How I became a gardener
How does one become a gardener? I should say at the outset that although I harbor a strong and mostly secret belief that gardening is what life is really all about, I am not a real gardener. I cannot tell you the common names of many plants, let alone their botanical names. My garden is mostly a mess, and I am very much a learner. I began my gardening career from a position of great ignorance, and I have not yet recovered.
It all started in the tiny back yard of a share house in North Melbourne. This was the kind of share house where the kettle was always on, where you didn’t know who you would find sleeping on the couch and where just about everyone (except me) trouped down to the local town hall for Labor Party branch meetings once a month. The kitchen was a lean-to built straight on to the concrete slab that also formed the back yard. This meant that you had to be careful of slugs on the floor when you came down to breakfast. As well, it meant the bedroom known to us as Cell Block Five, and reserved for the newest members of the household, had its only window opening on to the back of the fridge.
As people grew up and left the household, the occupant of Cell Block Five had the opportunity to move out into the light and upstairs into one of the more desirable bedrooms. But when I lived in that house the Cell Block had been occupied for a long while by someone who liked it, and remained there, because the heat from the conductor coils on the fridge meant his marijuana crop grew well on the window sill. That fridge was known as the Sir Douglas Mawson Memorial Refrigerator. This was because it was rarely defrosted, and a previous resident had stuck a photo of the Antarctic explorer on the back of the freezer. Gradually he would ice over, peering at us refracted through the ice. When he disappeared completely from view, someone would get around to defrosting and he would emerge again.
This was a fine and happy time in my life, if a time of intense urban experience. I didn’t know a gardener lurked within. My mother was a keen gardener, and had carved a garden from Adelaide clay during my childhood. She always complained that none of the rest of us was the slightest bit interested, and she was right. Nevertheless, deep pagan impulses were bubbling to the surface.
One spring day I was sitting in the pocket-handkerchief back yard and thought how good it would be to have something growing up the back fence. On impulse, I ripped out the remains of a failed marijuana crop planted by a previous resident. I went down the road to the supermarket and bought a packet of climbing bean seed. They were a runaway success (no pun intended) and I was hooked. I bought a book called “Vegetable Gardening in Australia”. The two authors were pictured on the back.
They wore tight shorts and toweling hats and looked, to my trendy eyes, extremely daggy. Nevertheless their word was law. This purchase was closely followed by another book on organic gardening written by a man who appeared in the photos grim-faced holding enormous cabbages. The captions extolled the virtues of poultry manure. I found these books a bit frightening. They were full of imperatives like “eliminate all perennial weeds” and “cultivate to a fine tilth”.
Nevertheless my enthusiasm was fired, and the only thing stopping me was that I had a total of about two square metres of soil to play with. Since then I have gardened in several states. I moved from the share house to Brisbane, where I lived for three years in a house with a big garden. I tried to garden here, but was largely defeated by a very demanding job reporting on corruption and sex in the Queensland police force, and the discovery that my back yard had evidently been used as a rubbish dump by generations of previous residents, and all sorts of unpleasant things lurked just underneath the couch grass. From there it was back to Melbourne, where I bought a house with a very small back yard backing on to the local McDonalds.
For the first time I could really let loose. In about five metres of soil I grew tomatoes and brassicas and beans, and became self-sufficient in vegetables. My library of gardening books grew, but I was beginning to realise that I actually didn’t like most gardening books. They made me feel inadequate. I never reached the standards they set. I began to fantasise about writing a real gardening book, that spoke to all the other people who gardened as I did, or who would like to garden, but had been put off by the grim-faced men with their passion for poultry manure and weed-free soil.
From Melbourne I moved to South Australia, where I lived for a while in the Riverland while I wrote my first novel. This was a place of big skies and extreme heat, where keeping my cliff-top garden overlooking the Murray watered was a challenge I was unprepared for. Many crops failed. Nevertheless, I made a discovery. Weeding is the best remedy for writer’s block. Writing and gardening are natural companions. My novel grew as my garden grew. Eighteen months on the clifftop, and I returned to Melbourne with a completed novel.
Then with romance and serendipity playing their part, I found my way to the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, and gardened there in the thin acid soil, kept chooks and goats, and grew vegetables and lots of weeds, and two children as well. Ten years of that and three books later, I returned to Melbourne, renovated the house at the back of McDonalds, and, with my new husband, snaffled two plots in the local community gardens. Bliss. When I ask myself what life is all about, the answer comes back “You are a mother, a writer and a gardener”. I can’t imagine any one of these three without the other.