The 10-Year Rewind – Part 19 – Petty Jealousies

Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 19 is this one — Petty Jealousies — from March 2014, in which I suffer from a mild case of the other gardener's grass seeming greener.


It was a comment from Jo in Melbourne, complaining gently about her fair city's recent lack of rain, that got me thinking about this next, not very serious, post. We're a jealous lot, we gardeners. Talk about "the other one's grass is always greener"! There's always someone else who we gardeners can envy in a very green way. Usually it's for their idealised climate. So often I wish I could do some gardening in another climate zone, just for a year or three. Where else would you like to do some gardening, if you had your wish come true?

Jo's comment arrived on the same weekend that a friend showed me a photo of her wonderful crop of fresh quinces from her backyard tree. No, that's not her quinces in this photo above. They're some I bought in our local 'Banana Joe's' fruit and vegie supermarket here in Marrickville. At least the quinces are in season now and I guess that's what really counts. But I would love to be able to grow my own. 

And so, here's my list of petty jealousies, in no particular order. 

1. I am jealous of those in cool climate gardens who can grow what I can't grow here in Sydney, in particular quinces, raspberries, cherries, Seville oranges, Cox's Orange Pippin apples, plums and pears. 

2. I am jealous of those in tropical climate gardens who can grow what I can't grow here in Sydney, in particular great mangoes, mangosteens, rambutans and pineapples. And cardamoms and nutmeg trees, too. And zillions of orchids, and flowering gingers...

3. And woe is me for residing in a place with humid, clammy summers, instead of somewhere nice and hot and dry and Mediterranean in summer (like Perth, Adelaide, or California or South Africa, or Greece or Spain) where I could much more easily grow pomegranates, olives, grapes, caperberries and huge drifts of lovely lavender. 

Before everyone leaps in and says "you can grow mangoes in Sydney, pineapples too" and "we grow olives, figs and grapes here in Sydney town too." I know, I know. But it's such a lottery when you garden in the wrong climate. Some seasons it all works fine, others are disasters. Besides, all the tropicals grow too slowly down here, and the Mediterraneans cark it in a really humid Sydney summer. In the ideal climate zones for all these crops, most seasons are good ones. Trying to grow these crops in the "wrong" climate zone, out of sheer bloody-minded "I'll show them" gardening envy, is utterly normal for gardeners, but a tragedy waiting to happen, as it does again and again. 

So this is a not-very-serious griping post for me, and I'm not really jealous of others, either. It's just sometimes I feel a little fleeting pang of garden envy, comforted only by knowing that someone else, somewhere else, is envious of lucky little Jamie and Pam in evergreen, lush, easy-grow, warm-temperate, cuddly Sydney. 

However... if I was a rich man, I would definitely buy a property in all the climate zones that I'm currently jealous of, and flit between them cultivating all the forbidden fruits I can't really grow all that well in Sydney. That's a sensible plan for a jealous man. Shame I'm poor...

This Lime Tree Bower my Prison

What a dramatic title for a simple little gardening blog posting. It's actually the name of a  poem written in 1797 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of my favourite poets (he of the 'Rime of The Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan' fame).

What brought me to think of poor old Sam, after all these years, is the sad, simple fact that I, too, am a bit of prisoner at the moment (and I have a lime tree too in my prison, admittedly a Tahitian lime, while Sam's northern English lime is a linden tree, but we're soul bothers across the centuries and continents all the same). 

Back in 1797 Samuel was a temporary invalid. Apparently, his wife had accidentally spilt a saucepan full of hot milk onto his foot (must have hurt like hell!) and so he was not able to join his other literary friends (several in the party, but notably William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb) on a lovely long walk through the Lakes District of England. Here's a link to the poem's text, if you're a poetry person. 

My comparison to the spilt-milk story is more bleary eyed, and at times mildly painful, but  it's nothing like a scalded foot. I have been afflicted with conjunctivitis, that bacterial infection of the eyes which immediately made me look like an extra from a zombie movie. For me that means not much computer, nor books, nor magazines, nor reading. The only thing left for me to do was complete all those gardening jobs which didn't require great eyesight but did need a gardener to get the job done. Time for a photo, a panorama no less, here in November 2016.

Now, this might look to you like a fairly well organised Sydney garden in early spring mode, with lots of baby vegies barely making an impression yet and the rest enjoying the weather. 

