Playing With Water (26 page)

Peri and I have been to the Botanical Gardens in Sydney for her to photograph some tropical trees for her friend Margaret Barwick to use in her book,
Tropical
&
Subtropical Trees: A Worldwide Encyclopaedic Guide.
We wandered in soft misty rain under our blue umbrellas, discussing plants and talking about what we wanted next for our own gardens.

Great swathes of clivia and begonias were in bloom and above us the bats swung chirping in the great trees. Peri has a sweet habit of linking arms as she walks beside me, so arm in arm we strode along until she saw the sort of tree Margaret had asked her to photograph. She would bring out her list from her bag and scan it, then, having taken the photograph, we walked on looking for the next. We found about six on the list of ten and so went and had lunch in the bistro above the creek.

Margaret has been writing this book for about a decade and there will be a photograph of Bend of the River’s homestead at the place where star fruit is described, Peri says.

As I tipped barrowloads of woodchip mulch from the platform down onto the station garden, I wondered again if this was a fool’s job and if the resulting mess would make me sorry. But I kept on, with David loading one barrow while I took another over, ran up the platform and tipped. When no more mulch was needed in that place, David came and lifted the barrowloads up over the wooden sleepers that make the edge of the garden. I had spread thick layers of newspapers from the newsagent over the weeds and around the plants. The rhythm of loading the barrows in this way exhilarated us both as we were faster than ever before. We had a thermos of tea and some cake while sitting on the railing and talking. Sometimes David runs his hands over the plants behind us as we sit and deciphers what they are: geranium, daisy, bauhinia tree, Caro and Peter’s wedding olive tree.

By one o’clock we had covered quite a lot of the garden and had to lock the gate where the pile of mulch stood because Tom was going home for the weekend.

We crossed the road with our barrows and said goodbye. How a man, completely unable to see the path, a car, a barrow or a tree, can cross a road alone, pushing a barrow, as David now often does, is as mysterious as flight.

Walking out to go for a run, I noticed smoke coming from the station garden. I ran over and saw that a fire had been lit from the papers we’d laid under the mulch, and in about six other places the paper was burnt but the fire had died out. My worst worry is I’ve made a fire hazard. I kicked the fire out with my shoe and picked up the burnt papers blowing around. A group of boys about twelve years old were standing near the takeaway food shop so I went over and casually asked if they knew anything about the fires. I don’t know that I expected a confession, but it seemed possible they might agree not to do it anymore.

I have never felt so beaten. One boy pulled two lighters from his pocket and I said, jokingly, ‘Oh, so you must be the guilty one.’ I didn’t want to antagonise them but wanted them to see that somebody loved that garden and it was ours. I wanted them to realise they don’t need to destroy it, no matter how terrible their lives. Oh, this is deep water, but I wanted them to see
that it was not an anonymous thing, but something valuable. I pointed to the dark-green cast-iron table and benches in the park among the newly planted trees and told them I’d got the council to put that there for them to sit and eat at. ‘For you,’ I said. Did it touch them? I don’t know. But if they want to, they can go back and relight fires if they were the ones who did it.

The sea was calm, the sky blue and people were out on the bike path, walking with dogs and children. Once, those children at the food shop were also in pushers, innocently going along beside the sea. As soon as I began to run thinking was not necessary. The wind was in my hair, the sun on my face and the sea stretching away with its infinite peace.

The new method of watering at the station, which I invented from need a few months ago, is wonderfully useful. Because it’s now dry, and the new trees given to me by Richard Bird, who grew them from seed, are shrivelling, I needed to get water to them. It was too far for the hose to reach, so I asked David if, once I’d turned on the hose from the tap up on the platform, he’d water whatever he could while I ran back and forth with the barrow filled with four buckets of water and the bowl of the barrow itself full of water. Each time I came back,
David filled everything and I rushed off again. It took only a short time and saved a lot of carrying.

After the watering, we finished off by covering the newspapers with mulch. We put on so deep a layer, which we then hosed, that it would be a hard job to ever set it on fire again. Well, that’s what I tell myself.

