A CITY GARDEN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 170, 20 July 1935, Page 7

A CITY GARDEN.

WELLINGTON STREET.

MADE FROM WILDERNESS.

NOW A PLACE OF BEAUTY.

Indisputably Wellington Street is not in the best part of the city for a residential area. It is drab, and the houses are not palatial. Yet in that street, which backs on to an untidy and weedfilled gully, there is at least one bright spot. It is a garden, a little place of beauty, won from a wilderness.

No. SS in that street is owned by Miss M. Kielty, who occupies the premises with her brother. It is due to her efforts that passers-by stop by the fence to look down into the garden below. She was formerly a dressmaker and a milliner, but because times were bad, and because she owned real estate, which in those bad times was an encumbrance, she decided to occupy the house. When she went there some 2A years ago, the place was a wilderness. There were high, dank and straggly weeds everywhere. The place had been unoccupied. There were bits of stone and brick half-hidden and ugly in the weeds. Just the sight of it depressed lier. Determination to Change. She determined to change it; and the change has been marvellous. Perhaps the picture reproduced above tells the best tale. It shows what she has done. In the place of weeds there are little island beds, shut in from a lawn-sea of closely-cropped grass. She cleared the weeds first, and the stones she collected were used to make borders for the beds. The borders have been whitewashed, so that the general effect is one of a background of green, irregularly crossed and striped with lines of white. Against the back fence there are largish trees. It is that far background which adds so much to the effect.

Furthermore, the garden is not laid °ut in straight lines like a geometrical problem. There is enough haphazard-

ness to save it from being a pattern, and to give it an individuality. The landscape gardener would not call the section a good shape to begin on. It slopes steeply, and has odd corners. And yet difficulties have meant nothing to Miss Kielty, for the garden is there

to speak for itself.

j When she found she did not have enough stones on her own place, she acquired some bricks from a building which was being demolished nearby. To begin with she did all the work, or most ! of it, anyway, but now her brother helps her. He clips the hedges—they are j high, but neatly cut. He does the dig[ging and the lawn-cutting and the whitewashing. Continual effort is made to cover what was naturally ugly with a new beauty. It is a little place of peace, with an old-world air of haven. And it is situated in a street in which the average passerby would overlook many a section and forgive a man who could not find the heart to start a garden.