When my landlord asked me for the second time to remove something I had just planted, I decided it was time to rethink my attitude toward gardening.

Not that I’ve done anything wrong when it comes to gardening. I planted two slender crepe myrtles, one pink, one white, in front of the rental apartment where I live with my children, transforming a strip of dust into something that passersby can photograph and post on Instagram.

I’ve transformed the communal back garden, six square metres of buffalo grass and discarded construction equipment, into an area where pollinators of all kinds crawl and hover over masses of nasturtiums, California poppies, thyme, wormwood, geraniums, purple rosemary flowers and a haze of black cumin, native violets and dandelions whose flower buds have not yet been mown down.

On the side of the building, I planted Boston ivy on an area of ​​graffiti-covered brown bricks. The ivy wasn’t planted to prevent graffiti, but it occurred to me that my landlords – who forced my aunt to sign the lease with me because they considered me a high-risk tenant as a working single mother – thought it was a good idea.

Not long after the Boston ivy began climbing steeply upwards, I received an email from my real estate agent, speaking on behalf of the owners, asking me to remove “the vine.” I responded in protest, writing that the vine would increase the value of the property and that they could look at the attached pictures, which included pictures of Princeton University.

Her email was followed by another. The owners also wanted the two myrtle trees at the front removed. They went on to say that they would allow small plants but not trees, along with a reference to the grapevine.

My landlord’s terms revealed the obvious incompatibility of rent and gardening.

Renting in Sydney is a well-documented horror of breakage and anxiety, while gardening requires continuity and time to grow. If a tenant cannot be guaranteed stability and a modicum of choice, is there any point in planting at all when abandonment is just a rent increase away?

All tenants live in precarious conditions. It is a brutality that we have come to expect and even accept. Things have only gotten worse. What was once an uncomfortable feeling is now so much more – it has become something like an identity. The housing crisis has turned into a war of attrition in which the most important prerequisites for well-being are undermined every day.

Maybe it’s hope, maybe it’s choice, maybe it’s pleasure. Uncertainty has become a prerequisite. Tenants know that the stability they provide, the garden they plant, the community they form, cannot be used as leverage for a claim to security.

A tenant is a precarious person. A gardener who rents, however, takes care of his garden because precariousness is in the nature of gardening.

In his book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, scientist Robert Pouge Harrison argues that gardens are always ephemeral, that nature is meant to last forever, but plantings are not. He writes: “They may be places of memory or sites of remembrance while they last, but with a few august exceptions, they do not exist to immortalize their builders or to defy the ravages of time. If anything, they exist to re-enchant the present.”

Gardening is a profession of caring. When we care for others, people, plants, it is not an act of ownership. Caring is rather a devotion to the immediate now and to all the nows that we hope will follow. A present that is always re-enchanted.

There are two ways to design a tenant garden that focuses on such a present: to design a garden that is light-footed; or one that emerges from what is already there and doubles the desire to stay. I do both.

There is a lot in pots in my garden. Rosemary, bay, French tarragon and a curry tree grow in plastic, terracotta, concrete and even foam pots. Pots are always only half-attached to their location. They look pretty solid, but by the time they are, their bags are already packed.

I also created garden features with a semi-detached character. On another area of ​​brown brick wall at the very back of the property, I managed to grow a climbing rose. This is the kind of feature that usually requires solid fixings and a lot of commitment to training. But I invented a kind of floating, wobbly wall net for the rose to climb up. In the small holes already present in the mortar, I put plastic dowels and screws with eyelet holes through which I threaded wire and string, hair ties in some places and a little tape where necessary. On this bespoke structure, the rose, which is called Renee, blooms floppy pink flowers with yellow centers even in winter.

If I had to leave in the middle of the night, I could dismantle the whole thing with little more than a tug.

A garden that is intended to encourage biodiversity must have a water source. That’s where my pond comes in. When I tell people I have a pond, they generally get the wrong idea about my living situation. Ponds, along with box hedges and gravel paths, suggest some pretty serious landscaping.

I built mine from an old cast iron sink that had been in the back garden. Converting it into a pond with shoreline, floating and submerged plants and aquatic animals is the exact opposite of the mobility of a geranium in a terracotta pot. The pond is completely immobile; I’m not going to throw it over my shoulder and take it to the next rental property.

I take care of the pond with devotion. When I’m feeling demoralized, the care and attention required to keep a small body of water in balance is very stabilizing.

Is my rented garden – held together with rubber bands, river mint and yarrow – an act of resistance against the precariousness of my life situation? Possibly.

When I leave this garden and can no longer afford the rising rent, I know that I will leave behind a fleeting memory of my love, not for property or possession, but for care, for nurturing. I will take it with me And leave it behind you.

But you can bet that when I leave and the property is back on the market, it will be advertised as having a “custom landscaped garden.”