Playing With Water (12 page)

I think too of what another man said: ‘A weed is a plant that likes being disturbed.’ This thought drives me mad sometimes and makes me tug and dig with more vigour so that not a bit of root remains. Disturbance. What is a garden, but disturbance. Yet the effect of a garden is to give serenity. If you have disturbed things enough, you’ll get a serene vision. Another paradox.

The blue flowering
Thunbergia grandiflora
is climbing up the verandah post again. Each year it wears the house as veil does a hat. It blocks the gutters too and that makes bubbles on the new cream paint in the living room. But I say nothing of that when Phil, who lives on the northern side, tells me to dig it out and get a canvas blind. I know he’s got a point but still. I cut it down in autumn and let it come again in spring. Because I love it.

Parrots screeching over this morning. There must be plants seeding that they like. They only come occasionally. They’re gone before I can see what kind they are, but I think they are green. On the train two days ago I saw a flock of white Major Mitchell cockatoos
in some bush, feeding with the busyness of birds when they find what they want. They remind me of French housewives at a vegetable market. Perfect attention is being paid.

To my mind, love is the paying of attention. I read the other day that it is easily seen whom you really love. It is those people whom, if you can, you put yourself near or you contact often. What the writer said was, it’s no use saying you care for somebody if, for instance, when they are sick, you don’t visit them. A simple ruthless test. If you love your silver teapot, you polish it. If you love your garden, you weed it, unless you’re half-dead.

I have just heard while writing that people have been shot while gathering olives. The news announced this as a breaking of the cease-fire in the Middle East. And here, in peace, I am hoping that before this book is ended I will have bottled olives from my own trees.

The olive tree in the back garden is now matched in height by the coastal banksia I put near it. The olive has got into the old septic tank, I think. It is more than twice as big as those outside the front gate. All that talk about the Ancient Greeks and it taking about fifteen years for an olive to bear fruit, and on this depended something like the funding of war, is interesting. No doubt it is true in a hard climate with poor soil and no fertiliser, but the soil of Ancient Greece wasn’t then what it is today. Erosion from the cutting down of trees
to build ships and for firewood and housing has ruined much of the soil. But once it was rich.

This olive is ten metres high and it was a small sapling, probably three years old, when it was planted two years ago.

Grey plants near pink flowers look wonderful. The olive has a pink trumpet vine growing through it, as the vine came across from the other side, where it was put in, along with the blue potato vine, to disguise the shed. These are happy accidents, born from chance out of ignorance.

‘I’ve got mulberries in my garden and I love them,’ Diana said on the phone this morning. When I put the phone down I remembered that two weeks ago, walking down Darling Street in Balmain, I saw a small boy on a bike trying to jump up to get mulberries. I drew down a branch for him and together we ate some.

Also, at church, the priest had said while giving out the parish news, ‘Please help yourselves to the mulberries on our tree.’ It seemed medieval that news of the harvest and an invitation was spoken by a man standing there wearing gothic garments.

‘Work, for the night is coming when a man’s work is done.’ That old hymn goes through my head often.
Plants are models of work: they never stop unless the cold makes them rest.

A fortnight ago a friend, Gem Flood, gave me iris rhizomes and together we dug them into the bed at the back step. Only one golden iris from earlier plantings has bloomed among the artichokes. I’ve heard that an iris won’t flower unless the rhizome has some sun on it and that is why most of mine don’t. So we stuck the rhizomes up and let the roots below go into the soil. Even when an iris is planted high, it seems to soon sink down and soil or mulch covers it, even if you don’t mean this to happen.

Speaking of artichokes: Sarah Day gave me two plants when she came to stay last autumn. Yesterday Terry, looking over the fence, pointed to one of these plants which has an artichoke on top. This is a surprise and I am waiting for it to get a bit bigger before I cut it. Terry said that if I wait the artichoke will come into flower. We had one of those tangled conversations where neither person wants to offend the other but cannot quite make themselves clear. I said that I thought this
was
a flower, as it has green petals and is shaped like a tulip. He said, nonetheless, that it
will
flower. Does a flower flower? Obviously I am not going to wait to find out, as I will eat it. I admit there are no seeds inside an artichoke unless the choke itself, the best part, is a big seed perhaps. On reflection, I think Terry must be right. But how?

