The leaves are turning again, their rims crisping at the margins and their laminas flushing a deep red. The fluorescent pink flowers of the crepe myrtle are dissolving like clumps of moistened fairy floss; their leaves — which appeared so late in spring I thought the tree might have died — are yellowing before my eyes, a slow-motion blur of green to the buttery gold that will precipitate their demise. High in the paperbark tree, a rainbow lorikeet is admonishing an Indian mynah; they’re fighting beak and claw over the creamy filaments of autumn’s already-moribund blossoms.
My garden and I have come full circle together, for the first time in perhaps a decade or more. When I arrived home on the second day of February in the Year of Our Plague, I was stepping from the bone-snapping frigidity of an Austrian winter into the slippery broil that passes for oxygen during Sydney’s most humid of seasons. Rumours were already circulating as surely as the plague itself, and a scattering of masks had appeared on the faces of travellers on flights and in airport transit halls; but I couldn’t have guessed as I passed through Australian immigration and scooped my bag from the carousel that I would not return to this depot for the longest time.
My life had been, until that point, a blur of travel, a flitting, in my job as a journalist and travel writer, across seven continents and more than 70 countries over the years. I had become immersed in foreign culture, food and geography, had become more adept at identifying birds of the polar regions than those in my own garden.
Serendipitously, I’d resolved to ground myself for the first part of last year — and to travel, when I did so again, more mindfully and with a somewhat softer carbon footprint. But the transfiguration of that intention into something more enduring has reaped unforeseen fruit, has expanded my shrunken world in myriad, soul-nourishing ways. Sitting at my garden table one warm February day watching birds dash from paperbark to Tasmanian blue gum to palm tree, I realised with a satisfying jolt that I had been present for every season of this singular year; I had journeyed in sync with my surroundings on their year-long journey around the sun.
Exactly two years earlier, as the cicadas droned and the dipladenias oozed from their stems in my Sydney garden, I was