It’s the middle of winter as I write this and it’s been raining all day, so fair to say it’s not easy to think about the golden hour – that magical time at either end of the day when the light gets soft and the shadows get long and everything goes all nice and mellow.

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It happens in winter sometimes, but not often. So – if you’ll bear a little diversion for a moment – when I went to gather houses together for this issue, I realised every one of them had some lovely golden light to them. Maybe I was instinctively seeking Vitamin D?  

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Last weekend, we spent the several hours in the garden – for the first time in a while. We’d planted it a year ago, after taking out the unused dry bit of kikuyu lawn in the front, covering it with layers of cardboard and mulch and compost. We finally planted out the back garden too. The whole thing grew like crazy. Instant garden!

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In summer and long into autumn, a hover of bees seemed to be permanently in place over the purple salvias and the gaura out the front. The flowers hung on well into winter even as the leaves dried out, and the gaura went all woody.

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It started to remind me of a favourite scene in the documentary Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf, where in the middle of winter some bloke fires up an ancient mower and decimates a field of sticky dead wildflowers and grasses down to the ground, only for them to emerge again in spring.

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We didn’t mow our garden. But we did take to it with secateurs. I found it daunting at first, and then enormously satisfying: hunting for the fresh growth, chopping away the dead wood, standing back and looking at the results and seeing the structure of it; the oi oi clear of all the other plants, the pratia creeping over the concrete walls. I thought it would look bare. It just looked different.

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Then Hannah took to the mānuka we planted in the front garden a few years ago, which had got all out of shape and black but which now has a lovely trunk and a pretty crown, and I planted two nīkau some friends had brought up from Coromandel to replace a couple of tī kōuka that had died. I set in some pavers so we can get to the carport… And then we took to the back garden, weeding and chopping and pruning until we ran out of energy.

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We sat with a beer in the fading light and the gathering cold, and then we went inside and lit the fire, having had a glimpse of coming spring.

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