146 MAY 2017
»I
f you reckon gardening is a
gentle, earth-motherly sort of
affair, you’d be wrong. “Let no
one think that real gardening is
a bucolic and meditative
occupation,” wrote the early 20th-
century science fiction author Karel
Capek. Capek, whose main claim to
fame was inventing the word robot,
described gardening as “an insatiable
passion, like everything else to which
a man gives his heart”.
Insatiable passion, or incurable
madness? It does seem to drive some
of us a bit doolally. How else
can you explain all those
eccentric Victorians shovelling
steaming mounds of fresh
horse manure into sunken
conservatories in a bid to grow
pineapples, or the 40 years that
the French painter Jacques
Majorelle spent creating his
Marrakesh garden – now owned
by fashion designer Yves St
Laurent – where he painted
every brick and tile in his
signature shade of cobalt blue?
If we’re honest, gardening is
actually a competitive sport,
appealing as much to vanity and
our sense of one-upmanship as it
does to our desire to feel at one
with nature.
When Lancelot “Capability”
Brown was Britain’s go-to guy
for landscape design in the 18th
century, his trick was to create
garden-less gardens: naturalistic
looking landscapes of rollinghills, woodlands, rivers and lakes
where previously there were none.
Over in France in the 17th century,
King Louis XIV pulled out all the
stops to create the most expensive
garden in the world. It’s estimated
that, were it to be built today, the
garden at Versailles would cost well
over $1 billion. To create it, all of
the Sun King’s horses and all of his
men were put to work reclaiming
swampy marshes, chipping away at
marble fountains, uprooting 200,000
mature trees from the surroundingcountryside and digging out a
1.5km-long grand canal complete
with 620 water jets and a fleet of
Venetian gondolas.
But like so many backyard
makeovers, folly trumped function at
Versailles. The waterworks were so
extravagant the pumps kept going
kaput; when the King set off for a
stroll, a team of minions had to run
ahead turning the nozzles on and off
in order to maintain enough water
pressure for the jets that were within
his line of sight.
I can sympathise, for many
of my own gardening projects
have also come unstuck after
the execution phase.
When I got married six
years ago, my husband and I
exchanged vows on our lawn
at home, standing in front
of a rather unusual altar: an
antique Romanian dovecote.
It was a thing of beauty, with
hand-cut cedar roofing tiles,
fancy fascia boards and 21
hidey-holes for cooing birds.
No dove has ever stepped
foot in it, although a couple of
magpies tried to nest in it last
summer and a contortionist
possum once overnighted
there. Also, it wasn’t
particularly weatherproof,
especially after slaters ate its
rotten roof off, and it ended
up as a bit of an eyesore.
My husband wanted it gone.
“Burn it,” he said. But I had aHotel Paradiso
Lynda Hallinanbuilds a bug hotel to offer bed and breakfast
accommodation for creepy crawlies.[Lynda’s project]
PHOTOGRAPHY●SALLY TAGG STYLING●LYNDA HALLINAN