Feb 1770), and wild
foxglove seed harvested from the Tararua Park.
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| Cook's rose, Cooks Beach - Coromandel |
There
are heritage plants here too, the seeds tracked down on the internet - granny bonnet,
and anchusa - honeywart to bring the bees, then a big, rangy, uncontrollable buddleia
for butterflies; along with tobacco plant first seeded from an artist’s residency in Ranfurly, up on the Maniototo
plateau, in central Otago.
So
this is a garden not to be viewed from a distance but to be lived in, puzzled
over, fostered and moved through. It is constantly evolving and it is a moveable
feast - a living garden, that she carries with her when she moves her
residential address. It also reappears massaged into her artwork...
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| Frances Jill Studd -Mantle 6 - u8Digital photograph 2013 |
Such a garden provides an example of the kind of sophisticated sensibility we need to
bring to our understanding and rehabilitation of rare and delicate ecosystems.
The Raumati Beach dune lake sits in the middle of town and has attracted a rich
variety of birdlife to its fecund waters. It is now doomed, as the juggernaut
of the expressway creeps ever closer but it’s complex, integrated and
vulnerable life cycle appears already to have been irreversibly damaged by it.
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| Emptied - Raumati Beach dune lake -Nov 2014 |
Yet even where rehabilitation of our wetlands is being promoted they are compromised by walking and
cycle tracks built for human pleasure and recreation and not the ecosystems
wellbeing. This is not the way to introduce a human presence back into these
vulnerable areas, but an extension of the history of human domination and disfigurement. This has involved the gradual reduction or local extinction of all our native species. The wetland forest and the delicate
native orchids and gentians were the first to go. They have been followed now
by even the hardiest of survivalists, like the raupo. The same goes for our threatened
bird life.
With
the premature drying up of this wetland this year we have seen that human
predatory influence in action. We have seen none of the rich variety of birdlife
that we usually see down here. We are unlikely to see it again.
Track we were listening to while posting this San Francisco (Wear some flowers in your hair) Ok- (chosen by the guest artist!)
For those who come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there
In the streets of San Francisco
Gentle people with flowers in their hair
Scott McKenzie of course - but oh! how San Francisco has changed since then.
