Playing With Water (17 page)

The sound of chainsaws made me run out into the back garden. Men were cutting branches of the camphor laurel hanging over from my garden into Phil’s. The circle of the neighbours’ washing, sheds and roofs were
revealed and the scent of the wood filled the air. There was nothing I could do so I have come indoors.

Nothing can be taken for granted. I had been thinking that now, after almost four years, my garden was enclosed: the trellises made from the doors of the house are covered in white potato vines and Terry’s shed is screened by the old pink cottage rose. Now there is a gap where the branches hung. I will save up and get a man to erect twelve metres of trellis. Tabitha, at the nursery, will know the name of a shade-loving vine to cover the screen. It is a way of thinking about trees that I find hard to endure. Nature harnessed, trees pruned, lawns trimmed; neatness the ideal, and trees seen as threatening.

This is not uncommon and I often puzzle over its origins. All attitudes come and go according to fashions but are sometimes hard to fathom. I am out of kilter here, although there are some people who would like to have trees, surely. This is a street Howard Arkley would have liked to paint.

When I letterboxed this street, asking if people would allow the council to plant any trees of the residents’ choice, nobody replied in favour of the trees. The general opinion was that it would be difficult to drive out into the street with a tree blocking the view. But I could not see how, if the trees were planted up close to the front fence, and if they had a slim trunk
with foliage branching out above, there would be much interference. I didn’t persevere, because I didn’t want to stand out or become unpopular. This was one of the reasons I began planting at the station. Desperate for trees and some gardens, I thought that nobody would mind as it would not block a view if the garden grew there. Already there was a pink and white bauhinia tree and a tall banksia thriving beside the steps leading up from this street. Stymied as I was, the frustration and pressure led to this explosion of tree planting elsewhere.

There have been many coincidences in the last week. Wondering what vine would grow in the shade, within the hour I saw in the newspaper that the star jasmine thrives in shade. Reading Richard Mabey and idly listening at the same time to the radio, I heard his name spoken. They were talking about the great storm in Britain in 1987, and Mabey’s belief that tremendous storms such as this are not unnatural: they are, in fact, nature, and the trees respond in their own way, left to lie in woods, creating habitat for hundreds of animals and plants. Sawing fallen trees, unless they are in the way of roads, paths and so on, is more unnatural than a storm, Mabey says. His own wood, Harding’s Wood,
which he bought in 1981, had adapted to the storm and the light let in from fallen trees has been good for many plants. The radio began a program about trees and nature as I read, and I was glad of these coincidences, meaningless perhaps, yet they felt benign.

I try to think of myself as an animal, because it helps me see my place in nature and to think of people in a different, wider, even richer way. Now that the Human Genome has been discovered, we know that mice and corn have similar numbers of genomes as we do.

Yesterday was the day of the barrow. Margaret O’Hara, having tried to win the money for my barrow on a horse, and failing, has been paid for teaching poetry, which she views as a pleasure. We have been to Warrawong and there, in an enormous new shed, were almost a hundred barrows of ten or so different types. Marg told me to choose any one I liked. Now a scarlet and dark-green barrow with a thick plastic bowl is leaning up against my shed. The bowl won’t rust. There’s no room in the shed because of the family’s bikes.

Now people won’t stare at the old barrow with the bottom rusted out and the wooden handles wobbling when I am at the station. But I’m keeping it.

Out in the hot sultry day, small butterflies, like the hands of children, flutter above plants, drifting and mating, their dance celebrating the fading summer.

Two tuberoses are flowering, bent under the weight of the rain in the hot air. I have never grown tuberoses successfully before and, from time to time, I run out to smell them. Now I have found a third, bending forward unseen before, and it is in full bloom so I have brought it in. Now and again I reach forward and take a sniff.

Why is it that they did not grow for me before? Perhaps in Leura it was too cold. These bulbs were planted late in summer yet they ought to go in before Christmas. Warmth, water and good soil is all.

Cutting back the big pink hibiscus down at the back fence, I saw a plague of snails making a beach of shells. I dipped some of the cuttings into hormone powder and planted them outside the bathroom, because I fancy lying in the bath and looking out on hibiscus as if on a tropical island.

