The Joy of Gardening

Lynda Hallinan shares how a country childhood can instill a love of nature in this extract from her new book.

Plants feature in my earliest autobiographical memory, although the purple flowers that seeded in my hippocampus were, ironically, weeds rather than ornamentals. When I was about two years old, I wandered off on our family farm one afternoon and ended up lost in a thicket of noxious Scotch thistles in the paddock below our house. Separated from my parents by a stand of remnant native bush, I can remember clinging desperately to my red plastic Frisbee with a feeling of rising panic.

Or can I? Memory is an unreliable witness. As vivid as this vignette is to me, I could have made the whole thing up. It could be a collage of unrelated recollections, an example of what psychologists call ‘imagination inflation,’ or nothing more than a misremembered dream in a familiar childhood setting.

At least part of my memory serves me correctly. Dad has confirmed that when he took over our family farm, Cirsium vulgare thistles did indeed prosper in the paddock behind our house, their roots mainlining into our septic tank’s soakage trenches. And it’s conceivable that I did once own a red Frisbee and wandered off with it because, let’s face it, the 1970s weren’t exactly renowned for vigilant parental supervision. Baby boomers had better things to do than keep an eye on their kids all day.

My childhood was a fairly typical smalltown upbringing revolving around school, sport and what child development experts now label ‘unstructured play,’ though back then we just called it being a kid. We took our freedom — and its nourishing effect on our developing imaginations, sense of independence and desire for exploration — for granted. My sister, our cousins and our friends next door built bracken-fern whare, foraged for blackberries and fished for eels. We boiled billy tea and cooked damper over bonfire embers, carved tracks through the bush and bruised our bums sliding down hills on nīkau palm-frond sleds.

As children, we are content to seek companionship in the natural world, whereas as adults we seek to control it. We mow lawns, prune trees, spray weeds and build paths, walls, decks and raised beds to put nature in its place. But while a neat and tidy, landscaped front garden might impress your neighbours, it won’t resonate with your inner child.

According to research by Californian professor emeritus of landscape architecture Mark Francis, "not all gardens are created equal for children. Rough, naturalistic places are sought out (and remembered later) more frequently than manicured places". His study ‘Childhood’s garden: Memory and meaning of gardens’, published in 1995, found that "for many adults, the decline of natural qualities such as wildness results in a form of grieving for a lost garden and a disconnection from nature".

Unstructured or wild areas have been removed from many suburban and urban environments, and childhood places such as gardens, parks, playgrounds and schoolyards have become more orderly. He writes: ‘With the public environment often tightly controlled for children,

Children who grow their own vegetables are more likely to eat them. Unless they're my children.

home gardens take on an even more important role.’

When I was a child, there was no distinction between our home garden and the rural landscape beyond it. Our playground extended well past our farm, pretty much as far in every direction as we could ride our bikes, provided we could also ride them back again before Mum and Dad finished milking the cows. There were no physical boundaries to contain us and we trespassed at will; to this day, and to my (city-born) husband’s shame, I have no qualms about jumping other people’s fences to get a better look at the landscape.

The joy of free-range parenting

When I was editor of New Zealand Gardener in the mid-2000s, we introduced a children’s gardening section. We published DIY projects, featured school gardens and trotted out the usual planting suggestions: giant sunflowers, giant pumpkins, strawberries and swan plants. We also gave advice for growing beans, peas and cherry tomatoes because, as we all know, children who grow their own vegetables are more likely to eat them. Unless they’re my children.

When I asked my sons to list their favourite things about our garden, no vegetables made the cut. Instead, they talked excitedly about expeditions to ‘The Big Barn’ (my husband’s workshop), ‘The Darklands’ (the rock-lined gully) and ‘Clay Creek,’ the farm stream where erosion has carved away the bank to expose the subsoils.

If parenting during the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that my children don’t want to be taught anything by me.