Toppin up the sweet peas and hangin in the garden

The front garden is my sanity saver and new addiction. Converting it from drought-stricken suburban dust-bowl to bird and butterfly attracting cottage-garden has become quite a consuming and satisfying project.

I am very conscious of the knock-on effect: two of my nearest neighbours have recently started to plant, and passers-by comment on how much my flowers and effort cheer them. I bought my house from the Department of Housing as a run-down wreck, in a neighbourhood where many of the front yards are full of dust, junk and broken down cars.

The previous tenants were violent to each other and the house. Restoring the place to a simple worker's cottage has a subtheme of erasing the marks of their moods and behaviour, not so that it will be forgotten, but so that the environment doesn't perpetuate it in others.

On St Patrick's Day I planted sweet peas. I thought the strike rate was unusually poor, and indeed, it seems as though the moggy who lives with the Angry Family across the road may have shat in the bed. So the weekend involved topping up- that exercise in patience and resilience that gardening, especially in public spaces, as I have for much of my working life, trains us in while we have our hands in the dirt, focussing on other things.

In this climate, we have until Anzac Day to complete the planting of the sweet peas, or so the story goes. I love that about gardening folklore- there is such a rich calendar of seasonal awareness, and a repository of ecological detail so missing in the lives of my new colleagues who move from overheated house to overheated office and wear their boots inside.