THE POLITICALLY CORRECT GARDEN, what now?

The Last Rose of Summer, what now?

Working in the town garden and listening on my sun powered transistor to the squabbling politicians in the Federal Parliament, my meandering thoughts turned to "politically correct" things. I looked around. How many "incorrect" things have crept into my gardens?

Town Garden: Well, I should scrap all the lawns for one, far too water hungry. But the house is 160 years old and the gardens have always been set off with lush green sward. So there is the first dilemma - the garden historians tell me that I must return to the "historically correct" garden. I am never sure what date or what garden was the most "historically correct"

As they never answer that question, I suppose I should take notice of the scientists and do my bit. But Tasmania is full of water, there are lakes everywhere.

Country Garden: My rebelling thoughts turned to the country garden. Do I have to pull out all the granny-night-caps and forget-me-nots? After all, if the birds bring Opium Poppies into my garden, surely they are taking some of my beautiful "thugs" back to the bush? The "Greenies" tell us that the natural bush is getting clogged up with garden ornamentals and I agree that is an awful thing. We have many hectares of semi-rain forest which is chock-a-block full of blackberries. It would be impossible for Kees and I to get rid of them on our own. So, I will pull out the ornamental seeders, if they [the Greenies] will come down and help us get rid of hundreds of blackberry bushes. I must confess that the reason the blackberries are covering all of Eastern Australia is because an early English settler decided he would like to have a blackberry pie with his Sunday dinner and imported one bush!

Both gardens: We must not kill the fauna. In Tasmania, the possums have increased to mammoth proportions. Most New Zealand gardeners hold a very big grudge against Australians because someone decided to import the cuddly possum into those beautiful islands. There are many jokes about there being more sheep in New Zealand than humans, but now the possums outnumber the sheep, all the politically incorrect jokes have to be changed. Possums eat EVERYTHING in the gardens, roses being their ice cream. We relocate the few we catch in a benign trap, but unless we go to the other end of the Island, they, being territorial, are back in one or two days.

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