The Summer Garden

This summer we were lucky enough to spend a few weeks at the cottage by the sea. Our ramshackle garden provided the perfect refuge to read, reflect and simply be. The borders of flax stood tall and green, visually protecting us from the encroaching high tide and physically shielding us from the wind. The branches of various trees arched overhead, vaulted and heavenly, they transformed the beating sun into leafy shade. A gang of wekas wandered across the lawns and through the house, occasionally nipping at our toes and stealing our jandals in the hope that either may prove to be edible. The days slipped by saturated by the majesty of the sea and the soaring, bush clad hills. This raw and rugged coastal landscape - the swell, the rasping and clawing of the tide, the simple liquid immensity of the sea always brings the diminutive nature of our lives and worries into sharp relief and every summer it provides me with the perspective I need to truly begin to relax.

My sister and her partner stayed with us for a few fun filled days this year, both skilled photographers constantly seeking and recording beauty. Kieran is usually equipped with a varied and fascinating battery of tools for image capture which he employs with such natural ease and wizardry. This year the kit included a small drone which photographed the churning sea and hovered, emblazoned by sunsets. It flew high above us and captured my sister and I as small specks - one wading into the frothing scalloped edges of the waves, the other standing upon a galaxy of pebbles on the shore. A distant memory fluttered across my mind of us playing in the sea as children - the same untethered delight visible now in my sister’s smile and I was visited by a familiar feeling of fondness and responsibility  - the older sibling’s need to keep her safe. The vertiginous drone drifted high in the air above us like a bird without a soul and below we laughed and shouted and thrilled to the cold of the water and the dash of the waves - the sun filled day felt endless, stretching out before us. We planned a walk, we planned dinner, we planned resolutions for the New Year - we felt invigorated, corporeal, connected and vital yet looking down from so many metres above we were nothing. Two sisters, merely tiny brush marks in an infinitely larger picture playing out all around us. Our insignificance recorded so indelibly in an image - at once horrifying yet again strangely soothing.

The time, as always, passes quickly and too soon we find ourselves loading up the car to head back to the fray. Sadly and in silence we drive along the tide ravaged road away from the cottage, the flowering pohutukawa trees punctuating the route with their splendour, like a fanfare, as we transition from our gentle summer to the demands of a New Year. I try to hold onto this uncanny sense of seaside calm - that expanded point of view that I have always imagined might be exclusively reserved for astronauts gazing back at earth. A heart gripping clarity of inconsequence that will simply not allow you to imbue pedestrian problems with unwarranted fear and horror. But as we drive away the anxiety about the coming year floods in - a tumult of things to do and things I may have forgotten to do … the overwhelming complexity of an entire imagined year invades the car like a spectre and my nerves begin to jangle. The sea and the hills recede into the distance.

It may be the end of the summer break but thankfully it is still summer ( although those of us residing in Christchurch may consider that to be debatable ) and gardens are such a lovely place to relax so we have gathered a small selection of garden related antique pieces at reduced prices so that you can take advantage of the sunshine and the sale prices to furnish your own garden sanctuary.