When someone disparages your lilies, the gardener feels pain and sadness. When they tear the style of your gardening apart, they may as well stamp all over your heart with their muddy garden boots. If they only look at your Christmas roses that are seeding and making new little plants and appearing rather drab with their pregnancies and remark on their unwieldiness, the garden owner would dearly love to say to the garden visitor, "But you should have seen them in the cold of winter. They looked so brave and beautiful." But you know you must refrain from constantly saying, "You should have been here last week" or "You should see the garden next week, next month, next year!" Far better to point out "How beautiful the delphiniums are this year, they did enjoy the cold winter."
Why do we open our gardens, our hearts, to the public? It is not because we are closet masochists; indeed, it is the opposite. We are proud of our gardens, they are as we like them and we love them dearly and thoroughly enjoy sharing them and the love with other people. It is also a satisfying experience to share the successes and failures with other gardeners. We relish praise and do not mind the silent smugness of the gardener whose herbaceous border excels our own, for we have had that experience too.
There are many gardens that open their gates under the auspices of the Australian Open Garden Scheme. These are big and small gardens, exotic and native, grand and simple. As for garden owners, these are grand and simple people, exotic and native and I suspect, big and small. But underneath the grand, simple, exotic, native exteriors, we are all the same. Dirty clothes and ingrained grime in our finger nails, aching backs and happy hearts, empty purses [you must always buy just one more plant for that forgotten corner], instant amnesia on the name of any plant in your garden and a keen desire to share it all with the world, this is the contented lot of the garden owner.
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