Choir in the garden.

Soon after classes began, I joined a club choir at the university. Cantores is a small group -- at our biggest, we might have about twenty-five people -- and a very informal one. We sing all kinds of choral music: in the first few weeks we sight-read opera, folk-tunes, hymns, and 80s pop. The group's casual attitude frustrated me sometimes (we have half again as many women as men, especially when big parts of the section don't show up; why are we trying to sing SATTBB pieces, exactly?) , but I got used to it and began enjoying rehearsals again. Sure, we don't sound like OSU's Chorale; but we're not music grad students, we rehearse once a week, and we choose fun songs over easy ones. Cut us some slack, Alexa.

Thus I tried not to worry too much when our concert date sprang up on us. This week is Dunedin's Rhododendron Festival, eight days of gardening-themed events and rhododendron displays. (The city's gardeners are showing off their peacock tails: the lush green shrubs and small trees are currently unfolding clusters of ruffled, brilliantly-colored trumpets all around town. Rhododendrons are widely planted here, and they certainly do well.) One of the earliest events is Art in the Garden, in which Glenfalloch Woodland Garden out on the Otago Peninsula plays host to an assortment of local artists for a day. We'd been invited to sing in the afternoon.

We met at the Clubs and Societies Building, piled into whatever cars were available, and drove the 15 minutes out to Glenfalloch. The weather got steadily nicer as we headed seaward: by the time we stopped, it had gone from cold and cloudy to mostly sunny and very mild. Through the entryway, past the green with blooming rhododendrons and artists painting them, between two temporary sculpture gardens: we set up on the deck outside the Chalet, unpacked the electronic piano, and began our concert.

We sang about as well as I thought we would... which is to say that we missed one conspicuous cue in the "Habanera" and were missing half our tenors and nearly all our altos. (I can't carry the section alone, augh!) No, what surprised me was the reception. We gathered a small but appreciative crowd, and afterwards several people stopped our conductor to say how nice it was to hear our sound floating through the garden. I don't think I give this group enough credit.

The garden itself was lovely, too. I wanted to stay awhile after Cantores finished singing and left, so I asked at the cafe whether there were buses back into town. The friendly local lady who answered couldn't be absolutely sure about that particular day, but she said there was usually one every two hours. I thanked her, thanked the guy whose car I'd ridden in on, and let the rest of the choir go without me. I really should've just gone back with them...

I did want to explore, though, and the garden is beautiful. True to its name, it's a garden laid out as a woodland, complete with winding stream and many levels of trees. The rhododendrons and azaleas were glorious, in a rainbow of warm colors against their glossy leaves; but behind them and the other lovely spring flowers, the garden was just as interesting for its variety of foliage and textured tree forms. Sudden grassy glens, low-arching tree branches, fuchsias with shell-pink flowers... There was much more garden than I had time to admire, with trails leading all the way up to the ridgeline. I vowed to come back, then took photos til my camera battery ran low and headed back to the main green to admire the artists.

They were almost as varied as the plants. Felting, silk painting, watercolor, pastels, limestone, textiles... A whimsical sculpture in the middle of one green consisted of a young, still mostly-leafless maple hung with bright blue plastic pair. One was perched in a birdcage dangling from a branch. More lay at the tree's foot and in a basket beside it. The title: "Commentary on Genetic Engineering." I giggled out loud. Another artist felted 3-D figures from local wool: it took me a double take to notice that the person lounging on a sunny bench wasn't real. Yet another used natural pigments to paint on Brachyglottis repanda leaves. That species of tree daisy has hand-sized leaves with velvety white fuzz on the back, once used when paper ran low. The New Zealand postal service still accepts them like postcards.

Too soon, I had to leave: I clattered out of the garden (still in my heels from the concert), down the steep driveway to the harbor-side road. Perching on a handy stone wall, I settled in to wait for the bus.

It took a while. I'd been sitting there nearly an hour when it came by, headed the other way, and stopped to drop off passengers. As it's not too far from Glenfalloch to Portobello, the town where the bus turns around, I figured it'd be back shortly to pick me up.

I was half right. Half an hour later the bus came back, headed my way. I waved, stepped up to the roadside, and caught the driver's eye; he looked straight at me and kept driving.

Upset and now stranded, I checked the garden (no one there anymore) and texted Lucinda. Before she could respond, though, the lady I'd asked for bus schedules came out to her car. She saw me standing there and asked what was going on: on hearing what had happened, she offered me a ride off the Peninsula to a place with a more certain bus schedule, even though she was actually headed in the opposite direction! No sooner had she dropped me off nearer town than Lucinda called to offer a ride back to the flat. I thanked them both profusely: not only did they save me an hour's walk in uncomfortable shoes, they got me home in time for dinner.