I can tell you right now that this is a terrible scene of neglect, lethargy, procrastination and dithering. A disgrace! But not any more it isn't. "Conjunctivitis Boy" to the rescue. All our tame zombie can do right now is prune, trim, repot, fertilise and water. And that's what I've been doing. The garden is in much better nick at the end of this week than it was when my eyesight was good last weekend.

However, at the end of each day, I have soothed myself with a nice evening glass of wine and a good sit down outdoors to contemplate "this lime tree bower my prison". What a nice way to end each day!

Now, poor old Sam Coleridge had a sore foot, I had sore eyes, but both of us were grounded, imprisoned.

My reading of his poem, based on my humble university BA course in Romantic Poetry which I did in 1973, is vastly different from the contemporary stuff I looked up online to refresh my 40-year-old memory. Today's reading of his poem seems mostly psychiatric, rather than poetic, and I think they miss the point entirely ...

In my understanding of this poem, Sam at first imagined the glories of nature in the vast wide world through which his friends were wandering without him, but he soon came to realise that in his own, imprisoned microcosm of world, this lime tree bower which was his temporary mini universe, all the glories of nature were around him. All he had to do was look.

And so it is with me. Though our garden is small, if you bother to look really closely, you can see enough of nature to keep you fascinated and amazed, forever. This is a theme I do return to again and again here at Garden Amateur, but right now I feel it so very strongly. I really could spend all of my life here and never cease to be fascinated.

Green thoughts in a green shade

Well, I can't say it was a shock, as the rumours were doing the rounds, but the way the news of the closure of our great old magazine arrived was a surprise. It was an informal end-of-year lunch for the team, the day after we finished the February issue. Our boss, Don, has been fighting like mad for years to keep the whole thing going, but our magazine is a joint venture with a giant global publishing conglomerate, and when they said 'it's over' Don had no choice but to come and tell us the news he hated to bear. None of us were shocked at all, and so it wasn't a teary, depressing kind of thing. It was just a sense of "rats, it's over," a lousy way to end a tough year. Bye 2012, you haven't been a great year, have you?

And so our March issue will be the last 'Burke's Backyard' mag, and I'll be looking for work from February onwards next year. And while the practical side of me already is making sensible plans, I woke up this morning thinking of a poem I loved while a student at uni, and so I thought I'd do a little posting on this poem: 'The Garden', by Andrew Marvell, written somewhere between 1650 and 1670 most likely. We don't know when, exactly.

I like this poem for itself. Perhaps you might already know the line "a green thought in a green shade" but what I remember is its meaning, or at least its meaning according to the way my tutor at university explained it to me. It made so much sense it has always been the way I have thought about this poem, and this is how I'm thinking right now.

So, here goes with my brief little reading of this poem, illustrated with some shots from my garden, taken over the years...

Marvell was a politician as well as a poet, and back in those days politics was more than brutal, it was deadly. The King had his head cut off, and many lesser mortals, many of them politicians, were tortured and executed in ways you would never like to know. 

And so Mr Marvell, in this poem, is about to enter a dangerous Parliament as a known former republican sympathiser when that wasn't the winning side to be on. In his poem 'The Garden', he is tossing up whether to stay in his beautiful, peaceful, bountiful garden, or venture back out into the treacherous, competitive and often dangerous world of public affairs. Why not just stay in the garden? Why not indeed.

My uni tutor, with a great degree more certainty than seems wise now, was adamant that Marvell wrote this poem at the time when he was considering re-entering Parliament. 
Academics would dispute this with much evidence to back them (so I have subsequently learnt) but I am still persuaded that it's a perfectly reasonable reading of the poem.

To me, it's a wonderful poem on the struggle between seeking the comfort and security of life in a peaceful garden, versus the responsibility of plunging into the hurly-burly of ordinary public life.

That's where I'm at right now. Not only do I have a lovely garden, I've been earning a quid in a lovely garden of a job for 14 years now, and the idea of leaving my two gardens for most of every working day is very, very unappealing indeed. How little can I live on? Can I still earn money while working from home? Who would have me?

I know that virtually everyone reading this blog doesn't live a cosseted life in a garden all day long, as I have been so fortunate to do for these last 14 years, so I accept your muttered 'tough luck' with head bowed. So many of us commute in crowded buses and trains, some hold down crappy jobs supervised by thoughtless oafs, are underpaid, tired and possibly a bit depressed by the grind of it all, too. 

All my life I've made the decision to leave jobs I don't like, and to go looking for something interesting, even if the pay is lousy. I've been fortunate that I have skipped like a frog from one interesting little lilypad of work to another, but this time I think I might be swimming to shore: times are getting tougher and interesting lilypads scarcer.

