In Australian Country Gardens

Percy Grainger loathed the popularity of his arrangement of the traditional air “In an English Country Garden” because it overshadowed his other works: “A typical English garden is most likely to be a vegetable garden rather than being used to grow flowers,” he complained, “so you can think of turnips as I play it.” In Australia, too, in his day it was common to grow both vegetables and flowers, in city and country, particularly in hard times.

From colonial times English settlers created gardens, sometimes grand ones, to help make themselves feel more at home. I once visited an old sandstone house near Bothwell in Tasmania, set in the bush some distance away from a road, which had a sweeping stone staircase, flanked by holly trees, leading down to a dry creek bed. In “Water Them Geraniums” (which Brian Matthews has called “‘The Drover’s Wife’ writ large”) Henry Lawson pictured the most basic of selectors’ gardens:

Geraniums were the only flowers I saw grow in the drought out there. I remembered this woman had a few dirty grey-green leaves behind some sticks against the bark wall near the door, and in spite of the sticks the fowls used to get in and scratch beds under the geraniums, and scratch dust over them, and ashes were thrown there—with an idea of helping the flowers, I suppose; and greasy dish-water when fresh water was scarce—till you might as well try to water a dish of fat.

The flower garden I recall from the late 1930s—when I was aged between eight and thirteen, before I left behind life on a small dairy farm to go away to boarding school and later to university—was typical of the time and the region: the Bega Valley on the far south coast of New South Wales. I have come to see the garden as a major influence on my life, nurturing a love of beauty which led on to an interest in painting and literature. The garden became an ideal place, separate from the onerous daily round, sometimes the grind, of farm life, with its unremitting routines and physical labour. While I enjoyed the beauty of the surrounding countryside, with its hills and creeks, the garden was something different, lovingly built up, hand-made, by my mother. Such gardens were the work of farmers’ wives seeking spiritual solace and relief from household chores, and they also formed a bond with other women of the district.

Our house was a wooden, tin-roofed one of unpainted, weathered timber. (I now realise it must have dated back to the later nineteenth century.) A hallway led to a narrow, sleep-out veranda, then down two steps to a straight path leading from it, about twenty metres through the garden, to the front gate. Beyond it was an unsealed side-road leading on to other farms. Passing cars were few. The baker and the “Rawleigh’s man” were the only regular callers. The garden, running along the front fence and down the sides of the house, lifted it above ordinariness, or what I saw then as shabbiness.

The expansive garden had only two special beds, one for gerberas, the other carnations (both of which were hard to grow from slips). Otherwise flowers were intermingled and the general effect was of profusion and richness. Flower garden space represented the division between male and female labour. Some farmers had separate orchards, as did my father, who cultivated as well a separate vineyard and vegetable plots, like his migrant German grandparents. I recall the flowering of fruit trees: white blossom of pear, quince and apple; pink of peach. The autumn leaves of our lone persimmon tree (with its squashy ripe, orange-coloured fruit) is vividly described in Marjorie Barnard’s eponymous story:

I remembered at home when I was a child there was a grove of persimmon trees down one side of the house. They cast a rosy light into rooms on that side of the house. In the autumn they had blazed deep red, taking your breath away …

As a primary school child I travelled by car to local shows at the small valley towns with my father, an enthusiastic exhibiter of fruit and vegetables. The show exhibits were mainly products of men’s work but there were smaller sections for those by women: needlework, cooking and flowers. I always went to see the champion dahlias. They were large, dinner-plate size with spiky, velvety petals, usually a showy red or pink.

I helped my father with the farm work in small ways, my elder brother by five years playing a bigger part, but I sometimes helped my mother in her garden. I liked to clear with a spade the dirt paths of moss and weeds, making imagined “roads” (an extension of sandpit days) and exposing in some places a hidden stratum of the previous garden, old inverted bottles, used as borders. I also carried away piles of weeds pulled out by my mother, taking them across the road to our tethered goat.

Flowers in our garden included most of those listed in the popular song (once taught in Australian schools), “How Many Kinds of Sweet Flowers Grow in an English Country Garden”. This was the model of Australian versions, varying according to climate. Omissions in our garden from the song list included lupins, gentians and foxgloves. Here is a random list using popular names: lilies (two kinds); snapdragons; stocks; chrysanthemums (a patch, various colours); dahlias (a group); tiger lilies; hollyhocks; marigolds; daffodils; jonquils; snowdrops; hydrangeas; cornflowers; wallflowers; fuchsias; crocus; geraniums; carnations; gerberas; zinnias; Chinese lanterns; gladioli; Marguerite daisies; forget-me-nots; daphne; pigface; blue larkspurs; flags or iris; asters; lilac; portulacas; salvias; love-in-the-mist; freesias; agapanthus; maidenhair; asparagus fern; Geraldton wax; white “sweet Alice” borders. There were also some shrubs whose names I cannot remember except for one dubbed “cloth of gold”, not as spectacular as it sounds, but the name appealed to me.

