You might just get away with a fruit tree before the neighbours began to mutter and write letters to the council, especially if it was an ornamental weeping mulberry. Anything useful like a cabbage or a slippery dip was banished to the backyard.

Those days vanished with the newly fashionable native gardens that supposedly didn't need pruning or watering. Vegie gardens became ''potager'' with purple carrots and red frilly lettuces. You could even grow heritage tomatoes instead of roses. Everyone is now free to have whatever they like in their garden, as long as it's not 100 bundles of back issues of The Canberra Times, six dead cars and a shaggy lawn.

But do you have the courage to create a garden you really love?

My favourite gardens are all ones adored by their owners. One is mostly stones, with a meandering ''creek'' of different coloured rocks and ornamental grasses. Another has possibly 1000 garden gnomes leering out from under the geraniums. There is the garden that is mostly giant mudbrick pizza oven, mudbrick walls topped with tiles to shelter those who'll eat the pizza, and the herbs and vegies that will be used to top the pizzas and a pergola with grape vines to keep off summer sun.

Snow gums and David Austin roses sound like an odd combination, but the result is lovely, as is the garden created by a friend who just wanders through the garden centre every month or so, falls in love with something and plants it, and then remembers to feed and plant it, too. There's no careful design to her garden at all but there is a lot of joy and beauty.

I don't want to live with any of the above gardens, but I rejoice that they exist. Too often garden owners are intimidated into having ''normal'' gardens, i.e. unremarkable to anyone who drives past. But that bit of land is yours.

What do you see, when you close your eyes and think of paradise? A wilderness of roses? A medieval walled garden with herb spirals and espaliered fruit trees? A small Norman tower and a drawbridge instead of a driveway? A sandpit, a kids' climbing wall, 10 fruit trees that can also be climbed by small people and a pond with frogs and tadpoles? Or a garden where you can wander around the apple trees wearing only a fig leaf or less, in which case you need a courtyard or a tall hedge?

Go for it.

It's taken me six decades to realise that I don't want a garden at all, which is possibly why I haven't been able to decide what winter annuals to plant in the front ornamental garden. I do love growing everything I might want to eat that will survive this climate. I love having flowers to pick all year round. I love having space where kids can ride their bikes, roll down a grassy bank and climb a large rock or a tree. But when I gaze outside it's usually not at the roses or camellias, but at the bush beyond. Or at the wallabies eating the roses and sniffing the camellias for the 10,000th time just in case they have turned edible.

A friend once described how at lunch one of Australia's wealthiest women gazed sadly at her immaculately landscaped garden. ''Of course it's beautiful,'' she said ''But I want something I can pick!'' Six months later the iceberg roses and elegant sculptural plants had vanished, and she had fragrant Mr Lincoln roses, raspberries, strawberries, rhubarb and much else that could be harvested as she wandered around her garden with a basket.

A garden you don't love is wasted space. Make it yours, even if you are renting (next week's column will be how to make a rented garden magic). But first of all, shut your eyes and dream of the perfect garden - the one that will be paradise for you.