In Melbourne last week, for a reunion of friends, I saw Paula’s new garden by the sea at Mornington. It was professionally designed, and it shows. I will never get the harmony of a balanced structure in this garden that a landscape designer could. I wonder if it is too late. Embedded in the design I have made, which seemed logical at the time, I have grown fond of it. Yet I know that if the garden were to be redesigned to a better form I would be happy and wonder why I hesitated.

Prince Potemkin, whose biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore I am reading, inspected his gardens in a dressing-gown lined with fur, worn open to the waist, and a pink bandanna. Walking this morning around the garden in my own version of this, I saw that a small avenue of gardenias alongside the curved path have been almost completely overgrown. Another idea that didn’t work. They must all come out and be put on the other side of the path, where plants do not reach out for the sun as if drowning in shade.

Prince Potemkin introduced potatoes to Russia, created the cities of Odessa and Sebastopol, and loved English gardens. He brought in Capability Brown’s protégé William Gould, among a host of other gardeners. Gould travelled ahead of the prince, making gardens overnight for his arrival. How a garden is made overnight is, I suppose, a bit like a garden festival. An army of workers and, in this case, instead of trees in pots, they were brought holus-bolus on sledges. Money is a great help in this. I am also reading George Eliot’s
Silas Marner
which gives balance to any longing to bring in the experts here, dig up the lawn and hurl money at the plot. The pleasure this garden gives me, day by day. Bending among the dew to pull a few weeds first thing in the morning, smelling a gardenia that has bloomed
overnight, throwing out food for the birds and seeing how the robinia tree has grown gives point and anchor to a day. Only those who have done it can know its pleasures. A pot of tomatoes on a verandah may not look significant, but to the owner it can be a consolation.

There are times in a life when a sight, sound or an idea springs up that never vanishes. One in mine was when I was about twelve, reading about the life of people who had been released from a German concentration camp. An old man, seeing an idle plough, was given the handles and his triumph and joy were all over his face. It struck me as strange that anybody would be happy to begin hard work again after its loss. It was then I saw the importance and privilege of work. That was when illumination came.

It is not that the person growing tomatoes on the balcony cannot buy them at the shop or eat them in the communal dining room, if there is one, although the flavour may be different; it is the pleasure of this mystery of growing plants. They give more than they take.

Down at the birdbaths, a crow has taken a bread roll to soak and soften. Having eaten half it left the rest, and
now sparrows and a bigger brown bird have come to eat. If this isn’t a recipe and a restaurant, I don’t know what is.

Today David and I walked into Woonona to look at flowerpots because we are both keen to plant bulbs. David knew of a place and had said, when I suggested a fresh planting of pansies at his back door, that he would rather plant bulbs as they are easier to differentiate from weeds.

I took around the Windy Hills bulb catalogue and together we sat in the new shade of the
Melaleuca
trees which he cut back so hard that two died, but three are now sprouting. I read out the descriptions of split daffodils, which have a trumpet made of separate petals and of mixed lots. After about five groups being read, I barely could remember the difference myself, with the pictures before me, so I wondered how David was going. I lay on the grass while he squatted, and read about Christmas lilies and freesias, choosing, you see, my own favourites. So today we looked at pots but came home with none. For myself, it’s a matter of my daughter’s wedding coming, and for David, I am not sure. Sometimes a sort of Zen state overcomes the two of us and we stride around, feeling the pots and me looking, and then we drift away.

On the long walk home I saw aloe vera plants growing wild on the side of the road. I went over and
pulled out three, leaving about six, so that we can have them in our gardens to use for burns and rashes. The leaf is broken off and opened. A clear viscous fluid comes out, which is cooling and calming to skin. I have wanted aloe vera for a while and now I have it and it was free.

Free like that dish of soaked bread the birds are eating in a small flock with fluttering pleasure.

When I got home, I reheated a Chinese dish in a wok and, taking some chopsticks to the table on the back deck, tried to eat it with my eyes closed so that I could feel something of what David does. Only the birds could see, but I felt a fool and soon gave up.

