I have always loved gardening.
I grew up on 10 acres in the Blue Mountains, where I plotted out little gardens of ill-fated eggplants, eaten by insects before they could fruit. I didn’t even like eggplants, but I loved the process of sowing a seed and watching it grow.
My mum would plant haphazard beds of decorative gourds and boysenberries among the farmer's friends and lush grasses that swayed brightly beneath the spray of sprinklers from our septic tank.
When my husband and I bought our first home here in the Illawarra, moving down from a rented apartment in Sydney, I revelled in the joy of digging my hands through the soil of my own garden beds once again. Becoming a mother a couple of years later intensified the need to produce my own food and connect with the earth and seasons. Gardening satiates this need. The cyclical metronome of life beats through the soil and into your awareness as you tend to the plants in rhythm with the seasons.
My gardens flourished, my first daughter picking tiny alpine strawberries from the bushes that bordered the garden. The plants were passionately and meticulously tended and we enjoyed the commensurate productivity that resulted. A quaint and wholesome picture indeed.
Then my second baby arrived, and with her came five months of relentless rain after two years of isolation during Covid and a crushing decrease in my capacity for anything beyond mere survival and tending my two babies. My garden was still a safe haven, but one rarely visited and its neglect manifested in wild, muddy growth as it became thick with weeds and plants gone to seed.
Nearly three years later, I have embraced the wild garden and succumbed to its lack of order, its chaotic harmony. I refuse to allow the sanctum to become riddled with anxiety about looking a certain way or pressure to provide enough food to ease the grocery bill.
As an homage to the gardens of my childhood, they remind me that the tangle of my mother’s gardens was borne as much from her chaotic creative soul as from her lack of capacity to tend them as a mother of four. She allowed her joy and intuition to guide her to the beds when her soul called for it and when her capacity allowed it. Now, I do the same, an echo of nostalgic wonder pluming under my skin as the smell of last year's garlic harvest wafts into my nose each time I open my dark, pungent pantry, reminding me that it should have been in the ground in Autumn.
We can learn so much from our gardens, the pieces of earth that we till and tend, as we parent in the confines of our homes. Our gardens can teach us to surrender to the season. Whether that be the larger season of motherhood that stretches us thin and forces us to acknowledge and attempt to fulfil our needs, or the steady beat of the day turning to night, or the ever-turning wheel of seasons that pushes seeds to sprout and fruit to fall and decay.
Too often, we are lured by the illusion of self sufficiency, a goal laden with work that was never meant to be carried by a single household. The illusion refracts the light of a gold-gilded past, hiding the shadows of our modern hyper-individualistic and perfectionistic acculturation. Our intent is pure, but our execution is often compromised by comparisonitis, stealing our own sense of joy and freedom, in the pursuit of belonging.
The #tradwife social media trend and its accompanying online milieu deepens the chasm between women and mothers, providing a glittering and completely unattainable example of how to be a woman, wife or mother. So often, the intent is to sell a product, a lifestyle and the impact creates feelings of isolation and not-enoughness in the women consuming the content.
Many, including myself, find joy in growing our own food, making preserves or bread from scratch. But those things can only be enjoyed when one has the capacity to do so. Those things are hobbies, not prerequisites for acceptance into the “good enough” woman/mother/wife/gardener/homesteader/human being club.
My garden looks like shit. It certainly doesn’t feed us enough to reduce our grocery bill and I only occasionally flounce through it wearing a flowing Instagram-worthy dress.
But it does bring me joy, just as it teaches me surrender. I grow plants that are easy and hardy. I grow things that the kids can pick off the bush – strawberries, snow peas, carrots they can pull from the ground and leafy greens and herbs that I can pick when I need them. In my flower beds, I throw handfuls of seeds to see what sticks after my patchy watering, whenever I remember and feel like tending them.
Pots of plants bought and not put in the ground stand the ultimate test of survival: months in their plastic pots sitting in the spot I plan to plant them. If they die during their potted incarceration, they are not tough enough to survive my garden, which is equally ruled by my mercurial energy levels and the weather. If they live, they go in the ground, when and if I feel roused to put them there. I try not to feel guilty for all those plants dying at the hands of my seasonal apathy and unpredictable capacity. In the gaps throughout my garden caused by said apathy, weeds flourish. Dandelions and chickweed are now welcome friends that I add to salads and soups along with the rampant self-seeding parsley.
Like a mirror of motherhood, my garden has become ordered chaos, a discordant and nuanced harmony of interconnected organisms bustling among one another, trying to thrive by surrendering to the seasons of life.