Bayley LuuTomes knows what some people think about tending a garden. It’s too hard. There’s not enough space. It’s just easier to buy fruit and vegetables at the supermarket. Yet as the garden expert in the new TVNZ 1 show My Dream Green Home, he’s not giving up on them just yet.
For Bayley, 41, growing a garden runs in the family – all the way back to his homeland of Vietnam, in fact. His parents were farmers, so cultivating and eating the results of their own hard work was a way of life. But what is now a career for the landscape gardener was once a necessity to survive.
Bayley’s family fled Vietnam as part of the mass exodus in the years that followed the war, when he was just nine months old – too young to remember escaping in a wooden boat that fit around 30 people.
His mother has mustered the courage to share with Bayley the story of their journey, but it isn’t a history lesson anyone would want to teach all at once. She gave up everything she knew and left behind everyone she loved for the uncertain promise of a brighter future for Bayley.
“She didn’t just bombard me one time, and say, ‘Sit down, I’m going to tell you our whole journey’,” he recalls. “It was something that my mother probably doesn’t want to relive too often.”
They wound up at a refugee camp in Thailand, where each family was given their own plot.
“Every bit of land was very important,” says Bayley. His parents farmed their small amount of land with whatever would take to the soil, such as chillies or lettuce.
“You’d have your own little community where everyone grew something and they would swap with another family for something else.
“Getting back to the survival basics of growing your own food is very important,” Bayley says. “You don’t need a large piece of land. Survival instinct kicks in and you do what you have to do based on what you know.”
It’s no surprise then that gardening would come to form a major part of his life.
Bayley’s time in front of the TV set as a boy was his crash course in the English language. Then as a teen in the ’90s, he discovered Maggie Barry in Maggie’s Garden Show.
“What I saw from her was the ability to transform something, to utilise a barren space and turn it into an oasis. I saw gardening as a form of therapy, of relaxation, a way to feed yourself.”
He also watched Captain Planet And The Planeteers, an animated classic following an enviro superhero who is summoned by combining five elemental rings from around the world. It’s the easiest way for him to explain how his gardening know-how works alongside the other home experts in My Dream Green Home.
“We’re like one big person that has multiple facets,” he says. “We all have our individual powers and when we come together, we form Captain Planet.”
Bayley’s documents were lost overboard in the journey from Vietnam, so he wonders if he’s actually older than he’s been told. Instead, his life can be measured in the gardens he’s tended, because life is like a garden, he says. “It grows and it matures, changes and develops.”
Above all, Bayley feels a pressing responsibility to impart his knowledge to the next generation, because people are losing the survival skill of knowing how to grow and harvest their own food. He says the quality of the kai just isn’t as good either.
“You’re losing all the nutrients you would have if you harvested something fresh from your own place and that only comes from passion, the willingness to learn and to grow, and to live this type of lifestyle.”
Bayley’s family briefly returned to Vietnam when he was a young boy, to show him his homeland. Instead, he felt like an outsider.
“On the outside, I look like the people back in Vietnam, but on the inside, I feel very different. This is where I was born, but it never felt like home. I didn’t understand the way of living. I didn’t understand the culture very well.”
Kiwi life is all Bayley has ever known, but it hasn’t been easy.
“My way of life is purely what I’ve endured and experienced in New Zealand,” he says. “I feel like a refugee in my birth country. But then at the same time, when I’m in New Zealand, I still feel like a refugee.”
Still, Bayley agreed to join My Dream Green Home as a way to say thank you.
“New Zealand has given me so much. How can I give back?”
Sharing his landscaping skills along with tips and tricks he’s learned over the years have been the perfect way of doing just that.
Just like a garden, Bayley has learned to be resilient in the face of adversity. “A plant will adapt,” he says. “If it wants to survive, it will find a way.”
My Dream Green Home airs 7.30pm Wednesdays on TVNZ 1.
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