I have a theory that, facing old age, it’s a good thing to work or exercise until you have only just enough strength, with your hand trembling as it puts the key in the lock to shove open the front door. Working within your strength will only keep you at your present physical level, or even imperceptibly slightly less, whereas really knocking yourself out might just extend strength.

David, who is about ten years younger than I am, works out on an exercise machine and is strong. He picks up the loaded barrow as if it’s a balloon. A week ago, on a bleak day, I walked around to see him and, finding the shed door down, his cane not at the back door, and no answer to the wind chimes being pulled, I was walking away when he pulled up the shed door from the inside. He’d been exercising there on the machine in the dark with the door down, for privacy from passers-by.

In Balmain for a week to visit Philip Martin in hospital, I didn’t go back to the mulching of the station. The day
I left, I went over to tell Tom about the fire. He said before I even began, ‘I’ve been putting out a fire down there in the garden.’ I asked, as I had to catch a train and didn’t have time to do it myself, if he’d hose down everything so the mulch would be too wet to burn, and he said he would. If you want frisson in your life, start a public garden.

A windy week. Chairs and branches are tossed onto the lawn. The wind howls while its silver rag polishes the trees. I crouch indoors, muttering, afraid and yet enjoying it.

Margaret O’Hara’s two King Charles spaniels were lifted off their feet by the wind and moved sideways, which surprised them mightily. Marg was laughing about it at lunch at the Balgownie pub’s restaurant yesterday. We looked out onto the wild bush of Mt Keira and a pink flowering gum at a side window. I haven’t had grilled sausages, gravy and mashed potatoes for years, and left the restaurant feeling less anxious about the howling wind.

We drove to Bunnings and I bought a Laurie Bray creamy-pink camellia for the back deck. I have cleared off the deck, given it two coats of oil and decided to have only three citrus in pots and one camellia. All the dross
has gone. It is easy to have a pile of pots slowly accumulating, littering, taking the space. Since this new revelation I want to be austere. The deck looks twice as big. It’s odd the way we put things in our way to trip ourselves and slow us down. In the end, I could be left standing with only a place for my feet, surrounded by a cluster of messy pots, all the while thinking I was gardening with purpose. And odd, too, the way people hold their tongues and do not tell you what a mess you are making. Or maybe they don’t notice. But once you do so yourself, everything, as in your personal life, gets swept away and you wonder how you stood it for so long. The howling, the beautiful voice of the wild. Wind calls to wind as whales call to whales. Howl on, screaming wind, I try to remember my place in this beautiful dangerous world.

Nowadays, change is the most constant companion. Once, dragging a bucket through the bathwater meant pain in the night. Now it no longer does.

The changes in the garden have been so gradual that I hardly notice them. Yet, once in a while, walking down the side path I get a shock at the thickness, the way the plants sway and loll and how the bright blue forget-me-nots, which came years ago from a packet of Blue
Cottage Garden seeds, has lavished itself in the natural way plants do, and which is so hard to imitate. It is always thrilling to see.

For all that’s been lost (for instance, the jacarandas and frangipani at the station, which held such promise), two ginkgo trees, a beautiful slow-growing pair, male and female, have green shoots in spite of the fact that they were never watered by hand, not even on the day they went in.

The roses in the back garden are a bounty beyond words, and Jude the Obscure has proved itself a triumph. Like a great horse, it has all one ever wants: perfect conformation, vigour, performance at the highest level, every attribute worthy of its kind. There are many favourite roses but when the last rose contest is held, Jude the Obscure will be among the finalists.

David’s sasanqua hedge, which I nagged for years to have him plant, is a triumph and he knows it. His fig, peach and apricot trees, which he planted somewhat reluctantly, have given fruit and he has put a wooded edging round the plot to save the trees from his mowing. When I call in I say, ‘The sasanquas are a triumph, David. Those fruit trees love it there. You’ve even got a few more figs. Look!’ And I take his hand and run it up the branches to the fruit, which he picks and takes inside.

