Seasonal slump

Gardening is something I have been doing since I was only four or five. My first effort was weeding out a bed in my parents' rambling and overgrown garden to plant some pansy seedlings. They didn't just grow, they flourished. After that I was given a packet of seeds and that was that. An addiction was born. While my friends were collecting dolls, I was grubbing around in the dirt trying to grow things.

I was lucky, I suppose, because I had a gardening granny who had lots of gardening granny-type friends who were very tolerant of a small five-year-old stalker following them around as they gardened asking them questions about what they were doing.

My parents, on the other hand, weren't noted for their horticultural gifts. My father, though able to grow many things, approached gardening with the same attitude he applied to most things in his life - a kind of out-of-control bomb blast behaviour that sometimes produced results but more often than not just left a whole heap of rubble for the rest of the family to clear up.

My mother was keen, but clueless, with a tendency to lose focus half way through a project and end up parked somewhere comfy with a cup of tea and a book. It made her a great mum and very well-read but not so much of a success around the shrubbery.

Over the 30-plus years Gorgeous George and I have been married and making homes together, there have been several gardens, each getting a little more quirky courtesy of my expanding knowledge and a tendency to botanical curiosity leading to expanding collections of plants. Our current garden sports a number of sub-tropical plants that should struggle in this part of Sydney but which are starting to romp along and a proliferation of succulents colonising pots just for a start.

But this last season has been dry and far too hot much too early in the season. The vegie garden has sulked, the lemon threw its fruit away, the cottage flowers shut up shop and a clever little red-flowering eucalypt hailing from Western Australia burst into bud and then keeled over in the wind. But that hasn't stopped the frogs. They have flourished and adopted the Alcantarea imperealis as their home. The frog spawn has hatched and there are tadpoles living there now - and I didn't have to travel to South America to see it. I am a proud gardening gal and looking forward to being a gardening granny.