The Garden at Moorfield Journal: 15
The garden that saved my life.... 21.04.2023
Let me preface this by saying this was an uncomfortable entry to write and is even more uncomfortable to share but these are the things that are important to understand in how we came to be here. Why? Because so often, especially on social media, where most of you found our story and why you are here, there is an assumption that pictures of beautiful things means an absence of that which is hard, or imperfect or ugly or sad. When what I want to say is, these are the very things we made something beautiful out of, it was the very presence of these things that created what you see, not the absence of them. I believe this is often the case for many gardens we see, they are places of peace created to counter that which we struggle with in life. Little Oak was most definitely this and Moorfield, something else entirely and so this is the story of what Hugo and I call, the garden that saved my life….
How did it come to be? This garden in this beautiful place? This life?
I often find myself stopped in the middle of my day pondering this and the calm that still surprises me, that lives within me, the good fortune I often go to sleep feeling such gratitude for.
It started out so very differently, when I was so very different, so very far from here….
From the north of the North Island of NZ where I was born and spent the first six months of my life and where my mothers family farmed in the south for the century and a half just gone. Where everything consumed was grown or reared at ‘Oakview’, as our farm was known and where my female forebears had grown roses for just as long.
So, as a baby I went with my parents back to the place they met, where my father was first to sail a yacht he’d built and moored at the tip of a remote part of the NT. Arnhem Land was different then, in the early years of the 60s when he arrived, he would say, on the cusp of the mine opening. It is where I spent most of my childhood barefoot on beaches and in the bush with the elders and their families who had befriended dad and whom mum came to work with over the years. Us kids running round mostly starkers, giggling madly while food was speared with three prongs just off the shore and a fire crackled on the sand and where the kids from my cul-de-sac and I belted about on BMX, trying to find buffalo down bauxite roads. Life was not perfect here, there were cracks beginning to show but it was wild and free and there was a magic to starting life in a place like that where my love of nature and need to be in it, began.
From there we went to the rainforest choked ranges above Cairns, and the sugarcane fields at their feet. Where life fell apart and I feel heavy like the humid air there, to go and be where such heartache lives in memory. Where we had a small vegetable garden and a few fruit trees, acres of horse paddocks, bush and a garden of mostly natives with the odd oleander and young red cedars, dotted about. A garden I would run away into when I needed to be scarce. Those mountains were where we left my dad with his art, my horses and his broken life that had really begun when he was a child himself, after 3 years of planning, my mum and I, hidden by friends and in caravan parks until the dust settled. A place I returned to many times in my young life to try and keep him on the straight, a danger to himself and to me, the property now lost and his home, the empty caravans on other peoples farms. I used to have to remember to breathe during those days you never knew when the wind would change.
To an old Queenslander we didn’t own, near a small cane town, that came with a dog named, “Lady” who seemed to sense I needed company and a crocodile farm across an empty lot, grateful as I was for the 50 metres or so of separation for a young girl with a big imagination to dream herself out of sad situations, envisioned them escaping to her yard. Cane fields grew all around, standing taller than I did, I liked the way they swallowed us up and hid us from the world. A place we called ours for a short while, a place where I remember pouring through a book I’d bought on the gardens of the French Chateaux’s and where I first began to scribble paterre’s, in love with their symmetry, their balance. I was 12 then.
To an all girls boarding school in a city far away, where the weathering of years of adult problems on my young mind began to show in self-loathing and the pressure to appear perfect, made me sick. To yet another school and another town to be the new girl once again. A little rental in 70s apartment blocks a few streets back from the beach, to its half done developments of cheap housing and vacant blocks on the outskirts, too far for any bus route, where no other kids from my school lived and where I sang often in the late afternoon sat around my backyard with the boys from PNG and the Pacific Islands and their beautiful harmonies, my neighbours who called me sister, and to an only child, it felt like a warm embrace.
To the west coast of the United States, where green had never been so green and wet, never so wet, the coldest and most alone I had ever felt in my 15 years of life. Where recklessness resurfaced and took on a whole new ferocity until I could not go to school and I could not come home and I floated, falling a little bit further apart until I returned, entirely changed. And I did my best to fit back in, though I never really had, with the perfect lives, or seemingly so, of my friends with their big houses and big families and dads who worked; and didn’t threaten the lives of their children, or their own. Where I hid the trouble I’d been in and fell back into old bad habits, wracked with more guilt and more hard memories, this time the ones I’d brought home to meet the old ones I’d tried to leave behind.
