Home » Plants & Animals » Tasmanian Gardening » The New World Gardener

The New World Gardener

© Gay Klok

Mary, Mary Quite Contrary
How does your Garden Grow?
With Silver Bells and Cockle Shells
And pretty Maids, all in a Row

When I was a little girl and I heard this nursery rhyme, I always had a picture of little girls with milkmaid bonnets on their heads and their legs and feet planted in the soil. The silver bells were imagined as like the little bells we hung on the Christmas trees and the cockle shells were as the shells we found washed up on the beach

Now as a grown up gardener, I know these are all common names for delightful perennials. Or do I?

The ditty states that Mary was contrary. What can that mean? What does the "contrary" gardener place in the good earth? It is very possible that some gardener, somewhere has literally planted such a garden. I think they would use kewpie dolls though and not real maidens. It is almost impossible to pick up a garden magazine, journal or book about the "modern" garden and not see an illustration of an "architectural" garden full of textures, shapes and colours, with hardly a plant or flower in sight. And I begin to worry that I am so old-fashioned and passe, I am not a gardener anymore, just a grower of [real] things. Shame on me for growing old-fashioned roses, foxgloves and delphiniums.

"Off with their Heads" as the Queen of Hearts ordered in Alice in Wonderland

No longer may we place on our coffee tables, books full of photos of wonderfully lush gardens to drool over. Put Ken Druse back into the dusty old bookcase at once and place the small, mean and serious tomes that instruct us to never grow water hungry plants [ no matter what your average rain fall is] and to rotary hoe the grass, immediately! The books inform me that to call myself a 'new millennium' gardener, I must turn [with tears running down my cheeks] to an architectural lanscaper who will take me screaming into the twenty-first Century. He/She or both, will allow me to leave the moss-covered boulders but the herbaceous borders must go. One tree with distorted trunks and branches may stay [that has managed on its own to create that romantic and aged look because it was planted one hundred years ago] and we will make a concrete courtyard around the tree, to emphasise the importance of the venerable plant. [Help! More peacock mess to wash every day!]

The copyright of the article The New World Gardener in Tasmanian Gardening is owned by Gay Klok. Permission to republish The New World Gardener in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.