when the plot plots back
Fiona Weir finds that growing pains in the garden often mirror those in daily life.
LIFE DOESN’T ALWAYS go as planned, as I know you know, and for me this is never more obvious than in the garden. Those tulip bulbs that just never came up… so frustrating! Or the feverfew that just keeps coming up everywhere.
The trays of Geraldton Wax seeds that never germinate, on repeat. The elder, which self-seeded in the middle of the herb garden that I neglected to remove before it grew absolutely enormous, and now the cats rely on it to get onto the roof and I can’t take it out.
The garden is a microcosm of the universe of outcomes you didn’t expect; of policy made on the fly and of making the best of things as you find them. Gardening is a lifelong lesson in resilience and pivoting. Last summer, I bought a little tray of cucumber seedlings in order to expedite my cucumber harvest. I planted them, watered them, watched the vines grow, and was a bit puzzled that the leaves didn’t look quite right… and then the first fruit appeared and it grew into a lovely… butternut pumpkin.
Dammit. I put up a stronger trellis (an old wooden playpen) and watched as soup-for-dinner evolved instead of fermented pickles.
This year, I bought three Boston ivy plants for a particular wall of a particular building – plants that unfortunately turned out to not be Boston ivy, but possibly some form of Virginia creeper. It’s not climbing, or changing colour, or doing anything I’d hoped it would, but isn’t that life? You start in one direction and suddenly you’re going in another, making the best of it, digging in, turning the compost and waiting for manure to turn into soil.
In other news, the goats ate all the Boston ivy that was on another wall, but left the creeper entirely alone. It may be a bit Pollyanna, but I swear there is always good news to be found if you look for it.
Sometimes the birds get the fruit, sometimes we do. We can cover all the fruit trees, or just hope the cockatoos don’t take everything. Plant more trees. Watch more cockies move in. Move the geese into the orchard. Observe all birdlife cooperating beautifully: cockies throwing down their apple ends, geese picking them up. Good on them. Luckily, there are apples at the farmers’ market, and our fruit trees are still young and growing, and surely one year in the future there’ll be enough fruit for all of us.
Meanwhile, the geese demonstrate that they are pretty good lawnmowers (in competition with the guinea pigs), as well as being great at cleaning up apple cores.
One day recently, I was admiring a succulent that had sat for months right above my kitchen sink, next to a lovely African violet. What an amazing shade of green, I thought, it’s so hardy! I hardly need to water it at all and it just stays so lovely, what a clever succulent.
I poked it and announced to my two daughters, who were having breakfast, that I thought I’d repot it as the soil was rock-hard. They looked at me silently, in slowly escalating disbelief, until I poked it again and Matilda, 16, held up her hand and said, “You know that’s a fake plant, right, Mum?”
Gardens can be humbling. As is deteriorating eyesight. Armed with a new glasses prescription and respect for modern fake-plantery (goodness! How real!), I am reminded that a garden is never a finished thing. It’s not an end point. It’s a work in progress, a classroom, a place of therapy, and a wonderful living (occasionally artificial) theatre where things might go wrong, but they often go right, and tomorrow is always a new day, with no failures that need to be pivoted to opportunities yet.
Happy winter, lovely gardening friends.
Follow Fiona on Instagram @buenavistafarm
“Gardening is a lifelong lesson in resilience and pivoting.”