Millie Ross is a highly skilled gardening expert who shares her knowledge as the co-host of Gardening Australia. She provides valuable advice on various topics, including creating your own vegetable garden, selecting the best seedlings, and DIY-ing a backyard berry patch. With decades of experience in gardening, Ross has worked in garden centers, taught horticulture at Tafe, and authored The Thrifty Gardener, a practical guide to creating your dream garden with the resources available to you. Prior to becoming a presenter, she even worked as a researcher and writer on Gardening Australia.
Unsurprisingly, this plant enthusiast relies heavily on her tools, owning over 50 of them. In this article, Ross shares the story of one tool she cannot do without and reflects on the significance of two other personal belongings.
If Millie Ross had to save something from her house in a fire, it would be the little pastel sketchbooks that belonged to her father when he was a young boy, around 13 or 14 years old. She stumbled upon these sketchbooks while packing her parents’ belongings for a move and instantly fell in love with them. Through her father’s teenage drawings, she can vividly see him as the man he would become, from his distinctive handwriting to his lifelong interests in planes, dogs, and boats. He was a talented technical artist.
Millie’s father grew up in a small town on the Atherton Tablelands and, despite not having a university education, he secured a job on a survey boat in the 1960s, eventually leading to a career in commercial fisheries. He possessed unique skills, such as parking a 54-foot yacht with broken steering better than a regular car. However, in his spare time, he enjoyed tinkering, sketching, and solving problems. He even worked on a perpetual engine prototype in the spare bathtub.
Just like her father, Millie Ross has a passion for sketching and finds it helpful in problem-solving, whether she’s designing a garden, renovating her old house, or creating customized tools and furniture. She sees a reflection of herself in her father’s drawings, which helps calm her busy mind.
Among the numerous tools Millie loves, her secateurs are the ones she reaches for every single day. She considers them essential and feels incomplete without them by her side. She has owned her favorite pair for over 25 years, and although they have undergone multiple repairs due to extensive use, including bashing pegs into the ground and cutting wire, they remain her go-to tool. Recently, she had the handle recoated and sent them to Dave, the “secateur whisperer,” for further repairs after accidentally exposing them to an outdoor fire pit. She also had her old leather holster refurbished by a local cobbler, ensuring another decade or two of reliable use.
When it comes to losses, Millie explains that gardeners become accustomed to losing things, especially countless plants they once cherished and nurtured. However, she finds joy in the endless exploration of new plants and views each failure as an opportunity to learn and create compost. Occasionally, she may come across a plant she used to grow and feel a sense of regret, but she mostly appreciates the memories associated with those plants, which serve as markers on her life’s journey.
While Millie may be prone to breaking things due to her fast-paced and multitasking nature, she deeply regrets breaking something valuable to someone else. She vividly remembers the heart-stopping moment when she accidentally shattered her dear housemate’s precious ceramic fish plate, despite her housemate thinking it was safely out of her reach. Millie expresses her sincere apologies and acknowledges that a fish pie will always be waiting for her housemate, Embles, as a token of her regret.
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