My sisters and I always know when our mother has been gardening. The smell is overpowering due to the amount of cow manure and fish emulsion she uses.

Tropical fruits

In the heat of summer, the stench can be dreadful. So too can the flies.Is it us she is trying to keep out, or it is them? My sisters and I chuckle over this.Maybe she’s just had a blue with our father?  It doesn’t put us off.
In we go, under the rose-covered arch, the banging of the back gate announcing our arrival.
“She would be hopeless in the country!” exclaims my father, who often fancies himself a country boy. “Plants just don’t need that amount of fertiliser!”
He always protests but he knows it’s useless.  My mother’s extravagances are notorious.
The garden is my mother’s domain.  It is her retreat from the world, the place she turns to daily for renewal and some form of measured peace.  Like her mother, and her mother before her, my mother has always wrapped gardens around her. During the sixty years that my father has been a public figure, she has needed those green walls between her and the outside world – they kept her sane.  Daily contact with the earth helped her to keep her balance.
A professed feminist (she yields little ground to my father) she feels women have been coerced into thinking that life happens “out there”.
“I maintain life isn’t out there.” she says. “It’s right here, now, in this house and garden.”
Her sentiments echo something Voltaire hinted at two centuries ago when he wrote Candide, something about the importance of caring for our own garden, both inner and outer.  “I get well when I can be alone in my garden,” she reflects.
My mother’s gardens have always been abundant, fulls of birds and butterflies, snails and caterpillars, old dogs and lazy languishing cats.
She has another garden, too, quite different from the one in town, but one about which she is also passionate.  It’s in one of the green valleys in the hinterland of the Gold Coast, a sub-tropical paradise, where the colours are so vivid they can make your eyes ache.  Here are mango trees, dark and mysterious, all variety of citrus (limes, lemons, grapefruit, orange, cumquat), lemongrass, persimmons, frangipani and bougainvillea.
A few years ago she planted an orchard of exotic fruit trees and spices – there’s cinnamon, cardamom, carob, cocoa, coffee; sapotes, lychees, jaboticabas, tropical apples, cashews, almonds, macadamias; barbados cherries, sea grapes and Asian pears.  She has followed the ideas of Bill Mollison in this garden, trying to keep to his permaculture philosophy.
And boy, are the trees prolific.  When they’re in fruit, it’s impossible to eat all the produce. Such abundance is typical of my mother.
In this garden, she has placed wooden sculptures, all out-size, in various places. These have been fashioned by a local craftsman Anton Richards and include a giant rabbit (the talking point of the valley), a bird bath (modelled after one seen in Denmark a few years ago) and a bird house for the fan-tailed pigeons.
Although it appears luxuriant, this is not an easy garden. Over the years, the best soil has been eroded and washed down the hill into the river.  During summer, it bakes hard and dry and only the sturdiest of tropical plants manage to survive.
Mulching and composting help, but my mother is not there often enough to ensure this is done regularly.
There are hazards in this garden too – black snakes, green ants and frogs. Mostly these lie in wait for us in the toilet, ready to dart at the first few backsides presented. Loud yells emanate from that room for the first few days after our arrival.  Once too there was a wallaby in the shower recess.
This love for her gardens and careful attendance to their nurture over the years has been of fundamental importance in my mother’s life. It was passed on to her from her mother, and her mother before her, and now it has become part of her daughter’s and grandchildrens’ heritage. Our gardens have become unconscious reminders of our mother, of all things pleasant, perfumed – and occasionally hazardous.
A few years ago my daughter was given a beautifully painted print by my mother which now hangs above her bed. Sometimes I glimpse her reading it, absorbing its message:

“Just living is not enough!
One must have sunshine, freedom
and a little flower.”

- Hans Christian Andersen