Gardeners, the saying goes, reap what they sow. But Australian journalist Margaret Simons isn't so sure. "What about," she argues, "all the things you sow that don't germinate?" What about "opportunistic weeds" and the occasional glorious, unlooked-for surprise? In her memoir Six Square Metres, Simons (Penny Wong) shares wry, often contrarian reflections on her years of tending a tiny urban plot in Melbourne, battling slugs, shade and burger wrappers from the McDonald's next door.
Simons is candid about her gardening frustrations: plants are vulnerable not only to wind, drought and wildfire, but sometimes refuse to grow no matter how much she coaxes them. On the other hand, summer zucchini will double in size (and become barely edible) if left unwatched for a day. Nevertheless, Simons persists, growing eggplants on the roof, a "Happy Wanderer" vine on her back fence and hardy daffodils in red pots on her tiny sundeck. She experiments with strawberries (a bust), various herbs (with various results) and a lavender hedge (which becomes so abundant that she leaves a bucket of clippings for her neighbors). The successes never quite happen when she expects them to, but neither do the failures, and the elusive elements of luck and serendipity can never quite be discounted. In this way, as Simons notes, gardening is both addictive and exasperating, like life itself.
A mix of sunny optimism and beady-eyed realism, Simons's memoir celebrates the small joys and "sheer stubborn hope" of both gardening and family life. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams