Trees, birds and garden design experiments: Angie Gallinaro spoke with Mapping Edges about how she translates her love of nature from the bush to her garden. She showed us her rainforest and dry garden, her fruit trees and flowers, and the sayings that lead her visitors through the garden.

This is the most important statement: I grew up in the country. I’m the first born of Italian immigrants who came in the fifties to Australia. They went to Innisfail – I was born in Innisfail. My father was a cane cutter for nine years. My mother and he got married before they came over here. Then I grew up from seven years old until I went to university on a farm, tobacco farm, in the Mareeba area. Although my parents didn’t really have a big vegetable garden, I’m sure mum used to do the typical Italian thing, I’m sure there were a few vegetables. But the most important thing is that I grew up in the country and I have a major appreciation of nature. That is where my love for the garden starts. Not because I grew vegetables with my parents: it’s just a love of nature. You will see the influence of being from Queensland: at the back I’ve got a rainforest, a wet forest. Alongside there is also a dry forest, because I grew up in Mareeba. Then I have the orchard, my passionfruit and my bananas, which reflect where I grew up.

I’ve been here 30 years, and my original scope was to walk around clipping flowers into a basket. That was my idea of gardening. I wanted a cottage garden at the front with lots of flowers. But of course it wasn’t to be. I’m a hapless gardener, so I’ve just over years tried things out and some things work and some things don’t and so on. There were Sicilians who lived here before me and they had their typical prickly pears. And their fig trees. They had citrus trees. The citrus trees, I’ve relocated along the fence, what I call my orchard. I got rid of all the prickly pears because I’m from Northern Italy so prickly pears is not something that I particularly like. Unfortunately I got rid of all the fig trees and I’m really very disappointed about that because I now appreciate fig trees, but that’s where I put the native forest. There were a few small trees, like the mulberry tree. There are a few that I’ve inherited from that period. There were a couple of nice magnolias and roses in the front which I think the people who lived here before me probably inherited. I can’t see the Sicilians having grown these plants, I think they were more interested in vegetables. There were no trees at the back. There was a lot of sun and that was their vegetable garden. So that’s what the garden was like when I moved in: it was an Italian, more a Sicilian style garden with leftover Federation flowers in the front: we had camellias and roses and a fuchsia, which used to do really well in its spot but I relocated it and I have never been able to grow fuchsias since.

I’m a very open minded gardener. I’ve been retired now five years, and five years ago I became interested in vegetables. I don’t do vegetables for the purpose of producing for the household, but my particular interest at the moment lies with vegetables. At one stage I was putting the vegetables amongst my flowers as part of the cottage garden. But that’s not working very well so I’m not doing that as much. I also volunteer at the Stanmore Public School with the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Program, The Edible Schoolyard.

I got this idea from Stephanie Alexander’s book, because again, this is a spot that was getting some sun. So I created a cluster of pots.

I started in Bondi about eight years ago, so I’ve been volunteering in the vegetable garden, learning a lot from that experience too. I learnt how easy it was to compost. The kiddies could do it, I said well that’s pretty easy. You know, just observing the kiddies doing it I thought ‘Oh, I’ll do it myself’. I use the compost to toss around the garden. I’ve been to classes. The Inner West Council have held lessons on healthy soil, so I have been to free classes and I have applied that knowledge.

I will say that this is my spiritual home, and I think the garden’s got a big part in that. For instance, I haven’t volunteered with Bush Care because I said I’ve got my own Bush to look after. It doesn’t get enough attention. My garden is a little bit of paradise. A haven, it’s my little oasis, it’s my country in the city.

I had tried to keep this room all native, but of course other varieties got in the way. So I call it my Gondwana because a lot of the undergrowth plants are from Africa or South America. They talk about health, mental health too, the calmness, which gardens bring to people. Very important. Our lives are becoming more and more frenetic and it makes sense taking time out and work around the garden. You don’t need a science degree to realise the benefits of that.

So it’s nice to just wander around and – I love the birds too. I feel that I contribute to the corridor, the green corridor essential to bird life. There’s a lot of bird life in my garden, and they entertain me a lot. I’m proud of the bird life. My property is, with the help of some trees next door, surrounded by tall trees. Those tall trees attract large birds. I’m disappointed I can’t attract small birds, but you can’t have everything. I used to have some fairy wrens on the narrow side because the big birds can’t go there. Just as an example, in the street outside – near my driveway there was a nest of currawongs, and one of the chicks after he got out of his nest came into my back garden. It was like a nursery for him. I called him Jack, and call his mother Matilda and his dad Bill. He has disappeared now, he has abandoned me. But for a good three, four months whilst he was growing up he was just living in here. That’s the sort of thing that has given me a lot of joy. For instance, these are pecan nuts. I don’t bother eating them. I feed the birds.  The birds get to them before they ripen. The tree was here before. It was a sapling. I wanted to keep it trim but the arborist said no, no.  You have to let this tree grow. But I like this idea of connecting trees to allow the bird life travel from one tree to another. You see, even that corner end of the road, there are five gumtrees in a row. The bird life! One day there was a kookaburra, I could hear it, and it came from the trees there and landed here. I don’t often get kookaburras. But there it was. You know, it is a very important canopy contribution.

