spring has sprung

As well as flowers busy budding, the dragonflies are back, there are lots of birds and bird sounds, and bees and butterflies. But my photographic skills are not skilful enough to capture these.

garden as architecture

I think it was Aaron Betsky who described architecture as a sequential and spatial experience.

That is how I see garden making. It is very important to grow high things so you can't see the whole garden at once. Winding paths enable changing garden views, as opposed to just looking out of the window.

I, like many gardeners, used to talk about taller plants suitable for the back of the bed and lower growing ones for the front. But of course, where the back is depends on your viewpoint.

book review: Green Pens

Green Pens: A Collection of Garden Writing, compiled and edited by Katie Holmes, Susan K. Martin and Kylie Mirmohamadi. The Miegunyah Press, 2004.

I loved this book. It contains excerpts from Australian gardeners' letters, diaries, books, seed catalogues, magazines - many quaint forms of communication that existed pre- internet. It provides a lens to look at Australian social history since white settlement: the gradual decline of the colonial mentality embodying lack of respect for Australian indigenous plants and the bush, the growth of multiculturalism, the important though under-rated, role of women.

You get a picture of the incomprehension between the indigenous people and the white settlers. Such different ideas about gardening. This was the start of building fences, boundaries, ideas of private ownership - leading to tragedy and displacement for the Australian Aborigines.

Some parts took me back to my own childhood growing up in the fifties in suburban Melbourne. We had a square of lawn, a Hills Hoist, and garden beds around the edges with a lemon tree and some vegetables. The front garden was for show - ornamental shrubs, particularly roses, and the backyard was for practical purposes: for children to play in and hanging out the washing.

if only ...

If only ... I had been able to work out what trees I wanted earlier, then today I would have a good structure of mature trees, instead of areas of potential verticality.



If only ... I had realized that I could control the wisteria growing over the deck by cutting it back hard, and understood that it would always come back strong as ever. I would still have the intoxicating scent and heavy mauve blossoms each spring.


If only ... I had not got rid of the eucalypt nicolii just because it had a tall straight trunk and didn't seem to fit into how I then imagined the garden. I didn't know then that parrots and other birds are attracted to the nectar amidst the safety and comfort of very tall trees.