Playing With Water (16 page)

Tomorrow, the first day of summer. Hooray. It’s hot and the bees were out early. The tall pink poppies are flagging. I want to pull them up, but I need to make sure the seed pods are nourished enough to be fertile. They’ve got about two more days to go. I want some tall summer thing to go in the tiny meadow plot. Not sure what. More white cosmos perhaps. I’ll ask Denis. Tabitha is not at work. She’s on her honeymoon. Last week over two thousand dollars worth of plants had to be thrown out at the nursery because of spoilage from the rain. I stood beside Denis in the sun, with the green shade cloth thrown back to air the plants, everything steamy and drying, almost shaking themselves like dogs.

We were discussing a deal on pine bark to finish mulching the station garden. Today it is due to be delivered and I must run over, slit the bags and spread it at once so the vandals don’t get it. It’s twenty-nine degrees, five past eleven, and I have just picked the first two tomatoes. Glory hallelujah, it’s going to be a tomato summer.

Dozens of tomato seedlings have sprung from compost around plants this week. These two small tomatoes are from another self-seeded plant beside the lemon tree which I only saw after it reached maturity.
They are the size of golf balls, but what kind they are I don’t know. Terry probably could say.

I have been round planting tomatoes with David in his back garden. Watching him work, feeling the earth, circling his hands like an elephant’s trunk. A storm was coming and big slow drops fell in the warm air, so we worked fast. I was bursting with excitement. Denis gave me two grafted Apollo plants and one pot, which were being thrown out and were perfectly good to my eye. I rode to David’s, hoping to find him home, because if I left the plants without saying he could trip on them. He was at the post box. I called and he turned in the wrong direction. At first I thought he was avoiding me. He wasn’t. He felt the plants in their little pots, saying that one had a curious stem, and he was right as the leaves grew thickly up the stem.

I rode home to bring in the washing before the storm.

While the storm held off, I hurried back to David’s with a bag of mushroom compost and a bottle of Seasol in the barrow. He had already placed the little pots beside his four tall staked tomatoes. But there, by the fence they would be shaded. I suggested he plant them out in line with the others, away from the fence, so he
did. He has white plastic tubes that he puts around the plants, as I thought, to keep weeds away. But he said it’s to stop him treading on them. Together we piled up the warm compost around the plants and he weeded. Then we went to the tap with his watering-can to put on the Seasol, which I gave him a whiff of.

‘Smells like the sea,’ he said. The can leaked, as I showed him, so we used a bucket. Again and again I saw how detail matters. A fine hole that you can’t see could let out all the fertiliser before you have reached the plants.

I stand beside my friend and try to see the garden his way. The world as shape and sound and scent and feeling. As a result of this, I am now mad on scented plants. Keen before, now besotted.

Today I planted two pineapple lilies
(Eucomis autumnalis)
and ten tuberoses. In the third pot on the verandah, having taken out the weeping Lilly Pilly, I put in a Madagascar jasmine (also called
Stephanotis)
. This smell is always at Peri’s Christmas party because she has it growing up the back verandah posts. Traditionally it’s used in wedding bouquets for the scent of the small white bells. And what else can I lay my hands on? Oh yes,
Nicotiana.
I put in a punnet of the annuals and asked Tabitha, back from her honeymoon, about a tall one. Colette writes of tobacco plants scenting her mother’s garden at dusk as Colette laid her head in her mother’s
lap. The annuals I bought are not that kind, so Tabitha is ordering in the tall perennial. Three punnets of petunias went in too, as their smell at dusk reminds me of Adelaide and drinking beer under the grapevine outside our house at Dulwich.

When David finally comes to lunch, he is going to be swept away. But how to negotiate the diamond-shaped cement blocks of the curving path down the side? He says he used to have a dog, but now he prefers ‘stick work’.

Peri has sent a box of mangoes from the farm. She rang and said: ‘There are so many mangoes, we are almost up to our knees in them. My brother Frank, who is eighty, has spent all afternoon up a ladder, bringing them down. He’s worked like a dog for hours.’

Tomorrow I will make mango chutney.