However, my first instinct is to not only stay here in the garden, try to make a goer of it and not abandon it, be unfaithful to it, until I have run out of options. So unlike Mr Marvell, who opened the garden gate and rode off to London and its lethal uncertainties, I am staying here, thinking a green thought in a green shade.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone, I'm sorry I didn't do a 'jingle bells' posting this Christmas Eve, but jingly bells aren't what woke me up this morning. What I woke up to was memories of this beautiful poem, below.

See you in 2013, best wishes to you all.

THE GARDEN

By Andrew Marvell

How vainly men themselves amaze

To win the palm, the oak, or bays,

And their uncessant labours see

Crown’d from some single herb or tree,

Whose short and narrow verged shade

Does prudently their toils upbraid;

While all flow’rs and all trees do close

To weave the garlands of repose.

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,

And Innocence, thy sister dear!

Mistaken long, I sought you then

In busy companies of men;

Your sacred plants, if here below,

Only among the plants will grow.

Society is all but rude,

To this delicious solitude.

No white nor red was ever seen

So am’rous as this lovely green.

Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,

Cut in these trees their mistress’ name;

Little, alas, they know or heed

How far these beauties hers exceed!

Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound,

No name shall but your own be found.

When we have run our passion’s heat,

Love hither makes his best retreat.

The gods, that mortal beauty chase,

Still in a tree did end their race:

Apollo hunted Daphne so,

Only that she might laurel grow;

And Pan did after Syrinx speed,

Not as a nymph, but for a reed.

What wond’rous life in this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;

The nectarine and curious peach

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons as I pass,

Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,

Withdraws into its happiness;

The mind, that ocean where each kind

Does straight its own resemblance find,

Yet it creates, transcending these,

Far other worlds, and other seas;

Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.

Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,

Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root,

Casting the body’s vest aside,

My soul into the boughs does glide;

There like a bird it sits and sings,

Then whets, and combs its silver wings;

And, till prepar’d for longer flight,

Waves in its plumes the various light.

Such was that happy garden-state,

While man there walk’d without a mate;

After a place so pure and sweet,

   What other help could yet be meet!

But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share

To wander solitary there:

Two paradises ’twere in one

To live in paradise alone.

How well the skillful gard’ner drew

Of flow’rs and herbs this dial new,

Where from above the milder sun

Does through a fragrant zodiac run;

And as it works, th’ industrious bee

Computes its time as well as we.

How could such sweet and wholesome hours

Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!

It is a far far better thing...

There I was this morning, deadheading the daisies, and all of a sudden I was thinking of my first romantic hero when I was a book-mad teenage boy: Sidney Carton from Charles Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities'. A grim connection indeed, when you think of poor Sidney's fate, climbing the steps to the guillotine in the Terror of the French Revolution, but I could see the connection. Sidney's final, noble words are the immortal quote: "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."

He was my romantic ideal then, sacrificing his life by substituting himself for the man who was intended for the guillotine, so the woman Sidney loved could live her life with the man she loved, who was, alas, not Sidney. (I don't think I was doing all that well with the chicks when I was 14, so I must have looked upon myself as a punily similar tragic figure.)

Where was I? That's right, deadheading the daisies. (These tangents of thought do pop up rather often while pottering about the garden.) It is a far, far better thing that the daisy plants lose a few fading flowers, as that's the only way for the show to go on. *Sniff*

The party is over for this bedraggled former
beauty. As far as the daisy is concerned, it has
done its bit and formed seeds (flowering is just
a means to an end, but the real purpose of
flowering is, of course, to set seed). As a gardener
my task is to thwart that ambition, to deny it its
seed. The only option for the thwarted flowering
plant is to try and try again, by sending up more
flowers. And that's what deadheading is all about.

There's a mixture of flowers in bloom and faded ones here, so
the trick is to cut off the dead 'uns without hacking down the lot.

This is my 'Sidney Carton' moment where a few
perfectly upright, decent blooms still in flower
get caught up in the revolution. I do try to be
accurate and neat in my snipping, but there are
always some casualties. (That's where the 'far
far better thing' bit popped into my head.) 

I trimmed back this little daisy completely, about two or three
weeks ago, and look at it now. Flowers aplenty, more coming
through. Hopefully that'll be the case with the others.

