Childhood Gardens

MyDad and MyMan share the very practical ‘why water it if you can’t eat it’ mentality. I remember as a child that my father cut a rectangle out of our clover-filled backyard to fill it with vegies, until the next time he was called away on a minesite job and the tropical rains came, turning the garden into our own personal slip’n’slide. But we were surrounded by retired farmers and Italian families who knew the obsession of a well-loved garden. Uncle Cec next door had a fence full of tomatoes which, if they escaped to our side of the chicken wire, were doomed to end messily. We’d sit in the shade wiggling our fingers into the wire holes to pluck pear-shaped yellow and red tomatoes. I grew up thinking I love tomatoes and then being disappointed at the taste of the supermarket fruit I bought for my salads and bruscetta. It wasn’t until I grew a poor neglected tomato in a pot which – in the heat and dry of my desert town – only created a single fruit. And that fruit, which I picked without thought on my way into the house after work, briefcase in the other hand, was red gold! The best thing I’d ever tasted. I WILL grow tomatoes like that again one day, just like Uncle Cec. Across the road, Aunty Amy’s husband had developed agoraphobia after his years in the war and his picket fence marked the boundary of his world. As a result, it was a haven of cottage-garden varieties I’d never seen before in the tropical wilds of Mullumbimby: snapdragons, poppies and the entrancing pink snowflakes of crepe myrtle. Our own yard sheltered a chook shed between a spreading mango tree and a sprawling choko vine. At night we’d listen to the fruit bats’ wings as they whop-whop-whopped down in amongst the sun-warmed fruit. MyDad ran pubs for a big part of a childhood, including our local MiddlePub (every Aussie town has one) so he was on good terms with most of the community’s farmers including a household of retired brothers who lived two houses down from us and ran a market-garden-sized veggie patch around the edges of an enormous Mulberry Bush. Uncle Algie and his brothers never had children of their own and seemed to love the parade of pre-adolescent mulberry-pickers and silkworm-collectors that roosted in their tree every Summer. I would sprawl out on those giant branches, dreaming of the Faraway Tree’s inhabitants and home-baked turnovers. I loved how those houses were built on sprawling half-acre blocks when I was a child. Now, despite the fact that most of those Mullumbimby blocks now house two buildings instead of one, today I live in the same kind of pastoral town with big yards and fruit trees and front-yard-gardens that are grown from cuttings that retire to ‘town’ off generational farms. It was easy to grow almost anything in NSW. I remember cracking macadamias with a hammer in dimpled concrete, not realizing it was a ploy to keep us kids busy while the grownups enjoyed their BBQ and a few beers. And I remember being dragged, sulkily (because almost everything I did at age 11 and 12 was done sulkily), along to a visit with one of MyDad’s work friends on the block they were still establishing and the friend’s wife took me for a walk through the beginnings of her herb garden where she took the time to show me how to crush the herbs between my fingers and breathe in their scent. I’ve been in love with lemon thyme ever since. Throughout my life, no matter if I had pots or a front yard or a sprawling farm garden, I’ve always had a lemon thyme. Now my family has their own requirements for a garden. TheBoy wants chilies, lots and lots of chilies. So he can spice up our dinner menu. He’s also a fan of stonefruits. While MyMan and his daughter demand mandarins. TheGirl wants cucumbers and an apricot tree, so she can continue the summer holiday tradition of pulling the trampoline under its branches and talking and reading and eating fruit straight from the tree all day and into the hot, still evenings.