In her back garden, I heard Peri speaking with her daughter Skye recently. They have written a book together called
Bend of the River.
Peri said: ‘You’ve got to live your values. If you don’t live your values, part of you dies. So you might as well die anyway. You’ve got to live your values.’ I walked inside and got an old envelope from a wastepaper basket and wrote it down while it was ringing in my ears.

I was running on the silver rim

of an old blue plate. From time

to time pink clouds were reflected

as my footprints marred the surface

and were swept away.

I turned to run again

on the restored and perfect rim

as if at dawn the seagulls called

to greet another day.

And then I saw the dog.

It was Funny Face our dog

from Tumby Bay.

Our father brought it home

sixty years ago and Muttee said ‘What a

funny dog!’

He barked and ran beside me

then tore off to chase a gull.

Here he was triumphant while the waves

rushed in and out as generations

blow across the sand

and disappear replaced

in endless waves.

P
ink hibiscus flowers almost cover the side path in places. This is the glorious month for hibiscus. The Wilder’s White I planted to block the neighbour’s kitchen window is taller than the gutter and in full bloom. It has a faint scent of something familiar. Going out and sniffing some, and then bringing them inside to describe them, hasn’t helped me work out what it is.

Last week, on a picnic to a bay with Diana and her friends, we snorkelled above a reef. After lunch I walked around to the headland over the rocks and lay in the sun while the others swam. Salt crystals sat in dry ponds, shining white. I gathered about three cups of salt in my hat and brought it home. This place is an Aboriginal site of immense age where Diana brings her students to teach them history and archaeology. It seemed, when I bent, scraping up the salt, that I was part of a history of
this work. Salt could have been traded for thousands of years from this bay. Big colourful fish swam among the coral and oysters grew on the rocks. I had a strong wish to bring a swag and to camp here with Diana some time, because there was a feeling here, like the white hibiscus smell, not easy to describe but nonetheless real, of happiness. This is a feeling, perhaps it’s called spirituality, that people, not only myself, get at Lake Mungo near Mildura, where new dating of human remains found there has placed them at about seventy thousand years old. When all around us there are signs of human habitation going back thousands of years, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that these people, their bones and their lives, had an effect.

Silence has fallen. The wind is moving the blue flowering vine outside the window and I can hear only a fly.

Yesterday, hearing a story about people on an island where they make flowering fences by cutting long branches of hibiscus and sticking them side by side into the ground, I decided to try it. Pruning the bushes down the side path to make room to walk, I stuck the cuttings in the ground and will wait to see if this can make a hedge of pink and white flowers.

I took a barrowload of pink hibiscus cuttings, a jacaranda thriving in a pot which Ghilly brought me last week and some
Ailanthus
seedlings from my garden to the station. Staggering around in the mud, I planted them down the side of the platform towards Bellambi. The barrow stuck. It is thrilling to see that about five of the jacarandas and
Ailanthus
trees David and I planted have taken. Now they must make their own way, because unless it is a true drought, it is too far down the line for us to carry buckets. The amount of water that falls from the platform makes a bog at times, which will help all the trees to get established. Tom hoses down the platform daily and a waterfall results. Perhaps it will keep a deep-down tide of water for their roots even when above it is dry.

I mulch as I go, as best I can, with whatever is around: stones, bits of old wood, weeds, iron bars, anything at all. Sloshing around in the mud with buckets of tree seedlings and cuttings makes me immensely happy.

Last week I put half-a-dozen cuttings of frangipani into the mud and they are all thriving. One day, this may be the prettiest bit of line on the coast. I am heading towards Bellambi and now have almost reached the last of the platform and head off like an explorer into the vacant land stretching as far as the eye can see.

Mung beans. I was proudly showing Terry my crop of mung beans, which I had sown to fortify my blood orange, and said I was planning to dig them in almost at once. Terry said in his cryptic way, ‘You need to wait until they flower.’ So I thought I had better wait.

