Canterbury Horticultural Society – The art of beauty, science and food
Growing plants is an artform for some people, a science for others and, for a growing number of individuals and families, a practical way of supplying themselves with food, comments Canterbury Horticultural Society interim manager Sonja Tschepp.
“A lot of people are starting to dig up the flower garden and plant vegetables,” she says. “Since COVID, people are much more interested in growing some produce at home.”
For more than 160 years, the society has fostered a love of plants and shared expertise in growing them. Traditionally known for competitive flower shows – who can grow the most distinguished dahlia, for example – the society is finding renewed interest in horticulture from people more attracted to a plant’s substance rather than its form.
“Our fruit and vege group is very active,” says Sonja, who is about to finish her year-long interim role with the society . “The group holds meetings once a month with speakers on various practical-growing topics and they touch on how to grow vegetables in the current conditions,” she says, alluding to climate change and the challenges of the region’s recent dry summer.
Yet Sonja doesn’t want to dismiss the benefits of growing flowers and plants for their aesthetic properties, or as a way to encourage birds and other wildlife. She says flower-growing remains popular with many of the society’s older members, in part because it makes the growers “feel really good” and gives them a sense of achievement.
“Blooms bring a lot of joy. That’s why flowers are used as gifts: they are important to humans and shouldn’t be forgotten,” she says.
The knowledge, science and skill involved in gardening and horticulture can take years of experimentation, failure and success. The oldest of the society’s 550 members is in his 90s, while Bots and Tots, a pre-school programme that is now in its fourth year since inception, is nurturing future gardeners. Held on most Monday mornings and offered on a koha basis, it offers preschoolers (and their guardians) the opportunity to get their fingers dirty – literally – with garden and nature related activities. The kids get to learn about, for example, herbs or how to make natural dyes from plants.
Older children can be involved with the society through the Orchards in Schools project, where the society assists schools to grow and maintain their own fruit trees. There are currently more than 40 schools – many in lower socio-economic areas of Canterbury – that have established orchards on school premises.
Thirty different garden groups offer the society’s adult members a diverse range of focus topics to meet and talk about. These forums are held in different locations throughout the region and are open to any gardeners and interested members of the public. Trips to gardens, events and other locations of interest are sometimes included in the agenda. Daytime and evening groups cater to differing work and family commitments.
So, from distinctly colonial beginnings, the society is increasingly responsive to the community’s renewed interest in horticulture and is adapting – just like the region’s gardens – to climate influences. Sonja says in her own backyard, she is discovering that cape gooseberries – which traditionally have been hard to grow in Christchurch – are flourishing. She even skites about the presence of nikau palm.
“[In future] there will definitely be choices of plants that will go out of favour and fashion; nobody wants to keep replanting something that keeps dying,” she suggests.“If our conditions change so much so that bedding plants are no longer practical, people will eventually stop planting them.”
“But the exciting thing is that because we are having a more subtropical kind of climate, we can now grow other things that we couldn’t grow before,” she adds.
(April 2024)
