Te Aute Crossroad S2 : E5

Sub-C

An Oehme and van Sweden Garden (The Native Plant Garden at The New York Botanical Garden).

Turns out, we were not to have an Oehme and van Sweden/Piet Oudolf garden after all. Turns out they make perennial gardens: perennials being plants that die down in winter, likes roses, and dahlias. Plants ideally suited to the places they live (O & vS, P.O.—North America and northern Europe), where it snows a lot in winter. Plants for gardens, in other words, that look spectacular in Spring and Summer (see photo above), but nothing much in Winter (see photo below). That, of course, is a value judgement: Piet Oudolf says decaying leaves have a role and even sometimes a beauty of their own.

A Piet Oudolf garden in Somerset. Photo by Jason Ingram

But, actually, that’s not the reason we were not having that kind of garden. When we asked Alan (Alan Titchener, our landscape architect) if he’d heard of Oehme and van Sweden, he said—without hesitation—No. Oh…So we agreed we’d have a New Zealand native garden, using plants ideally suited to where we live: plants that would be green all year round; plants that were more about us; plants that would complement the architecture.

You noticed me do that, didn’t you. Noticed that I slipped in a reference to ‘our Landscape Architect’. It’s only now, walking this path with you, that I’ve solved a riddle that’s puzzled me for years. How come, I’ve often wondered, if we were going to be peasants, living simply, growing olives and baking bread, drinking wine from cardboard boxes and relying on the kindness of strangers, how come we almost immediately had builders and painters and electricians and fencers and trucks and diggers lined up in the driveway?

Not long after we moved in, serendipitously, as it was to prove, Jude had been reading an in-flight magazine, or a magazine in-flight, or both (I don’t remember which, but it’s immaterial anyway) and came across an article about a Hawke’s Bay architect named Steve McGavock, who, the article said, had been John Scott’s protégé¹. And so we met with Steve, and yes, he knew The Brow well (not the last person to tell us that!) and yes, he’d be very keen to help us with the restoration/renovation (yet to be decided which).

And, serendipitously, Steve knew a landscape architect, Alan Titchener, who had also worked with John and who also said yes, he’d like to help us as well. He may not have heard of Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden, but he had grown up quite close to where Te Aute Crossroad isn’t, had been a pupil at Te Aute College, and was passionate about New Zealand native plants. So we decided that was all adequate compensation.

And, serendipitously, Cathy Veninga, interior designer² extraordinaire, who we’d worked with before, agreed to fly down from Auckland and do her thing.

So, despite our stated intention of living simply, on food parcels from a donation box we would install at the gate, we had gone off and recruited a formidable team of professionals, with the inevitable implication that considerable sums of money would be required. How on earth was this contradiction to be reconciled?

And now I know.

I read on the Internet (so it must be true) that 95% (95%!) of the decisions we make are not made in our conscious mind at all, but in our subconscious…and what that means is, we think we’re calling the shots around here, but actually we’re not.

Here’s how I made sense of that:

We imagine we are the CEO of our own lives: that we are the boss: what we say goes. But actually (my theory is), we all have a board of governors. The word ‘govern’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘to steer’ and, as you know, the purpose of any board of governors is to steer the entity in a direction that is consistent with its purpose: its reason for being. Our boards of governors (yours and mine)—they refer to themselves as our ‘Sub-C’ (from ‘subconscious’)—is made up of people who’ve been appointed because they know us well and have a strong interest in our well-being. We don’t actually know who these people are (you may be one of mine. There may be others who are no longer alive): they meet in secret and (unusually) without the CEO’s knowledge or presence (are you still with me?) Their decisions are final and forwarded to the CEO for action.

You can imagine, can’t you, the hilarity of our Sub-Cs when they heard the nonsense being spouted about what our life at The Brow was to be like. Seriously?!! Those two?! From that fancy penthouse apartment in Melbourne? Jude in her Carla Zampatti? Chris with his dreams of elaborate gardens and tractors?! Who’ve already been wine-tasting at Craggy and tucked away a few bottles of Sophia?? Ha! Give me a break!!!

Sensibly, our CEOs made no further mention of Oehme and van Sweden gardens, or of living on soup made from swedes:

Can we all please just get on with pulling that bloody ivy off the house and with the plans for the party??

Thank you.

1. Sadly, Steve died young, in 2018.

2. Now CEO of the Designers Institute of New Zealand