I’ve moved from the city to Melbourne’s outer east, where everybody knows how to garden. Blundstoned parents swagger in for school pickup with secateurs in their belts and parsnips the size of your arm. They have wood chippers and chainsaws and trailers filled with enough mulch to cover a national park, which until yesterday I believed was pronounced mulsh.

For the first time in my life I’m in charge of a garden. It has a lawn and some flowerbeds which require weeding every now and then. I envy women with strong opinions about this flower or that. They seem to know what they’re doing in life, which direction to take, what any of it means. I hope to someday have the confidence to make sweeping, ludicrous statements like Madonna’s “I absolutely loathe hydrangeas”.

My mother is a competent, unsentimental gardener. Last spring she came over to “help” in mine. This involved ripping four ancient rose bushes from the flowerbed along the front of our house on the basis that I could “do better”.

Her statement, in its vague enormity, echoed across the months that followed, tingeing my cups of tea at the window above the bereft garden bed. Was it a vote of confidence or menacing battle cry? Could I do better? My mother’s words warbled through the summer heat and fell like petals as the weather cooled. The........

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