Essay
Journal 01
/
Dec 18, 2025
The Mystery Garden
Words and photographs by Olive Gallagher
In a valley that spills towards the sea in the north of Te Wai Pounamu, where young hills slip and wrestle with rain and gravity, there is a mystery garden. A wild, restless thing with its own thoughts and fever dreams. A small universe of its own, with nothing to say but everything to mean.
Calendula, kale and cosmos grow as fierce as the weeds trying to outcompete them. Flowerflies and parasitic wasps texture the airwaves in the warm season, keeping leaf miners, aphids, and southern stink bugs on their toes. The more famous species of the Hymenoptera order, the introduced honeybee, visits from the nearby beehives with tiny handbags of pollen.
I first visited the mystery garden in the late autumn of my 25th year. The frosts were just beginning, the last of the summer fruits hung off trees, and I was a few weeks away from moving into a little red cottage that stood like a watchful sentry over the soils. I had asked a friend to help me ‘tackle’ the garden and prepare it for the winter ahead. We planned to cull the overgrown dandelions, fennel and other burgeoning summer skeletons, and plant some brassicas, winter greens and bulbs ready for the months ahead. A clean slate. An ordering of chaos. A human need for control.
We manically got to work, ripping, weeding and planting until the sun went down. Toward the end of the session, I searched around in the fading light for the bag of tulip bulbs I had brought. A sheepish confession from my companion revealed that they had been randomly scattered across the garden. In many ways, that first encounter was symbolic of the relationship I’ve had with the soil ever since. A desire for control surpassed by an ancient and mysterious order beneath the surface.
My first spring of playing tulip roulette instilled a sense of curiosity and an obsession with what I couldn’t see. Each season revealed secrets from the past. The asparagus came first; followed by artichokes, raspberries, rocket - all self-seeded. A love letter from the garden and its past custodians. Towers of yacon sprung up, as did the parsley, collard plants, globe artichokes, Jerusalem artichokes and more... The mystery garden had plenty of surprises to share — if I would stop trying to teach it what I thought I already knew.
I quickly learnt to lighten my touch and just observe what was already happening in slow motion. I began to see the garden as many things.
I saw hierarchies of power, dominance and sacrifice. Warfare between the paper wasps and my darling monarch butterflies. The greed of stink bugs, sucking the last of the sucrose from my heirloom tomatoes. By taking time to observe the complexity of it all, I found that making small adjustments were often all that was needed. We humans are embedded in ecology too.
Just as the impulse to a disturbance in paradise is to react drastically (which of course is sometimes needed), perhaps there is also a lesson in slowly fostering diversity and a culture of resilience in the soil by becoming aware of its needs over a longer period of time. There is a beauty in silent patience and observation. In a world infatuated with ownership and human ambition, the garden remains a place to feel humbled by what is ours to enjoy, but what is not ours to possess.
The mystery garden will remain long after I leave, and when everything and everyone has been, gone and passed through, it will always be waiting to welcome the next chapter, unravelling its secrets, patiently
But what is not ours to posses...