by Liza - Liberty Co-op member
My grandmother seemed fonder of her garden than she was of her family. Visits to her involved a mandatory walk around her garden, and this was when the tightness, the dissatisfaction, the permanent sense of disgruntlement and irritation with life she carried in her slid away – in her garden, talking about her plants, showing off the hanging baskets of pink and white fuchsias or clusters of purple-faced pansies, she seemed relaxed; a softer person.
When I moved into my first co-op house 17 years ago and felt securely housed for the first time in my adult life, I developed a strong interest in what was growing in my backyard. The previous tenant, I’d heard, had been a ferociously keen gardener, and when she was dying, our co-op paid for someone to maintain her precious garden. By living there, I inherited something akin to a duty-of-care to her garden. Although I’d never met her, when I moved into the house several months after her death, her presence was strong. I thought about her while I weeded around the plants she’d cultivated. From weeding, I began to plant, beginning my now ingrained habit of taking cuttings from nearly every bush hanging over people’s front fences or in their nature strips as I wander around my suburb.
I left that house several years ago. It was sold and the new owners ripped out my Yucca tree, my two avocados, my Hebe bushes, my Feijoa (which had never really thrived, but it was a gift from a New Zealand friend so had sentimental value), cut down the Wattle tree and planted a narrow lawn out the front. I still feel a small pang when I walk past that house, but mostly I wish I’d dug up all the plants and taken them with me.
The house I live in now is becoming something of a rarity in the inner north: a full suburban block with established trees, mostly old fruit trees too ancient to fruit, although, as they’ve scarcely been pruned for thirty years, that mightn’t be a fair comment. There’s an old apple tree whose canopy provides lovely shade in summer. One year it produced hundreds of little apples about the size of golf balls. They were too bitter for eating and made a rotting mess under the tree. The following year the tree produced only five massive apples, bigger than cricket balls; still too bitter for eating. There’s an olive tree which fruits prolifically; late last summer a couple with an Italian mother-in-law came by and collected bags of them, and a while later they left a jar of my olives, pickled, on my doorstep.
The previous tenant, I think, must have put the back yard out of her mind; just looked away and pretended it wasn’t there. I can understand why. When I arrived, it was feral: decades of invasive kikuyu growth was knotted, layered and tangled wide and deep, creating a thick, unyielding mat of grass, roots, vines, branches, bricks and rocks, growing nearly all the way up to the deck at the back of the house – impossible to mow and impossible to clear, unless you were going to knock down the trees and come at the entire backyard with a digger. And the ground is uneven and sloping so still hard to mow, even if it were covered with a mild-mannered species of grass. A nectarine tree down the back has struggled its way to sunlight – one summer it fruited; I could see the nectarines, but because the tree was enclosed in a metre-wide cage of grass and vines, I couldn’t get at them and they all went to the possums.
This has all changed. I realised a while ago that there was little point to my continued attempts to maintain the yard or manage the grass – the grass had to go, for good. First, I had to get it to back to a reasonable height before I could do anything at all, so I cut layers off the top with a whipper-snipper. There was an old lavender bush and a few other plants so strangled by kikuyu I had to pull them out. I set about slowly covering the grass – smothering it to death with layers and layers and layers of cardboard. When the grass grows back, I cover it again, applying sawdust, old leaves and pruning to form mulch over the cardboard. Eventually, this works. I’ve uncovered a bed of bulbs that bloom with a brilliant deep red flower in spring, and found young nectarine and tiny olive trees, obviously self-seeded.
It’s almost finished, the Great Grass Smothering. While I’ve been working in the garden – making sure, while I’m killing off the grass, I create and destroy equally, by potting cuttings of all varieties of geraniums, and succulents with names like blue chalk sticks and jelly beans, and making beds for potatoes, parsley, coriander and masses of yellow flowering rocket out of pallets, old drawers, a queen bed base and a repurposed filing cabinet – I feel lucky to have a chunk of land to cultivate.
I think a lot while I’m working, and I, too, soften; mad old memories lose their potency and grievances float away. I can turn a bad mood around by simply wandering the back yard. I understand how my grandmother felt secure in her garden in a way she did not in the company of other people.
I’ve dealt with the impact on me of this weird period the world is going through in the same way so many others have, by gardening: it’s one of the most restorative, relaxing and healing thing you can do. Gardening brings you back to yourself, but gently.