Loyal workers in the factory

of language.

All have one pair to do with as we wish.

I thought of my father’s excoriated lips

burnt and blistered after auctioneering

sheep in dusty yards. And my own used

then

only for whispered secrets, laughter

shrieks and questions.

The sieve of language through which

we can only say certain things

to certain friends beyond

‘Help me’, ‘Pass the salt. Please,’

‘Get out’. Just the bolts and screws

of language in the wood of the everyday.

But lips! Sweet pink doors

on the wardrobe of our teeth.

This sublime ordinary pair, soft tissue

of sighs, the shy muscle of the kiss.

Little bow of sorrow, perfect hollow

for the flight of our last breath

and our first.

T
he bauhinia tree drops its purplish-pink petals onto the balcony of the upstairs bathroom. Sometimes they fly into the shower and float around my feet. The white peacock flies down from the big mango like a bride falling from a cliff, veil streaming.

This morning, as I sat talking on the telephone, a blue peacock flew past at eye level. A low comet with a long green tail.

The wind, that great caresser, arranger and boss, flows over everything. The orchard rustles, the pink petals fly and the crows, black, fleet and shining, sweep past. Their bleak cries echo. We are related, the crows and I. We want the same things: the eggs, the fruit, the right to speak our minds.

The giant bay tree down in the horse paddock by the river where I am sitting on a log spreads like a hand of
green cards. Its beautiful grey roots rise up like the gnarled fingers of an ancient bridge player. Nothing stays the same, yet every year that I come here this tree stands as if it will last a thousand years.

All around new houses spill over the bowl of hills and they make it all seem more ephemeral. The fall of a leaf is a message to the living.

The geese that live among all this have their own concerns: their loyalty to each other, their nests and eggs, goslings, the foxes circling and their own flock’s striding events onto the golf course or into the dam. Everything is essentially individual but connected. Why else would we love the sight of this noisy white flock, and why else would they run to Julie flapping their wings and honking as she pours the grain onto the ground?

Julie caught a crow. She put it in a box and said, ‘I am going to kill you!’ and wagged her finger. Next day she came and said, ‘I am going to kill you!’ On the third day she said, ‘What right have I to take your life?’ and she let the crow go.

We have been down in the new pen containing eight chooks Julie and Peri bought on point of lay. One is dead, caught in the branches of a curry tree in which
they perch at night. Julie and I buried it in the orchard beside a banana plant and laid a log and a bale of lucerne on top, to keep it from the fox.

The fox took all eight of the last lot of hens two months ago, because the pen was old and had begun to sag.

This new batch came home from the breeder in a small cardboard box on a hot day. They sat in the station wagon an hour or two while the new pen was being completed. Suddenly Julie saw a hen flapping in the car and she ran over to it. One hen was dead, the rest collapsed. The breeder had put two bags of compost on top of the box and the lid had fallen in and begun to suffocate the chooks. They recovered and are laying four eggs a day. Death tangles through life.

‘It is never the one you are looking at,’ my friend Clare said one day in Adelaide, when we were each worried about one of our brothers. ‘You are always looking in the wrong direction,’ she added. It proved true not only for brothers.

This afternoon Anton drove me down the Pacific Highway looking for a shop that sold typewriter ribbons. I said, ‘Anton, you could find a wigwam for a goose’s bridle.’ He said, ‘You know, there is such a thing. Did you know that?’ He told me a wigwam is a wire that they put on posts above grapes or hops and from which they used to drop a leader down for the
new plant to climb up. That leader of string was the goose’s bridle.

Julie, sitting here drinking coffee, began to tell me the names of the trees in the orchard because I have forgotten many. I know the mango, lime, orange, lemon and mandarin and black sapote but forget the rest. ‘Grumachana, ramonche, ndea, Brazilian cherry, Barbados cherry, inga beans, Davidson plum, mulberries, sea grapes, jackfruit, giant lau lau, Fiji apples, macadamia, custard apples, rollinia, iaboticaba, carambola (star fruit), canistel, monkey pod, pecans, Indian almonds, abiu, and I forget the rest. It’s time I went back to work.’

