A New Garden – by Erica Nathan
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY | AUSTRALIAN NATURE WRITING
Photo by April Pethybridge
I live in a part of the country where ‘wilderness’ flourishes, on the ground and in marketing campaigns. Here, urbanised landscapes are less likely to attract environmental attention. We have a perceived safety net of backcountry, of mountain moors, of coastal heath, and ancient forest. For some, more fearful, the wilderness is best kept at bay, detached from the more comforting vivid colonial green. And yet, the suburban stretch of any city, even mine, is vast: extracting, eliminating and fouling on a grand scale. All is ripe for reinvention, including gardens.
Garden. Even the word sounds antiquated to Australian ears. Well, perhaps not all gardens. Productive gardens have a resurgent acceptability at the moment, especially at the community level, and showpiece display gardens with their topiaried privet and pleached pear seem to survive across the decades, appealing to the voyeur in us all. But the more generalised notion of home garden, as well as the institutional and corporate accommodation of gardens, is waning, well and truly. Even without confirmation from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, my profile, as a home gardener, is fairly easy to establish. Old. Comfortable. White. Female.
Enticing birds to feast, shelter and pause in a shared urban space has been my ten-year learning mission. I love to garden. But even as I write this, my guard is up quicker than a thornbill’s early morning dip in the birdbath. Even among the declining number of enthusiasts, my idea of gardening lacks broad appeal.
In the last twenty years, home ownership across Australia has declined; rental properties have increased from a quarter to a third of the market. Those units, apartments and houses that become investment properties, rentals and tourist bait do not invite the idea of gardening into their space. And where gardens might exist, there is simply less space around the many new homes. Land as an economic unit of housing and secondary wealth is at a premium. And for many working households, so is time.
There’s more to it than shifting economics and skewed wealth distribution. Our idea of ‘the garden’ remains locked in cultural quarantine. In temperate Australia, it is international plants that dominate, often in hard landscaping designed for convenience and floral performance. Gardens retain that colonial inheritance of imposition; of a setting down on the surface of undifferentiated earth. Materials, both inert and alive, are imported. The idea of the garden does not rise up from the soil, from the natural contours, from the relational elements of a specific place. Rather, it is pasted on, rolled out, airlifted in.
“The idea of the garden does not rise up from the soil, from the natural contours, from the relational elements of a specific place. Rather, it is pasted on, rolled out, airlifted in.”
For those properties devoid of ongoing intimacy, a hallmark of the traditional home garden, convenience becomes the defining principle. Recently I spoke with the new owner of a holiday rental. Much had been spent on renovating the upmarket heritage house on a large block adjacent to a bushland reserve. The ‘garden’ was reduced to grass that could be mown, bordered by a fenceline planting that would provide a decorative fringe without interfering with mechanical maintenance. For the body corporate, 'convenience’ translates as plants that do not shed leaves, hedges that can be routinely pruned, and a signature plant for economic adornment. Think box, bamboo, and magnolia. For the commercial buildings that occupy entire blocks, there’s simply no expectation that gardens will be landscaped into the build.
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In the 1960s and ‘70s there was a horticultural breakout of sorts that involved a blossoming of the ‘native plant garden’. We now see public gardens invest in ‘Australian borders’ and even dedicated native botanical gardens. Having been part of this trend, I would say it was a by-product of a cultural wave that celebrated republican ideals, Aboriginal rights, biodiversity conservation and a changing geospatial awareness. The full package was Gough Whitlam, a mud-brick house, and a challenge to 1788 as the first chapter of national history. For some devotees, a political militancy lay behind unruly gardens of bottlebrush, banksia and the ever-difficult boronia.
“The full package was Gough Whitlam, a mud-brick house, and a challenge to 1788 as the first chapter of national history. For some devotees, a political militancy lay behind unruly gardens of bottlebrush, banksia and the ever-difficult boronia.”
During this period of ‘native’ renaissance, I began to garden for the first time. Looking back, I have to question whether the fundamental idea of a garden was really being challenged beyond a fresh offering in plant selection. Like many new practitioners, I was in awe of the how, and the what, of it all. There was so much knowledge to absorb, so many plants to buy and eventually grow, trial, move, propagate, exchange, and understand. Native garden publications, and of course a new wave of landscape designers, were flourishing.
Our bible was the ten-volume Encyclopaedia of Australian Plants Suitable for Cultivation by W Rodger Elliot and David L Jones. Early on, there was much shared excitement as each volume introduced a fresh smorgasbord of garden plants from across the country. However, the monumental authoring task was too great; too much changed over the thirty-years of publication. Rather, it was the ever-new varieties developed by plant breeders, appearing in dedicated and mainstream nurseries, that sustained the appetite for ‘native’ landscaping.
My apprentice bush garden lasted twenty years. It was situated in a remnant woodlot hived off from a neighbouring farm, so there were many natural elements already in place. There was no history of extensive cultivation, only grazing, so the soil profile was intact to a degree I didn’t appreciate for some time. Although I learned hugely from this experience, I don’t think I fundamentally changed my idea of a garden. It was a family retreat, studded with plants that reflected native nursery availability and a more informal amateur marketplace. Over the years, the selection of exotic native specimens narrowed to a more reliable selection, and then more localised plants led me away from housebound garden beds. We almost took the wildlife for granted.
