The Garden Diaries

Hey there flower lovers.

This is my first post on what I hope will become a sort of publicly accessible garden diary. I’ve been keeping hard copy garden diaries for years and years – carefully mapping out what I want to plant where and with what. Keeping notes about when things went into the ground or into a seedling tray and how they grew (or did not grow). Recording species names. Making diaries impossible to shut with their bulging pages of taped-in empty seed packets and plant labels.

Since moving from Single-ton City into Couple-dom – the past 20 years or so – I’ve had to share my garden, and all of our plans and notes have been kept in the one communal diary. It’s a great historical document, and browsing through it recalls for me past houses and gardens we have lived in, loved in, brought babies home to, raised children in, renovated. Houses we’ve loved, and houses we’ve hated. Gardens where we’ve been smug with happiness, and gardens where we’ve faced the shitty stuff life can dish up.

But my earliest ‘diary’ isn’t in this book. It was a map for an ill-fated and brief-lived veggie/flower-combo patch. I was 9. The sketch is less solid landscaping plan, more (now water blurred) texta and paper rendition of a gardening fantasy. It shows a trellis for beans, a row of lettuce, plantings of what I am pretty sure are broad beans and corn, a straight row of a mystery red flowering plant (my money is on it representing the ubiquitous geranium, or pelargoniums to everyone outside of Australia) and some gladiolus. My Pop grew ‘gladdies’ for my Nan every year, and I was obsessed with those otherworldly, flat onion-looking bulbs that hung from the rafters in their garage in orange string bags.

In the drawing, there is a neat fence around the patch, a practical gate standing at one end. Around the outside of the fenced patch stands clipped, weed-free grass. The plants are all growing apparently pest free in neat, very well behaved and carefully cultivated rows. They look well watered and nourished, all drawn in the same lush green. On second thoughts, this may be because there was only one shade of green texta to hand.

In reality, although a version of the garden was planted, it did not by any stretch of the imagination grow into the thing of beauty that I had envisaged.

I remember watching excitedly as my Pop dug up a barren square of builder’s rubble in a corner of our yard with his rotary hoe. I’m not sure how we roped him into making the trip to us to undertake this task, but he would have been even more appreciatively welcomed (on our part) as he was undoubtedly accompanied by Nan bearing sustaining cakes and slices.

There was no soil prep. I did not mulch. The area was overshadowed by both fence and gumtrees. I bunged seeds into the ground with a similar gesticulation and enthusiasm as one might see in the one-armed bandit room at the local pub on a Saturday night.

I vaguely recall impatiently watering the emerging seedlings a few times with a garden hose and then, shortly after planting, we went away on holidays for a month. It will come as no surprise to even the most inexperienced of gardeners that when we returned, the Australian summer sun had turned my fledgling attempt at a garden into a potpourri compost heap.

Despite the inauspicious start, gardening in some form or another has continued to play a huge and happy part in my life. And now I’m at the beginning of my next gardening adventure – carving out a new career as an organic flower farmer and florist. I dream of sharing the beauty of local, organic, slightly wild, sustainably grown and prepared flowers, all cultivated on my micro-farm right in the heart of a big, busy rural town. I hope to share a little of this gardening magic with you.

The inscription on the back reads SATURDAY 21.11.1981