Seven is a number laden with meaning. From Old English, seofon. Seven as in the seven deadly sins, as in break a mirror and get seven years of bad luck. Seven signifies completion. As in Genesis, ‘And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made.’ Seven rhymes with heaven.
They say seven is a lucky number, but I’ve learnt to be wary of it. Seven was the day and year of the plane crash that took my legs (7 March 2007). It was my age at the time if you add up the digits (3+4).
By late 2024 it’s been seven years since we moved into our Sydney house. A portentous moment to reflect on how far the garden has come; on the seven things having a wilder garden has taught me.
1. Fear
In 2023, when I decided to create the small bird garden, my father staked out a new path that would snake between the horse trough and the paperbark. Afterwards, we tore out a large section of turf where the wider garden bed and new path would go.
I recall one morning staring into the black hole that had opened up, a fissure in the earth. Overnight a spider had spun its web across the hole. The web glinted like light on a vinyl record. It stretched from a stringy rice flower bush by the house across the blackness to the sweet bursaria shrub on the other side. I watched a dragonfly land on one of the shrub’s branches that curve softly, when in full flower, like a ballerina’s arms. The dragonfly teetered over the chasm as though there was a magnetic force field, pulling it down.
I thought of how the black hole was not really a hole. It was full of soil that looked raw – like wounded flesh exposed to the sun, churned like a vat of black butter. In it were small fragments of roots and boot prints, one of my father’s white tipped surveyor pegs. Where the sun hit, the soil was brown, like the soft fur of a possum. But where there was shade, the upturned earth looked cold, as black as the bats that feasted on the fruit of the nearby Eumundi quandongs. It was an open grave. As though it could suck in everything around it: the old house, the new native plants, me.
I remained at the edge of the pit, peering in. The silvery spider web reminded me that this apparent nothingness was merely an in-between time. That soil was death and decomposition, but also new life. More native plants would be arriving soon, bird baths and repurposed clay pipes too.
What other animals would emerge from that black hole and take up residence here? I fantasised about burrowing echidnas, held out hope for those elusive wrens. Far likelier was that I would see more curious skinks or shy blue-tongues. Perhaps foxes and rats too. Though I tried not to think of that, as I watched the sunlight play on the spider’s silken threads. How with my wilder garden, M believed I had created a ‘rat paradise’.
Freethinking English garden designer and writer, Mirabel Osler, once bemoaned how more people don’t grow vines up their house walls, allow the plants to diffuse the red bricks, disagreeable stucco, bleak concrete. ‘Are people afraid?’ she asked. Afraid of snaky tendrils, afraid of mess, afraid of fallen leaves, afraid of bird droppings, afraid of nature. That tangle of hope and fear invoked by a wilder kind of gardening. It is perplexing, how ‘nature’ can inspire such conflicting feelings, even as we crave more of it in our citified existences. The parts that we welcome, the others that we shun.
2. Playfulness
It was the autumn just gone, mid-April, the time of year when reptiles disappear from the garden. Lizards do not hibernate in winter, they brumate. Brumate, from the Latin word brūma for winter solstice: ‘A state of sluggishness, inactivity, or torpor exhibited by reptiles during winter.’
To prepare themselves for this prolonged period of indolence, blue-tongues engage in a flurry of activity, getting extra sun, eating all they can, cramming themselves with energy to see them through the colder months.
M had spotted the blue-tongue (we assumed she was female, since we saw babies that summer) trapped inside the ring of Corten steel we’d placed around the lime tree to stop our new Labrador from eating the chicken poo fertiliser. In dismay we watched the lizard try to scale the sheer metal wall and fail, again and again. She looked exhausted. Every time M got close to her, she would puff herself up and hiss at him.
‘Don’t frighten her!’ I cried.
We disagreed on how to get her out. I insisted we place logs inside the ring for her to clamber out by herself; M declared no, he would lift her out.
We tried my way first, put the logs in and waited. An hour passed. How long had she already been languishing? Was she starving? Dehydrated?
‘Okay, just do it,’ I said.
M stuck in his hand. The lizard hissed.
‘It’s all right,’ he cooed.
‘Hiss. Hiss. Hiss.’
Impatient me: ‘You wanted to do this, just get it over with!’
Patient M: ‘She’s almost there, oh – look at your tongue.’
Lift. Plop.
