Other People's Gardens

Sometimes I think I could spend decades trying to escape the echoes of old loves, and still fail.

That bewilderment, that perpetual shock of an unjust universe, is the way I understand that I am human- I think- or just the way I know my irrational heart.

(those hands, those eyes, that tenderness, that concern, witnessed at a distance: the unbearable plodding-on-ness of the world, that people continue to live and love, declining to politely cease and vanish once their scar has been struck into me, that the assembled scars decline to cease aching, still, after all this time.)

Old gardens haunt me too, and the gardens I haven't planted because I have made other choices in my life.

These chillies come from plants in the garden I built in the sharehouse that was my home, plants I planted and tended through their first summer of life. They have survived my absence, thrived- the lushest and most productive part of the garden now is this patch of chilli plants, heavy with new crops of ripe fruit from October to March and setting another crop still in Autumn.

I take liberties in this garden when I visit. My hands are possessive when I tend the plants. I harvest baskets full of chillies and freeze them for the household to use. Nobody asks me to, or gives me permission. I think that taking this liberty is a declaration of a sort of belonging, and belonging in that way makes it easier that I don't properly belong anywhere. I've been living on couches and fold-out beds and in living rooms and tents for so long now, floating on the current of the hospitality of others, I would come apart I think but for taking these small liberties that mean belonging.

I bought punnets of new herbs for this garden, outraged and a little judgemental that nobody had planted basil yet when I arrived back in Sydney in December (imagine having the space to grow basil and not doing it! Imagine a whole summer of cooking without fresh basil when you could grow it right there!). I visit regularly to pinch out the growing tips and pull off the snails. We frame it as a gift, my way of saying thank you to the household for hosting me as their guest, but I don't think the gift is for anyone but me. I planted rosemary, too, to replace the three huge & lush rosemary plants that died in the heatwave just before I came back (and try not to dwell on how gutted I was to see them dead- remind myself that this is what happens when you leave your plants, and go away. They weren't mine anymore, not to tend and not to mourn).

I drift through Sydney like this, half-belonging and half-alien. Connected and yet anticipating nothing more than the moment of departing again.

I spend a lot of hours walking the long way from place to place and spying on people's gardens as I go. There's one man's front yard that I know well- I notice when he replaces his broad beans with tomatoes, and the tomatoes with beans grown up strings on his porch (we've chatted a few times, over the fence). I pick out the gardens that have mint growing weed-like through the paving stones, and rub my hands over people's rosemary hedges. Sometimes I write fan mail and leave it in the letterbox ("Your edible garden is fantastic- well done- thanks for putting these plants on the street! xx another gardener").

I wanted to photograph this pomegranate tree in a front yard in Enmore for its beautiful heavy fruits. The owner of the tree came bustling out of her house, shouting at me, implying that I was intending to steal one of her lovely pomegranates, distrusting my stammered assurances that I only wanted to admire it. Somewhere between my stammers and her possessive bristling I discovered that the tree was about ten years old, planted on her return from a trip to Lebanon, where she had admired the pomegranate groves. "It has beautiful flowers, too" she told me at last, grudgingly. It's hard for gardeners not to warm to each other, a little bit.

A few blocks later on the same walk, taking a street I haven't taken before, I found that someone had planted a riot of mints and basils and nasturtiums along the narrow council verge, all the way down the block. It was so beautiful I wanted to roll in it like a happy dog, but I didn't of course. I leaned in close to it instead, breathed in its smell, crushed leaves of chocolate mint between my fingers and rode the memories of where that scent took me. Kept walking, wondering if these fragments of other people's gardens could keep me going, and for how long.