House and Garden: a meditation

thinking about place-attachment

We’ve been living in our rental house near the river for two years now. The house is old and valiantly shabby, with sloping floors, and cracks in the walls that make me think about sink-holes. ‘A good party house’, my friends said, although we don’t party much any more. But it does remind me of my nineties share-houses, those golden dole-days. It would have been around then that the owner planted the 25 conifers in a line around the backyard. He planted them too close together; they now form a thick border, a sentry stand. Not much grows under their coiffed heads, and they leave only a sliver of sky through which to see the stars. The trees feel out of place - unheimlich - sometimes we feel like custodians of a fairy-tale forest.

This is, I think, the most untended but also the most considered garden I’ve ever enjoyed. Conifers aside, there are two mature olive trees that hold up the washing line, and are frequently visited by finches. Also mature pittosporums at the back of the block. Trees that are often sold with a cheery “eff off neighbours” label. But it’s true that they shield us from the shouty man who lives in the house behind. Their poetic common name is “silver song”, and this is also true: they shimmer in the sun, and sway like rock fans holding up their lighters for the slow songs.

Before moving here I didn’t know the names of birds and trees, but they started to feel familiar, so I bought an app. The spotted doves scratch in the pine needles, and mosey up to the deck to drink from the water-tray. They’re always fighting in the trees, or, mating. I looked it up: doves mate all through the year. The males huff and strut; there is mutual preening and food regurgitation, they touch their “cloacas” together for a few seconds, and that’s them done. I try not to anthropomorphise. Sex and death. Three times I’ve found a dead dove in the garden, taxidermy-ready, like it has just fallen out of the tree. In Ancient Greece, the death of a bird was viewed as a symbol of rebirth and regeneration. In Christianity it was seen as a sign of impending doom. Every time I put a bird carcass in the green garden bin I feel a bit wrong, but if we bury them the dog will only dig them up.

I never used to think about gardens this much. Growing up in a bushy outer suburb I took nature for granted. I am thinking now of my metalhead Londoner friend who came to visit, picking her combat boots over the green and dewy nature strips, “Why does there have to be so much grass?” During the pandemic I started buying flower seeds online, planting pennyroyal, nemesia, nasturtiums, cosmos, and poppies. I expanded to salad greens and before long I was thinking about systems, and permaculture and mental wellbeing and the connectivity of every living thing. I was thinking I could become a garden radical. Although to be anything radical takes a whole-hearted commitment and self-education. But maybe I could start small.

In The Garden Against Time. Olivia Laing considers the garden as utopia. They write about restoring their walled garden in Sussex through the pandemic and beyond, and explore the history and contradiction of gardens as places of both solace and exclusion: “The story of the garden has from its Edenic beginning always also been a story about what or who is excluded or evicted, from types of plants to types of people.” Laing’s book hinges on radical hope. They hold up artist and thinker William Morris as a model: “I think what his gardens really stand for is fellowship: a humming, thrumming togetherness that transcends not only sexual desire but the human world itself. Call it a garden state: a cross-species ecology of astounding beauty and completeness, never static, always in motion, progressive and prolific. I want to live there, and the world won’t survive much longer if we don’t.”

I am inspired by a video segment from Gardening Australia about a couple who created a portable garden in the single car space of their rented inner-city townhouse. They lay mesh over the concrete, then gravel, a membrane and soil. They added pavers and planted native grasses between the cracks, making a mini-meadow. They had shrubs in pots and larger trees in fabric planter bags: lilly-pilly, silver wattle, a eucalyptus brush gum and an Illawarra flame tree that in eighteen months had grown four metres high. Their efforts show that you don’t need acres to make a biodiverse landscape and that the benefits go beyond good looks to include ecological services such as shade creation, habitat provision, and pollination. A note at the end of the video allowed that the pair had since moved out but had been able to take their garden with them.

For my real estate writing I see a lot of stone-topped kitchen islands and black matte tapware, but I fear that gardens are becoming phased out. While some of the newer builds have a pocket of green possibility - a courtyard, a balcony - more have no garden at all. Some eco-conscious developments have community gardens, but these are priced accordingly. One unit I saw had a big front garden filled in with grey gravel, easier than a lawn, cheaper than concrete, totally depressing. I think about how, when my parents became Australian citizens in the 1970s, they were given a ceremonial native sapling to plant. A Reddit thread on this ritual was on point: “Lol at department of immigration thinking the average punter has the space to plant a tree.”

Our ramshackle rental will one day go the way of all ramshackle rentals. There’s room for at least three townhouses here. I’m sure the neighbours will rejoice when the conifers come down. No more shedding, or feathers, or curious clumps of I-don’t-know-what (resin? bat guano? moth-bags?) I wonder if they will miss the birds.

I have been thinking about how place-attachment arrives with stealth. It’s a kind of alchemy between person and psyche and location. I wouldn’t have expected this particular backyard to stake a claim on my affections, but there it is. And I didn’t mean to write a pre-emptive elegy, but I was sitting out back watching the branches sway like sentimental drunks, and all my past gardens seemed alive before me. Cue a quote attributed to Epicurus: “not what we have but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance.” Railroad flowers. Strutting doves. Vampire bats doing their nightly circle. Those trees.