Lessons from the Garden

Gardening has many lessons. Some are very deep. Some are amazingly superficial. As a person that is constantly doing two things at once, watching TV while I sew, listening to music while I clean, I love the pure focus and quiet of gardening. No noise here but the thoughts in my head. Today was the first serious day of gardening for me in our new house since we moved in. You've got to live in a place for a while before you know what you want to do to it. Now that we've been here for a while we have a better idea of what needs to happen and today our garden went from maintenance mode to active growth.

As I worked I thought about some of the lessons I've learned from gardening. In no particular order;

1.) Bark chips are evil. I do not know if any other country has ever embraced bark chips to the extent that Australians have. During the 80s and 90s they made it into 90% of the gardens in Canberra and 100% of the playgrounds. Just as we realised how awful they look and started to give them away someone had the bright idea of dyeing them interesting colours and people went nuts for them all over again.

When I bought the house my aunt took one look at the red dyed bark chip mulch and sighed, "Oh no, not the quick fix." I knew what she meant. Bark chips are meant to be an organic mulch that breaks down. And they will - three generations after you put them down. In the meantime they will look great for the first four months and then they'll gradually become diluted by debris and redistribution of topsoil. And just as you think they're gone for good you will attempt to plant your spade and again be foiled by a solid hunk of timber. Today I am reminded of how much I hate bark chips as I try to remove them from my garden.

2.) If you plant anything with thorns there will be at least one moment when you really regret it.

3.) Weeds that look pretty are still weeds and will annoy me until I get rid of them.

4.) A post-hole digger is a must-have. 20 minutes of cursing while you remove loads of dirt that could be measured in spoonfuls with a spade or two minutes with a post-hole digger. The choice is yours.

5.) I am not a patient gardener. Some gardeners, like my mother-in-law are like garden fairies. They are happiest when they're in their garden and every time they step outside something gets nurtured. A prune here, a pot adjusted there and a bucket of water for you. Their gardens are constantly changing and always amazing. I remember seeing an interview on Gardening Australia once with a man who loved tropical gardens so much that he worked for years to achieve the look in his Melbourne home and had "created a sub-tropical microclimate in the process". My first thought was not "oh how pretty" it was "why on earth would you bother?"

I like having a nice garden but I want to sit in the shade and admire it more than I want to nurture it. I do not experiment with plants, I go with the hardiest I can find. They get fertiliser and mulch and for one year they get watered. Then they're on their own. I have better things to do than encourage a fuchsia to be frost-tolerant.

6.) It is not a good idea to pretend to be something you're not. Charles is a planner. I am a do-er. Occasionally Charles will have a go at being a do-er. His vegetable garden is a stellar example. He confidently prepared a bed for Winter vegetables, shunning my advice as he went about confidently fertilising to a depth of two feet, watering every second day and arranging his veggies in a haphazard fashion. With absolutely no need to store anything below ground the Winter veggies leapt for the sky. Two months later we had an alien landscape of flowering broccoli bushes, weird beetroot shrubs attached to radish-sized beetroots and six foot high parsnips with a sort of thick hair below ground that clearly wouldn't survive peeling let alone roasting.

While me pretending to be a planner does not produce such amazingly real and blatant proof that people should stick with what they're good at, I'm the first to admit that it's just not a good idea. Our gardens have always been the best example of Charles planning and me doing. I throw out suggestions, Charles yays or nays them while drawing up a plan and then I go and do it. It works every..single...time...but there's still a moment where I think my idea is so solid that there's no way it can go wrong...

7.) Gardening is about who we were; When we lived on a farm we were broke and resorted to interesting money-making ventures. Some successful. Some not so much. One year my father bought about three thousand bare-root strawberry plants with the idea that we could sell the fruit. So as a family we carefully planted them out in rows and mulched them. Unfortunately weeds and a dry summer meant they were quite stunted and the possibility of harvesting anything shrank by the day. After I overheard my Dad lamenting the waste of money we couldn't afford to a neighbour I took it upon myself to go down every day after school to weed those wretched things and try and turn the situation around. Dad in turn used the ride-on mower to cart water from our dam and lo and behold they took off and started fruiting. They were doing really, really well and promised a bumper crop until one horrible night when we caught our bloody cows eating them.

I don't even remember the moment now but Dad claims I sat and cried in the strawberries at three in the morning, threatening death and dismemberment to those cursed bovines. I do, however, remember all the time I spent trying to get those strawberries to grow so we could sell them. And I remember how much it hurt to have nothing to show for all that time I spent. My garden will always have strawberries because my family love them. But every time I plant them out I think of my Dad, how much we struggled and how much I wanted those strawberries to be a success.

8.) Gardening reveals a lot about who we are; While we're talking about him - my Dad is a clog wog. And like all wogs, he likes growing his own produce. I clearly remember him saying to me once, "Why would you have a vine when you can have a vine that grows fruit?" It was probably a throw-away line for him but for me it was one of those seeds that takes root and grows in your brain. And now, whenever I go to plant something, I always ask myself whether I could have something similar that would give me fruit, herbs or veg as well as look pretty. And this is why all of my gardens include fruits, veg and herbs.

My mother was quite the gardener too - although her focus was less on produce and more on pretty. She loved hardenbergias - a naturally occurring groundcover in the Australian bush that has masses of purple flowers. At some point after she died nurseries cottoned on to the fact that hardenbergias are not only pretty but practically unkillable and so they trained them into an upwards fashion, rebadged them as "happy wanderers" and sold them for stupid amounts of money. I don't care. I will love them forever because they remind me of her and I will always have one in my garden. I will just stubbornly refuse to call it a happy wanderer.

9.) Gardens are about family and love; For the rest of my life every garden I plant will have a plum tree for Charles, tomatoes for Charlotte and figs for all of us. Vines will grow tangled around the entertaining space - a mix of banksia rose, potato vine, climbing rose and jasmine. Rosemary and mint will grow in abundance for cooking. Fruit trees will give lemons for setting jam, plums for Pa's plum sauce and loquats because they're something from my mother and aunt's childhood that make me smile. Strawberries will serve as groundcover and the fruit will never make it through the door and into the house because my husband and children will scramble over each other to eat them. And I'll love every minute of it.