Perhaps because the natural elements of the bushy block were more obviously in place, I never really questioned what a garden is. This changed, gradually, with a move to a small city surrounded by flora, rocks and soils I was less familiar with. The agapanthus, gazania and lavender of my new suburban abode hurled questions my way, affronting my garden-based identity, affirming my foreigner self. It is always difficult to remove a living plant, to justify the end of growth that is working at some level. But I could smell the sterility. I could hear the absence of birds, and the gale-force winds off the mountain pierced unprotected ground.
“It is always difficult to remove a living plant, to justify the end of growth that is working at some level. But I could smell the sterility. I could hear the absence of birds, and the gale-force winds off the mountain pierced unprotected ground.”
Some people prefer to garden without gloves. This provides a dirty but rewarding intimacy with the soil – its water capacity, nutrient availability, mycorrhizal association, even fragrance. To not appreciate the astonishing suitability of certain plants to specific soils is a lost opportunity to learn in the garden space. So often the euro-agricultural label of ‘infertile’ is given to sandy soils, even though they support the most diverse heathlands in this country. Gloved horticultural practice upholds the ideal of free draining loam; clay and sand must be doctored, shovelled into line so they conform.
After pulling the debris of old carpet and black plastic from the dolerite-derived soil of my new garden, I did not import a truckload of loam. Removing this shroud was the first step in working with dry rocky ground to enhance its capacity for life. I wondered how I could be respectful of the long history that echoed in the space – the former land uses, the long-acquired associations with changing climates, and the natural plant community from which it was marooned. When an area has some remnants there is a starting point; without these, there is a particular challenge in tapping its logic. Key reference points for collaboration disappear. I would walk in local bushland for clues.
My garden is now a place that drills liveliness into difficult terrain. There is the obvious life of birds, bats, bandicoots, possums, spiders, frogs, bluetongues, a ridiculous line up of skinks and an endless assortment of insects. And then there are subterranean life forms I know are thriving. There is excitement and pleasure in knowing this. The growing, the observation, the making, have helped me appreciate a new corner of the country. I remain a native plant enthusiast, but where once I was intent on ‘the look’ and a pre-ordained plant selection, I now listen, and try to do the ‘looking’. I look to see how the garden negotiates climatic challenges, and opportunities, whether it generates the required energy to interact with life beyond the fence. My litmus is the arrival of smaller birds: pardalote, silvereye, wren, spinebill, crescent honeyeater and more. Seasonal markers, like the black-faced cuckoo shrike, provide occasional delight and reassurance. By night I listen for frogmouths and owls.
Importantly, to my eyes, the new garden is much more than a patch of quasi-recreated bush that is environmentally certified. Georgina Reid, founder and online editor of The Planthunter and the print journal Wonderground, recently reflected on her own garden. She declares defiantly, ‘Pretty is not enough’. She explains her garden as a garden for all life, not just her own, in times when the loss of habitats continues apace. Her rationale is to intervene as little as possible; to embrace the shambolic, to resist a neat, cultivated aesthetic. I admire her stand. Reid advocates a garden of meaning. Indeed, I agree. Climate change compels us to reimagine the idea of a garden.
“Reid advocates a garden of meaning. Indeed, I agree. Climate change compels us to reimagine the idea of a garden.”
While notions of beauty are inseparable from gardens, Georgina Reid suggests that beauty is in the function, in the role of her garden as a meaningful, mending nature place. She implies that visual aesthetics can be divorced from the ‘beauty’ a garden holds. But I wonder if this is necessary. Beauty is a capricious plaything of fashion across the ages, whether applied to the human form, to music, the visual arts … or to our green spaces. ‘Beauty’ is subject to learned appreciation, to inspirational shifts. This gives me some hope that the idea of gardens can change to accommodate a more modern worldview, underpinned by the imperative for environmental repair, innovation and nurture.
I try to understand my own culturally derived notions of beauty historically and critically, integrating these insights into acts of visualisation. Changing ideas of screening, layering, framing, as well as nostalgia, shape my decisions. Last year, I planted childhood tea-trees where chooks used to browse. I plant to keep the noise from the highway out and the full view of the mountain in. I’m scaled to the understorey, appreciative of shelter. In equal measure, I enjoy bending low to examine an unknown seedling, and craning the neck to see a patterned sky. Beauty evolves in the space, fashioning a singular garden place.
“I’m scaled to the understorey, appreciative of shelter. In equal measure, I enjoy bending low to examine an unknown seedling, and craning the neck to see a patterned sky. Beauty evolves in the space, fashioning a singular garden place.”
There is potential, I hope, for our predominantly suburban environs to surge with life and purpose, breathing contemporary fire into a jaded concept. The idea of a garden has not kept pace with the need for natural replenishment at a local, urban scale, or with a considered sense of connection to what is ‘out there’.
To bring creative process to working a home garden is too often a privilege nowadays, of relative wealth, education, and opportunity. Perhaps the re-alignment, or the re-imagining, of the idea of a suburban garden plot will correct community perceptions of the value of urbanised, over-concretised land that bakes in the sun, that floods in rapid runoff, that in so many ways is life denying. Perhaps institutional and corporate responsibility will follow. I don’t know.
I confessed to a love of gardening. I feel intrigued and excited by the potential of home gardens. I do know that when the light is right, when I am positioned at the right angle, when my body and mind have emerged from the undergrowth, what I see and know is a beautiful place, carrying me well beyond the fence, on the wing. ▼
Photo by Trevor McKinnon
This work is part of our Australian Nature Writing Project suite.
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