And I was never the friend most parents wanted their kids around or the student most teachers had time for and when I did take steps to try and be better I was told they took bets on me as to how long I’d last. So, I let that settle on me and I let it make me angry, angry I was good at then and I let it move me forward and in the end, I did last and I not only lasted but I won awards meant for “better” kids and I guess some people lost some money on me.
And those awards and a new found sense of self took me to the city that fortified me, right on the edge of adulthood. The fig and plane tree lined streets that ran off Oxford, when grit still existed there and we walked alone at night so at home we felt amongst it and the rawness of that time, the falling down terraces and pubs heaving with live music late into the night, silenced now and done or boarded up. My highschool girlfriends and I, and our casual jobs at the local chemist connecting us to an entire inner-city community that lived in the falling down terraces around us, in the parks at night and the commission housing towers I delivered orders to, the kind of place where my father lived now. And I excelled at university and I felt my life was changed and the trajectory would surely leave my past a speck on the horizon long gone but these things you carry with you and they find other ways to filter through and in a tiny apartment, with the best view of the harbour, I found myself in the worst relationship and I learnt I chose what I knew.
To more rentals back up north and a halt in the new “better” life I had begun in the big smoke to the south, to stay where both my maternal grandmother and my dad would die within weeks of each other and be buried side by side. I would lose my way for a time again, here, lured away from real life by beachside bars, boozie nights and boys, to busy up my brain with nothing of any real weight, to keep the grief at bay, so much hard there had been up until then, that I felt unprepared to take on anymore. Where mum and I bought a house together with my first homeowners grant and another casual job in a chemist, and we built our very first rose garden of mostly Hybrid Teas in the subtropics no less, and battled blackspot endlessly but when they bloomed they were beautiful and the garden became a friend for the first time. I learnt the joy of bringing them into the house, and I imagined that one day I might grow one of every kind.
But the city I’d stayed away from longer than I’d planned, by way of London and Italy, called me back with the promise of money to another tiny apartment above a busy restaurant and a bus stop. A shoebox in a straight line to the brutalist building where I cut my teeth over the longest days that bled into one another and then into years, in an exciting, and then just an exhausting career, that paid me more than I’d ever thought I’d make, let alone at 25. I earned every single penny and then some, and I could buy anything I wanted and looked glamorous all the time, and owned no flat shoes and bought perfumes worth as much as one weeks rent.
I felt I had arrived somewhere I had always intended to go, so far from the way my fathers life fell apart and so much closer to the hopes of my mother but it didn’t feel like I thought it would, this place they called, “success”. If success in this way meant the absence of happiness and ever present stress, it was not what I’d meant to ask for, made so freshly aware as I was at that time of ones own mortality and the desire not to waste a moment of life, those thoughts were slowly creeping in to every day I sat in that cubicle and tried to pretend I was content.
And then we met, Hugo and I and he couldn’t believe I owned no flat shoes and for the first time in years I talked about my childhood to someone, the way I was a parent to my parent, the trauma of a crazy and violent world where I feared for their lives and my life many times as a child and a young adult and the years in between and put everyone else’s needs first…..and spoke nothing of it. Of how ashamed of everything I was, though it was not shame I should wear, he assured me but pride for all I’d endured. Of the way the mayhem of other peoples madness and the silence I hid it under, made me turn on my young self and gave me all new problems to regret and revile but he made feel as if they were small and meaningless and they’d taken up too much space for too long, so I began to put them down and I’d never felt so free.
And soon I owned flat shoes for the long walks we would take together along the water near where we lived and have picnics at dusk watching the dog walkers because we could, because I began to leave work on time and I stopped skipping meals. For the trips out of town to visit beautiful country gardens that he would organise for me because I spoke of my love of them, so often and he saw my books stacked high and the hope I would have one of my own, one day. And I stopped waking in the night to write notes of things I needed not to forget, the thousands of details for far too many projects, I stopped trying to control everything, from having anything fail in that work I chained myself to in that big building all but a walk away, so I could be available to it, whenever it needed me, because I thought it needed me.
