One Magic Square

Late last year, I found myself thinking about horta; and in thinking about horta, I remembered an interview on Gardening Australia. An organic gardener was asked what happens when insects attack the leafy greens. 'Then you get holes,' replied the gardener, smiling, 'and you can eat holes.'

I was so charmed that I looked up the interview. The gardener was Lolo Houbein, author of One Magic Square. My husband bought me the book for Christmas and, now I've read it from cover to cover, I am more enchanted than ever. In her book, Lolo talks about vegetable gardening in a way that is generous and sustainable, pitched to the imperfect Australian backyard gardener ie me. Her tone is lovely throughout: thoughtful, encouraging, and full of good humour.

Lolo suggests that most veggie gardens fail because we start too big. Instead, she says, start with a single square, one metre by one metre. This is an achievable size to weed, water and maintain – and it is also as much space as many of us have in these days of tiny backyards.

To make the most of this square, Lolo recommends dense plantings of mixed crops. Early crops shade successive crops, and the gardener gains much satisfaction from the little garden. The book includes schemes for planting the square, with names such as the Aztec plot, the Salad Plot, and the Soup Plot; each scheme is followed by a few casual recipes. The schemes are not overly grand, and projects are listed in steps so that you can do a small job each day. When the job is finished, Lolo suggests, come inside, have a cup of tea and feel good about yourself. Any food you grow is a bonus. Don't try to do everything at once, she says. Don't get discouraged. Instead, relish what you can manage and celebrate it.

Her friendly approach extends to garden nuisances. Lolo lets weeds grow to shade the soil until other plants take over, pulling them out only when they are about to flower. Rather than trying to eradicate all pests, she recommends planting pest attractors a distance from the veggies. Let the snails munch on agapanthus, and they won't bother with the lettuces. If one plant is being attacked by bugs, leave it. It's a runt, and it's preferable that the pests attack it rather than move on to the second-worst plant. This is non-confrontational gardening, with a companionable approach to other forms of life.

Her practical advice reflects my experience of gardening in Australia. For example, Lolo uses broken umbrellas to shade seedlings; and I can vouch that after a recent 40 degree day, all our veggies thus shaded still looked fresh at sundown. She recommends growing some plants in basins, to keep them cool; and crowding many different plants together so that pests become confused and move on.

The photos in the book are of normal gardens, edged by water bottles and shaded by last year's parasols. Seedlings are grown in toilet rolls, which stand in old margarine containers. It may not be glamorous, but the gardens are bursting with life. This is real gardening, for real people: the sort of thing I can manage.

Lolo points out that gardening is not onerous and should not be regarded as such. Instead, take a few minutes each morning or evening in the garden, watering and doing one small job. This activity becomes a regular meditation, a time to oneself to reflect on the day. It can also be one's exercise, in the gentle bending and stretching and lifting that gardening entails.

I've felt so encouraged that, since Christmas, I've built a new compost heap; sown a bike basket sized square of horta and another of salad; started work on a new garden bed; and moved seedling eggplant and peppers much closer together. They have taken off, perhaps because together they form a moist microclimate – but I prefer Lolo's explanation, that plants are companionable and like to be near one another.

Already I can see some changes in the garden, and, perhaps more important, some small changes in me. I am the sort of person who expects too much from herself; and I am perpetually disappointed in what I cannot do. But Lolo reminds us to treat ourselves with gentleness: to accept what we can manage, and to recognise it as enough. I find myself walking the garden feeling less frustrated at myself, and more grateful for what is growing well. With her words whispering in my ear, I'm celebrating what I have: a healthy tree of white peaches, a regular supply of zucchini and basil.

Gardens are lively creative places, ripe for experimentation and bursting with life. Our approach should be commensurate with this: playful, intelligent, kind. With a gentle soul like Lolo at our side, such an approach becomes easy.

Becoming Clara Bebbs

As a child, I repeatedly borrowed Ratbags and Rascals from the library. It was a collection of unrelated short stories by Robin Klein: a clumsy monk accidentally blots a piece of parchment and turns it into a work of art; girls on school camp develop a Rube Goldbergian invention to try and stop a roommate from snoring; other girls scare themselves silly holding a seance at a sleepover; and so on. But I especially loved 'How Clara Bebbs put Strettle Street properly on the map'. Clara Bebbs, bored during her school holidays and fed up with her forgettable street, goes about making it interesting. She sticks silver stars to the pavement. She rigs up a trolley pulley so that no-one has to push their shopping up the hill. She builds a jungle, and a swimming pool, and an underground tunnel; organises swap meets and concerts and chariot races; and so on and so forth. To a child who grew up in nondescript streets in the suburbs, this was heady stuff.

