Fertile Ground

When children’s author and audio producer Janice Marriott bought her Thorndon, Wellington, worker’s cottage 10 years ago, there was a weeping apple tree and just enough lawn for her Labrador to loll about on. The dog, sadly, has passed on but the garden continues to thrive.

 

 

A decade on, every square centimetre of soil in the 104 sqm plot produces plants – edible, fragrant or both. The growth is so prolific it’s a matter of “quelling exuberance rather than coaxing things to grow,” as Janice puts it. “But don’t use the word riotous – there’s quite a bit of control going on!”

 

Everything produced on her flat section at the bottom of Tinakori Hill – historically the site of Maori potato gardens that kept the early colonial settlers alive – is consumed or returned to the soil via compost bins in each corner of the plot.

 

Fruit trees include pears, apples, plums, tamarillos, feijoas and a prolific passionfruit vine. Janice has just dug up her potato patch – an old variety named ‘Cliff’s Kidneys’, chosen for its slightly kidney-shaped tubers. And overflowing the fertile vege patch are four different varieties of tomatoes, a row of beans on bamboo sticks, lettuces, beetroot and carrots. Herbs are tucked in everywhere, along with artichokes and a now well-established bay tree. Janice’s cat Tensing loves whole beds smothered in Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’ (aka catmint).

 

After filling such a small area, there’s nowhere to go but up – the pergola built soon after she settled in now drips with roses, clematis and star jasmine. The 1890s cottage was very basic before Janice added a front verandah, French doors, the pergola and an extra back room. A laundry between old and new, with French doors opening to the patio, acts as a mud room for the gardener.

 

“There’s no need to spend a lot on plants,” says Janice, who grows most things from seed. She retains her own vegetable seeds each season and annual flowers such as cosmos, linaria and forget-me-nots pop up willy-nilly. Much to Janice’s delight, her sweet peas – all from one packet of vari-coloured antique-species seeds – have reverted to the classic, deeply scented purple and magenta form. Seeds are also kept from foxgloves – much loved by the bees.

 

Cuttings take well here, in soil so humus-rich you can sink a bamboo pole right down into it. The names of the cuttings’ suppliers make up the beginnings of a roll call of New Zealand children’s writers – hydrangeas from William Taylor’s wonderful garden at Raurimu are cut right back every year and the lemon tree was transplanted from Diana Noonan’s nearby Wilton garden when she returned to her Catlins home.

 

The section is sheltered from the worst of Wellington’s northerlies and misses the southerlies; in fact, some plants actually do too well. A border of olives screening the garden from neighbours has grown very tall very quickly and will need attention soon.

 

There are so many roses in this garden that in summer rose petals are the most common weed suppressant. Quite a few roses have been grown from cuttings. ‘Mme Isaac Pereire’, the only single-flowering variety allowed in this garden, came from Judy Shanahan, a book-designer friend.

 

Other roses include ‘Albertine’, with its deep salmon buds, ‘Sparrieshoop’, ‘Auguste Gervaise’, ‘New Dawn’, ‘Raubritter’, ‘Dublin Bay’, the salmon-pink ‘Francois Juranville’, ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ and golden boy ‘Graham Thomas’.

 

When winter comes, there is time for reading catalogues, such as the one from Kings Seeds – “winter fantasy books” – and to write longer letters to Virginia Pawsey, her old Gisborne Girls’ High School friend. Though Janice’s tiny Thorndon plot is a far cry from Virginia’s North Canterbury farm garden (see our story here), the correspondence between the two has recently been published as Common Ground – an appealing chronicle of their town and country gardens, working lives and recipes from the farm kitchen.

 

"I don’t spend forever in the garden,” says Janice, who won the 2007 New Zealand Post Junior Fiction children’s book award for Thor’s Tale and is also the author of two books on gardening for kids. “I guess I’m well organised and I know the garden’s annual pattern really well. There’s no point in having a garden if you don’t have time to sit in it and relax.”