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What the garden can teach us about shelter and resilience.

November here in Melbourne is like April in Illinois. So close to summer you can taste it but inclement, unreliable and moody.

So the garden - though slow - is growing. We eat a lot of zuchinni so we have two producing now and two more in the ground. If you want food all year we need to be planning ahead. We have excitement in the garden with zuchinni on the way! They grow so fast - we will be eating them shortly. It is still not quite warm enough we still have a week ahead in the mid to high teens with a few days reaching into the twenties yet they are popping out flowers both male and female and our busy local bees are doing their thing.

Every week I sow seeds for all summer food. I hope to feed vegetables to this little family and my visiting family AND maybe even some for my neighbors all year round.

I group my vegetables into three categories:

• Successive sowings through the summer - zucchini, salad greens, kale, beans, peas, carrots, beetroot, basil, etc.

• Summer plants - (these plants will last the summer and don’t need resowing) - tomatoes, aubergine, cucumber, capsicum, pumpkins, parsley, potatoes, cilantro, etc.

• Perennials – rhubarb and asparagus (coming soon), rosemary, thyme, chives, sage, oregano, etc.

I like the rhythm of sowing seeds. And always grow too many plants. That’s ok. More to share.

Of course the weather is the editor of the summer. But a wildcard editor. An editor with one eye on mayhem and the other on surprise. So far we are holding at almost daily rain with OK temperatures. Not warm, not too cold either but warm and cold are subjective terms. My warm is not your warm. But we embrace our differences. And we are all living in different zones, in fact just my family see warm nd cold differently. We are in different hemispheres and on different tectonic plates. That are all moving independently of each other as well. I am fascinated by tectonic plates.

Me, Daughter and Baby,

Melbourne , Australia – 15 / 9 °C (59 / 48 °F)

Continent: Australia

Tectonic Plate: Indo-Australian Plate

Eldest Son

Banff, Canada – 4 / −4 °C (39 / 25 °F)

Continent: North America

Tectonic Plate: North American Plate

The Husband and Farm

Illinois, USA – 11 / −1 °C (52 / 30 °F)

Continent: North America

Tectonic Plate: North American Plate

Third Son

California, USA – 24 / 10 °C (75 / 50 °F)

Continent: North America

Tectonic Plate: North American Plate

Fourth Son

Wellington, New Zealand – 17 / 13 °C (63 / 55 °F)

Continent: Oceania

Tectonic Plate: Australian Plate (on the boundary with the Pacific Plate)

And Second Son also known as Senior Son has taken his kids to the ballet! Then plates of pizza after! 🤣 The Arts are thriving in New Zealand. Something the USA will struggle with for a long time now so much is beginning to falter and entire programs being eliminated, the latest firings in this arena just in the last month include:

The Commission of Fine Arts (an independent federal agency) has had all of its board members dismissed by the White House (reported October 29, 2025).

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts advised the federal government on the design and aesthetics of architecture, public art, and monuments in Washington, D.C., ensuring new projects harmonize with the city’s historic character. Make what you want of that.

Shutting down the government. Firing the Fine Arts Commission, (amongst a catalogue of other firings just in this past month). Is that what clearing the field looks like? Repeatedly removing oversight or discussion, closing down conversation is unsettling. We do more talking around our dinner table. Imagine if we just chucked anyone who had another informed and considered view out of our houses.

But to have a proper aristocracy you need a rabble of poor. That’s us by the way. But much art and writing comes from the poor and disenfranchised. Remember this post? Do these people really not read history at all.

Sadly that congress will not be back called before the new year (in my humble opinion) and snap benefits will not be back either. Many people will be needing help. So. Think local. And give no money. That is not sustainable. Give food and time instead. Going forward and for the foreseeable future: if you can afford it add a bag of grocery items for food pantry donation every week. Every week. In the bag put a complete meal. Talk to the food pantry volunteers and ask for the bag to be given out complete. Or talk to them and ask what they need to turn what they have in the food pantry into a meal. I will help you: Baking powder. Yeast. Salt. Potatoes. Rice. Pasta. Cheese. Cans of tomato sauces. Stuff like that. What does your food pantry need?

