The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is wander out the back to say hello to everybody. By ‘everybody’, I mean all the plants and trees growing there. It’s the best way to start the day. My backyard is overgrown with rocket at present, which means many bees. The sunflowers have begun to bloom and open up. The bees love them.
The sunflower is the national flower of the Ukraine, oddly; not a place you associate with sunny weather. Once you’ve removed the seeds, you can use the head of a sunflower to exfoliate yourself, apparently, which you can imagine people might do in the Ukraine, perhaps after a swim in an icy river.
There used to be these tallish plants in my garden with blue flowers coming up everywhere but since I smothered¬ all the long feral grass, they’ve disappeared. I think they were cornflowers.
Everyone’s obsessively gardening now; someone in my Good Karma network is starting up a neighbourhood seedling exchange. I’m excited. I want everything that flowers. So far, I’ve scored four trees from local Good Karma networks – a cumquat, two as yet unidentified citruses and a silvery-leaved native shrub I’ve forgotten the name of, begins with ‘a’. The world’s gone mad for red geraniums lately but I’m loving the Schiaparelli pink ones. Geraniums are nearly the perfect plants: they look fabulous, are easy to cultivate and have such a good perfume. Besides plants I’ve picked up pots and buckets and hanging baskets, and the odd bag of soil, pretty much everything I need for the backyard.
I take it personally when a plant doesn’t thrive, not so much if it’s something I’ve tried to grow from a cutting ‘cos that’s always touch and go, but seedlings and things I’ve transplanted – if they shrivel and die, I feel like I’ve failed them and wonder where I went wrong. Love ain’t enough. I used to be casual about whether or not a plant survived but not these days. It’s especially gratifying when I find a plant that’s been left for dead on the side of the road and I bring it home and manage to resuscitate it. I did that with a salvia type plant and it’s lushly green and healthy now.
There’s so much to learn about different plants, what soil they like, how much sun and water they need. It’s important to be able to ID them and find these things out, but the process of trial and error is also satisfying. Someone recently described gardening as ‘cathartic’ – a term meaning psychological relief through the expression of strong emotions. They meant ‘healing’, I think, whereas for many people the cathartic effect from gardening ¬must come from freely expressing gentle emotions, caring and nurturing, without any fear of being exploited. And the getting of tangible results. Gardening involves the experience of simple pleasures. One of life’s real summertime joys is picking a tomato straight from the vine then a handful of basil leaves and, if the tomato isn’t too big, shoving the lot in your mouth. You want to feel the tomato bursting wetly between your teeth, taste the sweet pungency of the basil. My grandmother grew tomatoes; for lunch on Sundays in summer¬ we’d have tomato sandwiches made with fat slices of fresh white bread, New Zealand butter, and white pepper.
Right now, I’m trying to grow ivies indoors. Apart from the lack of drainage, light fittings on long chains make gorgeous indoor hanging planters. You need to plant things in them that don’t mind wet feet or alternatively don’t mind dry soil. I picked up two hanging lamp shades from hard rubbish last year and I’m cramming as many different plant cuttings into each one as I can – an experiment to see what will grow inside and what won’t.
A maiden hair fern in a pot in the bathroom doesn’t seem to be growing but it isn’t dying either, so I’m hopeful. There’s a wee orchidy thing in there, another rescue plant, a little palm type plant and one of those things that looks like Devils Ivy but isn’t. They all seem happy.
By Liza Dezfouli, Liberty CERC