Laid out on trestle tables were dozens of individual pink and white camellia blooms attended by three elderly men in cardigans. This happens every year in a local shopping mall.

It seems more Oriental than Australasian, this business of men involved with flowers. Yet I think there is a long history to it in this country and that we got it from the British. It is hard for Australian men to be involved with making beauty and yet here is one of the quite radical ways they can be. Men pass this love of flower-growing
and flower-showing to their sons. Men who love dahlias have been known to dig up their entire backyards to give the whole lot over to competitive dahlia-growing. Plants so tall that they are tied to thick wooden stakes, and with heads so enormous they are in danger of breaking off, fill these men’s gardens. Almost the entire year is occupied for the grower: feeding, watering, staking and then showing the blooms. The tubers are dug up, powdered with insecticide and put away in sheds for winter. There is something wonderfully obsessional about it, in that the growers rarely specialise in more than one type of flower. A camellia grower, for instance, doesn’t as a rule grow dahlias for competition nor does a rose grower plant dahlias.

Last year among the hundreds of camellia flowers laid out on the trestle tables was a great pink frilly one called Laska Beauty. I said to one of the men at the stall, ‘I don’t suppose I could buy a plant of that camellia?’ William Walker said that he would grow one for me and that it would be ready in about a year. I left and almost forgot about it, until last week in Wollongong Library when I saw some men putting camellia flowers into an empty glass bookcase. These men belonged to the same group of camellia fanciers as William so I asked if they knew anything about how he was going with my Laska Beauty.

A few days later I had a phone call from Brad, William’s son, who said that he had struck the plant for
me and he would bring it round along with a few other types if I was interested in them as well.

Brad came with three plants and sold them to me for fifty dollars the lot. He brought with him four saucer-sized flowers to show what the plants were. We walked around the garden and, pointing to the Brushfield’s yellow camellia, he said, ‘That’s too close to your sasanqua and you’ll get a few flowers for a while but in the end it will stop flowering because they need some sun you know.’

I explained that I had tried to move the plant but it had a deep tap root and rather than risk killing it, I’d left it where it was.

‘I’ll move it for you. No trouble. I moved one last year a lot bigger than that. I took out eighteen barrow loads of soil from around it before I could move it.’

I asked how it has done since.

‘Won Grand Championship at the show last year,’ he replied. That was good enough for me so I accepted the offer.

Two nights later he arrived from his work as a fitter at Bulli, carrying a pointed shovel. We decided to move the plant to full sun beside the path that leads down along the northern side of the house. He dug the way those log-choppers who race each other tear into logs, swaying from side to side, sweat spraying out. Roots were cut while I watched anxiously, but a big root ball
was left. The plant toppled over once freed from its bed and I ran to get the barrow.

Brad said, pointing to the hole he’d dug where the camellia was to go, ‘Have you got any boiler ash?’ Surprised, as I knew that camellias like acid soil not alkaline and that ash makes soil alkaline, I said I had none as this house has no fireplace. ‘It’s not wood ash I mean, it’s boiler ash.’ He went off to the ute and got a bag of it, explaining that he bought it from a soil company at a garden centre because camellias thrive in it and that is partly why he wins prizes. The secret at last.

As the plant was lowered into the hole Brad said, ‘You know that’s a Paradise camellia you’ve got over there.’ Pointing to one in the shade by the fence. ‘Bob Cherry bred it. It’s a chance seedling from the bees. He collects the seed from his sasanquas and he grows them on until they produce a worthy flower. He spends a lot of money to distribute his new flower, about a hundred thousand dollars. He just can’t grow it and get it out to nurseries. He’s only got one plant you see, and from that he’s got to get thousands of plants, so it takes a while—years.’

‘How many camellias has he bred?’

