Author notes - Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson

Andrew Barton 'Bingo' Paterson, 1864-1941, wrote some of Australia's best known verse - including "Waltzing Matilda" and "The Man From Snowy River." Use the title link to read more about him, and to read many of his poems online. (Including "Waltzing Matilda", if you're trying to remember the words and not quite managing it...). There are also prose selections, with an emphasis on humor.

Here's a sampling - the first part of "The Amateur Gardener", which is in a collection called "Three Elephant Power":

THE FIRST step in amateur gardening is to sit down and consider what good you are going to get by it. If you are only a tenant by the month, as most people are, it is obviously not of much use for you to plant a fruit orchard or an avenue of oak trees. What you want is something that will grow quickly, and will stand transplanting, for when you move it would be a sin to leave behind you the plants on which you have spent so much labour and so much patent manure.

We knew a man once who was a bookmaker by trade—and a Leger bookmaker at that—but had a passion for horses and flowers. When he “had a big win”, as he occasionally did, it was his custom to have movable wooden stables, built on skids, put up in the yard, and to have tons of the best soil that money could buy carted into the garden of the premises which he was occupying.

Then he would keep splendid horses, and grow rare roses and show-bench chrysanthemums. His landlord passing by would see the garden in a blaze of colour, and promise himself to raise the bookmaker’s rent next quarter day.

However, when the bookmaker “took the knock”, as he invariably did at least twice a year, it was his pleasing custom to move without giving notice. He would hitch two cart-horses to the stables, and haul them right away at night. He would not only dig up the roses, trees, and chrysanthemums he had planted, but would also cart away the soil he had brought in; in fact, he used to shift the garden bodily. He had one garden that he shifted to nearly every suburb in Sydney; and he always argued that the change of air was invaluable for chrysanthemums.

Being determined, then, to go in for gardening on common-sense principles, and having decided on the shrubs you mean to grow, the next consideration is your chance of growing them.

If your neighbour keeps game fowls, it may be taken for granted that before long they will pay you a visit, and you will see the rooster scratching your pot plants out by the roots as if they were so much straw, just to make a nice place to lie down and fluff the dust over himself. Goats will also stray in from the street, and bite the young shoots off, selecting the most valuable plants with a discrimination that would do credit to a professional gardener.

It is therefore useless to think of growing delicate or squeamish plants...