Deadheading annual flowers is more of a time-consuming chore than the cheerful monthly gardening magazine 'to do' lists admit, but it's amazing how well it works. These annual plants truly do live hard and die young – just a few months from beginning to end sometimes – but if you don't deadhead them they die far too young. With some judicious deadheading you can get them to put out two or three full flushes in their short stay here on Earth. 

FInally, thinking about poor old Sidney Carton and that wonderful book by Dickens, I really ought to also mention the movies of 'A Tale of Two Cities'. I read the book first, and loved it, but then I discovered the 1935 version of the film starring Ronald Coleman, and watched it several times. If I was going to be a tragic, romantic hero back then, I was going to do it Ronald Coleman style. 

Fortunately for me, I never got the gig as tragic teenage hero, but I have lived long enough to also discover the 1958 Dirk Bogarde version of 'Tale of Two Cities', and I'm sorry, Dirk: while you're a fine actor with many great films to your credit, I'm afraid that your version is not a patch on Ronald Coleman's. 

I haven't thought of 'Tale of Two Cities' nor of Ronald Coleman for years, but thanks to my little patch of daisies I have mentally dusted off my Dickens shelf. Gardening's like that, you never know what it's going to make you think of next.

And now, only if you can bear to watch some romantic tragedy while garden blog browsing, is the final scene from Ronald Coleman's 'Tale of Two Cities'.

Makeover madness

Hello everyone. After a longish absence from blathering on about our garden here at the Garden Amateur blog, Pammy and I are back, because we finally have something to talk about. Our much mused-over, and still undecided, garden makeover has begun. Slowly.

Today was Day One, and the theme for this day has been 'destruction': chopping, cutting, hacking, heaving, digging and a lot of sweating.

While we haven't, as such, actually decided on what the new garden will look like, we do have some firm opinions on what we want to get rid of. Pammy's hit list is a bit longer than mine "I don't like this, never did like that, why don't you take some cuttings of that and start again from scratch, etc etc". I just hated the big creeping fig covering our neighbour's garage wall, and I think I'll start with that story, because Huey the rain god came to my rescue one dark and stormy day...

Here's the creeping fig in its heyday last year. Lush, green, vigorous as a Latin Dancer and as unruly as a bus full of footy fans. What a workload keeping this monster tamed! The constant clipping was bad enough, but doing it on ladders was worse, and then I discovered that wasps thought it was the perfect place to build several nests. Was it on my hit list? Oh, yeah!

Here's the creeping fig today, and I never laid a finger on it, your honour. It was Huey the rain god, back in February. After a few shocking days of torrential rain and strong winds, the big, bad, unruly creeping ficus, weighed down with tonnes of water and blown from side to side, lost its grip on the wall and came tumbling down in one solid lump. Fortunately the sturdy little garden shed took most of the weight, and the lemon tree, though sorely leaned upon for half an hour, was quickly rescued by yours truly in the driving rain.

Top of Pammy's hit list was the Grevillea Robyn Gordon, which admittedly has had several long illnesses in recent years. She saw it as a mercy killing. Next door to the grevillea was the most rampant rosemary bush in Marrickville, and that's the one about which she helpfully suggested striking a few cuttings from to start all over again, this time in a pot. So both these have 'gone' this afternoon. The clean-up truck comes on Monday to haul the proceeds away.

Looking south this is how the cleared bed looks.

And this is the view looking north. A lot of bare, ugly brick and steel walls and fences exposed for a while, but reform is needed.

While we were at it, we decided to trim/get rid of/move/start again with several other plants. This large money tree (a Crassula) in front of our potted curry tree is a disgraceful story of neglect. It's one of those cases where the roots of a potted plant found their way out into the soil, and the plant went berserk with happiness.

The pot itself, and the base of the plant, was hidden from sight behind a dense thicket of culinary sage and as it was the most easy-care plant in the garden, never needing watering or feeding, I never took much notice of it. It must have burst out of its thin little green plastic pot a couple of years ago, and since then it has grown into a very sturdy monster. I'm not going to touch it right now, but in a month or so, on a cool day I will transplant it somewhere else, digging it up to take as much of the root ball as I can find, then moving it to a better spot. It's such a tough thing I think it'll be OK, but this plant's condition is just about the slackest disgrace in our garden.

Meanwhile, all the succulents, which normally live where all the felled shrubs are now lying in a heap, have been moved over to a 'parking bay' across the other side of the garden. The plan for them is (probably) to take them out of their gaggle of pots, and create a proper succulent garden bed were they can live and compete in sunny peace.

