Fifty years ago I promised Grandpa that the only non-native plants I'd ever grow would be edible- except for roses. Grandpa said exceptions should always be made for roses. He and his wife Jan spent years collecting native seed and cuttings, still at the beginning of Australian gardeners' love of native plants.
I've almost kept that promise - I think daffodils are the only plant here that aren't either native, or useful. Actually roses are edible too, if you like chewing on damp tasteless cardboard (the petals), or the rosewater scented Turkish Delight that a friend brought us last week and I have been nibbling ever since, and some years I do make Eglantine sauce from our rose heps, and often drink rose hep tea.
A surprising number of cottage flowers are useful or edible - our peasant ancestors were canny and bred them to be both, though it's a lot easier these days to buy cloves than steep deeply scented ''clove pinks'' in brandy, and I do prefer lettuce to primula or nasturtium leaves. Just now, though, the beauty of our garden is entirely that of fruit to come, apple blossom plum, peach, cherry, or the flowering part of the veg cycle, with carrots displaying great rosettes of white blooms and the white spires of about-to-go-to-seed rubarb. Later - quite a lot later - there'll be medlar, pomegranate, and kiwi fruit flowers.
Kiwi fruit blooms are beautifully, a waxy cream in mid-November, just as other spring blooms fade. They are a total delight- till they fall on the paving and make a slippery mess. Do not grow kiwi fruit over paving.
My favourite ''glorious and edible'' fruit is pomegranate: bright orange flowers, again quite late in November, fruit that turns deep red and hangs till I pick it or the parrots eat it, and leaves that turn butter yellow late in autumn and shrivel and fall off without too much mess.
In the last few decades vegetables have been bred to look magnificent as well as tender. Many customers no longer judge a carrot by its length and evenness, but its colour, from orange to white, yellow, purple, red, or one of my favourites, red-skinned but orange inside. The wombats, on the other hand, go for size and crunchiness, and are happiest with the cheapest in the supermarket. Thank goodness. Coloured carrots rarely grow as big as those.
If you want to fill your front garden with veg, the prettiest include frilly red lettuce, especially as you can just pick a few leaves as you want them - as long as you feed every week or so and water almost every day. Lettuce revenges itself on gardeners who neglect it, and turn bitter. Regard parsley as green alyssum, and it makes a frothy border. Our gardens are edged with garlic chives, with their blue-mauve flowers most of summer, or down in the driest sunniest garden, saffron crocus, where just occasionally I have remembered to hunt out the saffron stems before the flowers wither.
What else? Sculptural artichoke leaves, or even larger cardoons, where you eat the central stem of the leaf, but only in spring before they turn bitter; the reddest stemmed of the rhubarbs, and prolific cherry tomato in red or yellow, the kind that is so covered in fruit and colour you hardly notice the leaves; perennial chillies that are so prolific that they too challenge the roses for ''most specular bush in the garden''. Coloured chard - silver beet with yellow, orange or red stems - can also be spectacular, especially if picked often so you see more stem than leaf. They are smaller leafed and tastier than the giant green silver beet too - much of ours goes to the chooks.
I never manage to grow climbing sweet peas (a long story) but each year we do have about three square metres of flagrant red-flowered runner beans. They aren't supposed to set beans in hot weather, but do for us, possibly because their roots are well mulched, or possibly because the spot gets more shade than a vegie garden deserves. The beans are tough when full sized, the seed inside is delicious. I only use the beans when they are no longer than my smallest finger, and even then they must be topped and tailed and the edges trimmed. The flowers though are truly stunning, the brightest in the garden.
Garden tastes are changing. A lush bed of snow peas is more desirable than dahlias if you get to pick and crunch the snow peas when you get home from work or school, or even at work or school if there's an edible garden there. (If not, arrange one.) A strawberry bed is not spectacular, but it's less trouble than a lawn, and until you have eaten a totally ripe strawberry, still warm from the sun, and not leached of all its flavour by cold storage, you don't truly know what ''strawberry'' means. Blueberry bushes laden with fruit, dangling red and black mulberries, the new red-skinned native lime, bearing all summer and into winter: if it's lush, prolific and delicious, it is beautiful.
This week I am:
- Okay, yes, I have ordered a new red native lime even though I am not gardening or watering and promised I'd buy no new plants this summer...except I will tend that native lime.
- And while in confession mode, I am considering trying to buy another truly red leafed smoke bush, even though all the ones we bought subsequent to the first have turned out to be fakes, their leaves just vaguely red rimmed.
- All right, I admit this too: I bought three native limes but I am going to give two of them away.
- And I also bought a dwarf macadamia but that will also be a gift;
- And a black peppermint to make peppermint tea because Shaggy the swamp wallaby developed a new taste for peppermint and I am pretty sure ate my last bush roots and all;
- Plus, I have ordered a pot of purple sugar cane. I'm not quite sure who'll get this: a friend with a hot house, as I'm pretty sure it won't survive our winters outside. If you can't plant and tend a garden for a while, the next best thing is to find exciting plants to give away.
