My Father's Garden
When I write I am in my father's garden. I am seven years old and it is always spring. As I dawdle towards the house on another never-ending evening I punch holes in its shadow with my toes.
'Dad,' I yell. 'I've made holes in the house.'
My father looks up from the bed of tiger lilies he is weeding and his smile is lop-sided and conspiratorial. 'Don't make it fall down,' he calls.
My father and I grin at each other from our ends of the garden. He rises and I see him stretch to ease his back. He is skinny and hitches up his baggy trousers. In the late sunlight his grey hair is flecked with orange tiger lily dust. I am thrilled by our secret, and awash with delicious conspiracy. Joy prickles at my skin.
My father was nearing forty when I was born, and I was his fourth daughter, fifteen years separating the first from the last. But even at an early age I understood I was his new seedling, a part of the garden that sloped down to the rickety paling fence, and he cared for me as gently as he did any young plant. I have few clear memories of the sisters who were busy growing up high above me, their worlds of work and boyfriends existing on some other plane while I occupied a smaller world that revolved around my books and dolls.
I recall snippets of their lives: the weddings, which create a frenzy in which I play no part, the interminable talk and arguments about dresses, the latter catapulting my mother into silences from which I cower. I see the apricot dress I wear for the eldest’s wedding, but clearer is the ignominy of being sat on the front lawn in the sun for my hair to dry when terror of the bouffant hair dryer overwhelms me. I remember the green floral dress I wear for my second sister’s wedding, and the handbag with the doll’s head that hangs from my wrist on thin green ribbon, its wide skirt a miniature of my own. I remember the spats that accompany the bridesmaid’s dress I wear for the third wedding, its see-through lace upper bodice an affront to Catholic modesty.
If I squint hard I can conjure up my mother’s Sunday dinner table: the salads or roasts, the high, light scones accompanied by crystal dishes of berry jam and cream whipped with vanilla essence and a sprinkling of castor sugar. From a vantage point at the kitchen door I see her beside the combustion stove and sense its welcome warmth and assortment of smells: vegetable soup simmering, the animal-scent of wet wool looped into skeins and hanging from a hook in the chimney in order to steam out wrinkles from a previous incarnation as jumper or cardigan, the glowing charcoal briquettes in neat lines in the firebox. If I listen hard enough I hear the click-clack of her knitting needles.
There are few other adults in my kingdom. Three grandparents die before I am born. The other lives in a house around the corner from my own. This remaining grandmother has the tensile strength of a bird in the wind. I see her sitting in the rocking chair in her living room. Her hands lift and waver about before falling to the crochet blanket over her knees. Her hair is a halo of white fairy floss, but it is countered by a sharp nose which she draws inwards and down in annoyed concentration so that her upper lip puckers. Each year on my birthday she fixes me with her piercing eyes and gives me a new hardback Enid Blyton. She is as tangy as the peppermints she hands out one at a time when I call to see her on my way home from school.
But all these memories float like balloons, part of – yet apart from – my own world. When I call them to the forefront of my mind they arrive encircled like miniature still-lives. They are of me and have their own stories, and in turn fill out the jigsaw that is my narrative, but they do not form the person I will become. It is my father’s garden that sinks deep into my psyche, and spreads its roots through my soul.
My father bends his head and his touch is light as he cups a cosmos in his hand so I can see it fully. His face is brown and wrinkled and his gnarled hands are dotted with age spots. The flower is candy pink and there is a thick wad of bristling yellow stamens at its centre. For a time we are silent in the presence of this loveliness, and when we have finished looking my father runs his fingers along the stem, pushing the petals gently upwards so that they form a tulip-shape. He removes his hand and I watch the petals fan outwards like a ballet dancer’s tulle skirt.
My father doesn’t enter the world of dresses and arguments, and he prefers plain fare to fancy food. Each Saturday at lunchtime he sits at the opposite end of the kitchen table from me and munches contentedly on bread and the smelliest, tastiest cheese he can find. He drinks tea by the pot, and thinks it the height of indulgence when he buys a thin, paper cylinder of cream biscuits on his way home from working at the office. He mows my grandmother’s lawn but does not enter into the politics of old age. He lets my mother schedule appointments and bristle at the impositions on her days. Mostly, my father retreats to the garden – and I follow him.
My father built our weatherboard house on the first third of a quarter acre block, and stories of his building prowess have long passed into family folklore.
