I bought a house once with a tiny backyard made entirely out of concrete and ugly colourbond fencing – like a prison yard.
and I spent the next year and a half planting and and painting and digging and watering until it was green and bright and calm.
I love to garden, it’s peaceful and simple – it’s something I share with most of my family and a few dear friends and, with equal parts of sadness and a sense of freedom, for the last year I have lived completely without one.
My dad lives in Perth, Western Australia – home to one of the most consistently hottest driest summers in the whole country, but found it really difficult to give up his English country garden. His rose garden is amazing – but requires a LOT of water. I love Australian natives and I love the idea of a sustainable garden that doesn’t need watering and we have had many discussions over the years about how his garden is quite simply in the wrong country.
This year he decided not to water over the summer, see what would survive and rethink his garden along more sustainable lines (although I’m not sure we’ll ever convince him of the subtle beauty of many Australian plants). A couple of weeks ago there was a massive storm in Perth, rain, hail the whole disaster – quite unseasonal and perhaps a sign of the kind of climate change that should make all Australian gardeners rethink their plots.
This is an extract from an email that he sent me last week:
“I have ignored the garden for most of the summer, giving it minimum amouts of water, knowing that this is going to be the way things are going. I decided that any plants that couln’t survive the regime would just have to die. After the big storm I have found that many plants which I thought just about dead, including quite a number of roses have suddenly sprung to life. Bulbs have sprung out of the ground and the whole place is looking a hundred %. My interest is renewed, so another growing season beckons. Maybe I shouldn’t mention gardens to you as I’m sure that you are very disappointed and disiilusioned about losing your garden, but I tell you this story because one of these days when you get your next garden your enthusiasm will be be regenerated just like my roses. In the meantime it will be no harm letting it lie dormant for a while.”
I found this little passage about the garden surprisingly moving and completely pertinent to my current situation.
It’s been a month since I arrived back in Sydney and I’ve spent most of that month getting my life organised again and trying to recover from the culture shock. It’s incredible how even six months somewhere else can make your home country feel foreign and strange and there have been days where all I wanted was to walk out of my door and ride down the canal to visit friends or go to the movies or just watch the passing parade and it’s been incredibly sad that I haven’t been able to do that.
Like almost everyone I’ve spoken to who’s had a similar experience I’m finding it difficult to be back.
The thing that people complain about mostly when they talk about returning to Australia is the lack of culture, the dryness of the intellectual life, the desert of ideas and the impossibility of the tyranny of distance that makes it so much harder to travel around and exchange ideas. The dead brown garden of Australia needing the water of Europe to bring it to life…
But surely that’s just nonsense. This is fertile land – it just needs something dramatic to wake it up – a massive unseasonal storm or a bushfire.
And these are things we can create ourselves. An intellectual life is only dead if you let it die, the land is only barren if you see it through European eyes, the beauty is subtle but tough and ancient. Just like a garden there are times when everything looks so brown and dead you think you’ll never see anything green again – and then the storm comes or the fire sweeps through and the shoots start to burst from the ground, the bright chartreuse buds appear amongst the blackness of a burnt out tree and suddenly something especially Australian starts to happen.
We just have to wait for the storm.
Or maybe we need to create it ourselves.
Once again, Liz, you have captured something so succinctly and so beautifully! Dad’s comments are of the same timbre. CX :)
Liz, My father worked as a gardener for most of his life. And I regret to say that he never said anything quite so eloquent. About as revealing as he ever got was a postcard in which he lamented that Australia was a beautiful country, and it was a pity that so many people were intent on stuffing it up.
Coming home is always the hardest part. It forces us to make choices all over again. But the adventure is always worth it.