This morning the process of peeling a pineapple took me back to the far distant past of my childhood . My father was English , to be precise from Stoke on Trent , and came to Australia as a youth under the Fairbridge Farm Scheme . After training he remained for a couple of years involved with things agricultural , working as a hand on a station up near the small NSW town of Geurie (surprisingly to me easily found on Google ! ) then in Sydney as a gardener in Coogee , However , in the end he went back to what he had come from , coal mining .

He gardened , as did so many other miners , both as a hobby and as a supplement to the feeding of the family , in the quarter acre block that we had on which my childhood home was set . It is perhaps from him that I inherited my interest in trees and plants .

Anything that grew he would try out , and if my mother had not surreptitiously pulled out the seedlings , we might well have had a yard full of apple trees that would have grown from the multitude of apple cores that he planted . He also had a habit of always taking the tops of any pineapples that we purchased and sticking them into a garden bed in the fond hope that they might grow . They never did , though he was very successful with growing other vegetables.

Dondingalong , I found , was a much more suitable site for the growing of bromeliads . When I purchased my vegetable stocks in the Kempsey markets I would often buy a couple of pineapples , generally the small but delicious ones known as roughies , and when I had cut the top off , I would plant them just as my father had done . Because of my memories of those early failures , I expected little result . It was just another thing to do.

When the shed/garage had been built , it had been cut into the sloping ground up the block towards the road , and the excavated earth then spread further down the slope in front of it , forming a turning platform , and a well drained bank that was watered by the run off from the garage. It was there on the sloping bank that I rather crudely planted the pineapple tops .

Amazingly enough , they grew there happily , and in the end they began to produce fruit .

To harvest anything worthwhile there one had to be both very speedy , and also be lucky enough to be in residence as the fruits got close to ripening , as the bush creatures found them quickly . I don't know whether it was possums , or maybe the bandicoots ( of which I only ever laid eyes on one during the daytime ) or even the wallabies and kangaroos , which decided that the immature pineapples were theirs by right , so that unless picked early the fruit was chomped on ferociously . As far as I was concerned , I did not mind all that much and they were welcome to a share of it , but I often wondered whether there might not have been a marsupial or two with a bit of a stomach ache !

Together with the pineapples I had planted a purchased Monstera Deliciosa or Fruit Salad Plant ( vide Google ). I intended it to be more as a ground cover than anything else , but it fruited wonderfully, so much so that I was able to beat the beasts to the fruit spikes often enough to provide myself with a pleasant dessert. It grew down the slope and finished up huge and certainly working well as a retainer of the bank's soil.

Further still towards the house , a large gum marked a curve in the bank , which swung around towards the big sunken water tank . I had taken a couple of tubers from a cymbidium which my daughters had given the wife and me , and planted them in the leaf mould under the tree. Each year they produced glorious sprays of golden flowers with the coppery brown centres , very like the one known as Dashing.

Thus in an area less than ten metres long I had flowers in abundance , and a feast for both eye and belly .