On Gardens

Charlotte Wood reminds me I have a garden.

A derelict patch down the back of the house where I stacked four planters along the top of the Astroturf and enthusiastically grew silverbeet one year, supplanted it with a half-hearted attempt at zucchinis the second year and finally succumbed to beds of mint and oregano on the third.

It’s not that I’m not a good gardener, a large part of it is the environment. The house shields the planters from sun for most of the year, the olive trees shields them from rain for the rest. The plants that thrive are the ones that don’t need sun or water.

The other part is of course a lack of care. The busier I get the easier it is to sequester myself inside the house where there’s warmth and light and coffee, and a distinct lack of the pollen that sets off my spring hayfever.

When I’m busy the garden is left to its own devices, and it does a good job of growing, not in rigid straight lines of easily accessible zucchinis, ripe for the dinner table, but more in a higgledy-piggledy explosion of weeds and oregano, woody knots that find their way through cracks in the side of the planter box and then dig down through the Astroturf to find Mother Earth.

…

I read Charlotte Wood’s book The Luminous Solution in gasps, short bursts stolen at 3 am where my bed-time iPad IS the luminous solution, a handy way to make insomnia feel like a productive curse. I scribble notes in electronic bits that sync themselves between my iPad and my computer, and when I wake I find that my semi-conscious mind has circled the oddest parts of the writing – not the bold beautiful passages that neatly sum up the creative process but lines tucked between lines that I’ve convinced myself are worthy of a re-read.

At the top of the first page I’ve underlined the sentence ‘the sight of it fills me with an overwhelming gloom’, and made a note for myself to ‘check the garden, its October 1’, and when I sit with my morning coffee to re-read my night-time wanderings I realise that it is indeed October 1^st, and somehow the first month of Spring has sprung neatly passed me and I’ve neglected to do my yearly google of what I should try and plant this year.

Don’t worry, tomatoes go in on Cup Day, I remind myself, then remember last year’s tomato plants were a failure. The mild summer meant they only flowered in late December, fruited in late in January and then withered on the vine because they didn’t get quite enough warmth or sun to blood.

Maybe this year I’ll try something new. The problem is what. I crave productivity, so a bed of silver beet is often best – big and green and leafy. Silverbeet means I can see that I’ve really achieved something with my year, slowly turning giant green leaves into winter soups, convincing myself that I can feel the iron flocking to my bloodstream with each mouthful.

I could be exotic and have another crack at kale, but the last time I tried it, the plants immediately went to seed, shooting bright purple streamers up a meter high.

Maybe I could double down on my rhubarb production – the two little plants I’ve had in the bed for the last three years do a great job of throwing up stems that sag over the edge of the planters and along the Astroturf underneath. Of course each harvest only provides the ingredients for a couple of cups of rhubarb compote, and then the plants lie desolate for another couple of months, hardly the food-bowl of West Preston.

The first step is, as always, to prepare the beds, and this year I’ve really let the oregano take hold. On a sunny October morning I take my secateurs and spend an hour digging out woody stems, finding the clouds of hair-thin roots, shaking off the excess dirt and tossing the oregano into a bucket. By the end of the hour two of the beds are ready and I have a full bucket of oregano – leaves, stems, roots all combined together into a dirty mess.

Maybe this is enough for a year’s harvest. I can blend the entirety into an oregano pesto, feed it to my bandmates for dinner, talk about how well my garden is growing this year.

Or maybe this is year I press on, dig out the beds properly, layer them with compost, research best practice, use my time and creative energy to build a garden that will nourish and sustain me for the year to come.