How Does Your Garden Grow?

When a city bird moves to the 'burbs...

I do not know how to tend a garden. I understand that plants need water and sunlight, but the quantities of either confound me. I can objectively understand the difference between a lawn and hedges and flowers and trees, but I cannot tell you how or why they grow the way they do. This yawning gap in knowledge has become acute as I find myself the new custodian of a garden that is coming into bloom, and all I can do is watch.

Every window in our new home looks out onto the greenery that wraps around each available side of our house. Apparently the human eye can see more shades of green than any other colour, which delights me as a ponder on how many there might be just beyond my window sill. Hundreds? Thousands, even? Humans are hardwired to seek out nature, to find symbols and icons of the natural world whilst we fester in our glass and concrete cases, just like we search for the telltale eyes, nose and mouth of something that might resemble a face. I suppose we want to feel seen.

Biophilia is the name for this innate human condition to create connection with nature. It’s a name that means, literally, love of life, and scientists argue that this tendency is a survival mechanism built in from back when we were crawling out of swamps. Knowing your plants and animals meant you ate the right ones and avoided the wrong ones, and it all plugged us into this giant ecosystem of give and take. Nowadays we tend to forage at the supermarket, but being in nature is proven to improve health and wellbeing, increase productivity, calm our nervous systems and generally make us all happier.

Yesterday, after a particularly draining day at the email factory, I sat in my garden and ate a mini Magnum in the late afternoon sun before the kids got back home. I could feel the release that comes after putting down the emotional load, my face softening and my breathing reaching deeper and steadier into its natural state. I was surrounded by the buzzing and unfurling of life, and it’s moments like this when I feel unutterably grateful to have this slice of nature just beyond my threshold.

Flowers from the garden on my study window sill

That said, nature doesn’t come naturally to me. For four long decades, I’ve been a city bird at heart and my homing compass has always pointed urban. I get a bit panicky if I’m less than 10 minutes walk away from a bakery that sells decent sourdough bread and coffee, and I have all manner of icks about six- and eight-legged creatures. At various times in my life, I’ve forced myself into deep nature on Really Serious Hikes—the kind that require tents and rucksacks and first-aid kits—and whilst I’m grateful to have descended the Grand Canyon, and scaled Cerro Chirripó, and tracked gorillas and wot not, invariably the only thing that got me through was knowing there’d be a G&T and crisp white sheets at some point in the immediate future. No, I’ve always held nature at a slight remove. It was there and I was here, and that did me just fine.

And then we moved to the suburbs. I’m painfully aware it’s not some remote rural backwater, but still—the suburbs. People have sheds and garden tools here. We moved, for all intents and purposes, for a garden to call our own, along with a little extra space for our growing family. We could have gone longer without much more than the balcony we had in our apartment, but then we had our son and he is so untamed that I sometimes wonder if he didn’t come from under some hedgerow rather than my own body. As I was finishing my mini Magnum, my husband rolled into the garden with the cargo bike and our two sticky, wired children. My daughter ventured inside to find snacks and a drawing pad, but my wild little son plopped himself on the lawn and spent about 45 minutes picking daisies and singing to himself. He is the definition of touching grass.

My son 'helping' with the gardening

Before we moved, I was worried I would have an identity crisis. I did not know who Katie was when she lived in the suburbs, surrounded by detached houses and gardens and birdsong. I only knew the Katie who got a cappuccino to go and went for a rummage in the bric-a-brac shop. Turns out that Katie hadn’t actually experienced the full body sensation of a nervous system reset after a day at the email factory until she rounded the corner into her garden. For all the things I love about this home, the fact that it’s so green and light and quiet tops the list. This has genuinely been a surprise.

Evidently, you don’t need your own garden to experience biophilia. I thoroughly enjoy a ramble in a public park and a windswept beach as much as the next romantic, and I’ll take a picture of any given sunset like it’s my last. Hell, even synthetic or abstract representations of nature can give us many of the same benefits as the real stuff. Proximity to greenery indoors and outdoors is great, but if the maintenance is going to tip you over the edge, you can easily bring natural fibers or patterns of leaves and flowers onto the textiles and walls of your home.

Saga admires the greenery

I wrote in my book that when I feel out of control in my life at home, I buy flowers or a plant. These days, I put my gardening clogs on and water the hydrangeas. I find that walking 30 metres down the garden path to take the trash out is a remarkably efficient way of de-escalating my rage when I’ve asked the kids to get in the bath / brush their teeth / tidy their toys away 50 times already. I like waking in the mornings to birdsong, and working in the afternoons to that particular pitch of a child shrieking with glee on a garden trampoline. I like to stand at the sink as the sun goes down and watch the local magpies brazenly saunter down from the surrounding roofs to reclaim our tattered lawn. I like the Michael Pollan line that, “the garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway”.

Sometimes my husband will carry our enormous and, frankly, ridiculously white fluffy housecat out there to show the birds who’s boss, but they all just look at each other in bewilderment. I can’t help but think it perfectly captures my own haltering excursion into this natural world. It’s not so much the love of nature, but the love of life that brings me here. It’s home now—this buzzing, unfurling greenscape that gathers round this little house, and all who live in her. Even if all I can do is watch.

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Yes, I bought spotty red gardening clogs