‘There she is.’
‘Hiss.’
The lizard was plump, as long as my arm. She slunk across a rock, briefly eyed our saucer of water, continued on her way.
She was magnificent. The pattern of her scales. Horizontal rows of three, four white splotches, like baby’s teeth. Columns of black – daubed like war paint – in between, and behind her eye. That amber eye stared at me through the sunlit leaves of the silver spurflower. Her scaley head was like olive skin that’s spent decades in the sun. She didn’t like me watching and took off for home. Home being the grey plywood pool equipment box where she lived behind a black tub marked ‘LEASURETIME SANDFILTER 2’, amongst all the leaf matter and cords and winding pipes.
The following day, we found our blue-tongue turned Evel Knievel stunt performer trapped upside down in a hose reel, and mounted rescue operation number two. Even in moments least expected or planned for, the garden brought us levity and laughter.
3. Diversity
Our small bird garden today comprises four beds, between which two paths (one grass, two gravel), branch, meander, and disappear. It is one of the features I love most about this part of the garden: how you cannot see what lies ahead because of the bend.
In spring, I spot at least 16 kinds of flower. Most predominant are the white ones:
● Long-leaved westringia that flanks the horse trough.
● Flannel flower, with those felt-like leaves.
● Native parsnip.
● Midgenberry.
● Dwarf apple gum, the large clusters of fresh white blossoms.
● Wax flower, with enough blooms for a dozen wedding bouquets.
Then there are flowers every colour of the rainbow:
● Red: the prickly rosemary grevillea.
● Orange: the spiky juniper grevillea ground cover.
● Yellow: the short-lived, but constantly flowering, guinea flower.
● Green: the Wallum bottlebrush with green brushes.
● Blue: the wispy wild flax.
● Indigo: the indefatigable native geranium whose leaves, when they first unfurl, are wobbly like green jelly; the honey myrtle with flowers like one of those frilly back brushes.
● Violet: the lacy silky grevillea; the blueberry ash, whose flowers remind me of a woman’s puffy petticoat from the century our house was built; the Eremophila, with its last flush of tubular flowers.
This is not counting the spiky silky hakea whose tough, knobbly fruit look like large green slugs. The native raspberries we planted as food for the blue-tongues. The flowering gum whose pink tipped seed capsules will explode, pyrotechnic like, into flower in time for Christmas. The remnants of the hairpin banksia’s large orange cylindrical flowers which, when they appeared in late autumn, glowed like fire. If I could be a flower, it would be a banksia: tough, spiny, loved by birds. Up close, what look like spikes are more a schoolgirl’s bobby pins, a series of thin yellow wires folded in two.
The smells are of the bush. Earthy, medicinal. The flowers are alive with all kinds of native bees and wasps. There’s a tiny spider on the westringia. An orange and brown moth on the wild flax. A wad of frothy spittle on another plant – the work of a spittlebug. Earthworm castings. Ants marching in single file up the wall. The old horse trough, now a tangle of rushes, lilies and ferns, thuds with the calls of a frog that will continue around the clock and become louder, more insistent, should it threaten rain. A feather, large and grey. It belongs to one of the aggressive noisy miners that patrol our garden.
Lesley Hughes, distinguished professor of biology from Macquarie University in Sydney, gave a TED Talk in 2022 where she described how she has stopped calling herself a conservationist, because conservation is a backward-looking word, and we need to look forward. We must ‘stop looking back to some futile vision of Eden’ if we are to save nature and stem the loss of biodiversity. ‘No matter how hard we try we cannot keep nature the same.’
We need to create new habitats that are capable of sustaining richly diverse communities that are useful and long lasting. I don’t know if I am ready to write off the term ‘conservation’. But I realise I must focus on creating habitat to sustain the creatures that have already found us. And, for now at least, let those romantic ideas about bringing back the blue wrens go.
4. New Barriers
Navigating my wilder gardening journey, I imagined that acquiring knowledge about plants and ecology would compensate for losing my physical connection to nature through injury and disability. In some ways, however, my plant education has forced me to confront my losses in new ways.
Consider:
● I enroll in a nature writing workshop and we are assigned a reading which sets out a list of the ‘ten essential things’ a nature writer needs. Among them is ‘a pair of healthy legs’. And I think: I sleep with my legs propped by my bed at night.
