My dream to start a garden from scratch may not come about. But no matter what I will always be a gardener, always was. So maybe I just write up some garden stories this year.

My Gardens

February

Gardening was always a pleasure for me, from childhood on. As far as I can remember I loved flowers and as a little kid I picked flowers, even from other people’s garden fence. I still do that sometimes. Sorry! Of course pinching flowers does not make one a gardener, but it might be the beginning of wanting to grow your own flowers, to start a garden. 

One day playing in our street I found at the kerb of the footpath a big bulb with some green shoots poking out. I picked it up. I felt sorry for the plant to be lost. I asked my mother if I could put it in our little plot, and she said yes. My bulb grew into a most beautiful lily.  And what was so special was that my plant started flowering on my sister’s birthday. So I picked the flower and had a very special gift. I was 7 years old then. And this is how my flower looked:  

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 March  

After this success I wanted more.

I asked my mum to let me have a little of our garden, just a square meter or so all to myself. Anyway I did work a lot in our garden together with my sister, weeding the vegetable beds. So why not let me have a little patch just to myself? But Mama said the authorities would not like that. During the war some parks and green spaces around apartment blocks were turned into gardens and each family was allocated an area according to the size of the family. Seeds and seedlings were supplied too. 

There was still a long narrow stretch of wild roses standing in our courtyard. I had my eye on that now. I asked Mama to give me some seedlings but got the same kind of answer. So I bargained: „How many seedlings in each packet“? „ Ten“. I opened a little bundle of lettuce seedling. Eleven in it! Mama laughed shaking her head and said: „You win! You can have the extra one“. I checked the other and in the end I had three little plants. The rose bed was so shady and overgrown with weed. I worked hard and planted my three seedlings. I also collected some stones and put a little fence around it. I watered my garden every day after school. Not one blade of weed grew there. And one fine day one of the lettuce had grown big enough to be harvested. I took it home, showed it to every one and said proudly: „The first bite must be mine, the other half we can use in a salad tonight“. I bit into the lettuce and somehow it did not taste quite right. Mama and my sister laughed  and laughed. They saw half a slug in the half-lettuce. I just finished swallowing the bit of lettuce and said what my big brother often had said: „What is worse than seeing a grub - hm  a slug in your apple - lettuce? Half a grub - slug!“ And I tried to laugh too. 

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 April  

After the war it was even more important to have a bit of land and plant some veggies.  The garden we had in the big courtyard between the apartment buildings were of no use anymore, they were covered with rubble from the destroyed houses. We were allocated further away a larger patch on what once used to be a sports field. We had to get rid of the grass, turn the soil, make beds and planted maize-corn and sunflowers. That was all the seeds we could get. The summer days were long and we, my mother, my sister and me worked hard. We weeded and watered, carrying the water in buckets from a tap a fair way away. We watched the plants grow. The sunflowers grew fast and their big flowerhead were so beautiful. Then the first few corncobs appeared. It did not take long and quite a lot ripened and we could harvest the first crop. Nothing tastes as nice as fresh corncobs, just as they are. What a delight to eat and not being told „no more, thats is all you can have now!“ That lovely taste stayed with me for ever, and I still long for fresh, not yet yellow corncobs uncooked. Must plant maize in my daughter's garden. 

But the joy did not last. A few days later when we returned to our garden, all the corn had been taken, ripped off and most plants trampled down. Even most of the sunflowers were beheaded. The three of us sat down and tears rolled down our cheeks. We picked up a few forlorn, pitiful corncobs and some small broken sunflowers and went home, never to return to our garden.

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 May

A few years later we moved to a larger apartment. It was on the ground floor and had a backyard attached, a real garden with lots of fruit trees. We could eat as many cherries, apples, plumbs, gooseberries, red currents as we liked. And we had a beautiful white rose bush too. We tried to put in some veggie beds, but it did not work. The few chucks we had were convinced that everything green coming out of the ground  was meant for them. So no gardening here. 

But I must admit I did a nasty trick pretending to teach my little brother the benefit of gardening. It was the day of new ration cards and our mum always gave us kids then a little treat, usually a spoon of sugar each in a cup. My little brother said that sugar grains look a bit like seeds. I said: „ Don’t you know? They are sugar seeds“.  „Well,“ he said, „ I would get lots more sugar if I sow my sugar, wouldn’t I? Maybe four times as much? How long would it take till one can harvest the sugar?“  I suggested he should sow only half of his lot and enjoy a bit now. And he did. When our mother heard later about this she got cross with me and gave our little brother two extra spoons of sugar.

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June

For all my teenage years I did not do any gardening. There was not much opportunity. But most of all I was just too busy with myself. 

When I got married the two of us moved into a small one bedroom flat. One day I saw an advertisement for an mail-order of spring flower bulbs from Holland. And suddenly I had the urge to plant some flowers.When my order arrived I put the bulbs into pots and checked every day on them. Finally some shoots appeared. The progress was amazing. When the first flowers came out I was overjoyed. The four pots of tulips, snowbells, hyacinth and daffodils looked absolutely great inside on our windowsill.
From now on I always kept some flower pots. It is somewhat special to watch the flowers grow, rather more enjoyable than just looking at their beauty in a vase.  

