What Made Me a Gardener & Poet by Shaine Melrose

Cultivating a Gardener and Poet

I was born in Victoria’s high country, where there was always water, wetland, spring, weir, river or creek and misted mountains in hues of lavender and blue. The Great Dividing Range wound into the distance, a background presenting unrepeatable beauty. Imprinted within me was an inseparable connection to nature.

For a while, during the sixties, we lived in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. Like most back yards, ours had fruit trees, a veggie patch and a chook house. My grandfather built the home and garden. I loved the bright colours, especially juicy apricots in January.

When I was eight, we moved to a sixteen-acre lot in the Dandenong Ranges. The most inspiring and wondrous place I could imagine; lush green farms surrounded by temperate rain forest, towering eucalypts and scrub.

Although a puny specimen compared to my strapping family, suffering periods of fatigue and migraines, I was never afraid of hard physical work, and there was plenty of that.

I was often found up trees, down holes, wading through water.

In my last year of primary school, I was unfortunate to crash through the bike shed roof during a customary leap from a nearby tree. Among other things, I dislocated my coccyx. It was sports day, and the fastest runner in the school in less than a second could hardly walk at all. As a result, I suffered from chronic pain and vertigo for many years.

Writerly Beginnings

I was a chatterbox. With so much to know, heaps of questions, and ideas and babble in my head, I devoured books. I found an outlet for confusion at the loss of family and friends in writing stories and poetry. I kept a journal. Writing and performing plays also helped me understand but not articulate I was queer and inclined to self-destruction. The only place I felt grounded and whole was in nature.

Nursery Work

It seems inevitable that I ended up in the horticultural trade. At first, the work was mostly seasonal, and I always had a few gardens to maintain. I also worked with dried flowers—growing, preserving and making bouquets that were very popular in the eighties.

I spent one freezing winter on steep hillsides of heavy red clay, planting Buxus for the bare root trade, but the views over the Warburton Ranges, spectacular and energising.

Relief came with the arrival of a QLD semi-trailer full of plants such as giant cactus in pots to be unloaded and moved into the glasshouses. Thick leather gloves, hessian sacks, bravery and a strong back, were necessary.

Adding Advocacy

I went on to work in advocacy, training men with disabilities within a five-acre indoor/outdoor plant production nursery. The gift was the location, right on the Yarra Riverbanks, 32 km north-east of Melbourne.

We worked through the elements wrapped in yellow PVC outdoor gear or broad hats and shorts. Working in small groups along the far-reaching rows, weeding, staking and cutting back stock, our banter superfluous to the wildlife. Finches and blue wrens flitted all over the plants.

Then the Creatures

Massive red-backs tucked between the black plastic pots. Snakes in the sunny warm aisles. Eagles over paddocks of cattle. Royal spoonbills and many water birds gathered on the river’s mudflats, lavender-blue ranges in the distance.

And a Growing Love of Australian Natives

In these early years, my passion grew for Australian plants, Camellias and cultivation in general. The nursery boasted several hundred varieties of Camellia, thousands of natives, including Callistemon, Acacia, Grevillea, and Eucalyptus.

I delighted in watching cuttings and seedlings develop into sturdy flowering specimens ready for the retail sector. Masses of people would purchase our plants for their gardens.

My soul was sorry to leave this truly magnificent place. Still, I was headhunted into a new retail nursery, with a landscape design and construction branch, in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs, with management training prospects and becoming the green-life buyer.

I spent four years building my way up to manager. In my fifth year, I received an offer to become a company director.

By this time I had been through a shattering personal crisis and was living inner city with a new partner.  Insane traffic and a yearning to get back to nature led us to move to the Adelaide Hills in South Australia

Botanical Friendships

Plants and friendship involve a wonderful exchange of botanical treasures, cuttings, bulbs, divisions and seeds. Most gardeners carry a herbaceous memoir of these exchanges. I love walking around our garden and acknowledging the provenance of particular plants and, in turn carrying on the tradition.

I have begonias, orchids, chain of hearts plants that belonged to my grandmother, mother and elderly customers from my gardening days who have long since returned to earth. Our plants and gardens often long outlive us. Through gardening and the nursery trade, I have made many friends with a passion for plants and gardening.

Drought, Climate Change and Illness

I have lived in Adelaide for 24 years now, working in wholesale and retail nurseries and as a private gardener. The Mediterranean climate is a contrast to Melbourne’s garden state, which meant spending twice as much effort on soil improvement. The most demanding period was the extended  hot dry, and drought between 2006-2010.

There was a renewed interest in native plants, and the common lawn took a beating. Most were dug up and replaced with artificial grass or hardy plants. I spent my days as a gardener advising people about survival strategies, installing drip irrigation systems, replacing lawns and spreading tons of mulch. As the relentless dry went on, many trees and plants started to die. 

Drought reduced our garden to a desert, and my health slowly deteriorated. I succumbed to an unidentifiable illness exacerbated by constant back issues after falling down an embankment while attached to my brush cutter. The unrelated loss of an uncle and aunt to suicide compounded with drought, pain and illness, led to a long period of depression.

Water In a Dry Land

The natural environments, parklands, street trees, animals and humans alike, thirst for water. All life needs water. One of the biggest problems with ailing garden and house plants is under or over watering.

A journey to the UK, Denmark and France in 2008 to see family and friends highlighted how I had under-estimated my yearning for moisture and plant life that wasn’t suffering. We spent weeks in lush gardens and forests, by rivers, fjords and great bodies of water.

Twice caught in a deluge, my partner and I rejoiced, the torrents provoking excitement and laughter. In Paris, soaked through and shrieking with joy we tumbled through a café door into a small bar.

A group of locals stopped talking and stared at us, wild as we were, intoxicated by the rain. Unfazed, we explained we had come from southern Australia where it had hardly rained for years.

Hours later, toasting the regulars with apple brandy, we wandered through warm, steamy Parisian streets to our accommodation by the Luxembourg Gardens. The dried prune in my soul began to swell.

Now

No doubt, change in the climate today demands a different approach to gardening, and the COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a greater appreciation and a need for parks and gardens.

I potter in our garden, write poetry, sleep an unnatural amount (due to a condition called Fibromyalgia) and grow edible plants.

Author Bio

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

‘The Words’ first published in Friendly Street Reader 43 Alchemy in 2019.

‘Life in Water’ previously published in InDaily 12 February 2020

Photographs and text remain the property of the Author.

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