Aine: We are not really avid gardeners. It’s happenstance. We try things. If a plant doesn’t work, we move it somewhere else. Then we try something else. I enjoy it and it’s never felt like a chore because it’s just happened. I move things around and there’s a space, and I think, ‘I’ll put in some herbs there’. Cherry tomatoes self seed from the compost, and I allow them to grow – I haven’t had much success with other types of tomatoes. I do think about composition, I find something, and I stick it in for a bit of colour. A weed is only a weed in the wrong place.

Barry: I do know something about gardening, but I’m not the one who actually does it. I’m more of a supervisory role. It’sAine who does most of the work. I know how to grow vegetables, but we don’t have a lot of room here. So we couldn’t grow potatoes, for example, unless we dug up the lawn. We did attempt to grow beans once. Proper green beans! We grew seven.

Aine: Yes, we calculated that we spent $81 and got seven beans, half a portion. So it wasn’t very practical. But we have raspberries now, and lemongrass and plenty of other herbs. Spring onions, for example, we just cut the top off and plant them. We have a compost system, with two bins. And our garden has changed as we have learnt more. The garden is full of nasturtiums, for example. Fifteen years ago we would have said ‘we’ve got flowers all through the back’, but now we have ‘salad ingredients’. They just find the right place to grow. And you can actually pickle the seed pods like capers.

Barry: Many of our plants seem to just know where to grow. Growing up, in Devon in England, gardening was about vegetables to sustain the family, so it was serious business. We never bought vegetables. My father was a gardener. He worked for the local land owners, that was his job. My forays into gardening are driven by nostalgia and memory. So I remember the tomatoes that my father used to produce and I try growing tomatoes. But there’s a lot I’ve never attempted to do here so I am not sure whether everything we had, like peas, would grow the same way. From looking at other gardens in Haberfield, where people do have success growing lots of vegetables, I think those traditions can translate quite well.

Aine: My mother was a gardener. We were laughing recently because we were at the botanic gardens with the boys and it prompted a memory – because mum would have me on lookout while she took a little snippet of something to propagate. And when my son was little, there used to be a guava tree at the school, and the teacher was looking out the class window and said ‘There’s Liam’s mum leaping for guavas’. Well I was going to make guava jelly. I suppose for both of us, it’s nostalgia that drives our gardening efforts. Mum had roses, flowers, ornamental shrubs more than vegetables.

Aine: Some plants need a little more looking after than others. We have lots of citrus trees in pots. We just make sure they get lots of water in the hot weather, and we feed them with citrus food three or four times a year or definitely just before they’re due to flower. And we move them around the garden, between the front and the back. We were successful with citrus, so we just kept adding more trees.

Barry: We don’t have success with everything. We’ve never had success with pumpkins: we got flowers but no fruit. I know you can eat the flowers, because I’ve seen them in little packs down at Frank’s Fruit and Vegetable shop. It’s the same with the avocado tree. We grew it from an avocado pip nearly 40 years ago and we’ve only ever had about three avocados on it. But it is a beautiful tree.

Aine: Quite often we will google something ‘how to propagate ficus’ or something like that. I’m always propagating from cuttings. If we prune something, we try to grow more of it. We even managed to propagate azaleas. Geraniums, of course can grow from cuttings, and umbrella trees. Sometimes I will be out somewhere and I’ll admire a plant, and they will say ‘Help yourself.’ We have rosemary at the front that we have growing. I wish people would just take that. There’s bushes of the stuff. Why would anybody buy a bunch of rosemary for one lamb roast? It’s silly, isn’t it?

Barry: We have little oak trees that just grew from acorns I picked up in Canberra.

Aine: Our neighbour at the back is Italian and has a lovely mango tree. The chicory came under the fence, from her garden, but we let it runaway and it’s lovely.

Aine: We have been in this house a long time. Our two boys, who are now grown men, grew up here. We are now members of the Haberfield Association. The debate used to be about whether or not aesthetic changes were in the spirit of the early twentieth century, but people aren’t living in the early twentieth century anymore.

Barry: There are bigger threats to worry about, like WestConnex. That has puts things in perspective, there’s no doubt. A lot of people still have no idea what’s happening politically.