Letting It Go

Breaking all the rules with her wild garden experiment.

Wendyl Nissen’s happenstance garden experiment.

One of the things I like to do with my natural living quest is conduct experiments. In the early days it was creating concoctions in my kitchen using recipes found in books which were sometimes 200 years old.

The kids would come home from school to find me in my kitchen bashing together natural cleaners or old food, as in old-fashioned food like roast beef heart. Pretty soon they learned to grab a snack and leave me to it before I made them sample the delicious beef heart or marvel at my vinegar glass cleaner.

These days you are more likely to find me experimenting with my garden. Last year I became a compost enthusiast, which has me making daily visits to my three compost bins, taking their temperature and tossing in hen and cow poo, seaweed and ash on a regular basis. It would be award-pending compost if there was such a thing as compost awards.

This year it’s all about the wild garden. You could call it rewilding or reweeding or relaxing. All those words describe what I did six months ago. I stopped gardening. I simply left my 8 metre by 4 metre veggie patch to do its thing. I abandoned it and let it go rogue. Much like myself when I moved to the country.

I wanted to see what would happen if a garden is left to its own natural devices. Would it become covered in weeds, which is the expected outcome for any traditional gardener who follows the kill-a-weed-every-day motto? Or would it grow other things? A native fern, perhaps, or a tuft of native grass. And the things which grow, what can they tell me about my soil and the growing conditions of my garden, and what uses could they have?

You can see why I call these things experiments. I also kept a notebook, jotting down the various changes I saw taking place. Well, I kept a notebook for a week and like all things notebookoriented, it finished after a few pages. I have other notebooks with labels on them like ‘Italian’ and ‘Journal’ which have very little writing in them, despite my intention to both learn Italian and record my life in minute detail.

I had been influenced to do this by reading books about weeds, and how they are really just plants that some gardeners find inconvenient. For years they have been sprayed with pesticides like Round Up which we now know should not go anywhere near our home garden. Or they were simply ripped out of the ground, roots and all, in a frenzy of tidiness and structured conformity.

Meanwhile, over in the UK, nature gardening is a trend which is really taking o . At the Chelsea Flower Show this year, a Rewilding Britain Landscape garden, which was put together to show people how nature can re-establish itself, won top honours and it is very beautiful.

There is now also a term for what I have done called “happenstance gardening”. I love the word happenstance, which means something happening by chance or coincidence.

The thought of leaving my garden to coincidence, to let it create its own meaning, to let any plants which happen to take root grow as nature intended filled me with joy.

This experiment could have ended with a garden full of weeds which then never left. Traditional gardeners the length and breadth of New Zealand will be shuddering just reading this column.