Cultivating Mystery and Trust  

If my garden were a painting, it would be a small naive work, detailed and optimistic. In my early mental conception of it, (for my gardening and plant knowledge were nominal) all I knew was that I wanted to resist the formal structure and planning that had governed so much of my life. There was appeal in unruliness, beauty in asymmetry.  

Early evenings, I'd lean over the upper deck railing and, with a bird's eye view, indulgently moon over the crescent- shaped beds, noting how the individual plants were growing, how the plantings overall were beginning to blend and assume their own pleasing pattern, partly planned and partly serendipitous. Sometimes I'd wake early in the morning and envisage a new arrangement which would not only provide better growing conditions for the plants, but also improve the overall aesthetic. Aha! I'd say. Now why didn't I think of that before? But of course we are only ready to 'see' things or to make improvements when we're ready, and not before. Those exciting moments of illumination and rerouting, like all of nature, have their own perfect timings and cannot be hastened or predetermined.

As I learned more about what would grow where, and as my neighbours' trees grew, the proportions of light and shade changed substantially, so that for some months, I transplanted as much as planted. Impulsively I created a few pockets of mystery. Rounding a corner you might find a clump of Cape York lilies peeping through the liver-colored stems of tarrow leaves, or a serenely sculpted icon resting inconspicuously under the large flaps of elephant ears, her elegant throat garlanded by variegated ivy. The rear garden was unfenced and backed on to a reserve, the perimeter of which I planted out with dozens of bird-attracting native trees, shrubs and ground cover¹.  

Although my plot was tiny (and also because it was), there was a lot to think about, a lot to do. Uncharacteristically, I did not try to do everything at once, mostly because my energy, which had always been prodigious, was low. However, my desire to create a beautiful, sacred space around me was strong. This fortuitous combination of drives led me to undertake the planting in exuberant bursts, which helped me to enjoy the process rather than being focussed on the end result. I found it was wise to have a plan, but foolish to fall in love with it, for as the seasons went by, the seeds and saplings, cuttings and climbers (many given by friends) grew and assumed larger or different shapes than expected.  

Thus the garden evolved slowly, experimentally, flexibly into a hickledy-pickledy green life with its own casual charm, colorful outbursts and tranquillity. A living, breathing, changeable mosaic of foliage - serrated, ruffled and smooth mixed with spiky and scratchy, dull and wispy brushed against shiny and broad, speckled and plain merged with striped and splashed, elliptical contrasted with lanceolated, dark with pale - most of its myriad pieces ingeniously found a way to   grow which accommodated their neighbours. Those who either overwhelmed or became engulfed by others soon found them selves transplanted to more appropriate territory.  

Gertrude Jekyll, whose gardening book Wood and Garden was published in 1899 when she was fifty-six and whose writings still impact on today's gardeners, was one of the most famous innovators in garden history. She claimed that 'planting ground is painting a landscape with living things and I hold that good gardening takes rank within the bounds of the fine arts, so I hold that to plant well needs an artist of no mean capacity'.  

For me, gardening definitely became not only art, but also, to some considerable degree, invocation. Some days when I was more wilful and narcissistic, I felt myself imposing the plants and my muddling pattern of them, on the earth. Other days, when the energy of the Others blended with mine, the gardening was no less energetic, but it was much less effort. In that exultant, creative flow when I felt myself a deep channel for the community of all beings, felt the sun and the stars singing and dancing through my blood, it seemed I could do anything. I could be Creatrix.  

Friends pronounced my thumbs green, but when I emerged from those fragile, finite phases of playing the eminence grise, I was reluctant to assume that badge of merit. Far from being a seasoned gardener, I was an absolute beginner, a bumbling rookie; enthusiastic, yes, and practical in my care, but still pretty green compared with the depth of knowledge and experience acquired by veteran, full-cycle gardeners like my late grandfather. Most of the credit for the growth of my modest plantings I gladly cede to nature - to the living organisms themselves, and their complex and miraculous interactions with the light, the site, the climate and, not least  of all, the soil. On our ancient island continent, much of the land is so eroded, degraded, depleted, so poor that, as my father likes to say, you wouldn't grow old in it, let alone grow anything else. But in this charmed coastal strand, if you plunge a dead stick into the ground, especially during the rainy season, it's just as likely to sprout and grow.  

Hence, I enjoyed some heartening successes, mostly arising from trial and error. Inherent in this modus operandi, natu- rally, were errors of judgment which led to casualties. Some quickly became apparent; others emerged a season or two later. I under- or overestimated growth rates, heights, widths, the amount of available or required sunlight, or water, or lack of it. But these miscalculations and setbacks didn't deter me. Rather they made the whole co-creative process more fascinating, for they taught me important things - about the plants themselves and their preferences and idiosyncracies, about the earth, the climate, about the creatures (the birds, snakes, water dragons, dragonflies, butterflies, echidnas, possums, bandicoots, bush rats) who came in from the forest, and about the intricate web of interconnectedness among them all. They taught me how much there is to learn about and from nature and how rewarding and beneficial the whole co-creative process can be - for the plants, the creatures and us. Since we're all in this web together, we gardeners in particular may as well help to spin one as universally nourishing and ravishing as we can.  

