News Archive 2005

To organic gardener Sister Loyola Galvin, compost is a meditation about ongoing life. As well as feeding a community of twenty sisters, the gardens at Wellington’s Home of Compassion provide sustenance of a spiritual kind, she says.

Gardening gives you contact with creation, an understanding of growth, and the fact that life is evolving. Life is an ongoing continuum; it doesn’t stop when we die. Just look at compost – it’s a meditation about ongoing life. After death, all these things we put in the compost find a new form.’’

The garden’s powerhouse is a triple-bin compost heap, teeming with worms. "Compost is my big thing," says Sister Loyola. She stockpiles horse manure, kitchen scraps, leaves, untreated sawdust (traded for a home-cooked morning tea), and seaweed; "After a big storm we always go to the beach and get bags full of it.’’ These materials are laid in alternate dry and fresh green layers, covered with carpet to keep in moisture, and watered regularly; "A lot of people have trouble with compost because they don’t keep it damp enough. Worms are not amphibians - they don’t want to swim - but they don’t like to dry out either."

Water comes from a reservoir at the nearby Manawa Karioi spring – one of the reasons Sisters of Compassion founder Mother Suzanne Aubert chose this piece of land in Island Bay, says Sister Loyola. "She had a deep spiritual love of this beautiful land we live in."

On a shoestring budget, using mainly scrounged materials, Sister Loyola has created a bountiful garden. Healthy plants glow against rich dark compost. Beds have been built up by laying compost over cardboard spread on the rocky clay ground. Surrounding the immaculately kept beds - scarcely a weed in sight - are paths of pine needles, topped up two or three times a year. Sister Loyola credits these, and the eggshells spread around each seedling, with keeping away slugs and snails. Small seedlings are protected with home-made cloches - plastic milk bottles with their bottoms cut off – these have to be anchored with wire, however, when the southerlies blow.

It’s a windy site - while gardening last year, 83-year-old Sister Loyola was blown off her feet down a steep bank, fracturing her pelvis in two places. ``I was five months in a wheelchair - but I got an electric one, so I could still get out in the garden.’’

Windbreaks take the form of waist-high hedges of cutting-grown hebes; stacked plastic five-litre bottles, (filled with just enough water to hold them steady); and walls of tyres, three-high, which double as growing containers for potatoes. "Last year it was very successful - it means you don’t have to dig them out."

The garden provides three barrowloads of silver beet per week – mainly the red-or yellow-stemmed kind. "Even people who don’t like silver beet eat the red stuff." Two-year-old fat-trunked plants still produce fresh new leaves due to the constant picking. "It’s because they’re well fed." Other winter crops are broccoli, red cabbages, broad beans, carrots, celery and cos lettuces.

Her green fingers go back to childhood, when osteomyelitis kept her on crutches and home from school; "I was always outside. My father was a wonderful gardener, and as I child I lived in his pocket."

The nurturing spirit of a lifetime’s nursing, earning her a Queens Service Medal in 1996, is now lavished on her garden. ``When I got to be semi-retired, at 72, I didn’t want to stop. I found when nursing that a lot of people give up on life and I didn’t want to do that.’’ Instead, in her 'semi-retirement,' Sister Loyola studied organics and permaculture and, while rejuvenating the vege gardens at the convent at Jerusalem/Hiruharama, also learned from Wanganui river Maori about planting and harvesting by the moon. ``It doesn’t always work out but I do it when I can.’’

As well as being involved with next-door Tapu Te Ranga marae’s replanting scheme, she recently helped set up community permaculture garden Common Ground. "I’m very blessed," she says. "Here I am at 83, thoroughly enjoying life, with all these young people round fulfilling my dream. Isn’t it fun?"

Article courtesy of New Zealand Gardener, November 2005 By Hannah Zwartz
Photos by Sister Josephine Gorman