Like most passions... okay obsessions it started at a tender age

So here I am I have land. Land a plenty in which to garden. Natural rainfall that we upon occasions have the nerve to complain about. A climate that grows almost anything. I, like many other new gardeners I know, have some perverse fetish to grow plants outside the wide climate range we can actually grow here.
What EXACTLY is wrong with trying to grow berries fruit here again? I know they like the cold, yes I know they need that period of dormancy with night below certain temps for however many hours, yes I know if they do manage to squeeze out a few measly fruit they will be watery and tasteless compared to their southern cousins, all this is if they manage to survive the ravages of high humidity. But tell me again exactly what is wrong with trying? I would give my eye teeth to be able to put tulips in the garden and have them bloom. I diverse and I do that a lot.
What is this passions for ponds? Growing up there was a national park at our back door so to speak. There were these streams and watercourse complete with little waterfalls that use to entrance me for hours. Cold flowing water under the dappled shade of huge trees. Yabbies, leeches, water spiders, birds, snakes, bull-ants longer than your big toe. The occasional Kangaroo or Wallaby, an echidna. Flowing down eventually to where the salt water met the fresh in another flush of life.

There is a quote and I have no idea who first coined the phase but its true;
"Where there is water there is life"
Im not sure about the depths of space but in the garden this is true. The native trees you plant will attract the birds. Put in a area they can drink and bathe and you will attract twice as many. One of the happiest memories I have of my childhood is visiting my grandmother in her old Sydney house. To a little girl it was the next best thing to a castle. Set on a sloping site of two very different levels cut into Sydney bedrock it was like a dolls house. A long drive way down the side with, do you remember that Green corrugated roofing plastic? Well that stuff half way down at the main Entrance as a carport. A big old kumquat tree opposite the front door and an old wooden garage struggling with the weight of a huge leafy vine of some kind. The front was a lovely little square of lawn with rambling flowers bordering the street and drive. Grandmother Care-Care, as I called her. Would hunt for snails in the early morning there and drown them in an old galvanised watering can she kept just for this purpose. The sun room opened out onto this garden with a small patio of flag stone and an arbor under a double Juliet balcony covered in the most beautiful old wisteria I have ever seen. Breakfast, grandmother’s pressure cooked porridge, in spring with my grandmother after a rather icy dip at a nearby beach was perhaps akin to having breakfast in the realm of fantasy as you sat out there under veil of those wonderful purple racemes.
I shan’t tell you of the back garden yet for it holds the warmest memories let me tell you first of the house, The down stairs was a strange mixture of light and dark. The entry under the stairs was all wood panelled and dark, the green filtered like that can through the diamond bevelled front entry windows was always cool even on the hottest of days. I think the carpet was dark and hard like old Sisal but it may even have been stone or marble There was a small Deco clock too, unseen from the entry its measured voice seemed to just add to the air of cool and calm as you entered. The kitchen down the hall was large in size but like most house of that area it wasn’t terribly functional. Cool large and dark too I can remember the taps were old. They weren’t chromed like the fresh smooth lines of the ones you see these days they were silver, but old and knobbly. I can remember clearly the window behind that sink looked out over the hydrangeas at the laundry door. The laundry was the most fun as I aged, it had a laundry shoot from upstairs that, if you were tricky and stupid enough, your legs could wedge you in. Technically stopping you from dropping like a stone, from a tall second story. Oh, being an old house when I mean tall, the ceiling of the first story must have been close to 16 feet if not higher.
An endless fascination for me as a child was the toilet off the laundry. The system was up high and you had to pull a chain to flush it, not too hard mind it use to stick and run. An old house overseas is upwards of 200 years. Here, in Australia, I think our oldest is about 210. I think this might have been one of the original old houses in Mosman. Reminiscing here I miss the house and my grandmother.
The dinning room which only had a workout at Christmas was central downstairs and held little interest for me I wasn’t allowed to run in there it was dark having only borrowed light from the sun room and music hall. The table, a big old walnut thing seated at least 10, took up most of the room and there was the music hall that could be used to avoid even entering it dry dusty silence. The Television room and the sun room downstairs were connected by this music hall and it held all sorts of things, cupboards holding; scrolls of perforated paper for a piano that played its self when you pedaled. Strange games with carved bone and wooden markers, yellowing snakes and ladders with a rainbow of choking sized plastic markers, wooden dice with worn and lost dots.
, moth-eaten hats, old books with dust covers too old and faded to read. Tennis balls with most of the fur scuffed from them and the most fascinating of all, tennis rackets with cat gut strings. We still used these on occasion when we could be bothered to roll the clay back on the court at the lower level of the block. Wooden blinds held out most of the westerly sun but on a cold winters day it was the nicest place to sit in the afternoons with a book and a hot milo.

Sounds pretty good for a kid so far doesn’t it? I haven’t even mentioned the best bits yet. The stairs curled up around and over the entry way to the second story, a small landing led to the main bedroom, full of light and with an a frame roof I can remember so clearly my grandmothers dresser with all of her wonderful trinket boxes. Some silver with birds delicately embossed into them, Crystal oysters that opened and the smell of Fiji perfume. I still love that scent. The double Juliet balcony looked down to the garden below and further down again the tennis court borrowing vistas from many jacarandas, rain-trees and other tall timbers fin neighbouring yards.
There was nothing terribly special about the spare rooms everything just seemed so BIG, the beds were huge to me, and the wardrobes could have been used as inspiration in ‘ The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe’ In the covers I felt like I could have live quiet warm and comfortably in the arctic.
Even as a child I can remember thinking how absolutely stunning the bathroom was. The bath was large like everything else in the house and was blue. There was a curved shell tile soap holder above it under the huge frosted glass window. There was enormous glass jars on the bath shelf holding every bath-oil pearls known to a body paper shop, there were so many different colours shapes and sizes of soap, there was bath salts by the pound. Each visit I was allowed one bath a day with a soap, oil or salts of my choice. Still havent mentioned the best bits yet
I have a confession it’s a toss up for the best part of the house between the back garden and this;
This house had a court yard at the top of the house with a turret it came off the third bedroom, or studio as my grandmother had it set up as. Not large it was perhaps three by three metres but it had sandstone blocks as the wall around with interwoven iron work. To a young girl it was a castle. At night I would sneak out and look over the harbor towards the lights of Sydney. Many nights I sat out there wrapped in the quilt with my breath steaming.
Many days were spent lost in my other passion and this was my introduction to a simulated wild watering hole. A couple of old leaking water tubs. The back garden held many things. Big, blue, mop head hydrangeas, a passage to the next door neighbour I use to go pester. Jerusalem artichokes. An a-ray of many herbs, the obligatory hills hoist and a narrow passaged stairway that was too dangerous for children to take on until they are 4 or 5. Even then on many occasions running down or up from the tennis court I nearly completed the full 30 foot fall. That first sliver of water in a mass of overgrown cottage garden showed me frogs, tadpoles, boatmen water weed, wrigglers and every child’s delight; mud. This was created just by adding water and some plants. PICTURES TO COME I HAVE TO DIG OUT OUT PHOTO ALBUMS