Gardening
The warming weather brings jasmine into bloom – the power of its scent is to evoke old memories and to forge new ones. By Margaret Simons.
Jasmine and the power of memory
The jasmine flowers are out at last, after weeks of buds the colour of nipples and the shape of tiny spears. In the burst of warmth over the past week, the five-petal stars have emerged. Their scent is tangled with every memory I have of Melbourne in spring.
There was that first spring. I had recently arrived from Adelaide. I came down bleary-eyed in my dressing gown to the sunny brick-paved backyard of a Fitzroy share house. A friend of my housemate was having coffee at the table. We were introduced and, he later told me, my dressing gown parted as I reached out to shake his hand and he glimpsed my breast. The scent of jasmine was all around us and he fell in love in that moment.
I fell only into like, with a bit of lust. So it was only one spring we spent together, and I hurt him badly.
Yet I have planted jasmine in every house I have occupied since, and I think of him every time it blooms. I also think of myself, of course, and how I basked in his devotion while giving so little back.
The poet T. S. Eliot wrote that April was the cruellest month – April being spring in the northern hemisphere. He went on: “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / memory and desire, stirring / dull roots with spring rain …” This poem is “The Waste Land” and is usually taken to be about sterility. But I think of jasmine and my devoted lover.
I think of the way in which the body changes. I was 22 years old on that sunny morning 42 years ago. Nobody gasps or falls in love at the sight of a 64-year-old breast. Rather, we old ladies are expected to cover up to save others from the reality of what time does to bodies.
Stuff that.
I still go past the house where I met that man, but it has long since been renovated to within an inch of its life. I know from the Domain supplements – those glossy pages of sexless real-estate porn – that there are only neat flagstones in the backyard, and mondo grass growing in between. If jasmine is ubiquitous in Melbourne, so is mondo grass.
Surely nobody ever fell in love when surrounded by mondo grass. One of my gardening books tells me that it “is the picture of calm and serenity”. In other words, easy to care for and so boring it’s a sin.
Please don’t plant mondo grass. Rather, embrace the out-of-control wildness, the messy must-be-pruned-or-maybe-not chaos of jasmine, with its symphony of scent and sensuality. Because spring is nearly here and we are on the cusp of the growing season, the time of possibility, resurrection of the old and the creation of new life. So much is about to happen, but nothing good or unexpected or sexy will ever happen if you are the kind of person who lives surrounded by mondo grass.
Another jasmine memory. I was visiting Melbourne from New South Wales. I was breastfeeding my first child. This kind of breast-showing was not widely accepted in those days and so I left a restaurant table and went out to the tiny backyard where the waitstaff stacked the milk crates. I pulled one out for a seat and fed my baby with my back to the fence. Jasmine tumbled over us and it was windy, the flowers drifted and landed on her perfect cheek. I have had few happier moments.
Last week, that child, now 28 years old, bought a house. Right through her childhood, she sneered at my gardening, my making of disgusting compost mud pies, my obsessing over slugs and snails and my squeezing the green guts out of the caterpillars of the cabbage white butterfly. Her most dreaded household chore was to carry the compost bucket out to the compost bin. She thought it beyond revolting.
Yet now she gardens. When she was househunting, her non-negotiable requirement was to have at least a little outdoor space.
I have been waiting so impatiently to begin the work of spring. Now I am coiled like a spring, readying seedling trays to start germinating tomato plants (although it is still far too early for this), ordering many packets of seed (more than I can possibly use), and redesigning the drip watering system (although everything is still damp).
I have reorganised the pots in the backyard and planted shade-loving purple and variegated leafy things and they are settled in but yet to grow – poised, like me, for the days to be a little longer, the nights a little warmer.
The worms in the worm farm are multiplying. The household food scraps disappear in just a few days now, instead of sitting there for weeks, as they have through winter.
Growth is slowly accelerating. I can pick enough spinach and silverbeet to make a spanakopita and trust that there will be enough for another pie within a few weeks. The leaves on the mandarin tree are outgrowing the eating habits of the local possums. The street trees – gums – are not yet flowering, but their grey is dusted with the red of incipient blooms. The wattle is out.
Meanwhile, I am having the front of my house painted, for the first time in 20 years. I asked the painter if he could please try to avoid putting his ladder or his boots on the cabbage and sprouting broccoli seedlings that have been sitting sulkily since June in the strip of earth that divides my house from the pavement but which are now beginning to show promise.
To my amazement, he did not give me a lecture or a mansplain about the impossibility of fulfilling my request but said he would try his best. He has sanded and prepared and, as I write this, is applying the third coat of Weathershield. Not a single plant has been trampled. The feet of the ladder are perfectly positioned on either side of the row of seedlings and when he climbs down he does a graceful little pirouette at the bottom to place his feet between the seedling rows, then tiptoes to the fence, which he has also painted, and steps over it with great delicacy. I like him very much for this.
He is another reminder, at this hopeful time of year, of the beauty of ordinary things, and ordinary people and plants so ubiquitous that they are part of the mediation between us and the world, between memory and the present.
On moving day, I will bring my daughter a jasmine plant for her backyard.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 24, 2024 as "Jasmine recital".
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