Not too long ago, most of Canberra was concrete, bitumen and bare gardens, with a few sticks poking out of clay, shale or building rubble. New houses looked like rows of boxes with glaring tin roofs, separated by even more bitumen and concrete.
The dead-looking sticks grew into gardens - slowly. The gardens tended by those who shared the 1960s-70s passion for "native only" gardens grew gorgeous quickly, then just as quickly became a mess of tangles and dead wood, due to the myth that native gardens need no tending or watering.
True, native plants grow without human intervention in the bush. The less human intervention our native forests get, the better they grow. But in suburban gardens, natives need regular trimming to look neat, and to bloom longer and more luxuriously. They also need tucker to replace the bird, wombat and wallaby droppings they are missing out on in your barkyard, mulch to replace the bark and leaf litter from tall trees above, and a bit of digging now and then to loosen the soil, otherwise done by bandicoots, native mice, echidnas, lyrebirds, antechinus et al.
Native shrubs will bloom will fewer waterings than most introduced species. They'll also die faster, too, on the sensible ecological principal that if you grow in a land with decade-long droughts and frequent bushfires, your best species survival strategy is to bloom flagrantly the year before the drought or fire, set lots of seed, then die. When it finally rains again, your progeny will grow.
Canberra is now beautiful, except for new bits that will be lovely one day, especially if we keep campaigning for more tree plantings, and more green space. Twigs have turned into giant eucalypts. Parks have become mini forests. Older suburbs have magnificent hedges, and are lined with street trees for autumn colour and summer shade. By the time they are 10 years old, most Canberra gardens have at least enough greenery to prevent the street looking like a string of barracks, and some areas of Canberra are so sublime it is worth driving around in spring and autumn just to share their loveliness.
It only needed time.
Time is a gardener's secret weapon. I remember the shock when I met my first camellia tree in a University of Melbourne courtyard. I'd met many camellia bushes by then - my paternal grandmother collected them in the front garden while grandad cosseted his orchids in the backyard shed - but I'd never seen a camellia tree over 100 years old, twice my height and about the same width, with so many blooms you might spend a day counting. It turned a bare courtyard into a "wow", never forgotten.
Forty-five years ago I planted three species of oak on what was then the neighbour's backyard, in memory of an elderly woman I had met once, but with such a powerful connection she left me her books about trees. Those oak trees are now vast, sheltering a trampoline, a hammock, a swing set and still giving enough summer shade to play backyard soccer on a hot day, or the kind of soccer you play when grandma needs a crutch to help kick the ball.
Every day I look out at a green slope that most people - even botanists - assume is virgin bush, but 50 years ago was an orange clay landslide, eroding more each time it rained. I'm writing this on what used to be a two-metre-high blackberry patch.
Year after year we planted, clearing back only as much weedy area as we could plant out, so its new growth smothered the weed regrowth. Every year I have planted trees - including the years I promised "no more trees!" and every year they have grown, till now they are forest-high, and even the longest fruit picker can't reach the tallest bunch of bananas, or the ripest apples or mandarins.
Trees I have planted have died too, the ones which couldn't cope with years of drought, heat, smoke and then three years of wet soil. Dead bits of root began to rot and the trees above slowly turned yellow, then bare. Some have been revived with heavy pruning and masses of bark and lucerne mulch, but their new growth may only be temporary.
Bulbs have multiplied in some areas, and died - or been over-enthusiastically mown - in others spots, at least four asparagus patches have been pulled out by hired weeders, one of whom so devastated my beloved Climbing Albertine, the glory of spring, so we will have no wall of roses falling across the stone bank this year, and I may not live to see it bloom in full three-month magnificence again.
Who was it who said "God gave us memory so we might have roses in winter?" I have four decades of flush after flush of Climbing Albertine to remember now, including the dust storm year when overnight all pink roses and green leaves turned a brighter orange than Trump's tan as the westerlies blew red soil from thousands of kilometres away across our garden and into the Pacific Ocean.
The best gardens need time.
This is the month to plan your "quick" garden for the spring, summer and autumn to come. Will it be petunias again this year, or zinnias, Californian poppies, or elegant all-white statice and cosmos, native everlastings or flaming-red wall flowers, or even a patch of traffic-stopping Giant Russian sunflowers, or their small, multi-branched red and autumn varieties, that bloom for months if well fed and the flowers picked. Sunflowers are like proteas: you don't need skill or lessons in flower arranging. Just pick a bunch, more or less the same length of stem, and bung 'em in a vase tall enough to stop their weight toppling the vase.
It is also the time to make use of all the garden centre and mail order 'specials' as they hurry to make at least enough to cover expenses by selling the leftovers extremely cheaply. Plant them now, and year after year they will double in size exponentially - two will become four, four will become eight; eight will become 16, and by the 10th or 20th year you will have ... lots, because I can't be bothered to do the maths.
But please, this year - and now, while remnant trees in garden centres are cheap - plant at least three trees - ones that will slowly grow enormous, though not near your foundations or sewer pipes. These will be the trees for future generations, that will live 100 years or even 600: olives and English oaks, bunya buts, walnuts, chestnuts, ginkos, river red gums, grapevines or kiwi fruit whose trunks will grow bigger than your wrist, or a whole row of crabapple trees, the kind that give blooms, fruit, and the calls of 100 birds as they guzzle your fruit just before you were about to pick them to make jelly. Birds, fruit bats, possums and sugar gliders have a telepathic sense that tells them the day the humans plan to pick, so they can get in first.
Plant at least one vast tree, too. I love the modern mini magnolia grandiflora that bloom most of summer, it's a neat tree with neat, dinner-plate-size white flowers. But I also know a 150-year-old giant magnolia grandiflora, where a single horizonal branch can be a tree house, another branch holds a swing, and at least four picnics can be held under its branches.
We are the inheritors of generations of gardeners' generosity. Most of us will never live to see the tiny potted plant you put in today cover half a hectare, but others will. Every year, at this time, we have a chance to gift enchantment to the childrens' children of today.
This week I am:
- Thanking Kristy for hacking back the jungle of blue salvia, taller than I am, so we can now see down the garden again and don't need a brushook to make our way down to the vegie garden to pick a bunch of parsley.
- Almost wishing I didn't live in a valley of ardent fruit growers where it is impossible to give away Tahitian limes, chokos or grapefruit, as everyone is trying to give you theirs.
- Managing to give away bok choi. Why did I plant a dozen when we eat maybe two a week?
- Hoping this will be one of the "just right" years when the apricots bloom, set fruit, and the crop actually ripens in to a flavour and texture more delectable than anyone who has only eaten a supermarket or bottled apricot can imagine. You can smell truly ripe apricots 500 metres away.
- Bee watching. We had a population crash from a combination of drought, two wet summers, plus an invasion of European wasps. Three years of wasp traps and wasp queen poisoning have made an enormous difference, and once more it's difficult to pick a bunch of camellias without 50 bees strongly protesting as I harvest "their" crop. I planted these bushes, girls, and watered and even sometimes fed them. I am entitled to a share of the flowers too.
- Marking off what will go in the vegie garden nearest the kitchen: curly and continental parsley, basil, spring onions, celery that I mostly keep short and use the tender leaves, lettuce, and zucchini so I don't forget to pick them (but I still will forget to pick them) - everything a cook may need in an emergency, with aloe vera for the burns when I forget to use an oven mitt. Corn, beans, tomatoes, raspberries etc - the "big harvest" crops - can be planted further away.