It is one of the things I like about a cottage garden (an over-worked term which has come to mean mainly a mess), that vegetables and herbs grow among flowers.

I’ve been asking that old question: how does one live well, especially alone in middle age? A life of contemplation and then hectic activity has always attracted me. Dates and meetings get things done but I prefer to think of them as frivolous. If you elevated digging, planting and staring out the window to the most valued acts, life would take a form that gives a certain amount of peace.

There’s no point in envy or a feeling of importance; they’re just beguiling traps. Few things can make as much trouble for a person as working in the arts. There’s always someone else who the sun shines on. Sometimes I forget all this and become frantic, ridden with nightmares and there’s no laughter anywhere. At other times peace rises, as if a pair of blue cranes lifted up from a creek, and the day unrolls like a cream silk scroll. Most of the time I think what I work hardest for and long for most is simply the approval of my children. I can’t decide if that’s a fool’s errand or the better part of wisdom. Perhaps for that, it’s just too late.

Farmers and gardeners, although both people of extreme action, are also among the most contemplative. The farmer driving to the shearing shed, the water troughs or cattle yards looks out the window of his ute and sees the grass waving, the horizon and the vault of sky. The gardener walking among the weeds and plants looks at the ants, last week’s sprouting seeds and the birds in the greening trees.

People who live the life of the religious in convents and monasteries have always known how to balance their lives with physical work and contemplation. In one of my favourite travel books,
From the Holy Mountain,
William Dalrymple says that St Anthony invented the idea of the monastery. The saint was hounded by his admirers, rather like a Hollywood star, and when he fled to the desert they followed. No doubt feeling harassed, the idea dawned that setting the men up in separate cells or hermitages would leave him in peace. St Anthony began what soon became a rage for monasteries. Within two centuries, there were monasteries as far away as Scotland. He’d hit a nerve.

A wonderful day. Nine pot-bound advanced Lilly Pilly trees went in at the railway station. So too did some pot-bound pink poinsettias and a Yesterday, Today and
Tomorrow bush. Tom dragged the heavy hose over the line and turned it on at the tap by the passengers’ shed for me to use. I flooded the annuals planted there last autumn, the pansies and others. Digging a hole for a tree beside the platform, which stood three metres above, I heard a voice. A man on the platform, who looked like a priest in mufti—black trousers, white shirt, gold badge that I couldn’t read—said, ‘On your own, are you?’

‘As you see,’ I said. He wished me luck and said he’d noticed the Flinders Ranges eucalypts on the other side of the line had been wrapped in barbed wire. He said, ‘I hope it cuts them to pieces.’ Meaning the vandals.

Taking Peri’s trees over to the station, I was just going out the gate when I noticed my old barrow had a loose wooden handle that made it veer crazily. Four girls about twelve years old were passing. I asked for help and gave them a tree each to lug over. Amused at this, they walked ahead laughing among themselves, and the youngest lifted, dropped and dragged her tree while I wheeled unsteadily behind them, wanting to ask her not to damage the roots which, with every dump and drag, I could feel breaking. But I didn’t. One tree was a big robinia that Peri had donated. The girl who took that had it waving above her almost to the electricity wires. They left the trees at the steps of the station and went off to the beach, still laughing.

Silence, except for the faint drone of a plane and the sizzle of some skate cooking. Diana is coming and we are going to walk on the beach to Bulli. I picked the artichoke and I think I will give it to her.

Violets are blooming under the
Ailanthus
tree. The ground covers, with the violets among them, have flourished. I didn’t know that violets fly into other parts of the garden and grow easily.

There is one green fig hanging on the tree. I saw it as I threw Yates fruit and citrus fertiliser around. A bag of Yates rose food didn’t go far. I will get more this week as Woolworths at Corrimal have it as a bargain. It is extremely satisfying to slit open the bag with a knife and let fall the white grain. Like cheating without dishonour. Seems like a secret short-cut. I do not know, and possibly don’t want to know, what Fukuoka would say about this.

