For the first time in my life I'm in charge of a garden. Is it too late to plant?

The Guardian

05-06-2025

I've moved from the city to Melbourne's outer east where everybody knows how to garden. Blundstoned parents swagger in for school pickup with secateurs in their belts and parsnips the size of your arm. They have wood chippers and chainsaws and trailers filled with enough mulch to cover a national park, which until yesterday I believed was pronounced mulsh.
For the first time in my life I'm in charge of a garden. It has a lawn and some flowerbeds which require weeding every now and then. I envy women with strong opinions about this flower or that. They seem to know what they're doing in life, which direction to take, what any of it means. I hope to someday have the confidence to make sweeping, ludicrous statements like Madonna's 'I absolutely loathe hydrangeas'.
My mother is a competent, unsentimental gardener. Last spring she came over to 'help' in mine. This involved ripping four ancient rose bushes from the flowerbed along the front of our house on the basis that I could 'do better'.
Her statement, in its vague enormity, echoed across the months that followed, tingeing my cups of tea at the window above the bereft garden bed. Was it a vote of confidence or menacing battle cry? Could I do better? My mother's words warbled through the summer heat and fell like petals as the weather cooled. The flowerbed remained empty, save for some weeds and nasturtiums, and a stem of vanquished rose bush piercing through the soil like a hand through a grave.
I'd liked the roses, though nobody else seemed to. They were colourful and fragrant and reminded me of somebody's glamorous great-aunt. Surely that was a start. I could put something bright and lovely in their place. It would be simple after all. Autumn was coming to a close, and with it the optimal planting window, but it wasn't too late. Was it?
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No! I could do better. I would tear myself away from the glow of my phone with its earwax extractions and ready-made organic vegetable broths delivered to my door and get my hands dirty: do better by the earth and by my own human soul. I would be better.
It was a pale grey morning when I called the nursery. 'Is it too late to plant?' I asked. 'What do you … ' the woman spluttered on the other end of the line. 'Of course it's not … well, it depends. What do you want to plant?'
She seemed bewildered by my question, almost infuriated, not unlike a waiter who is asked by a patron not what but if they should eat. Are you hungry? I heard in the woman's flustered subtext. Do you even want to do better?
It was the week before winter when I arrived at the nursery. I had a vague ideas about planting some feathery native grasses and maybe a shrub with little flowers that hung like bells. It was a blurred vision at best but it was something.
It was Saturday morning and yet, troublingly, I got a parking spot right out front in the mostly empty car park. Thunder clapped as I pushed through the gate and made my way to the information booth where the attendant was sheltering.
'Is it too late to plant?' I asked faintly, as the Little Match Girl struck her last match in the snow. But the woman in the booth seemed to hear my real question: was it too late to be a gardener? Was it too late?
'No,' she said simply, and looked at my photos of plants I liked and the bereft flowerbed that lined the front of my house.
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'Your palette's white, purple, pinks, reds,' she said. 'And you're looking at a cottage core theme. Is that OK?'
Was it OK?! I had a palette! A theme! An identity! I was a cottage core gardener. I'd been given the gift of purpose; a map to follow through the monstrous unknown to my own little plot. Yes, I nodded, it was OK.
She showed me the hardy shrubs and feathery grasses, pointing out the best ones – meaning her personal favourites, she admitted, laughing. Oh, how we laughed. She recommended winter rouge, a native shrub with flowers that hung like bells, on the basis that 'she' can survive anything. I liked thinking of winter rouge as a woman who thrived independently of her conditions. I bought three of her.
I spent all day digging up the flowerbed and putting in the plants, watering and mulching them, pronouncing mulch correctly to anyone who would listen. By nightfall I was wearing a ski jacket and damp tracksuit pants and inexplicably one slipper, with my fingernails caked in dirt and an undeniable sense of achievement. The garden was planted.
The first frost arrived in the morning, bordering the fallen leaves in fine ice crystals that winked at me in the early sun. My plants stood in their bed, as peaceful and defiant as a row of baby strollers outside a Norwegian coffee house in winter.
The fresh air would do them good, or maybe it wouldn't, and I'd try again next year –with some knowledge under my belt.
Ashe Davenport is a writer and author