Imagine my surprise recently when I stumbled across an adult book that was pretty much the same idea. Street Reclaiming: Creating Livable Streets and Vibrant Communities, by David Engwicht, argues that streets have become dominated by traffic at the expense of public life. Children no longer play in the streets; people don't use the front rooms of their houses; our wisest neighbours sit indoors, away from the traffic, rather than outside dispensing wisdom. The result is a breakdown of community, of neighborhoods, of belonging.

The book goes on to suggest ways to challenge this. Simply put, Engwicht argues that traffic can be calmed, even diminished, through informal means. When people use the street for chatting or games or shelling peas; when neighbours walk or use public transport, rather than their cars; when banners and other mechanisms calm drivers as they slow to look, then drivers will choose other routes, or even other means, to travel. Instead of being solely for cars, the streets will be reclaimed as vibrant public space. Engwicht suggests setting up a 'walking bus' to school, building archways across a street, putting seating in a car space, and doing anything and everything that might entice people to move slowly, use their car less, stop for a chat, and use the street for human interaction. If we put ideas like these into practice, we will end up with more space for conversation and play, stronger bonds between neighbours, and, of course, safer streets for everybody.

This certainly resonates with my experience. In our street, those of us who walk or ride or use public transport are visible. So too are those of us who sit in our front gardens in the evening. We recognise each other, and chat a little. Other neighbours who drive everywhere are, quite literally, invisible to the street. The three houses next to me have rollerdoors at the back of their properties, and I never see the occupants. I wouldn't know them if they knocked on my door. Cars charge through our street, visibility is poor, and I won't let my five year old cross the road to a friendly neighbour's without me checking that it's safe to cross.

I'd love to know more neighbours, and strengthen the bonds with the others, but lack the gumption to go hammer on their doors. So last week, I took a small first step. My kids and I mapped out a chalk labyrinth on the footpath in front of our house. We chatted with a few people who wandered past, and left it there for people to puzzle out. Pity it was so rainy that it washed off the next day. But we will do it again, and again.

My fence is good for writing, as the graffiti taggers know, so I am thinking I might pose a few conundrums, or write a few quotes on it, in chalk. And we have a large street tree with nice horizontal branches on a decent sized 'traffic calming' square of land. I am trying to work out how to hang a tyre swing from the tree. My kids need a swing, and there are other invisible kids in the street who might emerge if there was reason to. A few lawn chairs near the swing, and we're halfway to a street party.

Feeding into these ideas is On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening without Boundaries, by Richard Reynolds. It's hard to tell whether Reynolds is deadly serious or tongue in cheek. Either way, the book is hilarious, delightful, thought-provoking. It recounts the guerilla gardening movement (private citizens gardening in public space without permission) and provides tactics and suggestions for action. The text is dotted with the language of revolution; gardeners are known by their first name and troop number only. As well as being amusing in its seriousness, it's full of good advice: how to choose a spot; how to minimise vandalism; how to recruit public support and other gardeners; how to win over city councils and the law. And it has helpful notes on plant selection, too.

My sister and I fantasize about dotting our suburb with walnuts, mulberries and other large, graceful, shady trees that will bear fruit. But between climate change and ongoing water restrictions, we can't see how we could nurture a sapling to a full grown adult. To do it properly, we'd need stakes, hessian, and council worker clothes, not to mention the saplings. And anyway, we're chicken.

Until I'm braver, I need to set my sights closer to home. Under our aforementioned street tree, our lovely council spread black plastic to suppress weeds, then dumped a thin layer of tanbark. Even lovelier neighbours regularly leave car tyres (reclaimed by us for potato towers), large chunks of concrete (been there for a year or two now), and all sorts of other rubbish. A council worker sprays the lot with roundup every few months to kill any weed that dares poke its head above the black plastic and tanbark. Yet a block down the street, another tree has been underplanted with daisies and geraniums. The spray-man leaves these, and it makes me wonder whether, if we planted densely enough, he might skip our little corner and spray somewhere else, instead.

Weaving the ideas from these books together, I imagine a little scented garden, a tyre swing, a pavement labyrinth, a few lawn chairs... perhaps, just perhaps, those neighbours hiding behind their curtains might be enticed to slip outside their front doors one warm summer evening. Someone might bring a bottle of wine; someone else, some biccies. And I'll have a moment where I have lost myself in the story, become Clara Bebbs, just for a little while. And Stewart Street, like Strettle Street, may too become interesting.

