“A Garden Is A Pocket Of Joy”
A self-confessed homebody with a fear of change, Jodi Wilson was the least likely candidate to pack her family into a caravan and travel around Australia. In her new book, Practising Simplicity: Small Steps and Brave Choices for a Life Less Distracted, she shares what she learnt along the way – including a renewed appreciation of how a garden can help restore your soul.
For most of my childhood, I watched my dad from the kitchen window amble from tomato vine to vegie patch, pruning and watering and tending his plants. And while I enjoyed the results of the many months tending soil – the cherry tomatoes that oozed summer sweetness, the rocket that added a peppery punch to the salad, the potatoes that would inevitably meet their match with salt and butter – I could see that it was the therapy of the process for Dad. When he was defeated by snails and ransacked by possums, the possibility of his plot spurred him to continue, but it was the quiet of moments found in the vegie patch that bookended his days. A bountiful harvest may be rewarding, but regardless of the success or failure we reap, gardening is a schema for thinking about life.
In her book The Well-Gardened Mind, Sue Stuart-Smith explores the garden-psychology connection and says, “A garden gives you a protected physical space which helps increase your own sense of mental space and it gives you quiet, so you can hear your own thoughts. The more you immerse yourself in working with your hands, the more free you are internally to sort feelings out and work them through.”
Before we left on our road trip a friend mentioned that she could never live nomadically, for the simple fact that she would be without a garden, a grounding patch of dirt and the opportunity it presented. I didn’t think much of her words at the time but as we journeyed further into our trip, I felt the pull of green spaces.
On the travelling days that went awry because of car troubles or agitated children or misjudged distances (and the inevitable fallout over alleged navigational skills), the discovery of a garden quelled the chaos and the tempers. I soon learned that there’s not much that can’t be fixed by a sandwich, water, a cuppa and a short nap in a green space. We would picnic under shady gums and, more often than not, we would read and nap there, too – much-needed rest before we drove on to someplace new.
I started to search out gardens, places to retreat to when we needed a break from the road, a green reprieve when the stark light of the highway hurt our eyes. These green spaces and parklands are thriving in cities and small towns, intentionally planted as breathing spaces among the buildings. They are also magnets for community, purposefully planted by the neighbourhood, a gathering spot that slowly becomes, with time and care and intention, a gracious offering.
These community gardens did not ask anything of us but welcomed us mere strangers and shared everything they could offer. Granted, in many cases we stumbled upon them when they were empty – quiet places where we could wander and think, play and shriek, lift leaves and vines to find edible treasure that we would pick with gratitude to the growers and the soil, the sun and the rain. I definitely wasn’t growing anything in these places but I benefited from those who had, with forethought, time and effort, planted according to moon cycle or season. Perhaps they were just coming together to create an abundant patch of food for themselves, but I saw each garden as an offering to those who visited for quiet, reprieve and hope – in the community and in the plants that sprouted under its care.
““In those first few weeks of lockdown, when our lives felt like a strange dream, a new friend dropped a small box of just-picked herbs and greens and a jar of summer honey at our door and it felt like a hug.””
Gardens are so much more than plants growing in the earth. They are the efforts of those who have planned and looked forward, who have knelt on the earth and dug with their hands, listening, watching and connecting. They are years in the making or perhaps only days old, and they are a magnet for communities who want to come together on the earth to commune and grow. We were strangers in the places we visited and yet these gardens were welcoming spaces for us to peruse and pick and to find our ground when the transience of nomadic life had shaken our nerves and tired our bodies. We found gardens everywhere, tucked into little alcoves of caravan parks where herbs and silverbeet grew in abundance and we were encouraged to please, take what we wanted. The roadside honesty stalls, the give what you can, take what you need movement, the botanical gardens where we spent an afternoon on the edge of the Stuart Highway before we ventured into the Red Centre where the wattle was in bloom: sunshine confetti against the red dirt of the desert.
I found my fascination with community gardens extended online, too. I started following homemakers who shared their charming vegie plots more for their own documentation and note-taking than for the likes they inevitably received. I watched old episodes of Gardening Australia (the show that we would religiously watch at 6.30 pm every Friday night growing up), and I scrolled back to see one woman’s progress on her picturesque English allotment. I didn’t have any soil to tend for myself, but I found just as much joy and satisfaction watching others grow their gardens and it prompted me to search out market stalls and locally sourced fruit and vegies at small-town grocers on the roads we drove from one town to the next.
In those first few weeks of lockdown, when our lives felt like a strange dream, a new friend dropped a small box of just-picked herbs and greens and a jar of summer honey at our door and it felt like a hug. A few months later, another jar of honey and five varieties of homegrown garlic were delivered via post and, when housesitting for friends in Devonport, we boiled eggs straight from the chook shed and gasped at the golden yolks that oozed as the kids dipped in toast soldiers.
These small joys are simple ones, but I remember how I felt when I found the bread and again when we cracked the eggs. They were joyous enough moments to file away for later and memorable enough to write about here.
These pockets of joy were found wherever we travelled, and I have no doubt that you could find them, too, in your neighbourhood, if you look. Because there is always the garden, there is always the park at the end of the road and the grass in the backyard. There are community gardening pages on Facebook and notes pinned to community noticeboards advertising seedlings to share or zucchini to take, because there is only so much zucchini slice, fritters and relish one can eat in summer.
Gardens may offer quiet and also joy, but I also believe they can offer us hope, in change and growth and things not always going to plan. I believe that we can all find solace here – in any green space that invites us to sit without judgment or expectation. Because the world is a noisy place, don’t we all need somewhere quiet where we can hear ourselves think?
This is an extract from Practising Simplicity: Small Steps and Brave Choices for a Life Less Distracted by Jodi Wilson, Murdoch Books, RRP $32.99.