Open Writing

Today's suburban gardens can be like a symbol of how we are wasting the earth. Yet gardens are also living symbols of the happy spirits of the city, to refresh us all.
For hundreds of thousands of years people have had gardens. I never had to use fertilisers in my garden in Aberdeen, although it had been a garden for 2,000 years. You could not dig to the bottom of the topsoil. Gardens remained fertile through putting waste back on them, including human waste.

My garden in the Garden City of the Garden State of Victoria, in Australia, tells me a great deal about how Australia differs from Europe. We have brought our thinking about gardening and farming from Europe, where the rain usually fell when it should, and the top-soil goes deep, deep, deep.

My Garden can tell me a great deal about the future of this country, and it includes several warnings.

Modern suburban gardens can be consumers rather than suppliers. They consume non-sustainable river sand and peat moss, as well as manure, pesticides, herbicides and the materials used to make so much extra garden equipment. They can use water at a rate that can make town planners hostile to gardens. But problems of water run-off can increase for drainage authorities, because a fashionable trend in modern garden design is to reduce the plant cover and increase the land cover of paving and pools.

Even the plants and seeds that suburban gardeners buy have not been bred to use minimum soil resources and have maximum fertile seeds - because plants and seed like that reduce gardeners' reliance on commercial garden suppliers.

The suburban garden has been part of the Australian Dream, and except when life has become too hassled to have any time for it, most families desire it, and up to the age of frailty, many retired people have their greatest pleasures in their garden.

Their gardens with their greenery also contribute to the health and the fresh air enjoyed in the cities.

But as population grows, these pleasures will become forced from them. Already the great excitement and happiness of the backyard incinerator is illegal, because there are too many people to allow so much pollution; barbecues have not yet gone that way. The more people the less water for each of us, and gardens must be restricted in their water use. The more people, the denser the housing, and the fewer homes can have gardens, even when there are children, who need backyards now that the streets are no longer the safe playgrounds that they were.

When the bushland in the back yard finally was dug and planted - getting too bedraggled with exotic weeds that had choked out the wildflowers - the first crop of vegetables was splendid. But the next was not so good, and now, unless lots of fertilisers and compost are added, the vegetable garden grows bonsai - little miniature bean plants four inches high flower and try to set three beans bigger than themselves.

So the garden is not fully self-sustainable. For all the composting and mulching, it needs blood-and-bone, and dynamic lifters, and lime. As far as I know, all these come from plentiful or renewable resources. Seaweed should be responsible garnering too.

But then I see advertised on the TV gardening programs products that may not be renewable or plentiful. How many gardeners will use 'river sand' before the rivers start needing to keep what they have left? What about the peat moss? Home gardening is being blamed for destruction of this previous resource in UK. Somebody says that coconut fibre is just as good. Is it?

Beaches get nicked of their crushed sea-shells, their sand and their ornamental rocks. It is the most accessible beaches, the most popular for holidays, that get most scavenged for these gardening benefits. is this doing anything to them that it should not?

Some vandalism is, I gather, now ceasing. I hope so. We are told that the sturdy fern-trees people love to buy for their gardens have been specially grown for many years in nurseries and not grubbed out, nice and mature, from bush gullies, as formerly.

If more people does mean more gardeners, not just fewer people able to have gardeners, what will happen about the resources of pea-straw and mushroom mulch and those other commercial by-product that once suppliers were almost glad to get rid of.

That's all about what goes IN to the non-sustainable garden. Now let's look at what goes OUT.

Suburban gardens are also wasters, as local councils have great expenses in removing all the green waste that local gardens produce, or the waste is burnt in incinerators, to pollute the air. Next month then, let's look at the NO-WASTE GARDEN OF THE FUTURE.

© Valerie Yule