Until one day I walked that straight line for the last time and I left that life smiling like a loon and so happy I felt I could almost levitate. The lightness of letting go, of saying no, for the first time, to the idea of me that I’d invented to replace the real one I was always told I shouldn’t want to be and had just discovered, I might actually really like, if I just gave her a chance to speak up over everyone else’s expectations and ask the question, what did I want for me?
So we left that city with a suit case full of flat shoes to a tiny island everyone always leaves off the map, where land was still affordable and where apples grew in sunken valleys and winds whaled through in ways I’d never seen and blew any remnant of our old life away and we made a home where no one wanted to go to live, then. Where everyone we knew thought us mad, and everyone we met, thought us naive. And we were but that’s how you begin to do the things you wouldn’t if you knew how hard they were going to be.
And so it began, acres and acres of land, and two around an old falling down farmhouse where we would make a garden that would change the entire course of my, our life. We had left our jobs and gained ones that paid us less than half of what we used to make and less still of what we would ever need to fix the old place up and we joked we’d live off the smell of an oily rag and the love of it alone and for a long time, we did. Never to underestimate again, the power of tasting one’s first homegrown tomato to sustain one’s fortitude against years of flailing about financially and whilst locked into the whites of each other’s eyes, smiling deliriously all the while the juice ran down our chins.
It was desperately hard at times, to make it all work, both of us bringing childhoods spent on the bones of our arses preloaded with fear of ending up back there but the rewards, oh the rewards of growing from seed something you could then eat and it would make you realise that everything you’d ever tasted before then, was a lie. Some half truth of how it was meant to taste. That food, homegrown, home-reared, in some kind of harmony with the tiny lives of microbes and buzzing, crawling creatures all around you, tasted of something else entirely, salvation. The act of growing, of gardening, could in fact, completely and utterly overhaul your entire central nervous system at the same time it gave you the best tasting apricot the world had ever known.
But I took on more and more work, to try and make ends meet, and so did Hugo and the last of daylight hours were sucked into commutes and that bucolic dream turned nightmare some days but still we built that garden, even if it meant working under flood lights. I dug all my stress into it, and that garden, in turn unearthed everything about my life that wasn’t good for me. Such joy and peace I found when in it, that it held a mirror up to the unhappiness and unhealthiness I felt in time taken up with a career I didn’t like, people too, from the past, from the present, the rabbit hole of ones own personal history delved down into with every hole dug, until I couldn’t stand to live with any of these things anymore. And so I let it all go, and I gardened and I gardened, and I gardened, and I gardened. I nurtured myself new with every plant I grew and every day I collapsed onto the verandah we could not afford to fix, a beautiful garden grown around a broken down farmhouse, and me, a little lighter each day.
My breathing slowed and my mind cleared and there, surrounded by this garden, of roses and cornflowers, salvias and apricots, tomatoes and crabapples, chickens and piglets, bumble bees and fairy wrens, I found calm for the first time in my life, complete peace in a tiny pocket amidst the madness of it all. The peace I had clawed at in my writing, in the daydreams of my childhood and adolescence when life would be different one day, I would tell myself and then suddenly, though it was not suddenly of course, it was. I put away my computer and high heels, pulled on a pair of well worn boots and went to study the world of plants and gardens and everything, EVERYTHING changed.
I smiled so much and so often and I met each day with the kind of enthusiasm you see in small people for small things and I learnt as much as I could. I became an unappeasable vessel for any knowledge pertaining to plants and I gardened daily. I worked in small nurseries with other passionate people, selling to passionate people and I, who had been tight in her bud, unfurled only just enough to see what I might be capable of becoming for so many years, grew beyond any idea of any life I could have ever imagined for myself. And I didn’t mind that people who didn’t know me would talk down to me, from their big busy careers and their fancy, shiny lives that I too had once had, as I sold them plants they’d probably kill despite my best attempts to teach them how not to because they didn’t really listen to little people like me…….I didn’t mind because I’d been misjudged before and I left my job every day, happy and I slept deeply through the night and I woke smiling, ready to do it all over again.