Roses at the station wave above the rocky ground, even though it’s almost a year since they had even a bucket of
water, let alone a hose on them. I’d always thought they might be hardy and so they proved to be. Perhaps it was the lawn clippings and the newspapers we mulched them with that saved them. Or maybe they are like some wild child, strong, muscular and vital, who seems stronger for a sort of benign neglect which, combined with good air, wind and sun, has made them thrive.

Recently Nan Evatt gave me
Yates Garden Guide
to look up trees to plant. She took me outside, into her most green garden, to show me a tall lacy green-and-white-leafed
Acer negrano,
only eight years old, which scrapes the sky. ‘It would be even more beautiful if it didn’t have those other trees so close by,’ she said, standing there in her blue dressing-gown, looking up with all her pleasure in the beauty of the tree.

Year after year Nan has taught me about plants and gardens. It’s the knowledge in people who have been gardening for over fifty years that I worry will be lost when they die. It feels precious when I listen to her, like a rare archaeology of the mind that I long to save in some museum, a sort of intellectual invisible catalogue in space. Yet it flows away like water through our hands unless it’s written down. And there is so much of it that it can never be entirely caught.

Last night the wind dropped. The silence was broken only by a magpie singing and the great trees stood above the birdbaths in massed abundance. The gardenias were
blooming white in the dusk, abandoned stars with their distinctive scent; and around them the white hydrangeas had water gleaming from their leaves. The olive tree flowed downwards, shedding a white fountain of blossom, its silver leaves slithering above the tap.

Yesterday Diana and I walked to Sandon Point. On the way we leant on the bridge railing above a creek and watched a fat brown duck paddle below. A few metres away, the surf ran onto the sand. A girl on a white horse rode past on the bike path, clopping along. We both need a bit of luck at the moment, so I made a wish. Two simple things, but vast as the sea to achieve. Miracles are what we need and they, I have found, are often about.

We walked around the clifftop where a house has been demolished. The garden remains and tomatoes are growing on the edge of the sand. We walked on past the protest tents, where the new development now has bulldozers working during the week. An Aboriginal flag is woven from streamers into the fence around the site. Every weekend the fence is pushed down, which doesn’t have any effect except, I suppose, to relieve the feelings of the protesters.

We passed the place where, on a different day, we had seen a woman in the paddock who I thought was
washing up. Diana said, ‘She’s not washing up, Kate, that’s archaeology she’s doing.’

We had walked over and had a talk. It turned out the Land and Environment Court had decreed that a search be made for proof of Aboriginal occupation. The woman, wearing a linen hat and rubber gloves, was sifting the soil into a basin. It was a hard job that found nothing of interest because, as she said, ‘The site is so disturbed—there was a train line here taking coal down to the jetty.’

The sea turned pink and the sand was opalescent. Waves broke backwards in high curves of white spray. We kept saying, ‘How beautiful!’ Diana went home white-faced from the exertion, as her asthma is troublesome. Sometimes you get a glimpse of the shortness of life and I think, who knows how many times we will do this together again, at peace with each other, laughing with chagrin and happiness. And then she drives off to her studio on the hill.

A card came today from Peri in the south of France. The all-white card has a pile of folded all-white linen on it.

Such beautiful old linen one finds in many village markets around this area. Almost every day there is a market in a neighbouring village. I’ve tasted the very best prunes ever. Margaret never passes a plant nursery
so I’ve plenty of chances to suss out the local produce. Picking raspberries every day and the cherry trees are laden. Rabbits are in their hutches waiting to be slaughtered. The vegetable garden next door is a work of art. Such a lovely place this is.

I have been trying to think about what my garden means to me. A green walk in silence. A sleepy lizard beside the flowering plumbago, my companion. The
Ailanthus
tree sheltering the lilies, the frog pond and the clivias. The loyal lemon tree, triumphant, laden and undemanding. Purple bougainvillea still climbing through the jacaranda beside the Turkish fig which leans towards the sun. The peace of walking round with a cup of tea soon after dawn in my dressing-gown.