Concurrently, the garden - and gardening - developed into a trove of tropes for me. Like so many gnomes, they lurked about under piles of rotting leaves, in the faces of flowers, in the tilling of the soil, in the rabid regrowth of weeds, in my plodding pursuit of an elusive ideal, in the turning of the compost heap, in the most unlikely and unsalubrious places,   waiting to pop up with their arms full of their buried treasures - their artful allusions, their florid symbolism, their grand personifications, their subtle significance or refined figura- tiveness. My garden, like every garden, became a paragon of perpetual change and unexpected outcomes. It enticed me to muse, puzzle or chuckle, to be patient, to loosen the Gordian knots of control (you can strategically plan, you can plant till your back seizes and prune till your arms ache, but ultimately the plants will swell and sprout, mature and fruit, proliferate and present themselves in their own individual rhythms and configurations) and to stay flexible, to remain receptive to fresh or unscheduled insights, consequences.  

Joseph Campbell reckoned that life could be read in terms of prose - denotation - or poetry - conotation. For me, being in the garden was, as often as not, threaded, studded, overlayed, highlighted and generally engorged with poetry, not all of it a panegyric. Batting away the blood-sucking mosquitoes who wanted to pierce a piece of me or ripping out the lantana that threatened to smother the native saplings, carried as much allegorical weight as, say, the replenishing pleasure of twilight watering.  

Planting and pruning, watching and watering, composting and fertilising, I felt as if I were discovering the emerging pattern of both the garden and my own life through uncovering, rather than imposing a form on either. One day I'd feel diffident, the next I'd dig and heave, tote and plant with bravura, and the energy somehow stuck to the garden (as oil will to canvas) and beamed out at the beholder. Many gardening writers are full of mundane how-to advice (and this, unques- tionably, serves a purpose) but I was learning to count as much on attitude, state of mind and receptivity as on technique. I exchanged how-to tips with gardening pals and read a few   books, but mostly I kept my senses, my intuition, call it what you will, tuned to Deva-FM for their transmissions, for I had no wish to suck the marrow from the magic.  

In the process, I learned that you don't need a lump of land the size of Sissinghurst² to create a beautiful home garden. One woman I read about spent three years thinking about how 'to make a small scale country garden with trees, climbers, shrubs, soft fruits, herbs, vegetables, perennial and annual flowers'. After wrestling with the space and climatic problems involved and despite the feedback of gardening experts who considered her an eccentric, she resolutely set about realising her cherished dream - on the topmost, twenty- third floor of a council tower block in east London!  

As my garden grew, I marvelled at how, despite their infinite array of form, textures and hues, their divergent requirements for growth and the propinquity in which they suddenly or gradually found themselves, they mostly co-existed companionably and harmoniously; how they created their own inter-connected balance and, with a little help from me, thrived. Some established themselves by putting down deep central roots; right alongside them other types secured themselves with shallow spreading roots. Some scattered their delicately veined foliage low and wide across the soil, others grew to imposing heights, providing protection for the more fragile. Some were subdued blenders, happy to lurk in the shade, providing an unobtrusive but solid background against which the showier varieties made bright counter- points in fuller sun. Some were vigorous growers, others took their time. Some distinguished themselves through fragrance, others through their blooms. Down in the burgeoning micro- rainforest, however, relations weren't always so civil and supportive. If the inner garden took shape and flourished   under my benevolent despotism, the rainforest grew up virtu- ally as alaissez faire regime. It was a case of every tree, shrub and vine for itself as they limbered, spread, crept and coiled themselves up, up through the densening canopy towards the light. That propensity, it appeared, was a definite demonstra- tion of consciousness. As I said, tropes, tropes everywhere.  

Anticipating and tending the needs of the plants in an increasingly familiar and intimate way, I became emotionally and energetically entangled in their various life cycles. I actively assisted and delighted in their growth spurts and bloomings, diagnosed and treated their ailments, monitored their dormancy, mourned their untimely demises and despatched them to that steaming departure lounge of the gardening world, the compost heap, there to break down in aid of nourishing their successors.  

Of course there was nothing revolutionary in this constant caring nexus. It merely enlisted me in the long, long line of those for whom the apparently ordinary practice of gardening becomes an intriguing interplay of elements both earthy and ethereal, a constant challenge to co-create, a regular cause for celebration, a numinous joy.  

My Dear Child,  

I am delighted that you are discovering through your garden your natural fellowship with nature. Nature is neither structured nor symmetrical. The asymmetrical has, as you perceive, its own special beauty, and it also signals change and growth, movement and evolution.  

