I last had clean finger nails when I was four years old, before I decided to dig up the bare dirt under the mango tree and serve the little boy next door a delicious bowl of soil, complete with salt and pepper. My hands have been ingrained with grime ever since, despite scrubbing. I occasionally have aphids in my hair, wombat dung on my shoes, and bits of mulching straw stuck to the back of my dress which someone usually tactfully removes when I stand up to give a speech.
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My days in the garden do not end with my radiantly tripping through the house extolling the beauties of nature, bringing rose petals and heritage carrots, but collapsing dustily on the sofa muttering, "I'm bushed. It's leftovers for dinner tonight."
There are many reasons to garden. Which kind of gardener are you?
1. The practical "I can save us at least $5000 per annum" which can be spent on a family holiday/a deposit on a house in a decade or two ... or a heck of a lot of daffodils?
2. The smug '"nice" type who ensures they have a better display of roses and more dead snails than anyone in the district?
3. The defender from the apocalypse - come the (insert favourite doom scenario here) our household will still be eating chokos, rhubarb, warrigal spinach, bunya nut bread, potato pancakes and defending the goat on the nature strip from marauders?
4. An "I just love the birds" gardener ... plus butterflies, native bees, wombats, lizards, and yes, even the possums who slide down your bedroom room shrieking at 2am?
5. You love fresh food and the kind of apples/apricots almost impossible to purchase without access to a well-stocked farmer's market, and so, sensibly, grow you own?
6. The exterior decoration gardener. Someone other than you does your housework, your ironing and your gardening, and all look appropriately neat and starched. So does your cat.
7. An "I'm looking for the Garden of Eden" type of gardener, "and maybe if I plant another 20 apple trees and 500 freesias I will attain it" personage?
8. The "Peel me a grape, darling, while I smell the roses as I recline on our comfortable garden chaise lounge" kind of gardener?
9. An "I just love growing things and watching them grow?" gardening species, the kind who fantasises that aliens carry her and a team of robots and a small botanic garden to a planet ripe for planting?
10. The "I fell in love with a camellia in full bloom a few years ago and now and then add another plant or six and now it seems I have a garden without quite intending to, and sometimes I even feed, prune, weed and water it" gardener?
You may choose more than one answer. I marked eight out of ten. I won't confess which they are, but if you read this column regularly you can probably guess. You can probably have a pretty good stab at it anyway.
There are, in fact, many other reasons to garden, though they are rarely the ones that get people out the door, trowel in one hand, packet of seeds/ potted rose/ new spark plugs for the lawn mower in the other.
Gardening brings fitness with no gym membership fees. Gardening breeds tolerance - hopefully, eventually - for the creatures that share not just your garden but your rose buds and peach blossom, and eventually humanity.
Gardening is also healing, in a way that is deep and profound. Hildegard of Bingen, the famous religious mystic and medieval doctor, coined the word viriditas, or "greening" - healing humans with the same force that gave growth to trees. She believed a physician should be a gardener, providing beauty, serenity and that "green life force", not a mechanic imposing their remedies on the patient.
Until relatively recently fresh air and walks or just sitting among trees in the nature was prescribed as the best cure for illnesses like tuberculosis, and desirable for convalescence from any serious ailment. Pretty often it worked, though antibiotics work faster. The hospitals of my youth had wide verandas. Most had gardens, and the large ones that didn't made some attempt at a courtyard or roof garden with potted plants where patients could sit.
Even the inner-city hospital where I had my tonsils out as a child had trees planted in the metre or so between hospital and footpath, so that our ward windows looked out at trees. Volunteers took patients out in wheelchairs to nearby parks, or even, in one case, to an old cemetery, believing that the flowers and trees growing there outweighed any depressing effect from the gravestones, even if they didn't consciously accept Hildegard's concept of a life force shared with trees.
Hildegard of Bingen's practice, if not theory, has been vindicated by many studies. People recover faster if they can see and smell greenery and the natural world, not blank walls and air-conditioning, and if they feel surrounded by kindness. Gardens are possibly the kindest places created by humanity, beauty that is shared not just by the owner, but for all who see it or may sit there, or even jut pass by in a car.
Humans evolved with other living species around us. Most of us are happier when greenery and animals are part of our lives - even if we haven't realised it yet. And that - with the eight other reasons above, is why I garden.
This week I am:
- Picking Golden Rod, which normally bloom when about two metres high because I don't prune it in December, which is what it needs to stay manageable. This summer the Golden Rod plants actually did get hacked down. They are now shoulder height and are rewarding us with spire after spire of gold in the vases.
- Wondering when it will be "winter" enough to begin picking the winter lettuces, which will sit in the soil without going to seed till the weather warms in spring. There are a few lettuces that look especially luscious, and so may not last till June.
- Possibly - once again - actually planting the rest of the garlic, as well as onion seeds.
- Ordering more varieties of wild thyme, which are so wonderful and so varied that I'll write about them next week. Thyme is both amorous and seductive, which means enormous cross pollination and a proliferation of varieties.
- Leaving all the runner beans to dry on their trellis, so we have seed to plant next year, and fresh dried beans to simmer in winter soups. The older dried beans grow, the more bullet-like they get. Fresh is best. Also we are sick of eating runner beans.
- Watching the eastern spinebill frolic in the blue sage outside my study window. They are breeding up after the bushfires and I am endlessly glad the sage is there for them all to feast on.
Jackie French
Jackie French is an Australian author, historian, ecologist and honourary wombat (part time), 2014-2015 Australian Children' Laureate and 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. She also writes a gardening column for The Canberra Times.
Jackie French is an Australian author, historian, ecologist and honourary wombat (part time), 2014-2015 Australian Children' Laureate and 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. She also writes a gardening column for The Canberra Times.
