The big picture

Extra watering and extravagant soil prep may be unsustainable now, but gardening is still a thrill, says

Ithink my days of juicy gardening are over. It’s more than 20 years since I first set out to make a garden, on a very low budget, and with no watering, that was worthy of opening to the public within 12 months of beginning. It succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. By the end of its second summer, I was totally swallowed up in its dramatic growth, happily drowning in a king tide of foliage and flowers. Despite being unwatered, and growing over record-breaking dry years, it was juicy. It was designed to be.

Back then, I was addicted to dramatic and voluminous seasonal growth. And I probably still am. But it’s an addiction that neither my time, my budget, nor my conscience will allow me to indulge any longer.

All that growth depended upon extravagant soil preparation and improvement. What little money I had was spent on compost, which I double dug (cultivated to two spades deep) into already reasonable-quality, moisture-retentive soil. This added nutrients, but its greatest effect was on the decompaction and consequent introduction of more air spaces to the soil, and the further water-holding capacity that the organic matter provided.

I no longer see this kind of soil prep as either sensible or sustainable for me. My current garden is much larger, the soil is less productive, it’s on a gentle, west-facing (and therefore hot) slope, and it’s in complete visual contact with the surrounding farmland. All these factors have me leaning towards a garden that is more responsive to the natural conditions than one that depends on huge modification.

I’m both excited by the creative possibilities and delighted with the results, so far, of working within these self-imposed restrictions. But it would be dishonest not to acknowledge the losses and the sacrifices. Like the juiciness.

I can’t, for instance, even think about growing summer annuals. Gosh, I loved them. Creamy yellow sunflowers towering over me at 2.4m; pure white cosmos staring me in the face at

1.8m tall (and nearly as wide); and annual climbers such as Ipomoea tricolor ‘Heavenly Blue’, which, having run to the top of the trellis built for it, made overhead forays in search of something to grip hold of and drape with its trumpets of implausibly delicious blue.

All that turgid annual growth was well supported by the hugely tall perennials I loved to be buried in by late summer. Miscanthus x giganteus would grow 5cm a day in spring, to flower at 3–4m tall by late summer. But achieving this with little or no supplementary water (and now that I’m on tanks, I have none for the garden) depended on lavish, and regular, soil improvement.

Those particular days are gone. But the fun, the experimentation, the thrill and the steep learning curve will come with me, no matter what style of gardening I’m playing with. They’re the only aspects of gardening that I really can’t live without. Michael blogs at thegardenist.com.au