I flew here. Now let me tell you about sustainable growing.

The swifts are screaming overhead as I write this. It's evening, and the heat is finally softening at the edges - though only just. France is in a heatwave. The kind that scientists are careful (and correct) to connect, publicly and precisely, to climate change.

I arrived on a plane.

In October 2020, I was interviewed by Rebecca Noble for Season 2 of her podcast, Dish the Dirt.

I had recently left my corporate role - the one that had me flying to Melbourne every single week, burning jet fuel on a Monday, pulling weeds on a Friday. I had done the ‘right’ thing. I had chosen the farm. I was, and I will be honest with you here, extremely pleased with myself about it.

I said things on that podcast about sustainability and slower living and the ethics of how we produce things. I meant them. I was also, in retrospect, just a little bit smug.

I've been thinking about that conversation a lot this week. Specifically, I've been thinking about it from our family home in France. Where I arrived on a plane. Having returned to corporate life five years ago - the only thing that made sense in the aftermath of my dad’s death.

The arc, as they say, is something.

Right plant, right place - and right conditions

Here is what a French heatwave looks like from a garden.

Our grass hadn’t been mowed since winter -we made a deliberate choice a few years ago to hold off mowing each year until July, and then only once again in September, to let the wildflowers do what wildflowers do. What came up this summer has been extraordinary: buttercups and cornflowers, red clover, great clouds of Queen Anne's lace (Daucus carota) and - unexpectedly, delightfully - self-seeded globe thistle (Echinops).

The globe thistle and the Queen Anne's lace have been almost constantly busy. Ladybirds, moths, butterflies. The kind of low, industrious activity that you only notice when you stop rushing past it.

As the evening temperature drops - fractionally, reluctantly - the smallest birds arrive. I think they're wrens and tits, though I'll confess my French bird knowledge is embarrassing. Our resident robin bobs around the yard. Blackbirds. And overhead, always, the swifts - shrieking and wheeling in a way that makes everything feel both urgent and oddly okay.

We're near a river. When I've deeply watered in the mornings, dragonflies appear, as if they've received a memo.

The moths come to the house lights at dusk. When we wade through the unmown areas, they rise up in soft plumes.

I've been leaving dishes of water out for anything that needs it - though I've learned I need to find shadier spots; the water heats up fast. There are concerns about the neighbour's cat. We've had hedgehogs in past years, and there's a patch of mulch that looks suspiciously overturned, though I haven't had confirmation this trip.

What I keep coming back to is this: the garden is teeming with life even during this heatwave because it's messy. Because we left it alone. Because the overgrown corners turned out to be exactly what something needed.

Right plant, right place. But also: right conditions, right chaos, right restraint from us ‘the gardeners’.

The thing about values

Here is the truth of where I am in 2026.

I am sitting in a French garden right now, in a heatwave that scientists are linking directly to the thing I spoke so confidently about in 2020, and I am doing so having returned to a corporate executive role and having got back on planes.

The irony is not lost on me. It never is.

What I keep returning to - something I've said to my students, and clearly need to keep saying to myself - is that you don't need a perfect life to grow something good. You don't need resolved contradictions to care deeply about the thing in front of you. The garden doesn't ask for your moral consistency. It just asks for your attention.

Rebecca understood something in 2020 that I think I only half-understood myself - that the stories worth telling about growing are the honest ones. Not the curated, resolved, I-have-it-figured-out versions. The real ones.

In 2020, I thought I was giving her the honest version. I had left my corporate life. I had chosen the farm. I was telling the truth as I understood it.

I just didn't know yet how much more truth was coming.

Rebecca’s been quietly doing something important for the Australian flower industry ever since: making growers visible. Earlier this year she took it to the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show, hosting Growers Avenue inside the Royal Exhibition Building, a living flower farm in the middle of the city, championing Australian-grown blooms from regenerative micro farms.

She is extraordinary. My 2020 interview with Rebecca is available here.

Unlike my 2020 smug self, 2026 me knows I haven't got it balanced, and try as I might, I'm not sure I will. Do any of us?

What I've stopped doing is letting that be a reason to do nothing. The water dishes are out. The mowing is on hold. The globe thistle is full of ladybirds and I didn't plant a single one of them - I just got out of the way.

That's not a philosophy. It's barely even a plan. But it's the next best thing available to me today, and I've learned -slowly and humblingly - that the next best thing is usually enough to be going on with.

One more thing

If you or someone you know is looking to start or deepen their flower growing journey — my approach leads with the reality of the gardener, not rigid rules of gardening. Contradictions and all. More here.