Part-time farmer, parent and plantoholic Lynda Hallinan has a new book out - The Joy of Gardening.
She tells Jesse Mulligan she'd be "a pretty awful person" without her regular gardening sessions.
Lynda Hallinan Photo: Lynda Hallinan / Facebook
Photo: Allen and Unwin
- Related: Lynda’s tips on sowing seeds
Gardeners can take it for granted how much more connected they are to nature and the benefits they're getting from that, Lynda says.
She'd hadn't explored the refreshed feeling she gets from gardening until writing about it for this book.
Sometimes she'll garden for hours at a time, thinking about nothing in particular.
"Certainly with Covid, you see all these people bickering online and stuff. What I find is if you just remove yourself from social media and go outdoors, you forget that you're grumpy, you forget your frustrations, and often you forget yourself, as well. It's almost like meditation."
People aren't confident to plant their gardens but they should just go for it, Lynda says.
"Plant what you like. Go to the garden centre and choose something you fancy and put it in. There aren't any rules. It's not like baking a cake, you don't need to follow a recipe. You can just have a bit of a play."
And don't be too fussy about what it looks like.
"There's a real trend internationally away from worrying what our gardens look like… and actually it does not matter at all what your garden looks like, provided you get pleasure from being in it."
The Joy of Gardening is not an advice book, it's more the reflections of a home gardener who's "not really a hippie".
"I'm not a sort of a 'mung beans and Kumbaya gardener'. I've always been a rip-shit-and-bust kind of person who launches into things with great bravado and then sometimes they come off, sometimes they don't."
- Lynda Hallinan is a regular contributor to Afternoons. Check out her gardening tips here
