Home » Plants & Animals » New Zealand Gardens » The delights of night - a journey through my garden

The delights of night - a journey through my garden

© Lynda Jardinet

Summer's just around the corner "down under" and as the days grow longer, there's nothing more delightful than an evening stroll around the garden. Of course, an evening stroll around my small garden is hardly a marathon effort. (Which is just as well if you've just polished off a plateload of freshly picked strawberries, topped with whipped cream!) It takes less than five minutes to do the entire circuit, and while I've never measured the exact distance, I imagine it's barely more than fifty metres all up.

But as Marcel Proust once said, "the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes". As night falls, there's nothing I like better than to meander across the deck, and step down onto the paved area - defined clearly at night by a single row of blue primulas between the square concrete slabs. (I found the slabs buried under the lawn when I first began digging up the garden. They led in a perfect straight line to the clothesline, but the lawn had obviously consumed them years earlier.)

At the third paver, I turn left, and wander up the garden path, the heavy fragrance of night scented Nicotiana alata hanging in the air. I squeeze through the natural doorway created by two Indian bead trees (Melia azedarach). As I walk past these two magnificent trees, I wrap my hand around each trunk - marvelling at their growth in just one year. When we planted them, it was early spring 1997, and each was leaf-less. They looked so ridiculous, just one straight trunk - a bit like a garden stake with no plant to support. Now, they tower high above, having shot up more than two metres in just twelve months. (And a bargain to boot - we paid just ten dollars for each tree.)

I push on, past the heliotropes and the weeping peach tree, past the rose covered trellis. I always find myself in a quandary about now - should I continue my journey, or rest awhile on the black seat hidden behind the cabbage trees? It usually depends on whether one or more of the neighbour's cats are around. High from the excitement of a furtive roll in both my catmint and catnip (each feline savours different flavours), the cats roar past, leaping on the seat to make a quick getaway over the fence.

When I made the garden, I purposely set out to create paths - as many as possible - even though the site is dead flat and just 15 metres by 15 metres or so. Some people would think it was quite ludicrous to put a path in at all. I'm sure my Dad thought I'd gone stark raving bonkers, when I asked him to bring up a truckload of tiny pebbles to scatter in loop-de-loops around the garden. In fact, even I was beginning to wonder about my mental state by the end of the next day! I felt I'd wheeled and dumped at least a thousand barrowloads of the gravel. But when I walk around my garden at night, I know it was all worth it for the wonderful crunchy sound it makes. Further up the garden path, our orphaned weeping cherry tree lurches into sight. I say lurches, because its deformed branches always make me catch my breath. I wonder if I was to turn my back, would it pounce? The weeping cherry is grafted at 1.2 metres, but the graft was far from successful. We found the poor deformed chap lurking in the unloved and unwanted section of a garden centre not far from here. Ridiculously underpriced (it seems even gardeners discriminate), I happily took it home. (The clump of green foliage you can see in the centre of the photo is the cherry. Can you see its three branches leaning out over the path, like gnarled witch's fingernails? I've drawn in the red arrow as a guide) This cherry tree takes on a whole new character at night. During the day it's just a tree.

The copyright of the article The delights of night - a journey through my garden in New Zealand Gardens is owned by . Permission to republish The delights of night - a journey through my garden in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.