"Hort" Sounds Like A Questionable Job Title
When I’m nervous, I get sassy. Once I was pulled over by the police for an RBT and was so nervous that when they asked me if I’d consumed any drugs or alcohol tonight I told the officer that I’d only done a “little bit of heroin”. I had to sit by the road for ten long minutes waiting for my (obviously) negative results to come back, all the while trying suuuuuuper hard to look like I wasn’t on heroin. Same goes for people who make me nervous. Have I ever pointed and laughed really hard in your face about something you’ve mispronounced? Have I called you a serial killer? Have I belittled or demeaned you in any way? That’s all nervous energy, boo. So of course, I am a wreck in interviews. Not a visible wreck, mind. Visible nerves would be ideal because at least it would be clear that I was serious and wanting to do well. Unfortunately, nerves just make me act like a complete dickhead. Once in an interview I went to physically remove the takeaway coffee from the hand of the interviewer as I chided him for not ordering me one. Another time I suggested next time the interviewers interview the candidate with their backs to them, but be in swivel chairs, so when they like the sound of what they hear they can turn their chairs around like they’re on an episode of The Voice (granted this interview was at Channel 9, so points to me for product knowledge). And a few weeks ago I had the most important interview of my life, and was pretty sure I’d fucked it up beyond all previous attempts at fucking up the things that are most important to me by eating a caramel slice while I was trying to answer questions, citing pinterest as an appropriate gardening tool and then stealing BOTH pens I was lent to make notes with (they’re still in the pocket of my jacket, and I won’t be returning them).
But, to my absolute surprise, I was given the job, and I cried for the entire afternoon I was formally offered the role. I cried driving home. I cried on the phone to Nick and to Mum and Dad and to Mel. I cried when three songs in a row came on about gardens in my apple music shuffle (Frank Ocean Nature Feels, Dua Lipa Garden and SZA Garden (Say it like dat)). Seriously though, that’s some weird shit, Siri definitely listens to our conversations. And then I wound down the day crying in the shower, replaying that moment over in my head, hearing those words I’d known I wanted to hear since 2015. I don’t know if other people feel this way about their jobs, and it might seem really foreign that I’d be such a basket case over getting a permanent two day a week gardening role, but I think I’ve narrowed down why it is. I’ve done a lot of reading about happiness, and by reading I mean I’ve seen some memes. And I’ve concluded that most of the wisdom we’re fed is bullshit, because the thing about happiness is that it is partially luck and partially contingent on you knowing what makes you happy, which isn’t always obvious. But I know one of the things makes me happy and it’s my work; the location (stunning), the work (satisfying, physically demanding and fun) and the people (all a little bit weird, kind but equally brutal and dry as hell). Nick often jokes with me that, because my affection is fragmented amongst so many friends and family members, he’ll probably find out in 30 years that I’ve been having a lifelong affair. Well Nick, I have taken a lover, and he’s a tall, beardy, rugged, sexy-ass, convict-looking motherfucker of a mountain. So in honor of this auspicious occasion, I have compiled a list of disjointed anecdotes about the people and things that I’ve met and experienced that make me feel so relieved and exalted that there’ll never come a day that I’ll have to walk out that gate and not get to come back in again.
The Location
In the depth of the winter months, when it’s windy and your lips are irredeemably dry, there is this part of my drive home which bolsters me against the blustery days. It’s only in this particular type of shitto weather that the gums along Bell’s Line of Road get this crazy, beautiful sparkle to them. I think it’s a combination of the low 4pm winter light, the tree’s thick leaf cuticle and the wind making them twinkle. I know this sounds super lame, but this is my blog and I’ll be lame about trees if I want. It makes me feel like everything will always be ok if those eucalypts can make the most out of the desiccating wind.
Also, the sunrises are crazy, the view from the top of the mountain is bomb and it’s isolated enough that you can feel like you’re the only people left in the world, just hanging out in this garden of Eden.
The Work
Once I ate five tacos and then got to have a go at driving the bobcat.
Being no longer scared of, and now able to use, a chainsaw makes me feel like a boss.
Every time I see a tree felled, or get to throw a big log in a chipper, I release an unbridled cackle. I cannot contain it, it just spews out of me. Also, climbing a tree at work is a level of enjoyment from a job I never thought I’d get to achieve. When I was little and being cared for by my grandparents, my Nanny would always say that if she couldn’t find me she’d just look up and I’d be in a tree. Being only 152cm tall, I’ve always had mountain goat aspirations and being in a workplace where I can be thirty weeks pregnant and tens of metres up a tree makes me feel like the world is my oyster. Also, working with people who understand that I know the limits of my own (pregnant) body is heartening, thank you for letting me live my best life and not grounding me, friends.
