Let me explain.

I have an extensive garden that, like all suburban gardens at this time, is a dry, gasping, summer-hammered, climate-change-tortured oasis in the greater heat-shimmering desert of desiccated suburbia.

I find it necessary to water every plant by hand (my place is blessed with five rainwater tanks of rapidly diminishing contents). And it strikes me how, by painstakingly going from plant to plant with my watering can, ministering moisture and whispering a few words of encouragement, I am doing something vaguely similar to what the saintly nurse Nightingale did on her busy wards in the Crimea, ministering to her wounded soldier-patients. Just as she, gliding through her wards at night, was famously The Lady with the Lamp, I am kind of The Man with the (Watering) Can.

I am not so vain as to make a moral comparison of myself with the wonderful Florence. Nonetheless, imagining myself to be her (often cross-dressing as her to make the illusion more complete) makes my watering work more of a play-acting game and less of a chore.

And there is some resemblance between what I am doing and what Florence did. Here I give the medicine of water and the boon of a comforting word to a deathly pale dahlia. There I give a word of Christian comfort to a withered sunflower reduced to skin and bone. Here I bestow a sisterly kiss on the fevered brow of a Banksia prostrated by drought. There I prop up, allowing it to lean on my shoulder, a gaunt hollyhock knocked over by this season's hot, howling winds.

But suddenly, early one morning, taking me out of the imagined Crimea and plonking me back in Canberra, there appeared a fox. A fox! In my street!

Literally bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, he was alarmingly splendid. In the dawn sunlight his coat glowed sometimes a dashing Ferrari red, sometimes a glossy Julia Gillard/orangutan-esque russet.

A plump, dead pigeon (an introduced species, thank goodness!) held in his mouth somehow decorated him as a hunter, the way a crown decorates a prince at his coronation. Long and lean and svelte and lovely, when he walked it was like a samba.

He sambaed to within just a few metres of me and then stopped. We stared at one another with frank curiosity, sharing the camaraderie of being rare things up and about at dawn.

He was the first to speak, but of course, forgetting his mouth was full of pigeon, it was just a mumble and made no sense. He put his feathery breakfast down and we both had a good giggle about his forgetful mumble.

Conversation came easily. He wondered why I was dressed as a woman when it was obvious from my beard and from the manly timbre of my voice that I didn't belong to the fairer sex. My explanation seemed entirely reasonable to him.

I wondered why he was in my street, where I had never before seen a member of his dashing species. He explained that the vicissitudes of climate change meant that he had to show more ingenuity about where he went a'hunting.

We agreed, as essentially English beings and both from the English countryside, that this looming Christmastide was a poignant time for us. Our instincts have us somehow tuned to the wintry Christmas of "home", while here we are, transported, in these hot, bright Antipodes.

Both of us, we mused, had in common that we'd been brought right across the world to anglicise Australia. His species was brought here in the 1840s to restore to homesick transplanted Englishmen the foxhunting they'd enjoyed at home. And I, young, heterosexual, English, Anglo-Saxon and Anglican, had been lured here in 1965 (my airfare paid) by a Menzies government hoping I would reproduce my kind here and help keep White Australia as white as possible.

Laughing about our shared experiences, at how life's cookie crumbles, we bade one another a cheery good morning and he, his walk still like a samba, melted away into nearby bushland while I went back to my needy patients.

To be a committed gardener is to be sensitised to nature and to nuances of weather and climate. And so when I come to power (I can neither confirm nor deny that the ACT Liberals want to parachute me into their leadership in time for next year's ACT elections, to use my popularity and name recognition to give them an edge not given them by their present leader, whose name escapes me) I will make some form of gardening (even if only on a townhouse patio or with a window box) compulsory.

Those who do no gardening (how distressing to see those new suburbs where everyone has filled their block with an ostentatious McMansion leaving no room for a garden) are estranged from nature, and so can never be complete, responsible, rounded, poetry-reading, planet-engaged citizens.

My government, which will show some totalitarian tendencies (our private polling shows the people of the ACT are tired of democracy and are hankering for strong leaders who get things done), will not tolerate horticultural illiteracy. Get ready, Canberra! The hollyhocks are coming.