My youngest brother, Peter, came with his wife, Helen, and took me to lunch at a new Indian restaurant in Corrimal. We sat talking about his crops and I told him about planting the mung beans to fortify the blood orange tree. Peter said that it is probably about time I dug them in, because before the beans are formed the nitrogen level will be high. What shall I do?

My back has made me lie on the floor to ease it. This is the only place where it doesn’t hurt. Gingerly walking around the garden shows the weeds quickly growing, but I don’t bend and pull.

David brought me round two bags of mushroom compost, along with the two he gave me last week to take home in my barrow. But they sit on the verandah, unspread. Whenever I see manure or fertiliser in bags waiting in a garden, I think of Peri saying to Frank the gardener, ‘Frank, that manure there is not doing any
good sitting in bags.’ To get here, David carried these big bags down three streets, coming through the gate between the roses.

Geoff Wilson, an old friend from Adelaide, came to stay and at Fairy Meadow nursery we found a big pot-bound Lisbon lemon tree. We brought it home in Geoff’s van and the next day wheeled it round to David. While it wasn’t a gift he really wanted, it was accepted. Every tree David plants is another obstacle for him to avoid when he is mowing the lawn. Each time we discuss planting a tree, David says he will put it down the side of the house. This amused and puzzled me for a while, until he said that it keeps it out of the way of his mower. The mowing is done with the help of two white painted plumbing pipes which he lays on the lawn and can somehow see enough of their light or shape to know where he is heading. Yet, as far as I can tell, David has no other sight, because, when we talk or I introduce him to somebody, he sometimes turns in the wrong direction.

The lemon tree is now planted in a spot where we strode out the measurements to get enough sun and space, away from the fence and the fig tree he’s just planted. David lugged over a big log to save the lemon from the mower and himself from falling over the tree.

Gardenias are blooming so that Daphne next door and I have fresh ones in glasses of water continually.

Weeding under the Mutabilis rose out the front I got stung on the chest by a wasp. I thought of Cleopatra and the asp. Only the letter ‘W’ stood between us. It’s a coincidence because I had been thinking about Cleopatra lately, as somebody said to me that we are inhaling her exhalations to this day. They said this because I told them that, although I know it’s stupid, when I pass somebody who looks ill in the street I am afraid to breathe. All air is used over and over. Take any small thought and multiply it to infinity (which is what holds everything in its grip) and you have a thought to keep you astonished all day. Sometimes one of these thoughts can last a lifetime.

I think I have had about three new ideas in my life. One of them was when I was about ten years old: lying in my bed, I suddenly realised, hearing children playing in the street, that if the wall fell down we would all be visible. And the same with gardens. All gardens would merge if our fences fell. So it is a natural thing for me to dig at the station, because, in some ways, that garden adjoins my own and all others in the street. In fact, it joins all those here on the coast, and goes to Sydney, north to Cairns, around to Darwin and then down to
Broome and Perth. A bird, for instance, would not be noticing the definitions of each garden; all of them would be a mass of trees and water bowls, flowers and nesting places. Streets are really only paths in gardens. It is only when we walk in the front gate we begin thinking, in the odd way we mainly do, that this plot is ours and is unique, separate and individual. It may be individual, but it is joined, as a patchwork quilt is joined, by roots—those stitches in the earth.

Peri has made a garden behind her house in Mosman, on the council’s nature strip. It is full of flowering trees, begonias, citrus, herbs, annuals, lawn, hibiscus and other shrubs. She’s built a stone path and steps to her back gate and the whole thing is serene and green. I remember Peri squatting under a hibiscus, trowel in hand, on the footpath of Moruben Road about twenty years ago. I was startled to find her there, and saw that she was busy and did not really want to stop for me. This was the first time I became aware of street gardening and I couldn’t understand why she was so gripped by the work. She was wearing a yellow jumper and I can still feel the force of her energy.

I have begun to read Richard Mabey’s
Home Country.
It is a classic of nature writing. Gilbert White’s book,
The Natural History of Selborne,
is, the Corrimal librarian tells me, only available to read in Wollongong Library. So this week I am going to ride down and read it. I am
trying to learn about nature and, as ever, one of these books leads to another.