It is a modest house, with the kitchen as its architectural heart, around which are placed three large bedrooms, a dining cum living room and a lounge room, the latter two separated by glass double doors. In memory, the lounge room – our “good” room – is reserved for the Fatima statue’s regular visits, when I creep into the flower-filled room to soak up its mystery before the local women arrive to pray the Rosary.
We rarely use this front door and our main entrance is at the side of the house and separated from the kitchen by a tiny ante-room. In this windowless passage between worlds there is a cubby hole for the shoe polish and rags and brushes, and a door leading to the laundry to where my father – this sire of four daughters – has long since been relegated with his shaving gear. It is through this door that I head out through the fernery and into the garden which my father has planted out with flowers, shrubs and trees.
There are banks of azaleas massed against the rear of the house. These are taller than the child who relishes the anonymity she finds within their fragile scarlet, purple and yellow blooms. Rows of garden beds flank the outer perimeter fence, filled with shrubs and roses, pansies, petunias and other annuals, depending on the season. I walk through the garden and I have fallen through a rabbit hole and, like Alice, am now in a more vivid and intoxicating world. I creep up behind my father and wait for him to acknowledge my presence. When he turns he is holding a snapdragon which he presses open between thumb and forefinger to reveal what he tells me is a grotto with a miniature statue of the Virgin Mary, opening for his freckled child layer upon layer of myth and belief. Later I read the Bible, Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, The Odyssey and The Iliad, and countless other texts from philosophy and religion, and decide that our many interpretations of life mirror the garden, sprinkling meaning like so many seeds. It is up to us to decide which plant sweetens our days.
In September I squat beside my father as he transplants a punnet of seedlings into the narrow strip of garden beside his shed. He is concentrating. The hush reminds me of church on Sunday mornings when the congregation falls silent as the priest holds high the Bread and Wine. I watch as he presses soil around milky roots and my heart contracts as one seedling hangs like fine cotton. I am sure it cannot live and twice each day I go with my father and his watering can to tend these small ones. During this time I see most plants grow straight and tall. The little one is only half their size and I hold it upwards with my fingers and look up at my father.
'I don't think it's going to make it,' he says.
I beg him to let it keep trying and he looks at me, his brow drawn in thought. That evening he makes a miniature splint from sticks of wood and ties the seedling to it with thread from my mother’s sewing basket. My father's nurturing is never arbitrary.
At Christmas it is deep summer and after dinner my father and I watch the garden from the safety of the house-shade. Nothing moves and only the irreverent humming of insects breaks the silence. I am lying on my back and my eyes are half closed. My father is sitting on the edge of a step, elbows resting on his knees. He stares into the middle distance. I sense that he is blissful and am peeved that I am not privy to the cause. I wriggle in the hope that he will notice me, and when he doesn’t I blurt out, 'Will we give the plants a drink, dad?’ Do you think they'd like some of my cordial, dad? Will you squirt me with the hose, dad?'
Excitement ripples through me. My mind is buzzing.
My father answers without moving his head. 'Not yet. Probably not. Later on.'
An hour passes and dusk creeps over the garden and, as I drift into a nap, I imagine that the insects are helicopters and I am a pilot.
During these long December days I see bees and butterflies and jet-black ants. I learn about their place in my father's garden. The bee is like the bus I catch to school, picking up passengers and dropping them off to start something new in another place. When I grow older I see ideas as butterflies and long for a net to cast over them, but I know this would only break their wings. Flat on the ground, my chin cupped in my palms, I watch trails of ants haul heavy cargoes through a forest of grass and realize that what seems small and weak can sometimes hold the greatest strength.
I build cubby houses of sticks in my father's garden. On a horizontal plane I form up walls and rooms, leaving spaces for doors and windows. I am builder and decorator and ask my father if I can have flowers for each room. I bring up imaginary children and move through busy days, mimicking my mother and my teachers. Sometimes I see my father watching but he doesn't come into my house unless I ask, and when he does he takes care to enter each room through its door and does not nudge the thin walls out of place.
Later in the day I am tired of my game, and my flowers lie limp and browning.
'My house looks ugly,' I moan.
'It was beautiful this morning,' my father says. 'Put the flowers on the compost heap and next year they can help us grow new plants.'
I forget my pique as I fork the flowers into the warm heap. I learn about respect and know that things cut off from their source can become fragile and die. I learn that joy and sorrow interweave and that this lies at the heart of our inconsistencies.