And I began to write it down, the way it made me feel, about the garden I grew. The names of roses and how I planted them, the seeds I sowed every season, the most prolific, sweetest toms we loved most for passata to last the year, the things that went wrong, the mistakes that we made, the journey we were on. I took pictures of it all and I began sharing them with these words and soon hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of people spoke to me and to each other of their love for it too. They sung out from over the sea, about their deliverance found in the dirt. Their voices circled the globe; students in Israel, movie stars in Hollywood, Botanists in New York, those suffering with illness of all kinds, growing in places ravaged by war, garden designers whose work I’d admired in books, mum and dads trying to find the time, young couples trying to find the money, people growing jungles in their courtyards and on their balconies, people who’d spent a life time gardening whose bodies had given out and who loved to watch those who were where they began all those years ago. And everyone began sharing their story, sometimes for all to see, sometimes quiet private messages just to me.
I sat on that verandah we could not afford to fix and let the world in and life became more open and more connected and we could see better than we ever had what we were doing there and for a while everything was crystal clear and at our finger tips, placed atop that patch of earth. It was as if life was vibrating through us and it all made sense, everything that had happened before, was all to bring me, us, to this point where happiness, true happiness existed not without hardship but with it, alongside it where it took one in order to know the other.
Until one day, the future appeared different and it lay beyond that first garden where the dream had begun but could not stay and still grow, and babies came and some left before we could hold them and then Nes came and she stayed..…and the whole world shifted to hold her highest.
And we left, we left behind that once gardenless falling down farmhouse, now the vision we had always had for her, by some miraculous means it had materialised, that which we never thought would or could get done and we almost burst with pride, in her, in us. The old house and her garden yanked at my heart, it yanks still as I write this, as we drove away for the last time in search of that which would call to us next, the family we now were and the two entirely different people to the young couple who bought her and bought into all our wildest dreams, now somehow realised.
We smiled, we laughed and we cried, in quick succession, as we drove down our hill on that last day and I felt the magic we’d made there, follow us and any of the heartache it had taken to realise that dream, disappeared into the air behind us as if it never was. And all the times I cried, “what did we do?!” Broke, exhausted, overwhelmed, as if they’d never been spoken and we set off, enthusiasm frothing over the top once more……to do it all again, with complete and utter intent.
And on a hot summers day, on the backroads of the big island from whence we came, after hours spent looking at houses with no heart, on a road we weren’t meant to take, lined either side with River Red Gums, to go to yet another house we’d not like, she appeared. We spied chimney stacks peeking over trees and a for sale sign by an old farm gate, for a homestead down a long drive that overlooked the rolling, granite studded country of the goldfields. She was the very picture of my childhood daydreams, like the homes in the books of my fathers and the stories he’d tell of the Gold Rush when we rode together on horseback through the old gold tracks of the north. It looked like the country and the people of the art he used to make and that I’d packed in boxes to bring here, and lost to galleries and countries far away.
And that same day she would drop in price to be within our reach….and so begun the garden at Moorfield. Where now I wander in the early morning light of our second autumn here. Past the herb garden now filled out, the very first parterre we carved from a hotchpotch of plantings and odds and ends edging, to create the symmetry I so love, cut back in late summer, burst forth again already and snipped at meal times almost daily.
And where I count the gaps in the Long Border, fluffed up more than I’d expected of a first seasons growth, to pop in the first tulips we’ll plant here in coming weeks to flower in our second spring. A dark maroon I’ve chosen, “Queen of the Night”, to mimic the Scabiosa atropurpurea that thrives in this border when the heat is high and long into the autumnal wane, along with mauve Spring Stars that will creep until it makes a carpet of little blooms in patches along the periphery of the path and pure white daffodils to lift the light on those grey days just shy of winters grasp.
Where I have planted over a hundred roses, just as I did at Little Oak a decade before, an old hand I am at them now that people ask me for my guidance which always makes me giggle. To think how far I’ve come from the girl who never owned flat shoes and mangled a good dozen of them in the early days, to the one who can talk rose health for hours now, having just ordered seventeen more. The Gallicas and Damasks, the Bourbons and Chinas, the parents of the roses we grow today. Roses of a different time, created when the house was built, and earlier still, with their deep heady notes, endless petals and thorny stems. The origins of the story I am trying to tell of a plant I so love and was so loved by the women I am descended from, it seems roses are in my DNA.
