Share a hobby you’ve picked up recently — what got you into it?
It wasn’t gardening, exactly. Not the glossy kind. Not raised beds, designer pots, carefully planned courtyards, or Saturday spent wandering through nurseries.
It was COVID. A five-kilometre radius. Closed borders. Cancelled plans. Too much time indoors and nowhere much to go.
I walked, of course. Through nearby fields and national parks, grateful for whatever stretch of sky I could get. But I wanted something else as well. Something active. Something creative. Something that connected me with the natural world without requiring me to leave home.
So I started growing native plants from seed on the windowsill of my study. The window faces east and catches the morning sun. Toilet-roll cores became seedling pots. Old Tupperware containers became miniature greenhouses. I ordered banksia seeds through the mail, bought some seed-raising mix, and began.
I have always loved banksias. They are rugged, hardy things, at home in windblown coastal country, yet generous with nectar for native birds. They seem deeply Australian somehow: tough without being barren, resilient without becoming closed.
It was slightly absurd to begin plants made for exposed places beneath Tupperware on a sheltered windowsill. But things grew. Tiny shoots broke through the soil. Seedlings became plants. Plants moved into larger pots. Eventually they were strong enough to leave the windowsill altogether.
Many became gifts. Some are now growing around the college where I live and work, long removed from the cardboard tubes and plastic containers in which they began.
I think about that sometimes because COVID is usually remembered as a season of restriction. And it was. There were people we could not visit, places we could not travel, things we could not do. Our worlds became smaller.
But constraints are not always only barriers. Sometimes they become creative boundaries. Freedom says: go anywhere. A boundary says: look here. Freedom offers endless possibilities. A boundary asks what can be made from what is already in front of you.
Had COVID not narrowed my world, I doubt I would ever have grown banksias from seed. There would have been another place to go, another thing to do, another distraction beyond the front door.
Instead, my world contracted to an east-facing windowsill. And on it sat some dirt, some toilet rolls, a few seeds, and enough morning sun.
The lockdown ended. The banksias did not.
The Afterword 
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