Hormonal Gardening

It's been about ten years since I last had a garden, my first, in the depths of Surrey, England. I used to spend hours and hours faffing about in it, learning all the correct latin names for bedding plants and conducting chemical warfare on various of God's creatures who showed signs of interfering with my plans for the ultimate evening gin-and-tonic environment. I joined the RHS, immersed myself annually in the joys of the Hampton Court Flower Show up the road, and generally spent a lot of spare time thinking horticultural thoughts.

Then I moved to Glasgow to a gardenless flat, the sorrow of which was somewhat mitigated by the fact that it was always bloody raining anyway, and dark for half the year so why bother gardening? Spare time was consumed by travel, study and writing, so I eventually stopped missing it so much.

But now we have Our Own Place in sunny Perth, I am rediscovering the joys of gardening, propelled not only by years of deprivation but by a tidal wave of pregnancy hormones. I am finding gardening while pregnant immensely satisfying. I lumber about the flower beds planting and nurturing in a kind of bizarre haze of fertility. It's just about the most enjoyable thing I can think of at the moment. And generally good exercise, if you don't count the time I lost my balance and almost fell into the fishpond.

It's taking some getting-used to, however, due not only to the long time since I last practised the art, but also because the rules have completely changed. Firstly, all the earth in Perth appears to be sand. Secondly, keeping things watered was before an occasional challenge to be met with a hose and a watering can, whereas here one has to be initiated in the arcane rituals of reticulation, a term I had never heard of pre-Oz. It's basically a system of pipes and sprinklers that can be set on a timer to water your plants automatically, sometimes running off a natural bore. There are whole aisles dedicated to the various kinds of plastic attachments required in Bunnings (think B&Q). Quite an eye opener. The system we have inherited with the house is quite ancient and I am only vaguely aware of hoses fizzing away in the very early hours of the morning, so I am still trying to suss it all out. Thirdly, a large proportion of plants here are quite unfamiliar to me, some seem incredibly exotic, and the ones I do recognise obey totally different flowering patterns (most annuals in the UK are perennials, etc). So I feel like a complete gardening virgin again.

I have a lemon tree, frangipani, elephant ferns, palm trees and gum trees in my new garden, along with bougainvillea, previously a long-held gardening dream. But I miss daffodils, tulips, snowdrops and bluebells, some of which technically exist here, but are not really observable in practice. And I am still getting my head around having Easter in Autumn, which is almost as wrong as a hot Christmas.

Oh, and there's the highly alarming insect life. But that's another post.