I am going to claim my father as the first person ever to grow karawilla/bitter gourd, and vatakolu/ridge gourd in Australia. This was in 1966 at the Married Quarters on the Singleton Army Camp in Singleton, Hunter Valley, New South Wales. I freely admit that he grew them from seeds smuggled in by his cousin, as were several varieties of dried chili and a quantity of spices. It was understood that when family migrated to Australia from Sri Lanka they would bring the curry wherewithals that were unobtainable in Australia at the time, packed in a suitcase, and would produce them thrillingly on the first visit to the earlier emigres at which time they would promptly be used to make a 'real'Sri Lankan curry. The karawilla and vatakolu were grown in the backyard, fertilised with chook poo and cow manure (the former from our neighbour,the latter collected by dad and I in the paddocks of the Army Camp which were hired out for agistment of surrounding farmers' cattle.In that garden were also some chili plants, brinjal/aubergine, beans and tomatoes.
This wasn't his first garden. That was also in Singleton but in the house we lived at in town in Buchan Avenue. The house is still there but there is no trace of dad's garden. The yard seemed vast to me, 11 years old at the time, dominated by a wooden set of swings at the bottom of the sloping drive (into which I crashed the first time ever I rode a bike - my brothers urged me to get onto it at the top of the drive and 'just pedal', which I did, careening down the drive and having no idea how to use the back-pedal brake and being too scared to turn the handlebars - both bike and rider survived and true to the old saying I got up and onto the bike straight away and was riding reasonable confidently by the end of the day). Dad dug the lawn up behind the swings to create two long and wide beds which he built up with copious quantities of soil and manure. This garden, from memory, grew tomatoes, lettuces, beans, pumpkin and watermelon from seeds bought I think from the Farmers' Coop in town.
The second garden, at the Army Camp, was smaller, the yard being limited and dominated by a rotary Hills Hoist. He didn't get long to enjoy the garden as he was posted back to Sydney in early 1967, leaving behind a last vatakolu that he was particularly proud of. Vatakolu have a natural tendency to curl in on themselves and growers tie little stones to the tip of the gourd facing downwards to keep them growing straight. This particular one had grown to quite some length but was not ready to be picked. Some months later, dad opened the door of our new home in Moorebank, Sydney, to find a very nervous NCO holding tenderly a metre long vatakolu. He had been instructed to bring this to dad with all care, and the poor bugger had had a stressful drive down along the then gravel and twisting Putty Road, having been warned that should it break he was bound to get hell from the Major.
The Moorebank house also had a big yard and dad set about making vegetable beds here too. He grew eggplant, tomatoes, capsicum, beans, pumpkin, but sadly no karawilla or vatakolu. It was also the last vegetable garden he maintained, the next houses we moved to having little space for them, and by then the labour of creating and maintaining them also was probably getting a little daunting.
It was mum who grew the flowers. The first of her gardens I remember was in the house of my birth in Fort Street in Colombo, the main flower here I remember being zinnias, starting a love affair with them that I still have, though I don't grow them. The next garden I remember more vividly in the last house we lived in before we left Sri Lanka, in Tourner Road, Borella. The house belonged to her uncle and we rented it. In the backyard (a narrow strip of dirt and gravel) there was a king coconut tree, short enough and with enough of a curve for us boys to climb and bring down a coconut or two in season (and to use as a ladder to get onto the parapet wall between us and the tenements behind and play trains on it, treading carefully between the broken glass our uncle had embedded in the cement capping to prevent people from the tenements climbing into our yard - we were roundly yelled at when he caught us at this one day as by then we had pretty well knocked off every piece of glass), also a lime tree (of which in a moment of whimsy dad once cut of a branch, stripped it, painted it black, stuck it in a jar of sand covered in crepe paper, stuck balls of white cotton wool on the branches and created that year's Christmas tree), and a letukocha tree whose leaves were used to shred and feed the chooks we raised in what amounted to a chook folly built by NCOs working under dad in the Ceylon Army, a two story affair of solid timber and wire mesh. At least one year I recall we also grew manioc in the backyard.
The side passage of the house and the narrow front garden were mum's domain where she planted some dozens of types of hibiscus ( I recall going with her to nurseries to find new varieties) and the inevitable crotons. There was a low hedge between this garden (more a patch of dirt with a sorry excuse for a lawn) and the gravel road in front, the leaves of which I used to love to chew, an acrid and somewhat tanniny, like ti tree leaves (Leptospermum) and which I also used in my first attempts at cooking in a brew I fancied as tea. There was also a bower over which grew a white and pale gold honey suckle whose flowers I plucked to suck the nectar out of the thin funnel where they joined the calyx. There were also balsams of three or four shades of pink and mauve whose seed cases I loved popping.
The Tourner Road house I also remember for the enourmous tamarind tree in a neighbour's yard whose fruit we used to eat green or collect and take to swap for acharu from the woman at the top of the street; for the billing tree in another neighbour's yard whose sour fruit (quite the sourest I've ever eaten) I used to pick and scarf down, leading to more than one upset tum; and a huge hedge of red hibiscus where our gravel lane met the main part of Tourneur Road, whose flowers we used to pick and make shoeflower tea, steeping the flowers in hot water till they turned a pale lavender, removing them and adding milk and sugar to the infused water.
I think I recall mum growing gladioli and jonquils in the house in Willoughby, Sydney, our second house in Australia, the first having been a cottage on an orange and apple orchard at Arcadia run by the Sacred Heart Fathers, and whose main floral feature was a front bed of small red roses (which in my typical way I took to eating the petals of, a habit I still indulge in) I am pretty sure she continued the gladioli along the front fence of the house in Buchan Avenue, and then I recall quite strongly the front garden in the Army Camp in which zinnias, cockscomb, jonquils, balsams and, yes, gladioli featured.
This may also have been the first garden where geraniums appeared. They were to be the main feature of the front and side gardens in Moorebank, with mum collecting colours and leave shapes here as avidly as she had hibiscuses in Sri Lanka. Her favourite and mine was a pelargonium called fifth Avenue which was a deep red almost into black.
And it was in the Moorebank house that I began my gardening career.
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