‘He’s only done Paradise as far as I know. Laska Beauty, the one I got you, is also Australian. That was a controlled cross. That’s when you take an unopened flower on a bush that produces seed. Then you wait for
the right time before it opens so that the bees don’t get in. You remove the petals before it opens by cutting them and then you take your fresh pollen from another flower and put it on the actual stigma—that’s the little bit in the middle. Then you take a paper bag and cover the controlled cross. And, if you’re lucky, it will produce a capsule with seed or seeds in it. You wait for it to mature—several months—and then it splits. You take the seed and label it, of course, and put it in moist, not wet, peat moss in a plastic bag.’

He puffed and worked, dig dig dig, enlarging the hole as he spoke. ‘Then what?’ I said. While he was digging I’d dragged up a chair, brought out pen and paper and started to write down what he was saying. ‘Leave that and wait for it to germinate.’ More digging. Then he went on, ‘What we do is, after we’ve got an inch of growth or a bit more, we nip the tap root off and then it puts out feeder roots. Then you put that into a mix of sand and peat moss. By this time it’s into the growing season and you’ve got a little plant—we like to get them early—if you leave them in the bag you get a twisted camellia.’

Brad began to sound like a human fertility expert explaining the finer points of embryo implantation and I wondered if it was all too complicated to be useful. Yet I felt that here was an expert, even a champion, and that I ought to take the chance to wrest from him (all this was gathered over more time than it takes to tell,
with many questions pressed) the knowledge from generations of breeders who had developed all the finest skills. It was up to me to take it down and to spread the news, although no doubt much of what I was told would be in some botanical book…somewhere.

Father and son are in competition but not, it seems, mother and daughter. ‘Do any women come into the camellia-showing business, Brad?’

‘Well, my mother shows miniatures.’ But as far as I can see, it is wives and daughters who sell the tickets and make tea and scones for the visitors to exhibitions.

As Brad had been on his way to buy material to make his own special camellia potting mix when he’d brought the plants to me a few days ago, I asked what it comprises.

‘I get this boiler ash. It’s Australian Paper Mills’ product from their steam boilers. I get sand from a soil company at Nowra or Unanderra. This mix is made of one-fifth coarse river sand, one and a half of boiler ash and two and a half of decomposed pine bark.’

I enquired who told him of the mixture.

‘Charlie Cowell, a retired nurseryman. Going to get some more ash. Back in a minute.’

While he was pouring the ash into the hole, I asked about the red camellia plant he’d sold me.

‘Dr Clifford Parkes, grows like a weed. Hardy, likes the sun. It’s what I won the Championship with, you
know. I’ll give you one for the railway station garden if you like and I’ll give you a gardenia too. Get the hose, will you. This thing needs a big drink. Now you’ll need to give it some Seasol once a fortnight and a deep watering once a week.’

Darkness was falling so we walked together to the gate, the man sweating yet seeming as exhilarated as if he’d ridden a horse. The woman impressed, grateful and slightly astonished at all she’d heard and seen.

While in the garden crushing snails, I set fire to the kettle. I came in to see flames eating it like greedy yellow birds.

The sea is still, only the top branches of a gum tree by the fence move slowly.

This morning I took a bucket of Thrive around to the poppies I moved yesterday. Some are stalwart, sword-shaped leaves upright; some are flagging like grey velvet gloves dropped on the soil. Yes, yes, I know—never try to move a poppy.

It is my new plan to weed daily. Ha ha ha. The earth is so moist, everything comes away easily. A small flock of sparrows has flown up from the feeder, like the wave of a hand. Below, pigeons are strutting around, eating some pea and barley stew I threw out.

A bulbul with its black topknot, like an Oriental husband’s, has come down to drink.

I watch for a while and think of the sacredness of food.

In the freezer there were leftover ciabatta bread rolls bought for lunch with a friend before I went away. I ate them with tea to wash them down and watched the television. I saw an old woman, probably not sixty but looking eighty, in Moscow, saying, because of Russia’s lack of heating, ‘What will I do in winter?’

Two-thirds of Bangladesh is under water. I remember the little girl who wrote a poem in the Dorothea MacKellar Poetry Competition I once judged. She wrote:
My Beautiful Bangladesh.
Until then, because of my Western hubris, I had not thought that anybody would want to do anything but flee that country.