I grew up in Oregon. My home climate is temperate rainforest, which does not mean a) monkeys or b) bananas, but does mean a) lots of pine trees and b) rain. My parents raised me on a quarter acre lot that sat on a semi-drained river valley. There were a lot of springs. You couldn't dig a hole without it filling with water. (This happened when we renovated, by the way. I don't know how long it took our crawlspace to empty out.) When people ask me about my childhood, I tell them I never had dry feet, and that it was very green.
As a result of all that rain, we had lots and lots of tall grass, and it was my duty to mow it all as soon as it got dry enough, usually in March, when it was waist-high and choked the lawnmower. How I hated that quarter acre then. And all that damn rain.
In the backyard, we had two matching photinias, mature, and under the right-hand photinia there was a clump of dianthus, but I always knew them as Sweet Williams. They smelled cinnamon-like to me, and I looked for them every spring. There were two sweet gums, which here are called liquid ambers, and the ambergris scent of the fallen scarlet leaves are one of my earliest memories. There was a gorgeous birch in the front yard and a much bigger, slightly different one in the back, that stood proudly over the 8-foot slide which we always called the 12-foot slide (that my dad got from a playground that was putting in new equipment).My dad planted a whole mess of crocus bulbs in the front yard that we looked for every February, right around the time the neighbor's "trash tree" (you know, those uneatable plumlike stone fruits that get tracked inside) was blooming its pink-blossomed head off. Those were the constants.
We had a succession of gardening adventures: my dad put sandstone down in the front under the windows, we had wildflowers growing in the front yard, and my mom always bought potted petunias. One year we had a vegetable garden, but lacking any serious adult guidance, third-grade-me didn't really understand what I had to do to manage it, so in the end, we had a bunch of corn and a palm-sized watermelon. Oh, and a rat that our mutt of a dog, Tipper, quickly dispatched. (Those little 'yappy' dogs are good for something, and it's ratting.)
So when I moved to an apartment, it was as far from gardens as you could get: 11 stories high, in the middle of a small city. I had views of other people's yards and trees but I didn't have to mow a damn thing. I pitied my lowly house-owning neighbors with their efficient barrel mowers. Look at those suckers. Apartments, man, the way of the future. Or so I thought.
So, let's fast forward to roughly ten years later. I live in one of the most beautiful parts of Sydney, and being around all the green and beautiful gardens had a definite effect. For years I'd been thinking, yeah, apartments are convenient, but. I had been slowly coming around to becoming self-sufficient, or even just a little less supermarket-dependent. Then I discovered the writing of Michael Pollan, the amazing television series Jamie at Home, and then who comes into my televisual life but Matthew Evans with his amazing tree change to Tasmania! I knew I had to grow. My balcony, too hot and dry for plants, failed me.
We tried a garden apartment. Too much shade, too much noise, not enough oursness.The grass couldn't even grow. Still, I tried. I was hopeful. To no avail.
In our third place, we settled on a balcony with a view, and grew our family. With our roots firmly settled in Sydney's sandy soil, we knew we couldn't go on living in apartments OR move to Tasmania (darn).
We began looking for a house. And I began looking for a house with a garden.
We offered in the first weeks of summer, amazingly got the dream house, and then renovated all through the summer. We moved in just as we were settling in for a nice, chilly winter - not a growing season for the unprepared - and I resigned myself to waiting for spring. We took out heaps of privet, a cotoneaster, a nearly-dead azalea, and I pulled out handfuls of weeds from once-trim cottage garden beds. I'm still working on it. But it's coming along. Our lush granny garden is now stripped back, ready to be changed. We've got a few citrus trees to plant, some leylandis, a ton of baby mondo grass, and I went crazy with seeds.
Oh, I have so many seeds. So many I had to share.
This is where the confessional happens: I am a lot like Barbara Kingsolver with seed catalogues. I really should just mark which seeds I DON'T want. Because I have got 7 varieties of pumpkin seeds. Where am I going to fit seven pumpkin patches? And some of the tomato varieties get HUGE - there's one called Broad Ripple Yellow Currant and it can get 3 meters tall and produce over a thousand tomatoes per bush. A THOUSAND. I will publish a full list someday (not today) of the seeds I have. Of the 120 or so different plants I have seeds for, maybe 3 of them are hybrids unsuitable for seed-saving. I can measure the success of the plants I have and whatever I like, I can keep for next year. Amazing!
But now, just now, we're starting the seedlings inside, and I hover over them daily, sometimes hourly, looking for signs of life. A tiny green shoot pushing upward, vegetable coolness of its hardy green stem; the spicy scent of the seed-raising soil as I poke my finger at the tiny, spear-shaped Yellow Perfection Tomato seedlings. I love how quickly the rocket has sprung up. I love that there are stubborn pale-green shoots of corn popping their sticklike heads above the edges of my home-made newspaper "Jiffy" pots. And I love the way I feel growing things. Knowing that once these bad boys are out there, in the ground, hopefully protected from possums and birds, that I will be feeding my family in a way I've never been able to. And this is all learned, right? The only gardening I had ever heard of was putting barkmulch down in our "fancy" neighbor's yard and his meticulous mowing. (Thinking back, I know he is proud of his garden, but boy, to my adapted sensibilities, is it a dry and tasteless thing. Like stale toast. There's neatness but very little else.) So yeah: compost, a whole new thing. Having a lime tree in my front yard? An unimagined luxury. Being able to say, "nah, let's not have grass at all in front" and instead plan a rolling landscape of changing annuals mixed with perennials, most of which are medicinal or food-based? Hells to the yeah. I won't be shy about it. I'm dead keen to get started. I'm ready for a harvest. I'm ready even just to try and grow something.
It is the start of something lovely.