Australia Weather News

Now the autumn leaves rush in under the front door each time it's opened: torn, ragged things that have had a tough time on the streets and no longer resemble their green selves.

They tumble in shapes of crescent moons and rough stars as if the whole sky is starting to crumple and fall.

I will spend the next six weeks chasing them back out and they will slouch back in with every entrance — smaller, less certain versions of their earlier selves.

I grew up with that hand lotion ad from the '70s — the one where the woman spreads cream over a dry brown leaf, curls it in her palm, and then opens it to reveal the leaf green and rejuvenated. I tried that a few times on some crispy plane tree leaves. It didn't work.

There is no rescue for these autumn victims.

That radical change from the promise of summer to the beginning of the long darkness — it happened in a moment. The southerly breeze was a relief from the hot, dry day; now it's a scold to which I have to turn my collar, hunched. And it's only April.

Winter needs the gardener I should be, not the one I am

I'm not ready for this change. I never am. I try to find the rush of joy in what the winter-locked Phil Connors describes as a "long and lustrous winter" but I'm fearful. Grey days, no more long evenings in a garden to which I give little but always rewards me with a deep green solace, and a place to spend a seemingly endless twilight.

The beginnings of my winter garden reproach me because it needs the gardener I should be, not the one I am. The hydrangeas are leggy and unkempt, their old flower heads a crisp ball of neglect.

My mother always said to cut the heads that flowered down to "two fat buds" but I never find a matching pair, and I cut them all off in a panic. The varied climbers that I squabbled with my husband about planting have, as I feared, insinuated themselves into everything and now shed leaves from impossible-to-reach corners. The roses have hips and should be pinned and brutally pruned but they are arrogant and intimidate me, and I never know where to begin.

I really want to be like Vita Sackville-Westat Sissinghurst, rambling through a green and white garden of apparent wilderness that is actually exactly what the gardener wants it to be: everything turned to the sun just as I demand it, even the chaos submitting to my direction.

Instead, the bay tree bursts its pot and puts roots into the ground, the rejected metal bands of the old barrel flung around it. The frail olive from the front verandah is now as big as an oak in its transplanted ground, and leans over the fence raining black fruit on the heads of passers-by. They slip on the fat kalamatas, swearing.

I am not in charge of anything.

I have to admit, I admire the insolence, the insistence of even this small garden to do what it will. Some years I sweep up the leaves, but others I don't, and I like how the garden beds consume and compost them, taking exactly what they need with no help from me.

All the leaves will fall, and the maples will go to sleep without any tender ministrations from me. The mint will shrug off my frantic excavations of their impossible roots and the gum trees will drop nuts and grow blossoms while the rainbow lorikeets laugh and laugh.

Maybe this winter I will learn, maybe I will teach myself. Maybe the garden will become my willing companion in taming and training and striving for the coming spring. Maybe I'll be brave.

This weekend stories of music legends, our region and those who tell the stories best of all.

Have a safe and happy weekend and, if you missed it, don't forget to stream the second episode of my new show Creative Types, which features the wonderfully puckish creative director of the Sydney Dance Company, Rafael Bonachela — with a cameo from this up-and-comer. Head to iview where you can see both episodes so far: a new one at 9.00pm Tuesday night on Janet King herself, Marta Dusseldorp.

And take a breath: that new Taylor Swift record has finally dropped, and it's a double album! Get thee to the couch with a glass of red – it's going to be wonderfully long weekend. You're no Dylan Thomas, she's no Patti Smith … 

Go well.