Tale of two sisters |
|
Give me the child until he is seven,” said Saint Francis Xavier, “and I will give you the man.” Or the woman – for Carolyn Ferraby was only nine, and her sister Kaye Green 14, when their mother May died, yet both girls had already unknowingly inherited her great fondness for gardening.
Carolyn was first to flex her green fingers. By the time she married her teenage sweetheart Joe Ferraby at 21, she was running her own florist shop in Blenheim. “I never gardened with my mother,” says Carolyn, “but when I started working as a florist, I’d smell a flower and instantly remember its fragrance from my mother’s garden. I remember it all: the grass paths, the flag irises lining the path to the chook house, her beautiful vegetable garden.”
Kaye, above, agrees. “I can still recall every detail: the onions laid out to dry in rows, the ornamental broom, the shrubbery where we used to play. I remember that, when our aunt and uncle came for afternoon tea on Sundays, afterwards they’d walk around the garden, saying, ‘Isn’t this lovely!’ As a child, I thought they were all loopy.”
Raised in Tuamarina, in Marlborough’s Wairau Valley, neither sister fell far from the tree. For 35 years, Carolyn has gardened at Barewood, the Ferraby family’s sheep and cattle farm in the Awatere Valley, while Kaye and her husband Gary’s garden, Broomfield, is just outside Blenheim in Renwick. Broomfield and Barewood are both recognised by the New Zealand Gardens Trust as Gardens of National Significance. And both have perfect potagers.
What’s a potager? It’s a vege patch with panache. The French invented the term to describe an ornamental kitchen garden – a spirited hodgepodge of flowers and food harvested from formal beds traditionally hedged with clipped box (Buxus sempervirens).
Carolyn and Kaye had potagers before anyone else in New Zealand had even heard of them. In 1993, at the height of the cottage garden craze, Carolyn went to England to visit Barnsley House, the Gloucestershire home of legendary garden designer and author Rosemary Verey. Famous for designing posh vege plots for the Prince of Wales and Elton John, Rosemary sold cyclostyled copies of her designs to garden visitors for the princely sum of 50p. Carolyn sent a postcard home to Kaye. “I have a plan for the potager,” it said.
Inspired by Rosemary Verey’s sketch (though the printing was admittedly somewhat skew-whiff), the sisters excitedly plotted their potagers. And in 1994 they built them together – a working bee here, a working bee there. It was a family affair.
It must be said that Carolyn and Kaye married well, as gardeners are apt to do. Joe and Gary are their right-hand men. There’s nothing these blokes can’t do. They’re handy with a hammer, hedge trimmers, even a stick of dynamite. “You can’t do it on your own,” admits Carolyn. “Joe hates gardening but he can build anything.”
At Broomfield, Gary looks after the lawns and prunes the beech and macrocarpa hedges that envelop the potager, though he makes himself scarce if he suspects Kaye is hatching a new landscaping plan. “He knows when to come home after dark,” she teases.
Who prunes Broomfield’s box hedges so meticulously? That’d be Kaye’s son-in-law, Martin Truscott. “He’s got the best eye in town,” she says. Daughter Georgie has clearly married well too.
During Hunter’s Garden Marlborough last spring, Kaye and Martin had a bet to see whose handiwork would elicit the most praise from visitors: Martin’s clipped hedges or Kaye’s wisteria walk. It was Martin who chalked up the victory.
It’s hard to believe that 15 years ago Broomfield was a bare horse paddock. But, for someone who “never had the time to garden properly until I stopped working 10 years ago”, Kaye quickly made up for lost time.
On retirement from full-time work, Kaye commissioned a concept plan from Robert Watson, a Christchurch landscape architect, and got stuck in. “I think when you start a garden later in life you know what you like. Fewer frills, more formality.”
