This early watercolour is part of Auckland artist Gretchen Albrecht's extensive garden series in which she adopted imagery not unlike Pat Hanly's of the same period ( see the collection's Hanly Garden Awake 1970 ). Here Albrecht uses a highly gestural and expressionistic brush application in contrast to her later acrylic on canvas method of sweeping a colour laden brush across the surface in huge horizontal bands. Michael Dunn comments of their garden paintings that Hanly and Albrecht " share a colourful and optimistic mood , striking a positive note quite unlike the darkness and despair often found in New Zealand painting. "