MANY TIMES I have been asked: “Why a 3-foot square?” Each time, I seem to give a different answer. Finally, I dug back in my memory to 1945 and the last months of World War II. It seems 3-foot square garden plots have dotted my life ever since.
At the age of eleven, I was evacuated with many other children from the starving western provinces of the Netherlands. I landed in a small canal village in southeast Drenthe bordering Germany. The village had a tiny school of two classrooms and an office.
Our teacher was an enlightened young man from Amsterdam. He may have felt fortunate to have escaped that starving city in time, for he prepared a long strip of ground in the school yard and divided it into as many plots as there were children. I remember my plot well, probably 3 × 1.5 feet. The teacher handed out the seeds. I think I grew radishes and some flowers, maybe marigolds. The summer was all too short for me and my plot, because convoys of children were being returned to the west after the country was liberated on May 5, 1945. My truck rolled up on July 4th, and I said goodbye to my foster parents and my teacher and was delivered home in the late afternoon of that same day to my very surprised mother.
We had no garden at home. Our workman’s cottage stood a little more than 3 feet from the pavement that adjoined the road. At the back of the house was a concrete place for the laundry, to tinker and store bikes, and a small shed. Our only plants were indoor plants, looked after by Mother and me.
When I arrived in Australia, I was hoping to have a garden. It took a few years before we qualified for a State Bank loan and had a simple house built on a block in what was then still countryside. I adored the wide views of the Adelaide Hills and the Aldinga Range. Although we could not afford fences, I started to dig some ground for a vegetable garden, but due to my ignorance and the poor quality of former grazing land, nothing grew and I gave up. Deciding on tough geraniums and succulents, I was constantly prevented from developing a garden because of plans to terrace the sloping site with concrete retaining walls. And so the best memory I have is of a quarter circle drawn in a 3-foot square corner where two walls met. Here, I made a miniature garden, building a hill with excavated soil, retained with rocks, planted with succulent cuttings I picked here and there. This became the only delightful little corner, full of tiny starry flowers in the summer. I’d lay flat on the grass looking up my little hills and imagine it to be a landscape.
In the ’80s, my partner, Burr, and I set up a trailer and shed on a hill in the Adelaide Hills, where we lived in primitive comfort. Burr began building an environmentally sound house, and I started to make a garden on top of the plateau in the forest. It would eventually spread across an acre. But the plots began by Burr picking over 9 square feet at my request, from which I removed rocks, stones, and roots. The soil was then dug, given compost, and planted with herbs. I remember a huge electricity truck with two men coming up the long driveway, looking fruitlessly for an electricity meter—we were not connected—as I sat on my bank of clay raking out gravel for yet another plot. “Making a little garden, luv?” asked the driver from his great height behind the wheel, a note of pity in his voice. They circled the rainwater tank and left the property, shaking their heads.
On the plateau, we built planter boxes with second-hand bricks to grow vegetables. These were approximately 3 × 6 feet—convenient to cultivate, plant, and reach across.
After fifteen years in the forest, we moved to a level 2.5 acres where we planted a mixed native forest on more than half of it. The house gardens sprawled over an acre and were developed in the same way as the Hills garden, square foot by square foot, cultivated and planted before going on to the next plot. You can have an overall plan in your head of what will go where, but to enjoy gardening, you best take it one square step at a time.
So there you have it. I am but a round peg standing proudly in a square plot. And since One Magic Square appeared, thousands of people have discovered how much fun, food, and satisfaction can be had from such small spaces.