Though both potagers were inspired by Rosemary Verey’s plan, they’re not identical. Kaye’s is a smidge bigger than her sister’s, though Carolyn’s lavender-lined central vista is a fraction longer. Kaye’s potager is square; Carolyn’s is oblong. Kaye opted for beech hedges (Fagus sylvatica); Carolyn choose hornbeam (Carpinus betulus). Kaye has swathes of dwarf ‘Hidcote’ lavender; Carolyn has the commercial oil variety ‘Grosso’. The bees aren’t fussed. They go mad for both.
Kaye says she wouldn’t change a thing, except for the paths that criss-cross through her potager. She originally laid hoggin, a handsome blend of gravel, sand and crushed clay. But the dirt got in, and then the weeds. “It was a nightmare,” she says. Weed mat went down next, with lime chip on top, but the weeds would not be moved. “We ended up spending more time weeding the paths than anything else,” she says. Third time lucky: the paths will soon be concreted.
At Barewood, Carolyn’s potager has English brick paths. “I’d been collecting them from demolition sites for years and stockpiling them in a paddock. We’ve never paid for a brick yet but we’ve laid thousands.”
Had she run out, she could have fired her own bricks from the solid clay soil. “It was shocking stuff. When I first moved to the farm, we tried to use dynamite to break it up. The explosion blew the horse cover into the trees but barely even cracked the hard-packed clay.”
Joe came to Carolyn’s rescue, ploughing up the potager with his tractor so she could add “gypsum, sand, pea straw, sheep manure… anything I could lay my hands on. It took five years to sort it out. I tell everyone that, next time, I’m marrying someone with good soil.”
Not that you’d guess it now. So productive is her potager that Carolyn, a keen cook, can barely keep up with her crops. In summer, there are beans, tomatoes, Lebanese cucumbers, sweet bell peppers, fat aubergines (she starts them off in her glasshouse) and her favourite lettuces – ‘Freckles’ and red ruffled ‘Merveille des Quatre Saisons’. In spring, there’s celeriac, chicory and Florence fennel. Even in winter, when frosts can linger from dusk to dawn, silverbeet, spinach, carrots, leeks and parsnips are mainstays.
Kaye and Carolyn’s potagers are proudly chemical-free, with just the odd spray of copper and mineral oil to check fungal diseases on their fruit trees. Carolyn has an espaliered pear tunnel, on quince rootstock to subvert the clay, while Kaye has trained her pear trees over archways. They both chose heritage varieties: ‘Clapp’s Favourite’, ‘Doyenne du Comice’, ‘Williams’ Bon Chrétien’, ‘Louis Bon Jersey’, ‘Josephine de Malines’ to eat fresh, plus ‘Winter Cole’ and ‘Winter Nelis’ for keeping.
Both sisters are mad-keen bottlers and grow old-fashioned apples for juicing, dwarf peaches and raspberries. They make pickles and preserves and roast stone fruit to freeze for winter desserts.
Are they competitive? Carolyn wishes she had Kaye’s soil and her longer growing season. “Her tomatoes are always better than mine and her fruit is always bigger,” she sighs. “Carolyn grows better clematis,” counters Kaye.
“But if I envy my sister anything,” adds Carolyn, “it’s that she started with Robert Watson’s concept plan. When I started, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just young and enthusiastic and the garden grew and grew as I got keener and could convince Joe to give me a little more of the paddock. If I had my time again, I would have persuaded Joe right at the start that I was going to have a big garden and I’d have consigned it to paper. I tried to follow Gertrude Jekyll’s advice to create a garden that curtsied to the house, but it was a lot of hard work and I made a lot of mistakes. I’m still fixing some of those mistakes, but it has been a wonderful rite of passage.
“I’m not a Lady Lunchalot. I gave up golf for gardening, but there’s nothing I’d give up gardening for.”
As for Kaye? “I was never any good at golf anyway,” she says with a giggle.
The sisters agree: there’s nowhere they’d rather be than walking around their gardens, saying, “Isn’t this lovely?”
For web-exclusive images click on the "photo gallery" link above
Story: Lynda Hallinan
Photographs: Daniel Allen
| 
|
| 
