A Love of the Land

Penny Zino and her garden, Flaxmere, are inseparable. In the last silvery twilight of a North Canterbury summer's night, she can be found making a final adjustment to the watering hose and early next morning she's back after a wake-up plunge in her pool. For forty years Penny has planned and dreamed and worked on her 2.8 hectares near Hawarden, an hour north of Christchurch, with a passion that has intensified with the passing seasons.

Earlier this year Flaxmere was chosen as a Garden of National Significance by the New Zealand Garden Trust. And from October 26 to 29 it will be the setting for Art in a Garden, an exhibition hosted by Penny and her friend Alison Meyer that is becoming an annual event.

Last year 1500 people visited to enjoy sculpture in Flaxmere's glorious garden setting. They came to view paintings and photography in a converted woolshed and to attend workshops and enjoy lunches and teas provided by the two Zino daughters-in-law, Keri and Rachael, and Alison's daughter Pip Miller.

The exhibition raised more than $8500 for Guide Dog Services and the local St John ambulance.
Twenty-five sculptors, twenty-four painters, four photographers and two jewellers will be displaying their work at Flaxmere this month. Penny spends hours with each sculptor, making sure their pieces are placed to look their best. She thinks about contrasts and whether a work needs space to cast shadows.
Is it a work to approach from a long distance or is it better experienced as a surprise, in close-up?
"As well as size and scale, I think of the materials - metal against soft foliage, rusting steel birds against blue sky, gleaming bronze where dappled light will cast added textures. It's exhausting but it's marvellous to see how people respond to the artists' work when it's displayed to its best advantage."

For Penny it's a natural progression to encourage local artists to exhibit in the setting she first opened up to visitors twenty years ago. Penny was a twenty-four-year-old bride when she went to live on the farm with her husband, John Zino, half an hour from where she grew up near Culverden. The couple lived at Flaxmere, raising their three children, farming and gardening, until John died in 1994.

Their old home was built from kauri dating back to 1890. An addition of inferior untreated timber, built between the wars, was pulled off and rebuilt in 1973 and a second storey was added. "The house had only one hour of sun a day and faced the wrong way. There were no windows on the north wall at all."
Once the trees were cleared for the garden the wind had free rein. "There was absolutely nothing between us and the Southern Alps. Our first plantings were blown to smithereens, the roses uprooted. It was heartbreaking really. Everything was so immature for so long. It takes twenty years before you feel the shelter you are creating. By then I knew I had a passion for gardening." Penny laughs at the wonder of it all.

"I had a great technique with John. I used to sit on the veranda and visualise trees in the paddocks. I'd draw what it would look like in fifty years and leave my papers lying around. He'd pick them up and come to think it was all his idea.

"If I mentioned a spade, John would be at the far end of the farm in no time at all. But he loved the construction of things like steps, walls, pergolas."

Making the stone walls was a family affair and Penny still makes new walls with her own hands. "The neighbour can't believe his luck, having a madwoman come with her truck and trailer to take away the stones that are ruining his paddocks."

This self-taught gardener is adamant she is not trying to put her own mark on the land. "The most important thing is to make what you've created a part of the landscape, so it looks as if it belongs.
"What has always fascinated me is the change of seasons. I have revelled in the contrasts. Winter could almost be my favourite, with the starkness against the sky. That's when you see the bones of the garden. But I'm fearful of the weather. It's when you have livestock - all those animals so dependent on you.
"I'm a farmer's wife through and through. I feel for the stock and I feel for my farmer sons and our neighbours, what they go through when the wind and snow or drought comes. But you keep going.
"It's the extremes you have to live with. I have never really reconciled to it all, especially when it comes to droughts.

"It's devastating when you see plants all curled up and dying. My plants are like my children, I have tended them for  so long."

It's a lifetime love affair, really.        

Art in a Garden, October 26-29 2006, www.artinagarden.co.nz