A garden is never finished, says a Marlborough nurse who, after 32 years, is still discovering ways to change, transform and enhance her colourful oasis.
“Most of the plants I originally planted aren’t there anymore,” says Churchill Private Hospital registered nurse Viv Vile. “I’m always changing it around.”
When Viv and her husband first moved onto their bare Blenheim section they planted flaxes, rampant grevilleas, and natives but Viv gradually discovered her passion was for flowers, pots and colour. A cottage garden emerged with roses, camellias, helleborus, irises and phlox, penstemons and peonies, rhododendrons and all sorts of perennials.
Now, Viv decides on a new annual colour theme – “it keeps your interest up for the pots” – which this year is blue and white and includes viola ‘Maggie Mott’ and blue pansies.
Many of Viv’s favourite flowers, such as nemesias and Lavender Major, seed or spread prolifically so she gathers them to give to friends or the Red Cross or Hospice charity shops to sell.
“I can’t throw things away, so I’d rather give them to someone.”
She does the same with her plentiful propagated herbs, but “I’ve run out of people to give them to”.
Another of Viv’s passions are roses. She has Iceberg and climbing roses Cecile Brunner, City of London and Arrowtown.
“Once I’d planted Cecile Brunner, I realised that it was the rose I wore in my hair when I got married.”
The rose thrived, so Viv and her husband put a trellis on their back fence, which overlooks a park, and trained the rose along that and an archway. The covered arch is a favourite if unstable sentry point for the cat, while the rose attracts comments from passing admirers, and acts as a windbreak.
Family memories and sentimental items abound in Viv’s garden, which was used as a venue by her own daughter after her wedding. There’s the covers for the strawberries that Viv’s late father, a cabinetmaker, built just for her; and the unique, delicate weeping rose tree that she was gifted when her mother passed away.
Viv’s love of gardening began young, when she grew cuttings provided by her mother in a plot in her grandmother’s garden, next door to her childhood home.
She maintained her green thumb through a stint in a garden-less apartment in Australia, where she tended pot plants on the balcony, before returning to a full garden in Blenheim.
Besides flowers, Viv and her husband maintain a thriving vegetable garden which supplies summer salads and pre-Christmas new potatoes. Fruit trees abound, and berries which Viv planted specifically for the couple’s two children, who continue to benefit from Viv’s preserves and jams.
Viv, who has worked for Churchill for six years and holds the role of infection control, also spent 15 years working in public health. She says doing shift work means extra daytime hours in the garden, which she still loves adding to and altering as she goes. “It’s a lifestyle, and I’ve always said to my husband that I don’t want to leave the garden until I’ve had enough.”