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July 

When we migrated from Berlin to Australia and had bought our first own home I had a garden all of my own. Now real gardening started. And I loved it. I neglected some times other work just to be in the garden. Of course that garden was well established, but it was very overgrown. After mowing the grass back to a lawn I started clearing under the bushes. And there I discovered hidden among weeds a beautiful orchid. A real  tropical orchard in my  garden!  

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August 

We lived for three years in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. There we had a garden too. We, that is Jacob and me. Jacob was a young man from a village who wanted to earn some money to support his family. We did not want a „hausboi“. The newly built houses in the newly established street were surrounded by bulldozed land. A gardener was needed, and Jacob turned out to be the best gardener one could wish for. Soon our block had the garden with the most flowers, the best lawn, and we even got a little roundhouse. We did not grow veggies because you had to buy vegetables from the local market on Saturdays, another source of income for the villagers. 

Our little house stood on a slope. With the frequent heavy rain I thought it would be best to put in some terraced beds. But Jacob wanted to put in vertical rows. With my limited Pidgin and Jacob’s almost non existing English our discussion did not go far. But somehow we managed to agree to a compromise - or shall I say competition. I planted flowers in a few horizontal beds and Jacob in a few sloping rows between vertical furrows. And who's flowers got completely washed away with the next heavy downpour? Mine! Jacob’s flowers stood straight and were a joy to look at. 
Taught me a lesson about local wisdom and textbook knowledge.

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September

When we returned from Goroka to Sydney we bought a big old house. It had a backyard but no garden. The house had been subdivided and used as a rental property for decades. The backyard was small, less than 60 sqm of trampled down grass and a huge rotary washing line was its centre piece.

We remodelled the house into a beautiful comfortable family home and the garden became over the years a miniature park, an oasis for the birds and retreat for us. 

The hills hoist had to go to make room for planting a lemon tree, a pine tree which was once a potted Christmas tree, four gumtrees, a birch tree, a flowering peach tree, two fern trees, a tamarillo tree, and we dug up a banana sucker from a friend’s garden which turned into a big clump, bearing lots of bananas. We also put in a very small cascading fountain. And there was still room for a bit of lawn to have a little garden table to enjoy a cup of tea or a glass of wine and listen to the birds. I love the magpies’ beautiful songs. This garden gave me great pleasure. I watched it grow for 21 years. 

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October

At the beginning of our retirement we volunteered to work in the Solomon Islands. We were allocated a little two bedroom cottage. Trees and shrubs grew all around, right up to the doorsteps. Nobody had lived in this little house for years. Everything was overgrown.  All looked so lush and green. Well, here I could get into serious gardening. I started straight away to cut away the tall grass and pulled out the weeds that had choked everything. I did it all by hand and on my knees. I discover lots of most beautiful tropical flowers hidden underneath. Once freed the flowers grew so fast, as is possible only in the tropics. Never did I have such success. But then very early next Sunday morning I heard soft voices in my new garden. There were some girls from the school picking my flowers. I got up wanting to stop them, but then I thought better and let it be. I did not want to start an argument. Everyone went to church on Sundays and so did we. The altar was adorned so beautifully, better than ever. 
And all my flowers were there.

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November

Back in Sydney we  decided to get out of the city and live in a quieter place. 

We moved into a big house in the Blue Mountains, not far from the National Park. The place was surrounded by bushland. Tall gum trees and native shrubs all around. There were so many birds: kookaburras, rosellas, white cockatoos, black cockatoos, king parrots, galahs, lorikeets and bowerbirds. Even wallabies hopped through our property. 

There was not much gardening to do because I decided to leave the beautiful bush as it was. I loved walking under the eucalypts and  among shrubs. Something was always flowering, small, delicate  blossoms all year around. Even just a few branches of gum leaves put in a vase made the room look so beautiful. 

One year the bushfire came right up to our place. The firies saved our house. But the bush was burnt to the ground and the big trees were singed. Still it all had a strange beauty. 

It was amazing to observe how quickly new shoots came up through the ashes and how the eucalypts got new leaves growing straight from the main branches. They looked like feather dusters. 

Black, grey and green is a great colour combination.

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December

When we moved again, it was to an old house with a very well established large garden. Still, it is always possible to do more planting. And that changes the character of the place. Sadly we had to remove an old willow tree, it had damaged the sewer pipes. But I planted lots of trees: 4 eucalypts, a wattle, a birch tree, a lemon tree, an apple, a pear, a plumb, an apricot and a cherie tree. The pear tree was the only one which did not do well. There was already a fruit bearing plumb tree and a lager passionfruit wine. A peach tree just appeared within a year, self seeded. And that tree produced after a couple of years the best peaches and buckets full. 

I put a pond in, shaded by 2 large fern tree. That was  ideal for 8 happy goldfish. Along the drive of the old house were 6 great Queen Elizabeth roses with the most fantastic perfume. I planted a warratah and some proteas, they grew so tall and had lots of beautiful flowers. I had flowers for my vase all year around. Everything grew so very well in this garden. Best of all grew the jasmine and after a few years it took over. It felt like being in the castle of ‚Sleeping Beauty‘. It was a big job to keep the jasmine in check.

This garden was for 10 years a great joy and gardening was a rewarding pleasure.

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Eventually we sold the old house with my beautiful garden. We now live in a very small flat. And the balcony is very small too. There was not even room for some plant boxes. But I managed to put a flower pot there in a corner, actually three pots stacked on top of one another. In my terraced little garden lots of herbs grow and on top I always plant a flower.  

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