Both my grandmothers were enthusiastic gardeners - in a very ladylike way. Ladies' gardening involved gardening gloves, the kind that protect your hands from prickles rather than the stiff-with-mud kind hanging from the back of the seat outside our front door. Sometimes an apron was involved too, to protect the respectable dresses from drips of sap, with a useful pocket for the secateurs.
The secateurs were a vital tool for ladylike gardening. Ladies wandered the garden each morning, preferably when the dew still glistened on the flowers, to pick the day's decorations for indoors: roses, camellias, daffodils, a small bunch of daphne for the kitchen table, or a careful mix of colours of more exotic blooms like orchids or gardenias and of course roses, roses, roses for the dining table.
"Floral arranging" was in the school syllabus under "home management" even when I was at school - a state school, not one for the privileged upper classes. Back then in the middle of a Brisbane summer there were few of the blooms in the English-based text book we worked from, so "arranging" usually meant looking at pictures of flowers we were unlikely ever to plant, much less plonk into vases. We also learned useful tips like "cream bottles can make suitable vases early in your married life" and "snip the ends off flower stems every morning so they last longer in the vase".
Ladies' secateurs might also be used for daily light pruning, snipping off past-their-prime flowers so the garden stayed immaculate and the bushes put out more blooms, or cutting off the wayward tips of hedges and topiary to keep them in shape.
Ladies might also pick the herbs for dinner, though back in the 50s and 60s the herbs were likely to be nothing more than mint for the fruit salad or fruit cup, or mint sauce for the lamb; rosemary to flavour the roast lamb dripping - though not if you were going to use it to make the pastry for an apple pie - and thyme and sage to stick up the rear end of a chook with breadcrumbs, and onion and lemon juice before the chook was roasted.
Ladies carried wicker baskets for lemons, apples, plums and other fruit, or vegetables like cauliflowers whose harvest didn't require digging and dirt. The spud crop was a male affair, as was the ritual placing of the pumpkins on the roof for the skins to harden for winter storage.
Many of my most loved memories of my grandmothers are set in their gardens: Jannie dressed in well-starched cotton, and the lipstick and pearls without which she would have felt severely underdressed when exposed to the public in the front yard. Grandma is in lace-up brown shoes with Cuban heels, stockings, a tweedy skirt and twin set - a thin woollen jumper with an equally thin cardigan of the same material. Hers would be adorned with a brooch. Real ladies wore brooches, even in the garden, and a sun hat, except in the early morning or dusk.
Jannie would be reciting poetry, especially that of Robbie Burns or Kath Walker, while she showed me the finer points of camellia breeding. Grandma and I would sit on the vast rock ledge above Sydney harbour and watch the ships or the way the light glinted on the water, careful not to move too suddenly in case we startled the red bellied black snake who shared the garden.
Ladies also designed gardens, perusing catalogues to buy 100 agapanthus in blue and white, or 12 matching pink camellias, or a weeping rose for the central flower bed in the driveway, or the seeds for the obligatory "along the front fence" flower bed. A naked front fence was even more an affront to the decency of the street that a nude family inside.
Ladies also instructed "the garden man". The man might be hired, usually cheaply. Many were on a pension from injuries in one of the world wars. I remember the one-armed gardener clearly - he even managed the push the lawn mower with ease.
While ladies might also hold the hose over the flower bed at dusk, my mother - like cleaning the bathroom floor or washing quilts - never learned that pixies didn't sneak out at night to water the garden when it failed to rain.
It was also the ladies' job to provide cold drinks or hot tea and a plate of biscuits, a slice of the cake baked last weekend or freshly baked scones out to the garden at appropriate intervals, while "the man" repotted the orchids, staked the climbing peas and dug and washed the parsnips till they wouldn't dirty the kitchen, and picked as many slugs as possible out of the cabbages.
Sadly, all attempts to turn me into a lady - or even the semblance of a ladylike gardener - failed. Instead I spent years carting loads of horse manure from nearby stables to build up the clay and shale that has now turned into soil. I planted trees, built stone walls, mixed many tonnes of cement, carried boxes of fruit to sell...
And now, decades later, with hands and back somewhat worn out from heavy loads, I have slightly more appreciation for my grandmother's strictures about "ladies don't...". A little less extreme and fairly constant heavy lifting in my youth may have meant a lot more mobility in my old age.
My gardening clothes, however, are still the oldest and most stained I possess; the gardening gloves so soil enriched that the spiders take them for a desirable garden habitat; the knees of most of my jeans are dirt stained and reprehensible, and I own neither pearls nor a gardening apron nor shoes with Cuban heels. But I do spend a lot more time picking fruit or flowers into a wicker basket these days than I do digging, and still do use Grandma's recipe for scones - real scones, not the "made light with lemonade" kind. I'm due to make another batch as soon as I've proof-read this, and will take them out to the blokes in the garden, three of whom are under 10, but extremely good at picking lemons and gathering firewood. I wish Grandma could be here to see them - and share the scones. Though knowing Grandma, she'd insist on being the one who made them.
This week I am:
- Thinning the bok choi that weren't thinned as seedlings, but seem to be flourishing under a regime of "pick the small ones and the others will grow bigger in the space they have left".
- Rejoicing in the first yellow daffodil of the season, a sign the days are becoming longer, even if not warmer.
- Picking the first dozen or so mandarins from a new, seedless and more cold-resistant variety. They are superb, and far better than the old-fashioned small seed-filled ones that were the only frost-resistant mandarins we could grow before.
- Admitting that the "secret" to my apple crumble is adding lots of fresh lime juice to the fruit to balance the sweetness.
- Hoping the new "cold tolerant" banana ready to plant when frosts are over will actually fruit in our climate, and that the fruit will taste of banana, not cotton wool.
- Rediscovering how fabulous broccoli is, and making a firm resolution not to eat any except in winter, when they are sweet and tender and not hard and sulphurous.