There was no rose garden, indeed few roses (perhaps because of price and availability—there were no nurseries in those days, as well as no “native” plants). I remember one nondescript white rose, inherited from the previous owner, some pink ones and a climber called “blackboy”, nailed to a wall of the house. It was a deep red, shading towards the centre into black, like a glowing coal.

The rose is a dominant image in English poetry. A lesser-known poem of Judith Wright, “To Hafiz of Shiraz”, uses a rose to celebrate the poet’s wonder at the miracle of constant creation in the natural world. Its epigraph, a quoted translation, reads: “The rose has come into the garden, from nothingness into Being”. In contrast, Blake’s “The Sick Rose”, about the worm in the bud, captures life’s duality by combining creation and destruction.

One of James McAuley’s autobiographical poems, “Wistaria”, explores his growing up and early attraction to natural beauty. The flowers are recalled through a series of imaginative transformations leading beyond the ordinary world: “Like grape-clusters transformed to lilac light … / bells, pagodas, pale balloons / … [changing] back to flowers at a touch”. The poem emphasises the visual, the flower’s power “to absorb all feelings into sight”, to offer symbolic “clusters of hope” in the arid world of Sydney’s western suburbs:

The soul must feed on something for its dreams,

In those brick suburbs there wasn’t much:

It can do with little so it seems.

The poem concludes: “Of all things I remember best that tough old vine / Roping our side fence …”

On top of the hill near our home, now a local lookout, stood a deserted house with walls of empty rooms covered by newspapers and magazines, as in some settlers’ houses in Henry Lawson. In spring the long front veranda, facing north, was festooned with wistaria, its bountiful almost riotous blooms contrasting with the empty interior, with its dank, musty smell.

The lilac bushes on each side of our garden’s front gate were white, blue and red-blue or magenta. What stays in my memory of them is not so much visual images, as in McAuley’s poem, but the transporting, heady perfume of lilac (even sweeter than wistaria but not as cloying). This nostalgia colours my love of the lines of loss and regret from Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady”, which I learned by heart in university days:

Now that lilacs are in bloom

She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

And twists one in her fingers as she talks,

“Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know

What life is, you who hold it in your hands …”

In my later travels around the world I would occasionally welcome the perfume summoned by lilacs, whether in college gardens in Oxford or in bunches stolen and sold by gypsies in the back streets of Bebek, a village on the Bosphorus.

My mother reached out to other women nearby by visiting neighbours and friends, walking across the paddocks or travelling by car, though the latter was less frequent in those days of petrol rationing. After a ritual afternoon tea, country-style—a lavish spread more like an English high tea—a tour of the garden would follow: plants were individually admired, gardening hints and lore exchanged and most importantly, gifts of cuttings or “slips” were tucked away into carry-bags for future plantings. This was the main way of extending home gardens.

My mother also reached out in another way to the wider world through gifts of flowers. She sometimes tied small bunches for my teachers to my school bag (I rode a bike into town to the convent primary school). I found this embarrassing, as I often arrived late and to give the teacher flowers seemed over-apologetic.

On some Sundays, after Mass, flowers were taken to the nearby convent because my religious mother liked to visit there to talk to the head nun, thereby, I think, finding some kind of moral support. She was the only one of a family of five, who lived as orchardists near Liverpool, Sydney, to “keep the faith” inherited from her German mother. In those rigid sectarian days, her “mixed marriage” to an Anglican, while working as a midwife in the country far away from her family, made her unwelcome to his relations. In the preparation for these visits to the convent I learned how long it took to painstakingly pick even a small bunch of short-stemmed violets.

Gifts of flowers also went to a local hotel run by a Catholic family called Brady. The widowed matriarch would graciously receive my mother and me in the foyer where she displayed the flowers, giving my mother a shandy and me lemonade.

Plants in our garden were seasonal (there were sharp frosts in winter, summers were hot) but in my memory of individual flowers and glimpses of the whole garden, they are always blooming and hence in colour. The bareness of winters is elided.

The garden itself has long since disappeared, turned into lawn for easy care, as there is no one to take the time and trouble to tend a large garden. The district has seen big changes: small farms have long given way to mechanised ones, the scattered butter and cheese factories of the valley have disappeared, replaced by a large centralised one. I wonder what changes have come to the country gardens.