The second time my landlord asked me to remove something I had just planted, I decided it was time to reconsider my attitude to gardening.
Not that I had been getting gardening wrong. At the front of the rented apartment I live in with my children, I’ve planted two slender crepe myrtles, one pink, one white, transforming a strip of dust into something that passersby photograph and post on Instagram.
I have turned the shared back garden, six sq metres of buffalo grass and dumped building equipment, into an area where pollinators of every sort crawl and hover over a crowd of nasturtiums, California poppies, thyme, wormwood, geranium, purple rosemary flowers and mists of nigella, native viola and dandelions whose heads have not been mowed off yet.
At the side of the building, I’ve planted Boston ivy over an expanse of graffiti-tagged brown brick. The ivy wasn’t planted to dissuade graffiti, but it did occur to me that my landlords – who made my aunty co-sign the lease with me, because as an employed single mother they considered me a high-risk tenant – would think this a good idea.
Not long after the Boston ivy began its rigorous climb, I received an email from my real estate agents. On behalf of the owners, they requested I remove “the vine”. I replied in protest, writing that the vine would increase the value of the property, that they might like to look at the attached images, Princeton University among them.
Their email was followed by another. The owners also wanted the two myrtle trees at the front removed. It went on to state they will allow for small plants but no trees, along with a reminder about the vine.
My landlord’s stipulations exposed the apparent incompatibility of renting and gardening.
Renting in Sydney is a well-documented horror of rupture and anxiety, while gardening demands continuity and time for growing. If a tenant cannot be assured stability, a modicum of choice, is there any point to planting when abandonment is only one rent increase away?
All renters live in precarious conditions. It is a brutality we have come to expect, even accept. Things have only gotten worse. What was an uneasy feeling is now so much more – it has become something of an identity. The housing crisis has escalated to a war of attrition in which critical requirements for wellbeing are eroded every day.
Maybe it’s hope, maybe choice, maybe pleasure. Uncertainty has become the baseline. Tenants know the consistency they might offer, the garden they might plant, the community they might make, cannot be used for leverage in a plea for security.
A renter is a precarious figure. Yet a gardener who rents tends to their garden because precarity is in the very nature of gardening.
In his book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, scholar Robert Pogue Harrison suggests gardens are always transitory, nature is meant to endure, plantings are not. He writes: “They may, as long as they last, be places of memory or sites of recollection, but apart from a few lofty exceptions they do not exist to immortalise their makers or defy the ravages of time. If anything they exist to re-enchant the present.”
Gardening is a vocation of care. When we care for others, people, plants, it is not an act of possession. Rather, care is a devotion to the immediate now, and all the nows we hope will follow. An endlessly re-enchanted present.
To make a renter’s garden that focuses on such a present there are two options: make a garden that is light on its feet; or one that emerges from what already exists, doubling down on wanting to stay. I do both.
There is much in my garden that is potted. In pots made of plastic, terracotta, concrete and even foam, rosemary, bay, French tarragon and a curry tree all grow. Pots are only ever half attached to their location. They look settled enough, but when the time comes, their bags are already packed.
I have also crafted garden features with a semi-detached attitude. On another expanse of brown brick wall at the very back of the property, I have managed to grow a climbing rose. This is the sort of feature that usually requires permanent fixtures and commitment to training. But I have invented a sort of floating, wobbly wall net on which the rose can climb. In the small holes that already exist in the mortar, I have pushed in plastic plugs and screws with eye holes, through which I have threaded wire and string, in some places hair elastics, a little masking tape when needed. On this bespoke structure the rose, whose name is Renee, blooms floppy pink flowers with yellow centres, even in winter.
If I had to leave in the middle of the night, I could take the whole thing down with little more than a yank.
A garden that is intent on encouraging biodiversity must have a source of water. Enter my pond. When I tell people I have a pond, they generally get the wrong idea of my living situation. Ponds, along with box hedges and gravel paths, suggest some rather serious landscape design.
I built mine with an old cast iron laundry sink that had been squatting in the back garden. Converting it into a pond with marginal, floating and emergent plants, plus aquatic animals, is diametric to the mobility of a geranium in a terracotta pot. The pond is totally immovable; I will not be throwing it over my shoulder and taking it to the next rental.
My care for the pond is devotional. When I feel demoralised, the tending and attention required to balance a small body of water is very stabilising.
Is my rented garden – held together as it is with elastic bands, river mint and achillea – an act of resistance to the precarity of my living situation? Possibly.
When I leave this garden, no longer able to afford the increasing rent, I know that I will leave an ephemeral record of my love, not for property or possession but for tending, for care. I will take it with me and leave it behind.
But you can bet that when I do leave and this place is back on the market, it will be advertised as having an “established garden”.