In her thoughtful and beautifully observed book, Six Square Metres, journalist and gardening enthusiast Margaret Simons takes readers on a journey through the seasons, through her life, and through the tiny patch of inner-urban earth that is home to her garden.
The persistent miracle of gardening, and parenthood for that matter, is that things grow despite one’s incompetence.
When I was newly pregnant with my first child, I remember looking through the early spring crop of seed catalogues with fear in my heart. After all, so many seeds fail to grow. Some rot. Some push out tender green shoots, and the snails finish them off. It seemed improbable to me that any should grow at all, and therefore unlikely that the cluster of cells inside me should grow to a healthy child.
Now spring has come around for 19th time since those frightened reflections, and the child I couldn’t quite believe in will shortly leave home. Once again, I am looking through the old shoe box in which I keep my seeds to see what I need to order, and to try and work out a way of finding space for all the things I want to grow. There is so much variety. The sand-like black seeds of poppies, the miniature burrs of carrot, the smooth, hard broad beans. The broad-bean seed is just the right size, I remember, for toddlers to put up their nostrils. When my son was a toddler, we had a hurried trip to casualty because of a bean stuck in the nose.
‘How did it get in there?’ I asked him. ‘I opened my nose and a bean fell in,’ he replied.
I remember a few years later trying to explain to him how he was made, and came to grow in my tummy.
‘Daddy planted a seed …’
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Now my son is over six feet tall. He rests his chin on the top of my head as a sign of affection. He has entered the grunty, apparently pre-verbal stage of late adolescence. His involvement in the garden is limited to helping me move and lift things, and only then under sufferance.
The children are all grown. They tell me they want to be left alone, and not to nag. They find out my deepest principles — principles I didn’t even know that I had — and flout them. So much planning and care, and then growing things trip you up and make you a fool.
Things grow according to their nature. You can train and trellis, but plants still struggle to be themselves. It’s one of the things that make gardening fascinating. But sometimes, you get to cheat.
Last year, I discovered my local garden centre has cunning, and distressingly expensive, pots designed to straddle a balcony railing. I requested one for my birthday present, which caused the teenagers to roll their eyes, but they bought it nevertheless and I was a convert. Now I have six of these pots balanced on my little sundeck balustrade, growing bok choy, strawberries, radishes, and lettuce.
Even more novel are the upside-down bags, bought for two dollars each on special from Bunnings. I assumed at the time that they were cheap because they didn’t work, and nobody else was foolish enough to purchase. There isn’t much to them. The bags are like green sausages, around a metre long, with a little hole at the bottom and a big one at the top, together with some wires, and a hook by which to hang them.
The idea is that you push a seedling’s leaves through the bottom hole, leaving the roots in the bag, fill from the top with potting mix, water it, and hang it in a sunny spot so the plant grows upside down. I have planted an eggplant, a tomato, and a capsicum, and hung the bags from the only part of my sundeck railing not occupied by the straddling pots. They look like fat, premature Christmas stockings.
The picture on the package showed tomato plants growing like upside-down trees, trailing below the bag and laden with fruit, but my plants are behaving differently. They clearly want to grow up. Just after their stems emerge from the bag, they take a U-turn and are struggling upwards against gravity. How will they fare once they (hopefully) set fruit? Will they be able to continue the upward thrust, or will they snap off and die? There is a ghastly fascination to watching this play out.
I always have to restrain myself at this time of year. A few days of sunshine, and blossoms popping, and magpies swooping at my head when I walk the dog in the park, and I want to plant out the zucchini and pumpkin seedlings.
I must hold off. Previous years have made me think the weather bureau should employ me as a reliable predictor of the last frost of the season. It always comes three days after I plant out my tender seedlings. At the moment, I am having particular trouble holding myself back from the garden. This is because I am writing a book, and also because it is spring.
The tasks I have put off all year suddenly seem very urgent indeed, but when I am writing, cleaning out the linen cupboard seems urgent, as does tidying my sock drawer. When I am mid-project, writing is misery. Every day brings a miasma of doubt and frustration. People assume that because I have written previous books, I know how it is done. It isn’t true. I know, sort of, how I did those previous books. I don’t know how to do the present one. Writing is a constant battle with feelings of incompetence.
My theme tune, mid project, is TS Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men.
Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
And, later in the same poem:
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
In this horrible shadowland, the garden keeps me sane. I plant seedlings — far too many. I want to plant out those zucchini so I can bank on a surplus, an embarrassment of swollen, green fruit. Then I can give them away to my neighbours, the product of my labour. Surely that will be enough. It ought to be enough. What perversity to feel it necessary to also write a book.
Yesterday was a good day. I allowed myself to procrastinate, and garden. My brain went on holiday, and the rest of me went on all fours as I weeded and planted out so many lettuce seedlings that it is hard to believe we will eat anything else this summer.
There is something meditative about being so close to the soil. My thoughts meander in odd ways, making strange connections. Sometimes I feel as though I am having a conversation with an older, wiser part of myself. Sometimes I wonder if this is what it is like to pray. The only other times this happens to me are when I am falling asleep, or when I am on a long car journey. Always, it is something to do with letting go and focusing simultaneously. First, I think about television programs I have seen, books I have read, conversations I have had. Then all that drifts away and I am in the moment, barely thinking at all. Who needs a mantra, when weeds are all pervasive?
And so I found myself liberated from the book, and instead reflecting on soil structure, and the different methods of tenacity displayed by the weeds. One weed — I think it is called a marshmallow plant — has tough brown roots that go deep, meaning one pulls up half the garden bed in getting it out. Dandelions, too, have deep taproots reaching far down beyond the reach of my trowel. But there are other weeds so shallow-rooted that one wonders why they bother. All one has to do is brush the soil, and they are lying there unrooted, their filaments drying in the sun.
Clumps of grass take such a firm hold that it is disheartening. They seem convinced that they belong. I often guiltily remember a gardening book I once read that said, rather fiercely, ‘Grass has no place in the vegetable garden.’ All my vegetable gardens since then have seemed determined to disprove this statement.
Then later, planting out all those lettuces, I reflected on the arrogance of use-by dates when it comes to a miracle like a seed. You see, the reason I have so many lettuce seedlings is that the seed I used was all out of date, so I sowed it thickly, expecting only a little to come up.
Virtually every seed germinated, meaning that I had boxes and boxes of crowded seedlings, their leaves struggling for light and their lower parts white and spindly, like legs on the beach on the first day of summer. I have planted many varieties. The names are very pleasing. Buttercrunch, Sucrine, Cos, Oakleaf, Radicchio, and Iceberg. They sound like liquors, or sweets, or the capitals of foreign nations.
Crawling inch by inch over the earth planting them out, my mind wandered, and I saw minutely the way the individual grains of sandy soil were bound together with roots alive and dead.
I counted the earthworms. I got muck under my fingernails. And, as it always does in the garden, happiness crept up on me. There are times when I think I would be happy to be a gardener, and nothing else. Why is it after all, that we feel the need to be more, or different?
And this morning, as I plucked up the courage to climb the stairs to my study, and switch on the computer, there was T.S. Eliot again.
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.