SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Spring brings out the gardeners

Press, 16 September 1976, Page 16

SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Spring brings out the gardeners

It came in wet and cold and windy. But there could be no doubt that “Spring was sprung,” that summer would sooner or later be “icurnen in” and that something or other would be “busting out all over.” Tn the Northern Hemisphere they listen for the first cuckoo and write to "The Times” about it. Here the perennial harbingers of the gladsome season seem to be the first pictures of what the best undressed girls will be wearing on the beaches during the summer. And if something is not busting out now no doubt it will be if what we have seen is what we shall see. If seeing is believing this economical collection of shoestrings and fabric patches is hardly credible. Yet probably never will so little have cost so much. But this is all for the future and the long hot summer that the long-range forecasters are saving lies ahead, the lazy days of wine and roses, mosquitoes and sunburn. But they are not here yet, not by a long way, and we have one other sure way of knowing that the year has turned the comer, that the calendar has clicked on. Come the first of spring and, to a man, every gardening expert flexes his muscles, bends his back, picks up his pen and exhorts us all to get out and start digging.

GARDEN HONEYMOON To be fair, most of them practise what they preach. One of Sydney’s best-known recently married men (the ceremony was held in his showplace garden by the bed of blue and yellow violas) and his new wife, another keen gardener, spent their honeymoon working in the garden before about 6000 visitors arrived to view it for the benefit of charity.

Sydney is not really a gardening city in the way that, [for instance, Christchurch is. “They don’t do much with their gardens do they?” remarked a recently arrived Englishwoman. She was blissfully unaware that she had

just moved into an area whose residents would, if they were asked, claim to have some of Sydney’s finest gardens. Municipally, some more enlightened thinking has recently helped to make Sydney look a bit less of an urban desert. There are window boxes on the Town Hall, shrubs among some of the concrete blocks and paved forecourts of recent developments.

Pedestrian precincts have been blocked off with flowers. Even Luna Park, not noted in the past for its horticultural standards, is changing its steel-and-concrete image and being landscaped into a wilderness of tropical palms and plants which will clothe its carnival amusements in greenery. The average Australian likes his garden. A survey, done recently in Adelaide but valid for all Australian cities, shows that Australians spend a lot of time in the garden. The suburban homeowner will spend 10 hours a week on average working in the garden — two hours mowing and trimming the lawns, four hours watering and four hours weeding and caring for flowers and vegetables. FOR SHOW The average Australian family tends to have two gardens — the front kept spic and span for show, the back for “living.” “Living” can mean a lot of things — relaxing, working on a hobby, sport, looking after pets, mending vehicles and boats, entertaining, cooking, eating, dry- ' ing clothes, burning rubbish | and storing things. It might not sound as if

much actual gardening goes on. Yet five per cent of families grow all their fruit and vegetables, and 21 per cent grow up to a quarter of their greengrocery needs. About eight per cent keep fowls for eggs and meat But whatever goes on in

the backyard it is the front garden that bothers Dr Truda Howard, who describes the over-all appearance of the front gardens of inner Sydney as “dreary.” They lack imagination in species and design, she . says, though most of their owners consider them decorative. Dr Howard is a professional botanist who lectures on plant ecology to students of the School of Landscape Architecture at the University of New South Wales. She goes home to practise what she preaches, spending five hours a week growing things in her own garden at Mascot. In her 40 sq m patch she has silver beet, radishes, cress, rhubarb and herbs, “foolproof things”. But if she could have her way every one of Sydney’s inner-city front gardens would sprout a tree and that woulcCjdter the whole look of thelnner city, she says. It would also bring spring to the city in a more comely manner than even the bikini fashion. Her ideal for every front garden is a grove of wattles.