Garden Post 2#

I don't count the work I did with my mum on the Army Camp house as my garden. So, my first garden was a modest affair around the garden tap in the Moorebank house. I was in my cacti and succulent phase then. I made a border out of sandstone bits (not the blocks, the stone shaped bits) scoured from bush nearby, and painstakingly crushed a heap of house bricks to make the pebble effect - I was doing this on the cheap. I bought half a dozen or so succulents from a nursery and relatives and friends of my parents gave me some cuttings. I was taken by the variety of shapes of the succulents mainly, and also by their flowers.

I did a similar garden when the family moved to the Campbelltown house, but I was less interested in maintaining it as I didn't live there at the time - I was at university and beginning my transient student housing days. Most of the student houses I shared with others wouldn't support a garden, their yards often being concrete or brick paved. The one house where we did have a garden was in Short Street, Balmain, where a pumpkin, some tomatoes and a herb or two struggled on for the 3 months we were there. That was the other factor limiting student gardening days, you were likely to be on short leases and starting gardens seemed pointless. Pot plants on the other hand were transportable and at various times I moved along with palms, ribbon grasses, ferns (frequently short lived), ivy geraniums (which mum had got me started on back in the Moorebank house) and creepers of various kinds. In summer there would be a pot of two of annuals, often petunias and sometimes marigolds. African violets were often occupants of bathrooms.

Muswellbrook, further up the Hunter Valley to Singleton, was where I had my first job, and I ended up living in an abandoned weatherboard and timber floored farmhouse with a yard of wild grasses and a huge water tank (our only drinking water and also the water that was pumped through the wood chip stove for washing). It had a verandah on which potted plants from the last of the student houses took up rural life, and the first of my herb pots, those tallish jar shaped terracotta planters with little open pockets on the sides into which to plant cascading herbs like thyme and oregano. I hadn't the energy to think about breaking up and building up the soil in the yard for vegetables.

Here I have to recount the death of my first and second dogs. Jenny was the first, a lovely Labrador cross retriever who came to us in the Moorebank house and was always considered my dog. She lived with my parents at Campbelltown during my student days and came up with me to Muswellbrook where she had the run of the farm and the surrounding fields. Unfortunately it was the latter that I should have thought more about. She and her playmate Carla, a gorgeous Afghan belonging to Phil who was sharing the house with me at the time, went out one morning while we were out and Carla was the only one who returned. Jenny was either bitten be a snake or perhaps shot by a farmer when she got too eager about playing with the cattle as she was wont to do. The second dog was Bluey, a predictable name for a blue cattle dog, who I found dead in the yard one afternoon having scoffed down much of a packet of snail bait I had been using on the herbs.

Muswellbrook was an 18 months stay and then it was back into the city and houses without yards suitable for gardens. So the pot plants and herbs came down with me from the country to begin the next round of short term accommodation. The herbs dropped out of the scene along the way and the pot plants became my constant green companions. There was the house in Leichhardt where a vague attempt at a garden was tried, dominated by a zucchini of considerable authority, but mostly it was palms, ferns and philodendrons again. I am happy to say I spurned the ubiquitous rubber tree, and sad to say I nurtured a lovely fiddle leaf fig for some time before it decided life in a pot was not for it. Another attempt at a garden was begun in Louisa Rd, Birchgrove, remembered mostly for luckily not eating the leaves of what John had thought was borage but which was in fact a foxglove. We left the house before the garden got established enough to give much pleasure.