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One of the greatest influences on my road to becoming a devoted gardener were the books that were part of the most homes I visited when I was a little girl. From the age of three, sixty-one years ago, I have been a compulsive, indeed you could say, a closet reader. When I was about six or seven, I was known to go missing for hours in a friend of my mother's linen cupboard where old magazines were stowed away. The range of reading matter was very expansive, stretching from "Man", the Penthouse magazine of the forties, to gardening magazines. Thank goodness I decided to follow the garden path and not the road to lascivious living!

When did serious garden reading begin? During my preteen years, my mother and father were great friends of Sir John and Lady Morris and many times I was taken to have Sunday night dinner at "Winmarleigh", a mansion built circa 1880, whose grand rooms included a huge library room. Sir John was Chief Justice of Tasmania and Lady Morris was an intellectual, a feminist, an avid reader and fanatical gardener. Ten foot walls were covered with built-in bookcases, a ladder had to be used to reach half the books, a veritable Aladdin's cave to the seven-year-old, myopic little girl. The house was surrounded by many acres of ornamental gardens.

Through these Sunday night gatherings, I dined with many famous personalities of both the legal and arts worlds. After dinner, the 'grownups' retired to the library for coffee and the discussions and arguments, continued far into the early hours of the morning. My mother, being a Member of Parliament, had strong views on every subject. As the conversations raged, I would be put to sleep on a sofa placed in a window bay on the far side of the room. The only light came from standard lamps and the flicker of flames from the open fire. A blanket was thrown over me. I would curl up under the rug and make myself as small as possible. After a while, when the far ranging conversation was going full speed ahead, I would drape the rug over myself and creep, like a little ghost, to the nearest bookcase and grab a book. It so happened this bookcase was full of Lady Morris' gardening books. Listening to the fascinating talk, reading under the throw-over, I would hope with all my heart that I would be forgotten - and I usually was.