The privilege of clean water & lush wise gardens

Did you know that more people on the planet have mobile (cell) phones than have clean water to drink?

For a $25 donation to water.org you can give a fellow traveller on this planet clean water for a lifetime. (And follow them on twitter – @water – for more water news and facts.)

Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth, and yet we flush our toilets with drinking-quality fresh water.

I’ve posted today a column I wrote for the Age newspaper when severe water restrictions were first introduced across Victoria, with a complete ban on outside use of taps in my area, in 2006.

I lived with these restrictions for four years (no turning on a tap outside, ever) and kept my beautiful garden alive (see www.mydeliciousgarden.com for a virtual tour), and even had a productive greens and herbs patch all summer, fed by my bath and washing machine water, a small pump and several long hoses. My garden was on a hill up behind my house, and there wasn’t much room around the house, so tanks weren’t much of an easy option, altho I had a few small ones.

So it was a learning time, and certainly had the effect of making me think differently about water, and appreciate just how efficient some plants can be. It also made me value water more inside the house and try to be more like those plants. Even over summer my average daily usage for those years was 70 litres.

However it was stressful, especially in summer and with CFS, and it meant I couldn’t go on holidays because in order to have someone come in and do a bit of watering for me, they’d have to have a shower or do a load of washing. (“Hi, would you mind popping over and having a bath while I’m away, and then letting it cool, and then using this tricky pump system to water my vegies? Oh, and could you throw these old sheets and net curtains over the groundcovers on those 36+ degree days?”)

The exhaustingly hot summers and the constant demands of the garden were definitely a strong factor in my decision to sell my house a year ago and move out of Victoria.

I don’t regret this, even though it was a very long challenging year living in a Van until I found my current lovely little house-let in Terrigal. But I wonder how many others had to make hard decisions regarding their gardens and their homes.

And I wonder if the person currently living in my old house has managed to keep the amazing chamomile lawn alive, and the enormous bio-diversity I’d built and nurtured over ten years. I wonder about the masses of wrens and silver-eyes I would watch from my windows in that last year (after having only sparrows and mynah birds in the first years).  Are they are still there?

Creswick has had so much rain this year that it flooded, and the creeks are apparently full again. But it only takes one season to lose a lot of key plants and groundcovers, and for weeds and thug-plants to take over.

So I’ve posted this column here, as it was written, as my closer-to-home contribution to water blog action day, and in honour of gardeners everywhere, and the choices each of us makes every day and their effects.

Please charge your glass with clean tap water, if you are one of the supremely fortunate able to do this, and sip and savour it, while you read it here.

And I would love to hear your own comments and experiences with gardens and water.

Thanks for reading,

Beth