Published The Advocate, March 19, 2005


I AM not much of a gardener. Mum was the keen gardener of the family. Her garden beds were always in flower no matter what the season. The removal of unwanted trees was not her thing, though. That was my job. She was always making me grub out perfectly good trees that had fallen out of her favour. I was never permitted to actually plant anything. I never had the pleasure of sticking something in the ground and watching it grow. Gardening never had a chance to take root in me. To me, the garden was death, disease and hard yakka. A real pain in the sacroiliac. Still is. I also had to mow the lawns for a pittance. Later on I was lucky enough to develop a severe hayfever allergy to all grasses, which made mowing impossible. My father was made to mow the lawns, for which he never forgave me. He was more your handyman type. He invented a lawn edger using an angle grinder blade, which gouged huge chunks out of the footpaths in a spectacular shower of sparks. It was light years ahead of the whipper snipper. Dad once bought a block of seaside flats. But mum made him sell them because he was always there doing repair jobs. Not that he couldn’t afford to pay someone else to do the work, he just didn’t trust anyone but himself to do the job properly. I blame him for my lack of handyman skills. He could never stand back and let me do a project on my own. "Here, that’s not the way you do it!" he would say, taking over. And so I would stand back and be forced to watch while he finished whatever it was I had been working on. It became easier to pretend I was DIY incompetent, which I duly became. So my parents are to blame for me being useless at gardening and next to useless at home repairs. My mother is of a certain age. Hardly a week passes when she is not attending one 80th birthday party or another. Yet she still found the time in her busy schedule to visit last weekend to check up on me. Standing together at the bottom of Dead Man’s Cliff – my backyard – she looked up and said, "Oowah!", the closest she has ever come to swearing. Oowah, indeed, as in a sense of impending natural disaster. She offered to go around the block marking the trees that should be removed. She also said the daphne had black soot and needed to be sprayed with white oil. And the azalea had leaf curl. I bought a rosemary shrub and planted it without incident. Then I read the potting mix bag, which advised to moisten the contents and to open it an arm’s length. Is that in the correct order? Mum said potting mix contained a bacteria that had been linked to three recent deaths in Victoria and to 24 other cases of illness. Too late, I said, sneezing.