> Robin Klein Ratbags and Rascals (Ferntree Gully, Victoria: Houghton Mifflin, 1989 (1984); David Engwicht Street Reclaiming: Creating Livable Streets and Vibrant Communities (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 1999); Richard Reynolds On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening without Boundaries (London: Bloomsbury, 2008).

Pretend the long grass is the sea

I'm nuts about gardens. I love to wander through them; I think about them all the time. When I can't sleep at night, I take myself for an imaginary ramble through a large garden. Awake, I walk everywhere, and find hidden pockets of glory, or even single trees, around my suburb. I cannot get enough of gingko leaves, or lime green euphorbias, or even homely rapa or chicory growing in lieu of a lawn. Just knowing that lots of people are out there Growing Things thrills me.

And I love garden things. Not glossy garden shop accessories, but the old laundry sinks that have become pots; the rusted out bike entwined by a creeper; the faded hammock shivering in the breeze. In one of my favourite short stories, a couple drink beer at the bottom of the garden in an old rowboat surrounded by long grass.

Pity about my own garden. It's dry and dusty, weedy and tired. I make noble vows about working in it for ten minutes a day, and plant out seedlings bought in optimistic moments, but some days it feels like a complete no-hoper.

That's why I need garden books. They are my ticket to dream. But the dreaming becomes ridiculous when I look at gorgeous books of French gardens set on hillsides. Too much beauty makes me despondent. Too much misty rain and photos of mud and I am gripped with envy. I need encouragement and enthusiasm fit for a small dry inner urban block, not the dreams of Northern Hemisphere princes.

Michael Mccoy's Garden, by a Victorian garden writer, is perfect. McCoy writes about developing his own garden on a suburban block over the course of a year. He writes about the labour of digging up lawn and shovelling compost; his backaches and failures; and his delight when things go right. He is an enthusiastic plantsman, detailing the virtues of this plant or that; and he charts the development of the garden with stunning photographs that I return to again and again. These photographs celebrate both the individual plant and the striking combination. They are photos to wander through, an invitation to dream, and yet the concepts are simple enough to influence the way I plant. In my garden, thanks to this book, feathery cosmos flowers pink against rigid grey euphorbias, and I get a thrill every time I see the combination.

Influential too is an older book, Surviving in the Eighties. The first part of the book is about small animal husbandry, and is full of fascinating if, to me, utterly useless information such as how to raise a herd of goats or incubate chickens. But Part Two of the book, Surviving in the City, profiles half a dozen gardens crammed with plants. The focus is on growing one's own food, although many non-food plants are mentioned; and it is startling how much a gardener can squeeze into a city block, whether it's just tomatoes and herbs, or espaliered trees. There are vigorous discussions on how to deal with gardens soured by generations of cats' piss or heavy pollution, or the pests that develop in areas with very few trees. The writing is enthusiastic and opinionated; it makes me feel that I, too, can grow tomatoes and green leaves and have great fun doing so. In fact, this book is responsible not only for my garden full of rocket and rainbow chard, but for the seven espaliered fruit tree saplings I planted last year. I dream of apples yet.

Even if I don't have a prince's budget or a garden on a French hillside, I still treasure whimsy. I love hammocks and outdoor showers, hidden garden rooms and rowboats sunk into grass. Gardens for Pleasure answers this need. It suggests themes such as Night, Butterflies, Reading, Resting, and Tea, then suggests ways to develop a garden around each theme in small, medium or large gardens. Many ideas are do-able, and its plant lists are useful, but it is really a book for meditating on. While few of us will go to the effort of building a small one-person sized island in a pond (in the Resting Garden), the book evokes questions about what we enjoy in a garden; how we might like to rest, or read, or sip tea there; and how we might develop a garden, or even a nook of our garden, in a way that matches our taste and budget. Gardens for Pleasure contains no glossy photographs. Instead, it is so beautifully illustrated that even my five year old curls up with it to scheme and dream of the garden she would like us to have.

Speaking of which, does anyone have an old rowboat?

> Blog title quotes Lisa Merrifield 'What I did with what I knew' in Splash (Ringwood, Vic: Viking, 1998); Michael McCoy Michael Mccoy's Garden (Glebe, NSW: Florilegium, 2000); Michael Boddy & Richard Beckett Surviving in the Eighties (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1980); Brodee Myers-Cooke Gardens for Pleasure (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1996).