Green acre

But her Auckland apartment’s little courtyard was cramping her green fingers and here was a large, if feral, garden, chock-a-block with irresistible fruit trees. And at the bottom of the garden she discovered a 48sqm monument to the worst of DIY – a damp, stinking sleepout comprising living space, bedroom, a mud-filled shower that hovered between kitchen and bedroom and a very unsavoury loo.

The price was satisfactory – “nobody else really wanted it” – and on April Fools’ Day 2005 Lynda and her cats took possession. The proud owner and her conscientious labour force – her retired parents – then set about making the sleepout fit to rent.

Its little deck was rotten and the floor holed and sloping. The windows dropped out when opened and, during the first week, Lynda’s cats dispatched 14 rats.

Her builder/handyman father, retired farmer Jock Hallinan, began to wish they’d never started the three-and-a-half-month process that transformed the shack/sleepout into a loft-style apartment. >

“But once we had started,” says Lynda, “we couldn’t walk away.”

Jock took up residence as soon as the bedroom, bathroom and shower were fit for use and Lynda’s mum Marjorie joined him whenever she could tear herself away from the golf course. She tiled and plastered in her husband’s wake as he repaired, reinforced or replaced everything but the exterior weatherboards and the flimsy rafters in the high-studded living space.

Those rafters are flimsy no longer. An architect recommended a robust central beam and Lynda’s dad encased the others in MDF. He replaced the decramastic roof tiles with unpainted Zincalume, built new decks and painted the exterior in ‘Baltic Sea’ by Resene. When it was finished, his daughter liked it so much she rented out the cottage in front and moved in with the cats.

“I’ve got way too much stuff for it, but when have I lived in a proper house? We’re obsessed with having bigger homes but I’d rather have a bigger garden. I don’t spend much time indoors anyway.”

And all that stuff declares its owner’s character, interests and love of the colour green. The bedroom has a duvet cover embroidered with green flowers, a madonna lily print by London-based Kiwi botanical artist Bryan Poole and a photographic print of a butterfly – a birthday present from NZ Gardener photographer Sally Tagg. >

The living area has a row of green jugs and a nearly complete collection of Anchor Hocking’s 1970s Fairfield range of glassware in green, assembled piece by piece from eBay – not without casualties.
“I find something I really want and it gets here and it’s busted.” Recently, she bought a retro bean slicer on TradeMe. It’s green.

The cats have got their claws into the white leather sofa that replaced the brown suede one ruined by an exploding bottle of home-made cider. The cider apples are, of course, from her garden.

In the absence of a fully formed kitchen, Lynda knocks up her meals on a barbecue, a microwave and a single hot plate. Her resolution to grow all her own food for the duration of 2007 attracted plenty of attention. This year’s mission is to produce 1000 kilos of food from her Edenic garden, though Lynda says it’s really too big for someone as busy as she.

The garden’s meandering paths, four raised vegetable beds and pretty picket fence are her father’s work; its astonishing variety of trees and plants is her own. Visitors to her open garden in December found the usual suspects in the vege patches: cabbages, tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, capsicums. They may have been familiar with the okra and the yard-long beans; they weren’t so well acquainted with the mini black popcorn, the glade of Jerusalem artichokes, the coffee beans, the pawpaw, the loofahs or the barley destined for beer.

They recognised the fig, plum, apple, lemon, fig and avocado trees, and why would you plant nine olives unless you intended to make oil? But they needed help identifying the dwarf almonds, the weeping mulberry and the guava.

“I’ve got everything,” says Lynda. You can’t say fairer than that.

Story: Prue Dashfield Photographs: Matthew Williams