Where Spanish Piccola olives newly in the ground grow alongside cold hardy lemons and oranges, there was a time I wouldn’t have thought to check. A Nagami cumquat for marmalade, like my mum used to make from the tree that survived a collision with my kid self and an out of control four wheeler. Italian oiling varieties, Frantoio and Correggiola will go in too and soon, a few seasons from now, the northern side will start to look like the hills of the small Tuscan town mum and I ran away to, the month after we put her mother and my father in the ground beside one another. And have since returned.
And more apples, apricots and plums will join the 38 fruit trees in the new orchard, heavy with cherry, nectarine and peach varieties too, planted in our first spring, the second orchard of this size that we’ve created now and so much quicker to be realised with far fewer false starts than the last, that finally began to feed us, despite us, years into countless mistakes. So it thrives and swiftly, to my delight, this new orchard of young trees where the old orchard once stood, protected still by the same craggy old Hawthorne hedgerow that shielded the first rows of fruit trees to feed the first family of this homestead over a century and a half ago, from the wind that swoops up through the valley to the top of the hill like a lashing whip that could easily snap a branch too heavy laden. A lesson we learnt at Little Oak.
Where the vegetable garden and berry patch terrace, and the cut flower garden and glasshouse that will sit to one end, will be built alongside a new dwelling for my mum with its tin pitched roof like the outbuildings that dot this landscape. Beds made of old railway sleepers, ready for spring seedlings and T-shaped trellises for raspberries, silvanberries, loganberries and boysenberries, having learnt the hard way how they get away from you, once before but how you’d never dream of not having them for all their high maintenance, for eating fresh and making jam. Where gardens of rolling perennials will rise around the granite and grow tall enough for little people to disappear into but not so tall we lose sight of the dance of the land beyond and the creek that cuts her way through it.
Where hours are stolen at sunrise and sunset, when babes sleep and thoughts can be finished, when plans are made, and illustrations painted of a garden that will again grow from the dreams we hold so very tightly onto because we know how it will test us, to turn them true. Each day unearthing a little more of her history and mapping the gardens long since lost, planted once by the mothers who lived here before me, in the country of my father’s family who made a life between Ballarat and Bendigo.
Where all the love I might’ve once withheld, in order to protect myself, is poured out all over the place with reckless abandon and I talk loudly and proudly of the trouble I once knew and the peace I could not find and how as everything began to change because of a garden and a dream and someone at my side who believed it, I became the person I think I was always meant to be and so in this way it saved my life, the one I was supposed to live, from never being uncovered after life layered itself upon my young self and kept going. It’s where I know this garden is not grown for me, or for us but it is for our little girl, that this garden grows.
Where everything we’ve learnt of plants, and life, is dug in around this 160 year old dwelling and her even older stone barn and it will be a place of permanence and stability, where our little girl can learn about the cycle of growth, of the creatures, all of them, that matter just as much and her childhood will be rooted in nature. For this is the garden she will help plant and she will watch grow, as she grows and will foster a life long love of the natural world and know she can turn to it whenever she needs help, finding peace. This is where, I hope one day, as we plant out the tomatoes or collect cut flowers together, she will come to know my story, when she’s old enough to hear it and understand that one that began with so much magic turned so much sadness and so much uncertainty, so much anger and so much fear, still held onto hope and that moment of magic had until it lead to her dad and a garden at the bottom of the world, and that made all the difference.
So, we have come home it seems, to this place we feel called to and where I am at peace already in the grounds I build around her, with my daughter and my mother, and with the man who helped return me to myself. With all the knowledge I bring from the place that once upon a time, I planted all of my heartache into, on an island where the apples grew, and where remains the garden that saved my life, left behind in order to begin the one where life can be loved, and a family raised. Where happiness can be cultivated unencumbered by what has been and rather send down roots where that which was, now cleared away, lets the light in, at last and new stories, new memories can grow. xo
Thank you for reading some of my story xo
This is such beautiful, light filled writing about darkness and pain and transformation - thank you for sharing. Going into my folder of ‘most favourite words I’ve ever read’. 🌱🧡
I so enjoyed reading your story at the perfect time snggled in bed still this morning, having time away from the family, time 'all by myself! Something I have wanted to do for a while but wasn't brave enough to do until now, Its what I needed. Thank you it has touched me, inspired and comforted me and I felt the love between the lines.