The garden also gives me some worry: the nuisance factor is the leaf litter, the amount of leaves. I can’t keep the place tidy. I don’t want to keep it tidy in a way, but it is a bit of a burden I have to admit to keep it tidy.

The change in the weather has had a major impact on my garden. In that fairy patch over there, hidden amongst the other plants, is the mother hydrangea. I got this idea of bringing sayings into the garden, like ‘fairies live here’, and I’m going to put a few others around. I got this idea from a Japanese garden in Ireland designed  like the journey of life. I propagated these from, the mother hydrangea. Now of course, with that scorching hot weather the flowers have just all shrivelled up. They’re the old fashion hydrangeas, you can see the very tight flowers and they grow quite high. I water, I water all the time, especially this year it has been very dry. So I’m always watering.

The drought, the scorching heat of this summer …  and so what happens is that those plants that don’t survive don’t get replaced and you put more of those that do survive. My cottage garden is an example: cottage garden plants naturally are very delicate. What I try to do is get very hardy ones that have that cottagey look about them, but they’re not really cottage plants, they just have delicate looking flowers. Another change that has taken place is at the back where I had a lot of trouble trying to get anything to grow under my gumtree. Then I said: let’s have a look at Hawthorne Parade. They have lomandras under the gumtrees. Now finally I have lomandras and that green undercover. It was a major change that took place, whereas before I was having trouble getting anything growing underneath it.

A lot of my plants also are memorials. So I’ve got a memorial there for my uncle. He used to love roses – it’s The Children’s Rose. Another one for my girlfriend who used to love wearing purple and gold, and that’s a gold Midas rose. I’ve got memorials everywhere. That one there in the middle there, is for my parents. My mum passed away last year, and it flowers on her birthday. My father was very tall and thin.

Gardens are massively important for the identity of Haberfield as a suburb, and not appreciated by the people who are destroying our brush box trees for instance. I am sure you have heard about the Ausgrid’s issues that we had, and WestConnex of course got rid of all those heritage houses. They called them houses, but they were homes.

There are cultural differences in our suburb.  I’ve been here 30 years.  My family is from Northern Italy by the way, and I am a divorcee.  For instance, my neighbours are Sicilian, married. My trees were already here when they bought their house, right, I think it was probably 10 years later. They invited me in for coffee, and then the next day they asked me to cut all my trees down and get rid of my dogs. That was the beginning of the end so to speak. The beginning of our feud. Because, you see, the Italians like tidy gardens, they like everything to be productive, and they don’t like leaf litter. They like everything clean. I want to feed the birds and trees create a lot of shade which keeps the house cool.

Across the road there’s an elderly Italian lady I always speak to when I can. I’ve got some succulents from her, from her front garden. I said: this is a lovely plant, she said: do you want a bit? Now I’ve got some of her succulents. There was an 80-year-old Italian man who had a mock orange, a philadelphus. I told him: I love these flowers, and he gave me two plants that he had propagated for me and they are in my garden. There was a Spanish gardener who lived in an apartment and was frustrated because he didn’t have a garden. He used this little spot and grew citrus from seeds there. One day he dropped off four citrus plants. That’s because I always talk to elderly Mediterranean people, I know a little bit of Spanish. And of course the gardening committee, we meet every Friday for coffee. It’s just a social group. I’m not on the gardening committee, but I’m quite happy to contribute as a volunteer. We have a lot of Italian gardeners here and there are a couple of controversies. One Italian gardener is really upset that he has never won the major category, because his style of gardening is not federation style. So we were talking as a gardening committee meeting, which I attended, about having a separate section, like an Italian gardening category. It’s something we are still thinking over.

The most common thing that we have amongst us is this interest in gardening. So we’re always swapping notes and swapping plants. Interactions between the gardener in the front of house and the people who walk by happen all the time. We get that all the time. My fence is higher than the original fence simply because I have dogs. They roam around the house. The neighbours don’t like that, but orginally I got dogs for security reasons because we were burgled whilst we were renovating and the police told us houses with dogs don’t get burgled generally speaking because of the difficulty factor. But certainly there is interaction with the people in gardens. Of course, I do the same. I walk around, I walk the dogs around, I’m always talking. That’s how I got to talk to that 80-year-old fellow about his flowers. It happens all the time. Because of my Italian background I always speak to the Italians in Italian.