I notice that some of that tranquillity you are co- creating with the devic queendom is rubbing off on you. I also notice that your garden is constantly engaging your imagination, for you think about the plants and the earth not only as you work with them in their natural rhythm, but also in your dreamings of the times ahead. In return, does your garden not please and succour you with its growth and glory, with the creatures it attracts, with the fresh foods it offers up for your plate? And so you are learning about the reciprocal nurturing that happens when you become a co-creator with the earth.  

As your garden blooms, so does your inner being, for you are starting to experience the wondrous reality that all growing things, including human beings, make up one seamless yet complex assembly or, as your ecologists like to say, web of life. This web, despite its unpredictability and turbulence at times, is ultimately benign.  

In the digging and sifting, mulching and fertilising, weeding and pruning, you are cultivating more than the garden. You are cultivating your soul, for the two are inseparable rites of passage.  

The creative energy you direct to the garden right now is really just one way of expressing your passion for life. Through this expression, you are learning to create for the sheer joy of creating, as I do. I do not struggle to have human beings acknowledge or understand me and my creations. If they choose to understand, they will.  

Through your relationship with the garden, you will be able, if you will allow yourself, if you will   trust the process, to experience a profound letting go - of the constraints and pressures of linear time (a mere fabrication of your rational world), of many of your ingrained and habitual fears, of the rigidity of the 'shoulds' and 'oughts' that have governed so much of your life.  

And as you admire the uncountable permutations of life and their inherent inter-relatedness and equilibrium in what is, after all, a very small space, you will begin to experience a deep knowing, a certainty that rests outside the realms of logic and empirical comprehension, that life also unfolds impeccably in and beyond your beloved mini-cosmos.  

In this deeper trust that comes from what you are seeing in the garden - because you are seeing how everything really perfectly fits together - you will be able to heal all that fear in your heart, the doubt that life in your larger world will work. And that is the healing that is coming now for you. And this is really what your writing is to be about. Helping people to understand that everything is designed to work perfectly, that nothing is failure, everything is accomplishment, everything is purposeful, no matter what feelings you have about it.  

Even your unhappiness is worth loving, for it heralds your readiness for change. Painful feelings and experiences are simply another segment of this life.  

Thorn on the rose. Is it painful? Or is it just there? It is really just an energy field. It can be painful. But it doesn't have to be. If you will learn to hold the rose where the thorns are not, you do not feel pain from the thorn on the rose. And the rose actually gets to   blossom, for it is one of the highest vibrations in your i world. That, by the way, is why it is so revered by all. The rose is a frequency of energy that is highly refined. The thorns are there to keep that refined energy field from being eaten by other things. It is a wonderful energy, the rose.  

My child, your journey in the garden is a magical one. Embrace it with an open heart and it will take you to places you have never been before.  

With love and light,  

Mother Nature.

1. The forest plantings included: Atherton palm (Laccospadix australasica), Bangalow palm (Archontophoenix cunninghamiana}, Bernie's Tamarind (Diploglottus bernieana), black apple (Planchonella australis), black bean (Castanospermum australe), black booyong (Argyrodendron actinophyllum), bracelet honey myrtle (M. armillaris), broad-leaved palm lily (Cordyline petiolaris), cabbage palm (Livistona australis), Carpentaria palm (Carpentaria acuminata), cheese tree (Glochidion ferdinandii), creek cherry (Syzygium australe), creek sandpaper fig (Ficus coronata), Cudgerie (Flindersia schottiana), Davidson's plum (Davidsonia pruriens var. jerseyana), dwarf palm lily (Cordyline haageana), elephant ears (Cunjevoi brisbanensis), fairy paintbrushes (Archidendron grandiflorum), Queensland fan palm (Livistona benthamii), fine-leaved tuckeroo (Lepiderema pulcherimma), Finlay's silky oak (Grevillea baileyana), flame tree (Brachychiton acerfolius), golden penda (Xanthostemon chrysanthus), kadamba (Anthocephalus chinensis), lemon myrtle (Backhousia citriadora), Lomatia silkyoak (Lomatia fraxinofolia), elephant's ears/native cunjevoi (Alocasia brisbanensis), native frangipani (Hymenosporum flavum), native gardenia (Randia benthamiana), native guava (Rhodomyrtus psidiodes), native lassiandra (Melastoma affine), Nightcap wattle (Acacia orites), pencil cedar (Polyscias murrayi), pink euodia (Euodia elleryana), pleated ginger Booroogum (Alpinia arctiflora), powder puff lilli pilly (Syzygium wilsonii), Queensland fan palm (Licuala ramseyii), Queensland maple (Flindersia brayleana), red carrabeen (Geissois benthamii), red-fruited palm lily (Cordyline rubra), red kamala (Mallotus philippensis), riberry (Syzygium leuhmannii), scaly tree fern (Cyathea cooperi), solitaire palm (Ptychosperma elegans), tuckeroo (Cupaniopsis anacardioides), water gum (Syzygium francissi), white oak (Grevillea hilliana), yellowwood (Sarcomelicope simplicifolia).  

 

2. The English estate on which Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), poet, novelist and gardener, created a legendary garden.    

 

 

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