I love plants. As little touchstones, they remind me of only good times in my life. The sweet peas my Pa would plant every St. Patrick’s day and my Nanny would wrap in re-used tissue paper and give me for my birthday (they still smell like my birthday to me). The smell of cedar in the summer that always reminds me of caravan parks and pacman. Woollsia and Pultenea damp with rain that I’d go out into the bush with mum to collect in the morning before school, still always reminds me of where I grew up and alone time with my mum. Actinotis minor, those tiny little flannel flowers which look like a million stars in the heathland around Lockley’s Pylon, one of the most stark and beautiful walks I know. Seeing a waratah growing in the bush in September still makes my heart skip a beat, no matter how many times I see it. Dahlias growing in my yard from nothing, running wild and making me feel like summer will never end. The smell of daphne redeeming even the deepest and darkest of winter days... I could go on, but really only I would enjoy reading this personal list of plants that I froth over, my point is though, getting to work with plants, tend them and see them flourish is a freaking joy.
The People
At work there are these thrushes that are sort of fat and speckled. They run around incessantly with seemingly no agenda, but when you pass them they stand really still and act like they’re invisible. You can clearly see them though, they’re so chubby with their big, black eyes and they’ve literally just been sprinting around so they have your attention. And I love that you can comment on them to anyone you work with and they’ll all stop to laugh with you at this stupid bird that is trying to be so surreptitious. What I value most highly in a friend is the ability to make fun of someone or something with me, because allyship truly is built on the mutual mockery of others.
One day, during this week when I felt seriously sad, we were taking the failed top out of a eucalypt. One of the boys was in the tree while the rest of us were doing groundwork, milling about, chatting quietly. It was the sort of week where you feel constantly on the verge of tears, wintery, weird and slow. I was discussing something inane with my tallest friend as he was leaning against a Rhododendron, when he started talking about how often he leans on things. Let me just say that this, in and of itself, is just a boring and ridiculous thing to say, Ian. Who cares? Yeah, you lean on shit. Cool. Is my conversation that the-opposite-of-riveting that you’ve defaulted to narrating what you’re doing? Suddenly, mid-conversation the branch he was leaning on snapped and he all but rolled down the hill, stupidly long limbs akimbo, flailing to keep his balance. There’s something about slapstick comedy which hits me hard in the funny bone. This was one of those moments, and I will hold it dear forever.
A paragraph specifically for you, Melanie Palmer: you have held me while I’ve cried in the warmth of the locker room, gently lifting my head to place paper towel below it to stem the flow of snot on a day when I had a hormonal breakdown and couldn’t stop sobbing. You’ve heard all my secrets in the safety of the rock garden, laughed with me until we have had to physically hold each other up, our vision clouded with tears, gently bullied our friends which me when they deserve it the most and sighed simultaneously with me going on one million times. What would I do without you?
A description I found in my diary of a new friendship that could have been about anyone I work with: “Like finding a two dollar coin on the asphalt, warmed by the sun. Surprisingly heavy in your hand and then sits in your breast pocket all day like a secret you hold close to your chest.” I know that’s severely corny, but it sums up how these people feel to me; valuable, comforting and familiar.
When I was eight months pregnant with Max and working in the nursery I came across this massive huntsman on the side of a pot I was weeding. I radioed for help, only for the “helper” who arrived to pick the spider up and chase me around with it. After much shrieking/waddling, I locked myself in the office. But that spider was waiting, at eye level for me, five minutes later when I assumed the coast was clear and opened the door, accompanied by the unbridled mirth of my would-be protector. I asked the midwife if I could be scared into labour and she assured me you can’t be, because the stress hormone cortisol inhibits contractions. But still, fuck you Crot for scaring a heavily pregnant woman.
Anal rape is not something that you really want to have to discuss with a coworker. And after a week in the nursery with someone I hadn’t got to know very well yet, this is a valuable life lesson I learnt, thanks to my love of audiobooks. I thoroughly enjoy a good audiobook, and ideally, the more gory and disturbing the audiobook is, the better. But the thing about audiobooks is that if you listen to them out loud, other people can hear them too. Great if you're cultured and listening to some Dickens shit, but if you're like me and your favourite authors are Stephen King and Jackie Collins, chances are that anything overheard will be sexual, scary or just lame. As was the case on this rainy day, when I found myself left alone listening to Stephen King’s latest novel. I was up to a particular sticky bit where the author recounted the prison rape of a character, when the nurseryman returned just in time for the full-volumed, prison shower scene, sodomy part. After a horrible, initial silence where we just looked at each other and a brief and stumbled explanation, we actually bonded over a love of Stephen King, but those few minutes have to be amongst some of the awkwardest of my life.
I left my corporate, media marketing job in the city, my pretty terrace house in the inner west, my friends, the bars and convenient food to live in a cottage 100km away and work as an apprentice. I told no one I was leaving to be an apprentice because that is a seriously weird thing to do in your late twenties, when you’d started carving out a successful life and career for yourself. I arrived on the doorstep of my new workplace and quickly wondered what the fuck I had got myself into. It was cold, I was secretly pregnant, I saw someone peeing in a bush within an hour of being on site, and was so freaked out I pretended I didn’t know how to use a rake just to make conversation. But since that weird first day, I literally wouldn’t take the decision to work in horticulture back for anything in the world.