Reflections on growth
As the school year gets underway again and my days at my desk are uninterrupted (except by all the salesmen trying to persuade me to change my electricity provider) I am reminded of the enduring truth of two of my favourite quotations. The first, from John Lennon (Beatle of the non-gardening variety). “Life is what happens while you are making other plans”.
The other is from Kurt Vonnegut. “We become what we pretend to be, so be careful what you pretend.”
The good things about these aphorisms is that digging deep confirms their truth, whereas aphorisms of the “Look before you leap” kind are always easily contradicted by another aphorism “He who hesitates is lost”. A friend of mine once made up a damned good aphorism. It was “Nothing in life is as simple as an aphorism would have you believe.”
It is now about twelve years since I first began to write about gardening - at first a column in The Australian, then in a magazine, and lastly in this blog. I will be frank with you, dear reader. I started doing it for the money. You see, my REAL writing was elsewhere, in hard-nosed journalistic articles and literary books and so on. The gardening stuff was to pay the mortgage.
Now I find that I am a gardening writer of sorts, simply because I have pretended to be that. And I find that the things I told myself were not serious are in fact the most serious things of all, and feed the rest. Thank goodness I never used a pseudonym. It would have made the job of accepting the reality of the pretence so much harder.
Gardening has been like that. I planted fruit trees and a vegetable patch not because I was a real gardener, (far too ignorant) but because I liked planting things
Now, two children and many emotional upheavals later, I walk round this house and enjoy the sight of city buildings through the window, the pansies on the sundeck, rooves sparking in the sun and the city in its haze seemingly only at arms length away, and the pots of citrus and herbs down in the back yard. I love being in an empty house, in the knowledge that my family will come home.
And while I have been making other plans, the kids have grown, the fruit trees have set fruit and the potatoes have sprouted, flowered and died, yielding the little balls of sweetness I eat steamed with chives for lunch. Isn’t it extraordinary the way things just won’t stop growing?
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