I didn’t plan it this way.

I went to the nursery to buy trees. Practical things, for the terrace, for the years ahead when Adelaide summers would need green and the pots would need purpose. But somewhere between the black currant and the morello cherry, I realised I wasn’t choosing plants at all. I was choosing people. And perhaps that’s always been the way: that the most honest acts of love happen not through words, but through small, rooted things we tend with our own hands and leave to grow.

By the time I came home, I had five trees. Five people. Or one of them a time, and one of them a version of myself I can no longer quite reach. A collection of pots that is also, quietly, a portrait of everyone who has made me who I am.

None of them are in the ground. They live in terracotta and soil I chose myself, on the terrace, where I can move them toward the light, where I water them by hand, where I notice when they struggle. A garden in pots is not a compromise. It is a different kind of commitment. These are relationships you actively tend. They don’t just grow on their own.

The olive, for my father

You don’t choose an olive tree the way you choose other trees. It chooses you. Or rather, you arrive at it the way you arrive at certain truths: slowly, inevitably, without quite knowing when the decision was made.

The olive is ancient. It doesn’t hurry. It doesn’t fruit in its first years, or its second, or sometimes its third. It simply grows, deepening its roots while the surface stays still, becoming more itself with every season. In Mediterranean and Turkish culture, the olive is not merely a tree. It is a covenant with time. To plant one is to say: I am thinking beyond myself.

What I didn’t know, until I began to think about it, is that the olive is also one of the great travelling trees. Some of the oldest cultivated olives in the world have spent centuries in pots, carried from house to house, courtyard to courtyard, country to country. They endure displacement. They remain themselves across distances and circumstances. Portable roots. Love that travels.

My father is the olive. Not because he is old or slow, but because he is the ground beneath everything. Present in a way that is easy to take for granted, vast in a way you only fully understand later. The olive will outlive me, probably. I find that comforting rather than strange. It feels right that something planted in his name should belong to a time longer than my own.

The almond, for my mother

The almond blooms before its leaves come.

This is one of those facts that, once you know it, you cannot unknow: the tree flowers first, bare-branched, in the cold, offering beauty before it is even fully dressed. It is the earliest blossom of the year, arriving when the ground is still hard and everyone else is waiting.

I didn’t consciously choose the almond for this reason. I chose it because it felt like my mother. Only afterwards did I understand why. There is something in her that has always offered warmth before the conditions were right for it, that has bloomed in difficult seasons, that has given without waiting for everything to be in place first.

The almond blossom is white with the faintest blush of pink. It is not showy. It is quietly, stubbornly beautiful. That too.

The black currant, for my uncle

My uncle lives in Paris. I visited him on this last trip, the same trip where I sat in lectures at INSEAD, walked meetings at work, and wandered streets that are always slightly more alive than anywhere else.

He made a sauce. Black currant, cooked down until it was thick and dark and sweet-tart and entirely unlike anything you could buy in a jar. He poured it over ice cream. It was the kind of thing that stops you mid-bite and makes you put down your spoon and just sit with it for a moment.

A day or two later, in a small shop somewhere in the city, I put a bottle of cassis vinegar into my basket. Cassis: black currant in French. I didn’t plan it. I wasn’t thinking of him, not consciously. But the hand reached, and the hand knew.

The bottle is on my shelf in Adelaide now, next to the memory of his kitchen. Paris, it turns out, is also where my sister’s lilac lives on her balcony facing the Eiffel Tower. One city, quietly holding two of the most important people in my garden.

The black currant is in its pot on the terrace. In a few years it will fruit. I already know what I’ll make.

The lilac, for my sister

My sister had a lilac on her balcony in Paris. It looked at the Eiffel Tower.

I have thought about this many times: what it must be like to live with that view, to step outside with your morning coffee and have the Eiffel Tower simply there, ordinary in the way that miraculous things become ordinary when they are yours every day. And on that balcony, in a pot, a lilac. Purple, fragrant, briefly and extravagantly beautiful once a year.

Her lilac was in a pot too. I hadn’t thought about that until now: that without meaning to, I am growing her tree the same way she grew hers. The same choice of container, the same act of tending something too large for its vessel and doing it anyway. Perhaps that is what sisters do.

When I was in Paris recently, I walked those streets. I don’t know if I walked past her building, past that balcony, past that lilac. Paris is enormous and also, somehow, intimate. A city that makes you feel you might round any corner and find someone you love.

Now she has a lilac on my terrace in Adelaide, too. It will bloom in spring, which in the southern hemisphere is September. Not the same season as hers, not the same sky, not the same tower in the distance. But the same purple. The same scent. Two lilacs in pots, two cities, one sister.

The morello cherry, for childhood

This one is not for a person.

Or rather: it is for a version of myself that no longer exists, a time that was whole and complete and is now accessible only through the senses. The morello cherry is for vişne suyu: sour cherry juice, made at home, not bought. The colour of rubies held up to light. The smell of summer kitchens. The particular tartness that no other flavour has ever quite replicated, and I have tried.

We made it. That is the important word: made. There were hands involved, and heat, and jars, and probably an afternoon that seemed unremarkable at the time, the way all the best afternoons do. Childhood doesn’t announce itself as childhood while it’s happening. You only know it later, from the inside of a different life, looking back.

The morello cherry will take a few years to produce enough fruit. When it does, I will make the juice. I will make it at home, by hand. And something that exists now only in memory will exist again, briefly, in the present. Tart and red and irreplaceable.

This is what a pot on a terrace can hold, if you let it.

The terrace whole

I stood back this evening and looked at what I’d arranged.

Five pots. Five people. Or one of them a time, and one of them something so old and vast it barely fits the word person. All of them here, on this terrace, in Adelaide soil, under the Southern Hemisphere sky.

There is something I didn’t expect: the terrace feels inhabited. Not busy. It is quiet. It will be quiet for years while roots find the edges of their containers and press outward. But inhabited. Like a room where people have gathered, and then left, and the warmth of them is still there in the air.

A garden in pots is sometimes seen as a limitation. But I think it is something else: an act of intention, repeated. You cannot simply plant and forget. Every watering is a return. Every time you move a pot to follow the sun, you are choosing, again, to tend that relationship. The trees cannot spread their roots into the earth and find their own way. They depend on you. And perhaps that is not so different from love. Which also does not sustain itself. Which also asks to be moved toward the light, which also needs you to come back, again and again, and pay attention.

I brought a bottle of cassis vinegar back from France without knowing why. I put a Paris lilac on an Adelaide terrace. I chose an olive because some loves are simply too large to explain, and a tree in terracotta carries it better than words.

This is what I know about memory: it doesn’t stay in the past. It travels. It crosses oceans in a suitcase, it arrives at a nursery on a Sunday afternoon, it settles into a pot and puts out new leaves and grows toward whatever light it can find.

Some families live in photographs. Mine, from now on, will also live on the terrace. In bark and blossom and fruit I’ll eat and fruit I’ll share, in roots that press against their pots every year, the way love does when you stop trying to contain it and simply let it grow.

What would you plant, and for whom?