Something strange happens to non-gardeners in spring. They dream of bowers of roses, topiarised shrubbery, bounteous home-grown tomatoes. True gardeners by now are out there doing it, or at least looking for where they left the trowel last autumn.
A word of caution about planting your dream garden if you've never grown a geranium before - it may slowly vanish over the next year, unwatered and weeds flourishing. A long time ago a garden series that shall remain anonymous planned a show where the crew went back to the new gardens whose creation they'd documented, to show them lush and blooming years later. Five or six garden deserts later, they decided to change the show.
If you have never actually got round to gardening, today's dreams may simply be yet another spring urge, as the world blossoms around you. On the other hand, if you are truly brown thumbed and can afford it, create you dream garden and hire someone fortnightly to tend it. This might even be possible if you can't afford it. Swap gardening time with green fingered friends in return for babysitting, dog sitting, house cleaning, computer de bugging - whatever skills you have.
Back to the garden. Step one: take a cup of something good, sit back, close your eyes, then dream of paradise. Now open your eyes. That's the style of garden you want, whether it is immaculate paving and elegant potted shrubs or a wilderness of boronia and kangaroo paws - the plant, not the animal, though on the city outskirts both may be possible.
Step 2: Put it on paper. Draw a map of your garden, and work out what needs to go where. Don't hurry this. Remember eventually large trees will cast deep shade, and any rose in its shadow will sulk and vegetable gardens fail to harvest. Don't make your map too detailed, either. The time is coming when we can once again browse through garden centres and fall in love with that plant... and that... and that... Give yourself a lot of impulse space, but do put down essentials, like six dwarf apple trees for year-round bounty, a camellia hedge, a row of snow gums with their weird sculptural beauty as they are shaped by wind and chance.
Step 3. Buy. This may take a single day, or a year or more if your dream contains hard-to-get plants. This may also take your food budget for the next six months, in which case modify your ideas to plants that can be grown from cuttings and seeds. Ask the library for a book on propagation - it is far simpler than you probably think - then slip a polite note into the letterbox of anyone who has a plant you love and that will grow reasonably easily from seeds or cuttings, asking if you might have cuttings, seeds or offshoots.
The backbone of my own garden grew that way, gifts from friends, most long gone, as I was in my 20s and they were usually in the last decades of their lives, one reason why they had accumulated gardens that could be generous with spare gladioli bulbs, rose or tree dahlia cuttings, mats of thyme or a dozen irises. My garden is memories and friendship, as well as a heck of a lot of plants.
Step 4. Plant. Properly. It is not as easy as you may think to dig a decent hole - not if the tree, shrub or tomato is going to thrive in it. As a general rule the hole needs to be twice as big as the root system. Forget round holes, or square holes - dig the hole the rough shape of the roots, so that the big root poking out to one side has a chance to keep going in that direction.
Nor is creating a vegie garden quite as easy as digging a round or rectangular area at the edge of the lawn. The grass will invade faster than troops into the Sudetenland, and be difficult to remove without pulling up the veg too. Other weeds will sprout. Weeds are weeds because nothing much eats them, and they grow faster than the plants you want.
Dig the bed; water well; leave it a week then dig again to kill sprouting weeds. Now dig it over once more before you plant, sieving out every single grass runner or bit of weeds. Edge your garden to keep out the grass. Ornamental edging can be purchased in convenient lengths, but even rolled up newspapers will last for months and do the job, as will bricks, tiles, or long lengths of fallen trees.
Step 5 is waiting, weeding, watering, plus mulching and feeding. Follow the directions of the packet for feeding, and borrow another book that will give you options for home-made fertilisers like compost, green manure, liquid manure, chooks, pigeons or a minute cow shared with the neighbours that grazes on the footpath. NB I don't know what regulations may pertain to grazing a cow in Canberra, but miniature ones are the size of a large dog but give far more milk plus manure that is usable on your garden. (Dog droppings are not suitable to be left in the garden, unless buried under at least 30cm of dirt).
Step 6. Enjoy it. This may simply mean asking friends over for a socially distanced garden lunch. If you get the gardening bug though, there will be enormous pleasure in hacking back the rambling roses before they invade the bedroom, counting the apricot blossoms to see how many fruit you, the parrots and the possums may get, and digging up a crop of the best spuds you have ever eaten. But if there is ever a season to begin a garden, it is now.
This week I am:
- Mourning the loss of a 34-year-old Mutabilis rose which has bloomed almost constantly, but finally collapsed down the bank outside the living room, a victim of rotting roots from years of drought followed by two years of damp, and the weight of this year's extraordinary abundant foliage and at least 400 buds, which now will never blossom. That rose bush was a friend, stubbornly blooming and giving joy in the worst times, and I will miss her.
- Waiting for the first red mulberry to turn deep purple-black.
- Wondering every morning what tree's bare branches have become covered in small lime-green new leaves overnight.
- Glorying in the first crab apple blossom, a vast umbrella of white, hopefully soon to be followed by pale and dark pinks from the many other varieties of crabs in the garden.
- Clearing space for the parsley, basil, tomatoes, corn, lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, melons and pumpkins to be planted in a few weeks - just a small planting this year, but the best summers contain tomato and basil salads straight from the garden, even if you only have pots or hanging baskets to grow them in.
