I took a walk around my farm this morning. Spring is here, and after a little rain everything has burst into flower.
When I was a little girl, my Nana always told me that hers was a friendship garden. When I asked what she meant, she told me that most of her plants had come from friends, and that she thought of them whenever she looked at the plants that had grown from their cuttings or transplants.
Now I have a friendship garden too. At my back door this morning, a cactus plant given to me by a dear friend’s equally beautiful mum has put forth magnificent pink blooms.
“Oh,” I said to myself. “That’s Jewel’s cactus plant flowering.” I thought of Jewel and then of her daughter Carly coming to visit me from the city in her Jeep, dressed in crazy hot pants and gum boots, and with a bag full of cuttings from her mother’s garden.
Up by the pool, the rose geranium has gone mad. Every time you brush past it a delicious fragrance is released. I first took a cutting from a plant at my mum’s twenty years ago when I was at College. The cutting went into a pot, and that pot travelled many places before being put into the garden of my first home in Brisbane. When I moved, I took a cutting and planted it at my new home. Then I broke a bit off and planted some at my farm…
Geraniums? Not a one in my garden has come from a shop!
- Red Geranium from Valerie Askew’s garden – a neighbour at our previous farm
In my vegetable garden, my garlic chives came from seeds from a plant at the top of steps to my other grandmother’s back door. Marga’s chives, I think of them as, and I am immediately transported back to her house, her garden, and her kitchen.
The Hippeastrums that bloom under my jacaranda tree came from George the Cabbie, who was my next-door-neighbour at my first house in Brisbane. His wife called me ‘Nicky Love’ and they were always at the fence ready for a chat. George has passed on now, but I still think of him when his ‘hippies’ bloom.
I must be getting old, because I’m thinking like my Nana. Memories everywhere in this little garden of mine. There is something very precious to me about being able to look around my garden, and not see just plants, but people.
My heart feels very full this morning. ♥
