My garden is my reason for living. Many may have larger ambition, but my true happiness resides deep within my garden bed. My plants are my inspiration and my driving force, they are my advisors and my true companions. It was after I moved house late last year, into a place with old gardens, neglected for the best part of half a century, that my love for gardening freed itself from an unhappy place in my mind. The house I grew up in had sprawling gardens. It was a semi-rural place when my family moved in, but, as time went by, people gradually encroached on the surrounding land. Never the less, we had a very large, very established garden that acted as the local gathering point for countless parrots, koalas, magpies and lizards. When I was a child I would spend days, from dawn until dusk, experiencing everyday wonders through the goings on of the undergrowth.

As I grew through the awful years of adolescence, I parted ways with much of what I had once loved.  It wasn't until I realised I had spent the past 5 years doing and being things that made me unhappy that I began the long and laborious task of regaining my roots.

You can't get sick of gardening, sure you may tire after a day of heavy planting in the sun, but the riches of the garden keep you coming back. 

My friends tell me I am an 80 year old at heart, and that is unequivocally true, I would never have it any other way. I have never obeyed trends, not as an open, considered act of rebellion, but instead as a result of being completely disinterested altogether, I guess my love of gardening and staying home as many Friday nights a year as possible is all part of that.

The truth is, there is very little difference between my artistic expression and the ferns in my greenhouse, or any of my plants, for that matter. Though one might be quick to assume the banality of these plants, and see some of what I create as high abstraction and progressive, the truth is the antithesis. I, and indeed you too, are but pawns in the life and dominion of these botanical beings, and we would do best to respect and live harmoniously with them.