● We read Nan Shepherd’s memoir, The Living Mountain, based on her experiences walking a Scottish mountain range. I am uplifted by her descriptions of the mountain’s wholeness, where rock, soil, water, air, rain, sun, seed, root, bird are all one. But knowing she walked for many many miles up and down her mountains, explored every different vegetation, reading how the silky, yellow-fawn pollen of the heather settled on her feet and legs, makes me remember how I once walked mountains too. And I think: how can I experience that oneness when all I can do now is sit in a wheelchair in the garden?
● I enroll in a biodiversity and conservation degree and before it begins, spend hours conferring with the university’s disability support services on how to make the course manageable for someone like me. I repeat this process every time I begin a new subject. Sometimes the course convenors don’t believe that it is possible for someone with two prosthetic limbs to study the natural world, at which point the disability support services people must help the convenors understand yes, it is. And I think: I shouldn’t be trying to study biology.
Then I realise that the way Shepherd describes her mountain – as ‘one and indivisible’ – is how I’ve come to see the natural world around me too. And this is in part since I’ve begun working on wilding our garden, which has not entailed traversing any living mountains, but rather has involved reviving a tiny piece of land that had become stupefied.
5. Kinship
The botanical star of the small bird garden is, without a doubt, the first tree I planted there: the paperbark, Melaleuca linariifolia. Four years ago, it was the size of my palm, and today it rises higher than the house.
Melaleuca linariifolia was first described in 1797 by the English botanist, James Edward Smith. Smith founded the Linnean Society where Charles Darwin first presented his theory of evolution, in 1858. He saw a ‘large tree, the bark of which is very thick and spongy, serving the purpose of tinder’.
Getting up close to our tree, I put my hand on its papery thin bark. I notice how the bark contains the full spectrum of human skin colour from the palest to the darkest, like it embodies every human possibility within. Looking into the etymology of the tree’s name, I find that ‘melaleuca’ is derived from the Ancient Greek words ‘mélas’, meaning dark or black, and ‘leukós’, meaning white. The tree is known as budjur to the indigenous people.
I remember peeling that spongy bark as a child, a compulsive act that seemed a defiling of the tree. It was like removing dead skin after a bad sunburn: you know you shouldn’t to do it, but you peel it off anyway until your reach skin that is too raw to be bared. But then I recall how the First Nations people used the papery bark as a blanket for young babies. Suggesting a godparent type relationship between the tree and the human newborn, a desire to nurture.
The paperbark is the most radical of my native plantings, a tree that gardening books warn should be planted with caution (far from sewer pipes), that usually grows to five metres, though it can grow twelve! And I think of Osler again, describing some ‘folly’ involving her rose trees, reflecting: ‘I see I should have kept my head, but a part of gardening must surely have come from losing it?’ The paperbark was me losing my head.
It has also been my most constant planting. Our paperbark seems defiant, like it knows it belongs in this garden, in this soil. As a local species typically found in the tough-leaved sclerophyll forests on Australia’s east coast, it likes the clayey, swampy soils of our garden
Photos I’ve taken over the years document its progress, like another child:
● August 2020, when its roots were buried uncomfortably close to a camellia causing the paperbark to tilt sideways, and eventually fork asymmetrically, perhaps to ensure its future survival.
● September 2020, when it had doubled in size.
● May 2021, when it towered over M.
● Spring 2023, when it burst into flower for the first time. Spikes of stalkless flowers weighed down the ends of its branches, like a thousand giant snowflakes. Pollinators swarmed. Then, pfft, like melted snow, the short-lived flowers were gone.
● Now, when the tree is as tall as our chimney, and surrounded by a circle of formidable shrubs. Sweet bursaria, bottlebrush, tick bush. Like a ring of security around a VIP.
I love the paperbark for its determination and dependability. I’ve never had to fear its demise, unlike the delicate hakeas, the capricious banksias. It grounded me through times when the things that should have been dependable in my life were not. It belongs in our Sydney garden, and so do I.
The paperbark is fixed in place, yet there is movement all around it. Lizards, insects, a multitude of pollinators including birds and bats. To watch the creatures dance and dart around it, the sun catch in its leathery leaves, the breeze strum its branches like a musical instrument, brings me and, I believe, the tree, joy.
In it I see a kindred spirit.
