Lost in Space

My main point in writing this post is to suggest that the landscape can offer a more beautiful outlook than what most of us contrive in our gardens.

I'd decided to head out to the country today, on the train, about an hour north of Melbourne, to see a little somewhere I'd like to live in. Believe me, if you are wanting to head off to a lively little country town, do NOT head off to Kilmore East...

..as I did.

A hamlet, I'd call it, Kilmore East, without a single shop, cafe or pedestrian ( well - there was me ). Home to retirees, the real reason to visit is to wander beyond the housing, beneath its surrounding rolling hills.

This, to me, is already a garden, but it's not, of course. It's a bit of country land, mowed by just-visible sheep. You see, as I'm getting older, I really don't want to have a garden at all. I want to transplant myself to a country landscape where nature's done/doing the work.

Did a clever stylist plant this? No, it just happened, here on the roadside, a bit out of Kilmore East, on Sunday Creek Road. 

This COULD be a deliberately planned garden-scape. Fortunately, the garden-makers of much of the land I saw today haven't yet stuck their toxically-bright bits of geometrically logical exotic flowerdom into this peaceful bit of paddock.

In this grove of Eucalypts burnt by bushfire but re-growing mops of leaves, I see a troupe of dancers performing a delicate dance. Did they need a human director? No.

Having tucked into my lunch, here in a one-time former bus shelter - almost the only place in Kilmore East  to sit - with the prospects of both the human imprint and a broader native amplitude before me, I've decided we gardeners could do well to just let nature take its course...instead of poking and prodding it into a malformed drudgery of weeds and alien aesthetics.