By Kate Llewellyn.

MEMOIR

Allen & Unwin. $29.99 RRP.

You will see that this is not a common or gardener's journal when you read the opening words: "It began in Patagonia in a seedy hotel ..." And having known Kate Llewellyn only as a poet - my fault, this is not her first prose work nor indeed her first gardener's journal - I did not know what to expect.

What I found was a journal, at the centre of which was the story of her planting a new garden in Adelaide, recorded from autumn 2009 to summer 2012. But then there are anecdotes, aphorisms and adages about friends, wisdom, age, ageing with grace - and a touch of crankiness - and the importance of work, action and achievement as we grow old.

"I seize the chance to work because in work lies happiness," she writes, quoting Goethe: "Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power."

Llewellyn's garden in Adelaide is not her first, and that she begins a new garden in her 70s is both telling and inspirational: "As the gardener shrinks in her ageing, the garden should expand. In theend, it will be all garden and no author."

Again, having known her only as a poet, it is a revelation to find the wry and elegant prose writer and storyteller. I noticed, part-way through, that she uses no contractions. It is always "I did not", and never "I didn't". This bestows upon the prose a leisurely elegance. It proceeds in stately splendour, no matter what she is writing about, whether discovering hidden parma violets ("these violets I had thought long lost") or musing on age and her perhaps briefly departed sexuality ("It is grazing quietly and may never return").

Her poetry is woven throughout, to illustrate, underline or illuminate. Of plums she has planted she writes:

I thought how foreign/

this tree is, yet how it thrives here/

like our own families,/

all of us, plums, people/

came here on a boat,/

took root/

and the plums glowing in jars/

stand on the shelf/

while the other stalks the land/

picking plums, giving thanks/

for all the red juices.

That cunning linking of plums and people points to our common origins as migrants, or invaders - an interpretation favoured by the poet in the line "while the other stalks the land". Not walks, but stalks.

Having heard Llewellyn speak, the one thing I was not surprised by was the humour. The poem Lemon (one of my favourites) characterises the tree as "the acerbic aunt/of the orchard", which she much prefers "to those cloying salesgirls/the soft stone fruits". And from a section titled "Things I have learnt", which brings to mind The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, one lesson both practical and, for me at least, hilarious: "During heatwaves hens need to be dipped into a bucket of cold water when they collapse". And another, which elicits a sequence of wicked stories about a friend, whose name I do hope she has changed: "Beginning sentences with 'It's terrible ...' has a disheartening effect on others."

You can dip into this garden of delights as you would a box of dark chocolates, or devour the lot from go to whoa. That way, you get a real sense of the development of the garden. For example, at the beginning we go through the trials of establishing the blood orange tree, sheltering it from the wind with a sarong in the spring of 2009. And then, in the winter of 2012, red vermouth with blood orange juice and soda is enjoyed: "I feel triumphant and grateful ... all that fuss over these trees is now a memory." It is a rare book that offers both poetry and practical gardening tips.

 Review by John Newton