All sorts of gnomes, hidden from sight behind pots, shrubs and other thickets of greenery have all been discovered in the clearout, and the parking bay definitely has a party atmosphere raging on at the moment. "How have you been, long time no see!"

Though the overgrown money tree is a bit of a disgrace, several other plants which I have been neglecting for months on end seem to be doing better without me, like this haworthia.

And this lemon thyme...

And the truly wonderful Plectranthus 'Mona Lavender'. Let me put in a plug for this plant to any gardeners in a climate like mine. This thing is only a year old, and has flowered for three quarters of that time, has grown like mad in a spot that gets no morning sun and only a burst of afternoon sun for a few hours each day. I don't feed it or water it, but admittedly with Sydney's unbelievably wet recent summer, nothing much has needed watering this last soggy year.

So that's the makeover on Day One. Just a whole lot of destruction and nothing much else. Still no firm plans that we can agree upon, just a pile of corpses waiting to be hauled off to the plant cemetery.

My main aim is to make the garden a lot easier to maintain. It's too much work for me now. I have fairly persistent back problems, and a major episode of sciatica immediately following the 14-hour non-stop plane flight from San Francisco to Sydney last November put me completely out of gardening action all the way through to the New Year. At that stage it was too hot to do any work, and even now I'm still very wary of doing much heavy work. I want to make the garden much lighter and easier to look after. That'll mean fewer vegies and annual plants, more perennials and shrubs I suspect, but we'll see.

Over the 21 years we have been here we have completely remodelled and rejuvenated the garden three or four times, and each time it was a thrill to do it. I remember with previous makeovers that some friends were actually a bit shocked at the major changes we made, as things always look a bit stark in the first several weeks after all the replanting is done. However, each time things grew back quickly, as they always do in Sydney's lovely climate, and the lushness and vigorous good health of new plants is always a vivid thing to behold. So that's the plan. Stay in Sydney and it'll all grow back fast, no matter what we do!

Wish list? I'd love a frog pond, just like Lanie's!

Plugging the gaps

Well, hello everyone. I've been away from blogging about gardens for a month and a day, although I don't think anyone actually noticed. The odd thing about being absent from my blog for this short period is that during that time, the number of hits on my blog slowly but steadily increased. If I stay away forever I might eventually have a hit on my hands...

I don't think so, and so let's get down to the business of today's topic: plugging the gaps. In this case, it's a fairly big gap. Let me explain.

Now, this is not a recent photo of my front garden. It was taken back in April 2009, when everything was going well with these outrageously healthy and vigorous natives. The blue-grey thing spilling over the front fence is an alleged 'groundcover' version of the Cootamundra wattle, according to the plant label. It's a monster, but it is a beautiful monster. But see the big grey plant behind it, in the centre of the photo? That's now the gap in question. It has carked it. Died. It is an ex Correa alba. It started to get the wobbles this time last year, and for a while I thought it had survived, courtesy of my nursing talents. But this summer I lost my grey native patient and it just faded and faded, and so this morning I pulled it out.

Now I have a very large gap to fill. That's a big gap, isn't it! I could do nothing and just let the monster wattle fill the whole area, and that's not a bad plan at all. We might do that. But Pam and I just can't help discussing alternatives. We could plant a dwarf gum tree there, the one with the lurid vermilion flowers, for example. Not sure what we'll do, but there's no rush. February is a stinker of a time to plant anything in Sydney. I regard February as the one true "killer" month we have here in Sydney each year. Hot and humid, it gets at plants' roots, gives them diseases, and pests are everywhere. I've attended more plant funerals in February than at any other time of year. So I'll wait till it cools down, late March or April, before I plug the 'gap' with something else.

Right now, I've also been filling a few other gaps in the backyard in a very stop-gap way. To other Sydney gardeners, all you have to say is "that hot Saturday" and they all know what I mean. On that unbelievably hot day in early February, the temperature went past 40°C everywhere, and my little digital thermometer in the shade peaked at 41.5C (which is 106.7°F). And it wasn't dry heat either, it was humid heat, awful debilitating heat.

Fortunately, all the major plants here survived, the goldfish in the water garden even made it through (thanks to some timely shadecloth cover), but all the annual flowers which were past the half-way point of their short seasonal lives suddenly heard the referee blow "full time, game over" and down they slumped, deep-fried by sunshine.

So this is the scene this morning in the backyard. Mulcherama. Everything was pulled out, the soil has been dug, composted, limed, watered and mulched. And I'm not planting nuthin until March. I don't trust this weather. It's deadly. What little gardening I'm doing is happening before 9am, or after 6pm. When March comes I'll be planting vegies and flowers again, as I always like to, but until then I'm cruising, watching mulch break down.

