The Adventures of the Voyeur Gardener

As a little girl in country Queensland I decided to create a garden by pulling up interesting-looking plants by the roots and sticking them in old ice cream cans. Having attained some measure of maturity I can claim a little more finesse - I sometimes know the names of plants before I look at the tags, and after decades of practice I am getting much better at calculating the seedling's possible life span at my lackadaisical hands.

You've heard of the lazy gardener, and the armchair gardener, and perhaps even the band the Avant Gardeners, well I'm sort of a voyeur gardener. I peek through fences into people's back yards, spend hours wandering through nurseries, collect coffee table books of beautiful gardens, and stroll in ill-informed, but appreciative bliss through the many wonderful public gardens.

For those of you who are unaware, Victoria claims the title "Garden State", and there are certainly plenty of green spots on the map. I hope that you will join me in my forays through the gardens and public transport of this fair city.

Below is a list of the gardens that I plan on visiting as the months go by. I'll leave the hard-core gardening details to the experts, but I will try to point you all -- red-hot gardeners and brown-thumbs, to some of the nicest places in Melbourne. Meanwhile, if I have missed any of your favourite gardens, please let me know.

In June 1996 I visited the Fitzroy Gardens, and I'd like to extend a special thanks to the bus driver who saved me from getting lost by ordering me to "sit down!" until he told me I could disembark (decoach? debus?). Now if I could only get the Met to issue instructions to have drivers prevent me from getting onto the wrong buses and trams to start with … by Ali Kayn

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