The heart of Bendigo |
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Earlier this year the Perriam family of Bendigo Station near Cromwell lost Heather – adored wife, mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and friend.
The small community of Tarras lost its much-loved prime mover. The parish of Tarras lost its beloved organist, who had played a rickety old instrument for congregations of any denomination that needed her for the past three decades. And the charity CureKids lost one of its finest and most effective allies.
Heather (née Stewart) had been the steady rock at the centre of her family and her community since arriving from Palmerston North as a young bride in the 1970s.
On a hot February afternoon this year, more than a thousand people came to mourn and to celebrate Heather, for whom giving was a given, and whose life stood for everything that is great about family, friendship and community.
Heather’s husband John, daughter Christina and sons Stewart and Daniel have asked that NZ House & Garden proceed with a story about Heather, her home and garden. Heather and I talked in October last year, just weeks before she learned that a rare melanoma, which had earlier claimed her eye and which she believed she’d beaten, had returned.
Kate Coughlan
The gravel drive at Bendigo homestead’s front door is carpeted with a foam of crab apple blossom. Heather Perriam is happy that I have seen this tree in its glorious spring finery as she wants to steer our conversation away from herself to a former Bendigo homestead owner.
Elsie Lucas, Heather tells me, was given a crab apple by Gwen Stokes of nearby Cloudy Peak Station and germinated a seed to plant at her front door, knowing it would have to be tough to survive in that cold garden. This was about 60 years ago and the tree, known as Granny Stokes, is a beauty indeed.
I am thrilled to find one aspect of Heather’s glorious garden that she talks happily about, for the truth about wonderful Heather Perriam is that there never was a more reluctant interview subject. It’s not long before she has bundled me into her car and hurtled me into the nearby town of Tarras (more of this later) to meet the many other people she regards as much more worthy of being interviewed.
She whirls me down a narrow shingle road to the Tarras church to show me the kneelers made by local women over many long winter evenings. In the centenary year of women’s suffrage, they got together every week in each other’s homes to embroider church kneelers after Heather had ended up with acres of Bendigo merino wool spun into yarn and dyed blue and green. Each kneeler tells the story of a local family.
She whisks me along the road to the Tarras cemetery to explain how local women have got together to fund the rebuilding of an old stone wall and the preservation of heritage roses from the graves of the earliest gold miners.
Eventually we sit down by Granny Stokes and have a cup of tea. Let’s talk about you and your garden, Heather?
“I am not a real gardener, you know,” she asserts, in a final bid to avoid the spotlight. “Real gardeners have plots and plans and I don’t. I just love plants and trees.”
We stroll across a springy lawn of the freshest green bordered by a teardrop drive and turn to look back at the low-slung mudbrick homestead. Over 85 years, it has grown under each of its three owners. The Beggs (1925-47) built it, the Lucas family (1947-1978) added the kitchen, chiller rooms and top storey plus a living room and office. Heather, well ahead of her time, was an early advocate of what’s known today as inside-outside flow.
“I love verandahs so we added them all the way round the house and French doors too. We pushed out the kitchen and I made it a whole metre bigger than the plan said. John was away but I told the builder to keep moving the wall out because I love big kitchens. I don’t think John ever knew.”
She also added the timber panelling and created a formal dining room as well as the enormous farmhouse kitchen and pantry.
“I love my garden,” she says as we walk in the large woodland area. “Bendigo is a very busy place and I love the peace of my garden early in the morning. That’s when I put on the sprinklers and have a walk around. It is more of a memory garden than a planned one. People give me bits and pieces from their gardens and as I walk around I get the pleasure of thinking about them. I love the plants and I particularly love plants that mean something to me. I let the plants go where they want to go and they lead the way. Even if they come to a tree and are happy to go around it, I let them keep wandering. In this climate, you grow what is happy.
“At first I had to learn that one plant wouldn’t do anything. I had to plant 15 of them. The Scottish Presbyterian in me took a long time to get over the idea that you should establish a garden from cuttings. I’ve always been lucky and had help in the garden otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to do the other things I do as well.”
Those “other things” include establishing a thriving retail business in Tarras called the Merino Shop, catering for the tourist market.
Heather’s enterprise has kept Tarras alive and led to its recent, almost miraculous burgeoning into a bustling hive of retail fashion, homewares and a local produce shop, making it one of the smartest tiny towns in the country.
Its connection with the local community is what pleased Heather most. She was keenly aware that, in her day as a young mother, rural women were involved in their communities. Today’s young rural mothers are just as likely to be commuting to town every day to earn a much-needed off-farm income.
“Country living has changed and I think I was lucky that in my day our gardens and our families were the outlets for our creativity.”
When Heather married then Lowburn farmer John Perriam, her father, a Manawatu farmer, thought she’d moved to the end of the world.
“Dad thought grass always grew up to your knees and here I was in an arid place. But I was lucky with my garden because the soil is good and because of the shelter that Elsie planted.”
Shelter poplars were planted in 1955, followed by almonds and a macrocarpa hedge. The rose garden first planted by Dick Lucas was extended to include many heritage roses.
Heather pushed out the boundaries of the garden again and again for expansive plantings of her favourites: trilliums, peonies, irises, rhododendrons, camellias, magnolias, hostas, hellebores and spring bulbs.
She created a series of serene outdoor “rooms” that would make the grandest of garden designers proud, built a dovecote and kept a kitchen garden large enough to feed the continuous stream of workers on the large station (for which the homestead remained the beating heart) and the many guests who enjoyed her generous hospitality.
For her special-est friends – her four grand-children – she created a secret garden inhabited by Nancy, also known as Mrs Gong Gong. Mrs Gong Gong was a busy woman and often away, but she always left treats for the children on low tree stumps at the far end of the garden.
“Some of my happiest times in the garden are here with my grandchildren, reading books that Nancy – that’s Mrs Gong Gong – leaves on the stumps for them.”
Story: Kate Coughlan
Photographs: Tessa Chrisp & Suellen Boag
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