“If I just pick one it won’t hurt and no one will notice.”
I can almost hear those words being said, or thought, when I arrive at our office every week in November and December.
Our office is accessed down a wide cement path in a sort of pedestrian cul-de-sac. The path gives access off the main street footpath to an array of offices, an outdoor seating area for a cafe and an amenities block that services the offices, the cafe and a restaurant up on the street.
It also gives access to our shared garden beds.
When our landlord redeveloped the vintage buildings and made the shared outdoor space a place where garden beds could be formed up, he knew I was a plant nerd and so he asked me to choose what should be planted in them.
I said native plants that thrive in our area however he did request that one bed was planted out with plants like his grandmother grew.
So, one of the two main garden beds was planted with pink Hydrangeas with dwarf Agapanthus around the border. The other was planted with the magenta-pink flowering Little Kurrajongs, with white flowering Hoya vines, all-year-round flowering Native Violets and a yearly increasing number of pink Rainflowers as groundcover.
Those plantings were done quite some years ago and are now ‘pretty as a picture’ in Spring and Summer and green and lush looking for the remainder of the year.
The success of the plantings was hard won.
The soil in the native garden bed is shallow and the violets need to be regularly fed and weed invaders eradicated frequently due to bird droppings bringing in asparagus vine seeds and other nasties.
The Little Kurrajongs have grown as if they have been fed steroids and have obviously pushed their roots down into deeper soil below the bottom of the garden beds. They shed their leaves with glee over a month long period before a huge number of flowers appear along every stem. Sweeping up the leaves is a chore but worth it when the flowers open.
The garden bed planted with ‘grandma’s plants’ is located where an old tannery once stood, so the plants’ reaction to whatever is below the top soil takes some counter balancing. But again, it is worth the time and effort when flowering begins.
These gardens are much admired and certainly enjoyed by all who work in the cul-de-sac.
But it’s those “I’ll just pick one” customers and passers-by who raise my ire.
They “just love” the flowers of the Little Kurrajongs and happily tramp all over the groundcovers to take a cutting or pull off a seed pod.
And those “I’ll just pick one” types who try to pick an Agapanthus flower and find that the fleshy stems don’t snap and so the flower head is often left bent and broken … and ditto for the Hydrangea flowers.
These are the types that don’t stop to think that if all the people who walk through the cul-de-sac every week decided “I’ll just pick one” there would be none left for all to enjoy.
I don’t have a solution to stop the ” I’ll just pick one” brigade other than to become the ‘flower police’ and stand on guard to repel all intruders.
All I can do is to ask that should you ever consider picking a flower from a beautiful display in a public garden … don’t do it!