Richard Mabey tells of that moment when you can feel the season change. A slip of wind and a sudden breath and spring stood there. I love his description of how spring came to England one May day:

I saw the actual beginning of spring here, and felt for a moment like a witch-doctor whose spell had worked. There had been nearly 24 hours of cool, heavy rain, and I had driven down to the Chess to try to get beyond it. I sat on a log by the side of the river and watched the cloud begin to lift. Small bands of swifts and martins appeared, drifting in high from the south. Then—it seemed to happen in the space of a few seconds—the wind veered round to the southeast. It was like an oxygen mask being clamped to my face, so sudden and inspiriting that I looked at my watch for the time. It went down in my diary: ‘6th May, 1978. Spring quickening, 4 p.m. exactly.’

Last week I had a similar experience. I didn’t write the day in my diary, because I wanted to deny that summer’s ending. Yet the change coming can’t be wholly denied because three days ago the water in the sea pool was colder. I will keep on going to the pool, but it will be harder. The cold tides come up early from Antarctica
here and whales begin to come north. Last year I swam until the middle of May, but it was so cold that, when spring came, the water wasn’t as appealing as it had been so I waited weeks to swim. One elderly man swims at the same time all year round. Reliable as the dawn, he is there at 2 p.m., going up and down. Speaking to nobody, he walks along the beach, bringing his towel, and, with little ado, he undresses, strides in and begins his laps. His back is brown, his hair short and white, he gives a sweet wave, as if wiping a windscreen of air, when we meet.

Yesterday Hugh mowed my lawn and spread the mushroom compost David gave me. I have been too timid to lift anything, to weed or to dig since my back began to hurt. Afterwards we went to the pool with Sophia and Claudia, who are learning to swim. Coming home in the car, in wet bathers, both girls began a sort of thrumming, like pigeons in the afternoon. It may have been to get warm. It’s not a noise I know how to make: a blowing through the lips that makes them tremble and gives the pigeon’s noise. The car was filled with the sound of satisfied pigeons.

Yesterday David and I walked to Thirroul for me to pay a bill to Tony at Beach Art for framing some paintings.
As we walked with the sea crashing on one side, high clouds moving slowly in a blue sky, and, from time to time, soft warm rain, we held a broken black umbrella above us. Occasionally the sun came out, and then finally it stayed and we folded the umbrella into David’s yellow backpack.

Between Bulli and Thirroul, where three creeks come down to the sea among sedge and reeds, about twenty tents had been erected. Two Aboriginal flags fly above the sea. We walked down a muddy track to investigate. There had been some signs on the track earlier, protesting about housing that is planned for this green place. White Easter lilies bloom on the low green hillside and, behind, the mountains rise in a long dark arm.

Two men came out to greet us. It began to rain again, so they invited us into the biggest tent, where there were two chairs, a table and boxes of food, bread and cans. We were given chairs, and while the two young men told us that their people were buried on the side of the hill, and that one skeleton had been dated at sixty thousand years, I signed the visitors’ book. Two young women with children arrived and asked what they could do to help. They had walked along the beach from Austinmer, but neither of the men seemed to be able to say what was needed, apart from candles. The women made many suggestions and to all of these—meat,
camp beds, hot-water bottles—the men agreed modestly they would be acceptable. As we left, Glen, the taller of the two men, showed David a smooth wooden tool like a boomerang but without the curve. He held David’s arm and showed him how to throw it with a flick of the wrist. I stood directly behind David. After a flick, and then a flop into the sand, Glen threw the tool and it spun like a helicopter’s blades, high into the sky, and landed on the sand.

David and I had lunch at Oskars Wild bookshop cafe in Thirroul and discussed planting a hedge of either
Murraya,
hibiscus or sasanqua down David’s drive. I see now that I have been too ardent in suggesting this, because it is not convenient and will need pruning. Because I see the bareness, it does not mean David should have suggestions made that will probably give him little pleasure—unless the hedge is scented
Murraya
—but will just make work. I need to learn to hold my tongue. And yet, if he had a sasanqua hedge, how beautiful it would be.