GEORGINA REID CONSPIRES WITH NATURE
Occupation:
Writer and editor
Interviewer:
Kirsty de Garis
Location:
Milsons Passage
Date:
May 2022
If you love to read and think deeply, Georgina Reid is a wonderful conversation partner. A gardener, landscape designer and journalism graduate, she launched her website, The Planthunter, almost a decade ago. It immediately found an audience of nature-curious garden lovers. Since that time, Georgina has done what I consider to be a wild act of optimism in the face of overwhelming evidence against: she launched a print journal, Wonderground, which comes out twice a year. Similarly to how Anna Wintour uses fashion as a lens to frame the pressing issues of the moment, Georgina uses the garden to explore the urgent issues of our time. It is brilliant and beautiful.
It was a searching personal essay from Georgina in issue two of Wonderground that made me know we needed to hear from her for this issue. In “Other Motherhood”, she nakedly examines what it is to be a childless woman in our culture. The piece is generous and loving and cuts to the quick of femininity in today's world.
The ancient root of the English word conspire means “to breathe with”. That's how Georgina is. She breathes with the nature around and within her, to offer something timeless and priceless in our commodity-driven world: care.
I met Georgina at the end of a jetty on the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney, on a morning so foggy I didn't see her boat until she pulled up alongside me. We made our way through the gloom to the riverside home that she shares with her partner and their two dogs. By the time I left a few hours later, uninterrupted sun had drenched our setting on a perfect late autumn afternoon. It was the ideal backdrop for a deep conversation about what it is to continue to choose to live a big life, in whatever way shows up for you.
Kirsty de Garis: Let's start at the start. In your first issue of Wonderground, you said that so much of what's meaningful in a life exists in and grows out of the landscape of childhood. So I'm interested in what your childhood was like.
Georgina Reid: Well, a farm in central New South Wales. Near a town called Molong, which is northwest of Orange. I carry that landscape in me. It's lovely open, undulating country. We grew wheat and had sheep, and a garden of course. My mum's a great gardener. I really wanted to be with my mum, and she was in the garden. I would traipse around behind her. Mum had a massive veggie garden. And my brother and I, we had a little patch there. We were always in the garden or in the paddocks. We would take spaghetti and sliced cheese, and an old saucepan and some