Step onto the Sensory Garden Bridge at Elizabeth Park, making your way past a bubbling brook, water fountains, and paperbark trees shedding layers like old history books with annals of lost monarchies. Like a journey over an ocean. All at once there they are; two walls growing aromatic European mint.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
These walls assemble a range of mint like a series of dance cotillion with rustling silk dresses and a treading on each other’s toes, as the tendrils twine outwards. Like flushed boys and girls laughing at the innocence of it all.
Puts me in mind of a scene straight out of the 1958 novel ‘Doctor Zhivago’ by Boris Pasternak. They banned it in Russia you know. There it is at the Sventitsky’s annual ball and party. Any moment now Larissa Fyodorovna, crimson with shame, will step aside from the sparkle and glitter of jewelled evening gowns sprinkled with sweet eau-de-Cologne mint.
We have peppermint, eau-de-Cologne, at the base of the two walls and I defy anyone to ignore their strong fresh aroma. Above, along the body of the wall is variegated apple mint (Mentha suaveolens ‘Variegata’), also called pineapple mint, with soft woolly, mid-green leaves, splashed cream and white, emitting a scent of apples. In the bluestone herb garden next to the walls we have common mint which lives up to its invasive reputation.
Anyway, all this began when an Aussie-looking family with sandy hair, being husband and wife, and three children of Primary school age, visited our gardens recently. However the chatter among themselves was not English. Turned out, they were Russian from the Urals.
I mentioned ‘Dr. Zhivago’ (my only association with USSR), and their blank looks told me I was transporting them by Sputnik back in time before the anticipated prosperity of Gorbachov, glasnost, and perestroika.
Sure, it is all of some 100 years of time past; the splendour of Cossack guards, the grandeur of palaces, and the brutal murder of Tsar and the Romanov family. All that remains is the sweet, pungent scent of mint, and the knowledge that we are all in the same boat.