“Beautiful people, you know the garden’s full of furniture, the house is full of plants.”
– Australian Crawl
It’s Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show time again. When impossibly perfect garden designs are presented in little bento-box-sized pavilions, where the grass has been clipped with manicure scissors and water features splash in endless happy cycles.
The garden show. Every gardener’s delight and torment – the chimera of elegant, sustainable, stylish design seemingly just in reach. But we all know that’s not true.
The evolution of the suburban garden is worthy of its own television series. From couch grass and agapanthus to rockeries and palms, cottage gardens and creepers, to the dry-planted and stone-path wonders of today, our gardens trace an aesthetic and ideological journey matched only by that of our national public debates – especially all the stuff about water.
TV has also turned the idea of the makeover into a kind of domestic religious rebirth, and our backyards now must reflect the casting-out of the horticultural sin that is an old-fashioned or badly presented garden.
Yes, there are always lots of amazing moments at a garden show and much useful inspiration too but, after so many years of attending the big one in this town, I can officially say – enough. I’m immune to its charms.
Enough of the pressure, the impossible dreams, the succulents and the water pumps, the paving and the gravel, the micro herbs and the clipped hedges. It’s all too much – it’s too much pressure, and my fragile sense of self as a crappy suburban gardener can’t take it.
At this point I would like to confess that one of my greatest achievements in the garden this summer was the purchase of a couple of metres of fake grass to lay on the blasted earth at the back door. I bought the really expensive stuff – it was $70 a metre. And here it is under my feet, as green as the day I bought it. Job well done.
Tending the summer vegetables and herbs in the three boxes that we were so thrilled to have dropped on the garden has taken all of my effort this summer. The idea of also having to manage prissy borders and nervous annuals does my head in. A water feature? It would be green and gangrenous before the week was out. My tomatoes (and the dog who kept pinching them off the vine and eating them) were work enough.
I do dream of the perfect garden, however, and the extreme sense of order, grace and peace that comes with the well-designed and managed plot. But it’s just too much work for me – does that make me lazy? I watch the weeds come up and feel overwhelmed at the number of hours required to get rid of them all, so instead I snip some chives and leave them to it.
Maybe I will go to the show this year, just for a little while. It would be nice to see and contemplate the handiwork of someone who has their gardening act together.
» Virginia Trioli is co-host of ABC News Breakfast on ABC1 and ABC News 24, 6-9am weekdays.
» Follow Virginia on Twitter: @latrioli
