Christine Ross has seen plenty of seasons in the garden of the house she shares with her husband, David. But she has never seen one like this year's.
"The other day I was so distressed with everything, I thought I'm going to take my cats, my canary, and I'm going to move into a flat," Mrs Ross said with a laugh. "I had had it with the weeds."
The weeds have become the bane of the couple's existence, growing in absolute abundance thanks to the recent rainfall and warm temperatures.
But there has never really been any question that Mr and Mrs Ross would give their gardening up.
Forty-six years ago this week, the couple appeared on the front page of The Canberra Times as the winners of the annual gardeners of the year competition.
Proud as punch in the black-and-white photo, Mr and Mrs Ross stood on the lawn for the Times' photographer, very surprised to have won.
All these years on, the garden is hardly recognisable - and the house barely visible - for the number of plants and trees grown in the decades since.
The prize included a trip for two to London, with $200 spending money from the Canberra Permanent Building Society.
"It was a year soon after they had jumbos, so being a plane enthusiast, it was great. I was travelling on one of the jumbos. Fantastic, I just enjoyed the life out of it," Mr Ross said.
At the Chelsea Flower Show in 1975, Mrs Ross saw her first Japanese maple. And, as Mr Ross said this week, that was it.
"We came back and we were as poor as church mice because we'd spent all our money, had a great time. We went down to Cassidy's Garden Centre, and there was a grafted Japanese maple. I think it was $17 and we didn't have $17 really, but we scraped together enough money to buy our first Japanese maple," Mr Ross said.
That tree is still growing in the couple's garden - and Mrs Ross, who went on to receive her horticultural certificate, would later work at Cassidy's Garden Centre at Jamison across two decades.
Now the garden, which Mrs Ross has directed through many changes and gradual reconfigurations, is home to flowers of all kinds, trees, hanging baskets and more - and a lot less lawn than there used to be.
Mr and Mrs Ross moved into the house in 1968, before the suburb was named and when only two other houses, directly over the road, were completed. They arrived to nothing but a house and a block of surrounding soil.
The pair had met playing tennis in Braddon. When they got engaged, they put their names down for a new government house in the city's growing suburbs.
For Mrs Ross, who grew up gardening with her parents in Sydney, it was a blank canvas. She was excited by the quarter-acre corner block, while Mr Ross was not.
Mrs Ross planted Anemones at the right time in the first year. But they did not flower until summer.
"I put them in upside down. I think they'd gone down to China and come back again," she said.
After that, a backyard crop of Larkspurs had Mrs Ross hooked - and the garden grew from there.
Now Mr and Mrs Ross, contributors to the famed Canberra Gardener guidebook and regular competitors at flower shows, are growing things once thought unimaginable in Canberra: Abutilons, known as Chinese lanterns, and Fuchsias have flowered right through winter, which is not supposed to happen.
Although the Ross' garden now has its own microclimate, the harsh frosts are a thing of the past. The coldest it ever got was minus 12 degrees, they said. It was cold enough to kill a lemon tree.
"They used to say sometimes you can't grow [something] here. I thought, 'Oh right, whatever.' So I'd try, and it would grow," Mrs Ross said.