6. A new name
Irish landscape designer and author Mary Reynolds wrote: ‘We are here to be guardians. Not gardeners.’ It flicked a switch in my brain and has since kept me company on the lonely pursuit of transforming our perfect, still life garden into a messy one that supports life.
Horticulture certificate or not, I was never going to be your classic horticulturalist. Nor did I ever feel comfortable calling myself a gardener, not in any traditional sense. I always felt compelled to add the word ‘habitat’ before the word gardener, as though that explained, and made more palatable, my odd obsessions with mess and skinks and unattractive plants.
Now it dawns on me that it doesn’t matter that the moniker gardener never fit, because I am something else: a guardian. A temporary caretaker of the land on which I dwell. Arriving in Sydney, I was back where I came originally from, yet I felt more adrift than ever. I was an outsider in this place, among these people I had sprung from. Especially when things started going wrong, I felt myself flailing, like a lizard finding herself stuck in a deep saucer of water with nothing to cling to.
I lost confidence in my decision-making as a wife and mother. In my self-belief as a writer who had something to contribute. In my worth and value as a daughter and sister. In my right to call this city home again.
And yet, out of all that flailing and clinging, I made a garden, one more full of life than any I had known before. A garden inspired by the disconcerting scenes I saw around me: the fires, the nightly silences, the absence of wild creatures. This garden sprang from empathy, hurt, and the need for true connection with nature, rather than from any gardening ability or knowledge about how to control and conquer. It exists and thrives because someone believed in and nurtured it, despite constant doubt and barriers. It is an unconventional garden that supports life, that feels like home.
This, to me, is what guardianship means.
7. Legacy
We had an intensely muggy, record-breaking Singapore-like start to 2024 and frog song sounded from all kinds of unlikely places in the disordered corners of our garden. Heard but unseen, until I went to repurpose a disused pot I’d left at the end of the skink wall, down the side of the garage.
Lifting the pot, watching the water drain, I remembered, too late, the thudding I’d heard coming from there earlier. There it was, staring back helplessly at me – a slippery, slimy creature with big dark eyes, the first striped marsh frog I had ever seen in the flesh. It was the same dark brown of the waterlogged, decomposing leaf matter in which it had been living.
Feeling elated but terrible for disturbing its habitat, I grabbed a nearby plastic saucer which had also filled with rainwater, placed some leaf matter and sticks inside, along with an old timber plank so the frog could get in and out. I left the saucer next to the now drained pot. A day or two later M called me outside.
‘Come have a look at something on the skink wall.’
‘What is it?’
He refused to say.
I imagined a scary-looking giant cricket leaping on me. ‘Will it run away if I come down there?’ Being in a wheelchair, you cannot make a quick getaway. ‘No, it won’t.’
I wheeled down the ramp to the far end of the skink wall.
‘Are you sure it won’t run away?’
‘I’m sure.’
It was the grey plastic saucer, filled with hundreds of tiny tadpoles. Like black passionfruit seeds but with wriggling tails. Clumps of them clung to the rim of the saucer. That frog I accidentally evicted was a female and she had used the saucer I left to lay her eggs in the shallow rainwater, among the moist leaf matter.
It is said every generation has less awareness of what a healthy living landscape should look like than the one before. And that it is difficult to care for, to fight for, a version of nature, a past, you have never known.
M grew up with the sound of native bellbirds in his family’s backyard in Melbourne; the house is still there, though the bellbirds are long gone. I grew up with the sound of crickets in mine and it was the absence of that sound that first triggered the alarm for me that something was amiss in our new Sydney garden.
Ten months after that close encounter with the striped marsh frog, I was hanging washing in the back garden when I heard an unusual sound. At first, I wondered if it was a machine starting up next door. Then I remembered I’d heard the sound before, coming from the row of Eumundi quandongs outside our bedroom window at night.
The sound was nothing like the singular thud of the striped marsh frog. This call was rapid and repetitive, like a jackhammer.
I whipped out my phone and turned on the Frog ID App and pressed record. When the recording finished, I checked the App for possible matches. And there it was: Peron’s Tree Frog, Litoria peronii. It was a local frog species, and December was its breeding season, when the males call from high up in the trees. It seemed miraculous. A second frog species had found our garden.
M had his bellbirds. I had my crickets. And now our son, L, has the frogs. Perhaps this will be the version of nature that he will fight to keep.