The garden in which I grew up was a child's delight. It was full of big trees for climbing and hidey-holes for secret kid's business. There were fruit trees to raid, berry patches in which to gorge and tender young vegies to snaffle by the handful. There were mines of rock hard clay, eminently suitable for mud pie making. There were sandy bits, ideal for growing loquat forests for elaborate games (usually involving dolls). There was a cubby-house and a sand pit and a home-made tyre swing on the pepper tree.
For the zoologically inclined, there was a never lack of things to see. There were blue tongues to capture and skinks to torment. Cabbage moths to net in the vegie garden and fuzzy caterpillars on the grape vines. There was always at least two dogs to tumble with and a cat to annoy. There were magpies and kookaburras that tamely came to feed and beetles and worms by the score. If all else failed, there was always an ants' nest to disturb.
It was a paradise of getting dirty, tearing my clothes and skinning my knees. I was an expert in all three.
When Mum and Dad moved to there new place, thirty odd years ago, they started off in the same vein. Dad ensured that the builders cleared the minimum of trees before building. A huge grove of ancient gnarled teatree filled most of their front yard. They added a manna gum and a daughter of the desert ash I had climbed as a kid. A red flowering gum and a row of pittosporum. It was all in-filled with a riot of vines, creepers and perennials. It was a grandchild's paradise in the making.
Then Dad died.
And Mum started pruning.
And she just kept right on going. When it was too much for her aging body, she employed fit young men to do it for her.
The trees disappeared one by one. The creepers got tamed and then uprooted. Gradually, limb by limb, tendril by tendril, she hacked that paradise into neatness.
By the time she left a single teatree and the lone ash were all that were left. The rest was a tidy display of geraniums, lavenders and daisies in a thick bed of tan bark. There was nothing over 3 feet tall. It was so neat and tidy it was painful.
When she arrived here, she was thrilled with the little courtyard we had made for her. She busily set about mulching and planting her beloved geraniums.
And then she set her sights on the rest of the garden. Our bit. There was (and is) and endless stream of not so subtle hints about our lack of neatness. There are lots of suggestions for pruning, lopping, and razing to the ground. Everything, it seems, is too big, too overgrown, too rampant, too messy. We need to cut back, tidy up, neaten. We should pave and fence and make things more accessible, more usable.
She just doesn't get it. We have spent 20 years encouraging a garden where blue wrens will happily breed. Where frogs and water rats visit. Where honey-eaters can rely on a feed and lizards and snakes don't fear for their lives. Twenty years to build a wildlife friendly habitat and it is condemned as needing a good tidy up. It si our choice. We like it like this.
Yesterday we had an unexpected visitor. Isn't he just fine?
I introduced him to Mum. Maybe he would help her understand that neat is not our priority.
*sigh*
It seems our frog was interesting and that our pond would look so much better if I cleared it all out. Mozzies, you know.
