As a young girl, I was privileged to have grandparents with a bach up at Orewa, a beachside town North of Auckland, where we decamped every holidays from Boxing Day for what seemed like the whole school holidays.
There we lived out of the garden that Granddad put in at Labour Weekend, eating fresh vegetables, and amongst other things, fish we caught off the rocks and the pipis we gathered at low tide.
Along the long driveway Nana had planted a perennial bed which seemed to include lots of brightly-coloured flowers like hydrangeas, hibiscus and geraniums.
In the mix were coreopsis, these bright yellow suns of flowers that withstood the salty breezes and neglect of months without human nuture.
By the time we arrived on Boxing Day, the coreopsis were in full swing, bobbing thousands (it seemed to me!) of sunny smiles all along the driveway and that meant dead-heading everyday...
...which I think I helped with - at least I remember being at Nana's elbow, watching and listening, although my adult memory is not of her talking but me chattering away in a constant flow of (probably very) tall stories...
...one of my happy holidays memories :)
