YOUR GARDEN AND MINE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 53, 28 June 1940, Page 41

YOUR GARDEN AND MINE

By

Ann Earncliff

Brown

(No. 36)

‘Ware of Ghosts Y day school childreu would hurry the Captain’s garden, whistling and laughing to keep their courage up. But, on moonlight nights, when the garden ghost showed blue white and insubstantial, the tongue clave to the roof of the mouth; small hands grew clammy in the grasp of ‘grown-ups; heavy heart throbs, it seemed sounded as loudly as the crunch of shoes on the gravelled path, Wide childish eyes stared in horrible fascination through breaks in the clipped macrocarpa hedge, searching yet dreading to see the leaning lady with windblown hair streaming from her smooth high brow. No benighted child needed the light of the moon to remind him of the full-bosomed, narrow waisted figure, inadequately draped in gossamer veils, and horrifyingly without limbs. * x * Now time has turned the Captain’s Ghost Lady into a shabby, weathered ship’s figure-head. The Captain in his haunted garden no longer rakes the autumn leaves, no longer knocks a ripe pipe against the garden seat. But the lonely white lady is still there, and still no doubt frightens children. Yet there are gardens-I think now of one at Governor’s Bay-where the old figure-head would be altogether lovely. Set on a rock, whitened by the salt sea spray, face to the rising sun, Madame would become a truly benign garden influence.

In English gardens Ann Acheson’s lovely laughing garden kiddies are as attractive as they are rare. Cast in lead, these garden ornaments are not a mass production family. Ann Acheson models from living children, and makes only six of anyi one design. There are gardens here in New Zealand where such charming figures would be an asset, but alas, lead to-day is destroying and not creating beauty. For the average person; it is perhaps a dangerous experiment; to dabble in garden statuary-and, most of us have little or no artistic training to aid us in selecting or placing such inge--oree if we had them. +46 However, if I am ever offered a garden statue of a real Maori Wahine, I'll risk putting her down where the raupo grows close beside a flax bush. F’ll face her towards the lily pond. She’ll belong there! And after all, that for all of us can be a sure guide. All garden ornamentssun dials, bird baths, or figures must merge naturally into the léndscape. If you are unduly conscious of any of, these -a sort of mental blow comes each new view-well, like Punch, ea put "Don’t!" P.S.-I said carelessly in No. 35 that fantails as well as , Sparrows draw in winter on the "iron supplied by the laburnums. The fantails do visit the laburnums, but of course for carnivorous reasons-to secure the insects on the bark, and any odd belated mosquito that may still be about.-A.E.B,