The big picture

Pleasure in the beauty, followed by the drive to do even better, is all part of the rich experience of gardening, writes MICHAEL McCOY

If I could afford to get someone to do all the hackwork in my garden, I wouldn’t. I don’t say that I love every job that my garden demands of me, but I love the physicality of it, and it’s only in doing the work that I get to really know my garden. Intimacy and understanding is what I seek, above everything else, and you simply can’t buy that. But there are multiple layers or levels of pleasure in this gardening game, and I keep discovering new ones.

Back in late spring (which is always lovely where I live, but was particularly so this season, with mild temperatures and good rainfall), I stood in my garden, being slowly engulfed in a rising, shimmering tide of the best of all ornamental grasses, Stipa gigantea. The flower stems rise high above the foliage, but they start to bloom, with their curiously bronzy, photon-shattering flowers, while still at about waist height, and quickly ascend until they’re over your head. In one part of my garden I’m sparsely surrounded by them, and the effect is achingly good.

So I stood there, investing time in harvesting the pleasures of years of planning and care. You’d think this would be an obvious and even inevitable result of several years of nurture, but it’s not. I have to make time to do it, and it’s a bit scary how rarely I manage it. But this time I did, and what I sensed at the time, but didn’t really clarify until later, is that, while I was able to totally love the result of my efforts, there was an undeniable itchiness to make it better still.

The grass is magically veil-like and diaphanous, and so much of the joy comes from seeing the surrounding plant colours and forms through it, enticingly veiled by its semi-transparency.

It’s a bit like how much more mysterious and compelling Hanging Rock (just up the road from me) looked when they shot it through a piece of old lace for the opening sequence of Picnic at Hanging Rock. As it stands, I love the planting around my grasses, but I couldn’t help but start to consider how it could be even better.

But the specifics of my planting are irrelevant. The point is that I was able to feel both hugely satisfied and stimulated to reach higher in the same moment. I know that you’ve felt exactly the same. It’s not about being overly critical of your own work (though I certainly can be that). It’s about that wonderful aspect of creative pursuits – that, no matter how far you journey, the road still stretches out before you.

How lucky are we to have something that provides rich satisfaction in the labour itself, great pleasure in the results of that work, and the joy and creative drive of dreaming how much better our creation may yet be?