Volume 5

A History of Your Garden

by Sonja Ronning, Moore Park Beach, Queensland


Sonja's girls going for caterpillars raining from the trees
Creating a garden history is about recording changes that take place in and around your garden.  This is a wonderful way to see how you and nature evolve with each other.  Maybe you have acquired the garden from someone else and wonder if the caterpillars that rain from the eucalyptus trees is normal for that time of year, or is this a new event?  If you rent a property and later move to a new property, a record of what happens in both gardens will make an interesting comparison.  Creating a history of your garden can be very special and is something you can pass on to new owners, or your family.  What’s more, if you cannot remember the variety of silverbeet you grew three years ago, look back at your ‘Garden History’.  Remember, your garden consists of not only plant life, but also animals, soil structures, and weather.

Observations to record

Wildlife movements

The movements of wildlife in and around your garden are a wonderful indication of what the next seasons will hold.  Do you have rabbits or hares in your area?  Are they hungrier at different times of the year, and will that affect your vegetable garden? I seem to have trouble with hares for about a fortnight each April.  I find a certain amount of my soy beans levelled each morning.  The two hares hide amongst the seaside daisy and on dusk, they emerge to have a feast.  Since they are so cute, we have come to an understanding; the two weeks a year is fine with me.  Perhaps certain birds come and go.  Try to record when they leave sand when they return.  When one species leaves, does another arrive in their place?  One year in our garden the magpies left and a pair of tawny frogmouth owls arrived on the same day.  We have yet to see if this happens again.  The goannas and frill neck lizards are a common sight in our garden and often dig tunnels under our garden to lay their eggs.  Because we know this occurs each year, we mesh over a couple of special areas in the garden that we do not want dug up.

What self-sows when?


Back yard visitor: A hungry Wattle bird makes its annual visit to the editor's garden to feast on the flowering Warratah. Photo by Fiona Tunnicliff. 
Watching what self-sows when is a valuable lesson in gardening.  Nature tells us when the best time for sowing certain seeds is.  Sometimes seeds sown for the vegetable garden have a lower germination rate than the year before, or perhaps three years before.  Then I notice that what is usually self-sowing at this time is not.  The flowers are not as developed as they normally are.  So from this I perhaps know that the weather is not quite the same.  On the other hand, perhaps I have done something in the garden at previous times that I have not done this time.  If all this is recorded, I can look back and see what happened last time.  Maybe it is part of a much bigger pattern that I will see in years to come.

What flowers when and do they smell?

Sometimes flowers appear early or late, or not at all, or are a bit lacking in scent and some years the scent is at its best.  Recording this can reveal a long-term pattern or it can reveal what gardening method is most effective for a good scent.  Also is the scent connected to how many bees are in the garden that year?  If you have kept track of the bee-life in your garden each year, maybe this can be correlated with how effective the scent is each year.  You may like to conduct your very own research study!

Weather patterns

This is perhaps the most common record kept: temperature, humidity, rainfall, and wind speed and direction.  Dams and ponds and what is planted in our gardens can help form microclimates.  Perhaps compare your garden temperature to the temperature recorded by the Bureau of Meteorology.  If changes are made in the garden, the weather pattern of previous years can be compared with the weather since the changes were made.  It all makes for interesting gardening.

New appearances

Keep an eye out for new plants or weeds that have attempted to establish themselves.  They can sometimes arrive in bought mulch, or perhaps the seeds came in with the wind or the birds.  Are there any new birds or wildlife that has turned up about the same time as the new plant seeds?  Recording new arrivals can be important because you may find that the new arrivals come at the same time each year, or perhaps each time you buy in garden mulch.

Soil changes


Keep a record of rainfall with a rain gauge.
Reading a history of your soil structure improvements can be a gratifying moment for the gardener.  If your garden will be passed onto future gardeners, they will able to read about how you achieved this success and ensure the worms and microbes keep on multiplying.

Put it all together

When you put all your observations together can you see any relationships they have to each other.  Is there a new pattern forming, or is it a much larger pattern that you will have to wait to see the full picture?

Purely practical, or personal, or family activity

The garden history can be purely practical, or a family activity to help children understand their environment, or, the history can be a personal journey.  My history is purely practical; merely just lists of what I observe in the garden and what gardening practices I have used.  However, you may like to personalise the history with comments on how certain aspects make you feel.  Perhaps you feel elated when you see the chamomile emerging from self-sown seed each year; like the return of an old friend.  Perhaps you think good riddance when it dies off after taking over a large section of the lettuce patch.  As a learning tool the history can teach children how important the eco system within their garden is, and how they can ensure its continuation.