While writing it, she realised she wasn’t a superwoman who could maintain a picture-perfect garden, manage a busy family household and write a picture book at the same time.
The concept of chaos gardening was a godsend and it didn’t take long for her to recognise benefits more numerous than just the time saved.
“A chaos garden is about embracing a wide variety of plants, both flowers and vegetables, and only requires keeping everything watered and the soil completely covered with plants,” she says.
“In the first spring, I spread wildflower seeds into lightly raked ground and waited. It is a beautiful surprise to see what comes up. As for vegetables, I pop small seedlings into any available gaps and veggies such as lettuces happily grow alongside the flowers. It doesn’t require arduous preparation each year but just a little attention to fill in any barren spots with fresh seeds from time to time.”
A relaxed gardening style offers a healthy pushback against the stress of trying to have everything perfect, Weston says.
“It gives me pleasure and requires so little effort, although I will pull out obvious weeds. It is not a wild garden but has a lot less order than a traditional garden and there’s no garden to-do list.”
Weston is enthralled by the intensity of insect life thriving in her chaos-inspired garden and values the biodiversity blooming before her eyes.
As an educator, she spends several weeks a year in primary schools helping children appreciate pollination and how the process is crucial to producing our food.
She says nothing helps a child better understand the pollination process than seeing a bumblebee crawling out of a pumpkin flower, its fat body covered in yellow pollen.
She’s become a keen advocate for the native bees of Aotearoa – (ngaro huruhuru). These small, black insects fly very fast and have adapted to pollinating kiwifruit. Watching them at work on her family kiwifruit orchard at Te Puna inspired her book Kiwi Bees Have Tiny Knees.
She is a fan of wildflower seed mixes, though there are no rules for a chaos garden. Cottage-garden-style flowers, both annuals and perennials such as petunias, johnny-jump-ups, pansies, nasturtium, nigella, alyssum, cosmos, borage, calendula, fennel and even sweet corn can all be useful in this planting method.
While Weston couldn’t care less if her garden is Instagram-worthy or not, there is a current online buzz about chaos gardening.
And the craze is sprouting pretty images that green thumbs warn might be misleading. Chaos gardening isn’t the same as naturalistic planting by which, with a great deal of disciplined work, an imitation of nature is created – should nature be terribly well behaved and weed-free that is. A naturalistic garden is far from effortless.
Chaos gardening, on the other hand, is a cross between a food forest (very popular earlier this century) and an old-fashioned cottage garden (an evergreen favourite) in which a glorious profusion of flowers reigns supreme, providing a relaxed, luxuriant vista – as long as the viewer isn’t bothered by free-form.
“One person looks through a window and notices the window is dirty while another looks through the same window and sees a glorious view,” Weston says.
National Gardening Week, from October 20 to 27, acknowledges the value of gardening, including community gardens, by providing food, reducing waste, improving the environment and, perhaps most importantly, providing social connection and cohesion. More than a dozen such gardens operate across Auckland, all of which welcome new volunteers.
Dig It! at Royal Oak is heading towards its fifth decade and has up to 10 volunteers a day working in the 2000sq m of gardens. Dig It! co-ordinator Brendan Murphy has been involved for more than a decade and says community gardens hit all the recognised five ways of wellbeing: connection with others, being active, taking notice of the present moment, learning by trying new things and giving to others through acts of kindness.
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