It is windy and April. I stand on the concrete path near our front door and the grey sky presses on my skull. The liquidambar in the centre of the lawn glows gold and amber. Crisp, brown leaves lie at its feet. My father has a large prickly broom and the wind slips under the mounds of leaves that rustle and shift.
'The tree is getting undressed,' I giggle. 'Soon it will have nothing on.'
I dance around the trunk of the tree, my arms flailing, my feet a law unto themselves, when suddenly I am stopped by the end result of all this frantic shedding. I have come face to face with autumn fall. The thought of all this fun ending in nothing is overwhelming. I ask my father why some leaves and plants disappear during the cold, whereas others remain, stubborn and green. Some plants are like some people, he tells me, they need time to dream and recover. He shrugs and says that others are hardy and can withstand the weather.
In this changing state of nature I learn about being still and waiting. When I carry my children, I remember my father's garden in autumn.
In July or August I look out at the garden from the safety of the glassed-in front porch. It is early morning and the frost flashes in the sunlight like liquid mercury. I blink. Drops of water slip along the liquidambar's bare, thin limbs and splash to the ground. My father is leaning on his spade. His breath writhes into the still air. Winter is the time for transplanting dormant trees and he has three to plant in the garden bed that flanks the front fence. The evenly-spaced rose bushes have already been pruned and their stubby, stick limbs now have no leaves or flowers.
'Where are the roses?' I demand. 'The garden's boring.'
Look beneath the bushes,' my father says. 'Close to the ground,'
'I can't see anything,' I sulk, and scuff my toes against the coir mat inside the porch door.
He puts down the spade, walks over to me, opens the door and beckons for me to follow him. I sidle behind him to a bare patch of ground beneath what I know is a blush pink rose. He bends down and scratches at the dirt with his finger and I see a speck of green.
On this bare and cold morning, my father tells me that winter is summer upside down. He tells me about the bulbs growing plump under the ground. I am entranced and now know that nothing is as it seems. When I am older I remember that there is a story behind every façade; that surfaces are for protection. When I write, I want to travel underground with my characters so they can live deeply and the reader can feel less alone. I see writing as a mirrored world that clarifies and sharpens that which we think we know.
My father spends his evenings in the laundry. It is a large room and along one wall, beneath a low window, are pots of all sizes and shapes. He inspects the minute leaves with small pieces of stem attached that he has snipped off and placed in jars of water. He is looking for tiny cobwebby signs of life. Small seedlings bend towards the light in a miniature Mexican wave and he turns these around the other way.
There are more complex things in the laundry, structures of sticks and plastic supporting little bits of greenery rooted in pebbles or sand. He tells me that everything grows in its own way. This is how I come to see literature. This is how I come to see life. No one tells the same story and no journey is identical. I read and ask what a book brings to me rather than whether or not I like it. In the same way, only much harder, I ask the same questions of the people in my life.
I read in my father's garden. The books I first remember are Anne of Green Gables and the worlds of The Magic Faraway Tree. Anne's joy in the avenue of trees that form 'The White Way of Delight' is no surprise. For me all things green and growing lead somewhere. As for the children and the magic tree, I am intimately acquainted with their secret. The existence of lands floating in an undefined mist coincides perfectly with my worldview. I nod sagely and read on.
I grow older and become Dorothea, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Teresa, Daisy. I am English, French, Russian, Australian, and American. My world spreads beyond the garden, but I carry it with me in my heart, and when my larger world strays far from what I learned in my father’s garden, I know it is there if only I remember to feel.
When I look back I see my father’s garden outlined in sharp relief. It embraces the child I was and the woman I have become, and for a second I catch my breath. I see the seeds of my writing in the 'exquisite awarenesses' first experienced in the colours and scents of my father's garden. Compassion, patience, respect, acceptance and understanding lay waiting to bloom like the candle-shaped buds of a winter magnolia. When I write I let idea emerge from idea like a piggy-back plant, which in its joy at being alive throws out leaves from its leaves. I see some ideas and emotions as ready to face the light and others needing time to grow strong. I write not only to understand but also to accept.
Now, on a late rain-splashed autumn afternoon, I drive past the suburban cemetery where my father lies under a towering pine. The road ahead glistens and behind the high brick walls I sense peace and wonder how far I have travelled and how much I have learned.
I pull the car into the curb, wind down the window and lean out. 'Dad,' I call, 'my camellias are gorgeous this year and the Pin oak leaves are the colours of fire.'
Published in The Age, A2, Saturday, September 2/2006
©️KarenSparnon/My father’s garden/2025