I worry about my people in Illinois. The ones who are struggling without food assistance. With winter on the way and gardens finishing up. My mother in law had her lunch delivered every day by meals on wheels. For years. She is lucky to have a large involved family and savings. Not everyone is that lucky. Many of my farm people already have meat in the freezer for the winter. The whole winter. This needs to last a whole winter. With snow nd ice on the ground. They are lucky too - to be able to grow their food.

But I digress - (often my political anguish is hidden in the body of a post so don’t invite trouble. Though there will be no flying into Illinois for a while until the air traffic controllers start getting paid again).

Back to the green - I was talking about the weather here in Melbourne and its impact on the gardens.

It is not too cold but not too warm. And once it warms up the second sowing of zuchinni plants will catch up with the first sowing. More of my family arrives in five weeks so I’m out there saying to the plants ‘get a move on, ignore this inclement weather’. They say talking to your plants helps. 😳

Or it will stay cool a while and the garden will proceed slowly.

My potatoes above. ⬆️ Fourth sons potatoes below. ⬇️ His are flowering already. And though we don’t need flowers or germination to make a potato I was taught that flowers on the potatoes indicates ‘forming’ of the potatoes below. He is going to beat me!

Not that it’s a race or anything! 🤣

The potatoes are loving the cool weather. So are the parsnips, and the first sowing of carrots are up! The peas are in the kitchen.

And finally after threatening to pull all these poppies out because they were falling all over everything, they are starting to bud up.

Hallelujah!

I wrote that sentence ⬆️ yesterday then the rain came back with a wind behind it.

They were all budding up then another stormy day happened and the wind knocked all the silly things down. They were quite literally the TALL POPPIES. Now I have poppies lying on the grass. The tall hollyhocks were knocked over too. Hopeless. Gardeners re such optimists which often results in failure which we take to heart!

Here’s what I did wrong. I planted them along a solid wall. (It is a very boring wall but that has no bearing on the matter). When the wind comes, it hits that wall and has nowhere to go. So it bounces back. Scooping downward like a wave curling in on itself. The curl of a clenched palm. The rebound rolls out from the wall and slams into the plants along the wall flattening them outwards. Wind was not designed for solid immovable objects. To mitigate damage allow the wind to pass through the plants. A hedge, a mesh, even a row of canes — it would break and soften instead of crashing back.

Here is one of Fourth Sons line of windbreaks protecting the limes. The wind is mitigated but still gets through. Coincidentally this is better for the little trees - they get stronger with a little resistance. We know about that don’t we.

I have always thought that windbreaks are a metaphor. But I am not sure what it is a metaphor for. If faced with the gale force wind of something evil do we allow a little to pass through so we can save the whole? Do we purposely design shelter for our people with holes in it so the evil can whistle past our ears and out the back window?

What parallel would you draw?

Architecture that is designed for stormy tropical places gives the wind somewhere to go. With some lower walls being open and using louvre style windows, etc.

This reminded me of a Ted talk I once saw by Alyssa‑Amor Gibbons, from Barbados. I found it for you.

Rather than designing walls and homes as rigid, sealed shells that resist every force of wind, Gibbons draws on old fashioned Caribbean building practices to design facades and wall systems that allow wind to pass through controlled apertures; thereby reducing the build‑up of destructive pressure on the wall, and letting the structure flex rather than break.

This approach emphasises resilience rather than sheer strength: the building may bend, but doesn’t collapse. Gibbons states: “The result was that the house might … bend, but it wouldn’t totally break.”

This is why trees and hedges are the best shelter for the plants. They mitigate the wind. Calming it before it enters the garden. Channelling it through and out. How would this help with our own resistance to continued bad news.

But here in the city I am surrounded in hard immovable walls and the confused wind bounces about like a rubber ball in a dining room.

I cannot save my little garden of hollyhocks and tall poppies. They will grow on in their fallen form for the summer. But I do want taller plants to soften that wall. So I will think hard and plant strong tall plants. Like camellias or azaleas. Perennials I think.

Gardens teach us that we can change our minds. And I want to know what is on your mind too.

Love Celi