So there's not really all that much to blog about here at Amateur Land at the moment. When the weather cools down next month there'll be all sorts of things to post about, so I might just wander off for another month and a day, and watch my web stats keep on mysteriously rising.

2010 - the best of

Well, this is going to be my last posting for 2010, and so as a way of signing off for the year, I thought I'd hand out some 'Best Of The Year' type awards for everything from the Plant of the Year (POTY) through to meals of the year (MOTY), book of the year (BOTY), movie of the year (MOTY) etc. You get the idea, so it's on with the show.

Envelope, please, glamorous assistant..... the 2010 Plant of the Year is....

Mrs Lithops! Well, a runaway winner is Mrs Lithops. She has starred in numerous 2010 blog postings, here, here and here. And she has been through family tragedies, the change of life, plus unanimous 'on the voices' election as Mayor of Succulent City (in which she has led them all superbly through a very wet spring, with no casualties). And she has achieved all this with a quiet, demure-but-strong demeanour. Well done, and congratulations, Mrs Lithops.

The second set of awards go the meals of the year, the yummiest food we encountered during 2010. The winner of dish of the year (DOTY) in the home-cooked division is....

Chermoula! This spicy North African blend of cumin, garlic, parsley, coriander, olive oil, paprika, cayenne, lemon juice, salt and pepper was this year's discovery in the kitchen, which I blogged about here. We combined chermoula with everything from fish to chicken and lamb, always with plenty of vegetables and couscous too, and it never let us down, and often thrilled us.

The award for DOTY, in the eating-out restaurant division, unfortunately doesn't come with a photo, but there was a joint winner, fortunately at the same Japanese restaurant, Azuma, in Chifley Square in the city. This very plain and sedate looking, wood-lined dining room was where Pammy and I had our 21st wedding anniversary dinner in June, and she absolutely loved the tissue-thin slices of fish, and the dressing, in the Kingfish Carpaccio there, while I just couldn't believe how incredibly yummy a Seaweed Salad could be, until I tasted Azuma's. No other Japanese restaurant comes close.

And now, a few other awards in the 'lifestyle' category...

Book of the Year (BOTY): '1959' by Fred Kaplan, a fascinating retelling of all the things that happened back in the year 1959. I won't bore you silly with a recounting of all the contents, but my poor friends were bored silly by me telling them what an entertaining read it was over several dinners in the middle of the year. Sucker for non-fiction, I'm afraid. Close second was one for the political junkies, Race of a Lifetime, by John Halperin and Mark Heilemann, a fast-paced, gossipy account of the 2008 US Presidential campaign.

Gardening book of the year (GBOTY): aw, shucks, it's Organic, by Don Burke, the book that I worked on, and which spent most of the year as Number One best-selling gardening book here in Australia. That was such a thrill that I surprised myself at how excited I was about its success.

Film of the year (FOTY): so hard to choose! I loved two French films with Vincent Lindon – 'Welcome' and 'Madamoiselle Chambon' – but the boy in me couldn't go past another wonderful pair of French films starring Vincent Cassell, the true, sometimes romantic, often violent, anarchic and chaotic story of France's Public Enemy Number One in the 1970s, Mesrine. Slight cheating here, as we saw Part One of the two-part epic back in December 09, then we saw Part Two around April this year. Pam and I see lots and lots of movies, including lots of Hollywood stuff, Aussie films, etc but this was a good year for French cinema.

Employee of the Year (EOTY): Pammy and I have a lovely tradition that now extends back several years. We work from home together and are set up as our own little two-person company. So each year we have a 'Staff Christmas Dinner' just like the big companies do, and each year one of us wins Employee of the Year. There's always a buzz of excitement around the place as the big day (and the lovely dinner) approaches. We're off to our favourite Japanese restaurant next week, and the envelope is sealed until then, unfortunately folks. You'll just have to share the tension with us, until then (but sources close to the company say that rumours are flying about that Pammy is a hot favourite to win it for an unprecedented third year running).

And so that's it for 2010 from me. I'm taking a break from work, from blogging (but not from gardening, watching movies, eating out and cooking) until some time in the New Year.

So thanks to everyone who has visited my blog, left comments and participated in the fun. Here's hoping you all have a wonderful Christmas, a memorable New Year celebration, and I'll be back some time in January to update you on the good life here in beautiful, sunny Marrickville.