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- It’s hard to say goodbye to a cherished piece of paradise.

I’m sure many people had “bright ideas” in lockdown last year. Ours was to sell up after 30 years in a four-acre paradise of trees, lawns, perennials and roses. My husband had designed a new house during the enforced stay at home and found the perfect site for it only 100m away, but with less land for him to stress about – just one bare acre instead of the four well-planted ones we had been developing for three decades. He likes machines and seemed to manage to have every machine possible to make his maintenance work on the property easier but he wasn’t getting any younger. One year later, we had bought and sold.

I divided and potted up about 300 lots of perennials to bring with us. They surround the cottage we are in now, along with all our garden furniture, seats, obelisks, planters and pots and urns and so on.

Leaving the garden was by far the hardest part of the move. The big trees that I had planted in that first decade – alders, weeping willows, Van Houten elms and pin oaks – provided shade, a skyline and shelter from the beastly easterly, frigid southerly and gusty nor’west that blows in north Canterbury.

I hadn’t realised what an emotional attachment I had to my trees until showing the new owners round the garden just before we moved. I stood in front of the pin oak-lined drive, and started to say, “This is the scene I will miss the most.”

I didn’t get the words out of my mouth before I was overwhelmed with tears. We both returned to the men in the garage – talking about cars, of course – with tears streaming down our faces.

I cried in waves of grief for the rest of the day. It was a strange feeling that I had no control over. It didn’t happen again. It seems that I had got my grieving over and done with in less than 24 hours.

The pin oaks I planted have a pleasant pyramid shape and colour up attractively in autumn, but spring is when I enjoyed them the most; the last trees in the district to gain leaves, slowly unfurling with soft pale green growth appearing like fairy lights over the dark bare branches.

The contrast between summer and winter for the trees that line the driveway is a special feature of this garden. The dark tunnel of summer contrasts radically with the lace-like effect of bare branches in winter when plants that have been hidden all summer are now exposed to the light of day.

Before the pin oaks grew, the central garden between the driveways featured a colourful collection of euphorbias, lupins, poppies, stachys and daylilies on the mound of soil from the excavated driveways.

As the pin oaks grew, the same euphorbias became the mainstay of the underplanting, along with daylilies. Depending on the ground water level, the lilies can flower throughout summer in a wonderful orange display but it is the euphorbias with their lime green heads that bring early colour to the garden when the pin oaks’ branches are still bare. Grasses, often self-sown, were left to make their home under the pin oaks.

The pin oaks have provided tonnes of leaves which all went onto garden beds, but those that fell on the drive were the bane of my husband’s life until he adapted an old trailer that he towed along behind his ride-on. But first he used his blower to remove the leaves from the drive onto the nearby garden beds. They kept all weeds away although in a wet year the number of acorns that turned into baby trees could be of concern – once, a Wwoofer spent her whole week with us once meticulously digging out every single one – there must have been thousands. But the leaves kept falling and blocking the drive and so the special trailer was put to use. Adapted from bits and pieces from his workshop, my husband had created a catcher that collected the leaves as they spewed out of the mower. They were then transported to areas I had set aside for the composting of the leaves, and in spring relocated around the garden to both keep the weeds down and provide welcome mulch to keep the moisture in.

The trailer was left with the new owners who can have had no idea of the amount of leaves they were to look forward to!

The pin oaks kept getting bigger and the lower branches higher, and we had to limb up the spreading branches as access along the driveway was increasing in difficulty, but they are still a picture today.

To help celebrate the oaks, I had designed a pair of gates that are halfway along the drive and got the local metal worker to make them up. They feature oak leaves on criss-crossed metal.

A couple of the trees that were planted too close to the house have had to be removed. We had no idea how well they would grow. Their trunks had, of course, expanded over time and against the base of one tree, the white trilliums that were planted not far away are actually growing amongst the tree roots that have pushed up around them.

The trilliums don’t seem to mind though, and are a magnificent display every spring.

In 1991, I had bought the trees for $10 each from someone who advertised them in the paper, having grown them from acorns. They were less than half a metre in height. It doesn’t seem that long ago. ■

This part of the garden is the most photographed every spring as the new leaves unfold.

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2021-09-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://stuffmagazines.pressreader.com/article/283175791583019

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