Margaret O’Hara gave me a dozen clivias from her garden at Mount Ousley. They still sit piled in the barrow. I can’t dig; too worn out. It is always like this, a flurry where weed and plants are dealt with, as if a bomb is about to go off. (No, not one hidden by a butterfly.) Then nothing for days, weeks or months. In these flurries as I look down and often notice I am wearing my best Stephan Kelian shoes, or other
unsuitable things, I think often of my first editor, Barbara Ker-Wilson, who told me that she could never make herself go in and change her clothes, even when she picked up a paint brush full of paint and began on a wall.

Later, as I stood outside in the sun, eating the skate, I noticed what an amazing sense of smell seagulls have. Two arrived within moments of my stepping out with the fish. It can only be smell that directs them. When I put meat on the lawn, seagulls come in a shrieking flock within a few minutes. They are not sitting in the trees waiting; no, they are away elsewhere and, with one whiff, they fly in. I think it may be that other birds can actually smell seeds.

As Diana and I walked on the beach, she told me that she’s had an article accepted by a Greek archaeological journal and so she said, ‘I suppose this means I can call myself an archaeologist.’

Jane, in Adelaide, wants us to join a dig at Paphos in Cyprus, where Diana goes most summers, to excavate a fourth century BC Greek theatre. But washing shards in a cold wind or hot sun isn’t appealing to me. Hundreds of volunteers go to the dig each year. Diana curated an exhibition of drawings and photographs of fragments found at the site, for Sydney University.

As we walked she said that the ficus trees I had planted at the station are the kind farmers plant to
shelter a mob of cattle. I see now that it is the same giant tree in front of the farmhouse at ‘Bend of the River. And that tree could shelter about fifty cattle as it is as wide as and taller than the house.

Speaking of animals, Diana brought me back from Turkey, where she took her art students last year, a silk mat decorated with animals and birds. It looks a bit Egyptian, with cats standing in cream squares with burnt orange and purple peacocks. It tells a story, but what it is I don’t know. Diana is a tapestry artist, so she told me how the mat was made and says that each knot on the back is one stitch. Among all this colour, pale turquoise deer stand, their antlers like question marks in the story.

The clivias are in. The soil is rich and soft down there in what I call the badlands, an ugly neglected spot. And now, with a dozen clivias, some spare arum lilies and tall cuttings of tree begonias Peri brought, it’s starting to look better. And then I saw a frog.

Six months ago, Jack and I rode to Diana’s with jars and plastic bags. Five times we brought back tadpoles and put them into buckets with plants and water from Diana’s pond. But never a frog was seen. Lacking a pond of my own, I decided to dig the buckets into the earth and plant ground covers around them. With stepping stones inside and ramps to travel on, the tadpoles thrived. I can’t wait to tell Jack. Frogs at last.

When a house down the street had a green iron bath removed, because the daughter was afraid her elderly mother might slip in it, I asked for it. Day after day I moved it around on the owner’s lawn, trying to stop the grass being killed, until some men carried it down here for me. They brought it in, though it was no feather, even for them. One, looking around, said, ‘I used to play in this garden when I was a kid. You’ve certainly filled it up.’

One day when I was away and Hugh was here with his daughters, as a surprise he dug the bath into the soil under a gum tree. Then he made a wall around it of geraniums in big pots, so that Claudia, his youngest, couldn’t crawl into it. I was glad when I saw what he had finished, but a book I’d read said a pond for frogs ought not to be entirely under a tree. I didn’t tell Hugh this, as the job was done and it was too hard to undo. But no frogs ever called or ruffled the surface. Week after week I gave the frog report over the phone to Jack.

Tonight, discussing this with Diana on our walk, I said as we parted, ‘Well, that’s it. It’s no good, the bath has to be dug up. They can’t live under the tree.’ Then I walked down and saw the surface rippling, although there was no breeze. No leaf above stirred. I thought perhaps it was mosquitoes landing. Then I saw legs swimming. It’s frogs alright.