Playing With Water (24 page)

I rode to the nursery and Pamela, who has taken Tabitha’s place, suggested some dilandrenias, which I bought. I got a white
Gaura
too, called Dancing Butterflies, and a dozen pots of white petunias with some pink and blue. The soil is rich and it’s bare of the rose branches that tore shreds from my clothes. Now, eyeball to eyeball, the garden and I stare at each other. I hose myself down head to toe as I work in the sun.

David came over late this afternoon. He offered to water the garden while I am at Peel for six days visiting Ruth and Barbara. I thought of the prickles on the robinia tree at the back tap, the pots of geraniums all around, but said, ‘Thank you. Let’s have a trial run.’ He went to the tap and traced the hose up and turned it on and I handed him the end. Together we traced the brick
edging Jack and I had built with cement months ago, showing the edge and length of the bed. I went on planting while David watered. As we stood talking afterwards, he gave me a hosing, but as it was very hot, it was pleasant, though unexpected.

It showed again that David’s hearing lets him down, in that he does not know where a sound or a voice is coming from. I try to imagine this and can’t. Last month, when I was away for Christmas, David brought in my mail and put out my rubbish bins. He said when I asked him if he’d collect the mail, ‘Just one problem, Kate. Where’s your letterbox?’ I told him that if he traces his hand along the fence from the gate, he will meet a passionfruit vine, a climbing rose and the box. Nothing’s easy.

It is a continual truth about gardening that, whatever successes are waving in your face, it is the weeds, the sick plants, the bare spots, that call out. I keep reminding myself that if I had seen this green and blue alley four years ago, I would have felt triumphant. But that’s not the way it works. So today I took a walk around, remembering what was here before.

The side path is the most successful part of the garden. Plumbago on both sides bends over the path and dark blue spikes of bog sage wave around. The whole thing is
crammed with plants in bloom, and the look is what I was probably aiming for, although I could never envisage it. A wild, waving, frondy, spiky look, which Philippa first taught me in her garden, is what has grown and I rejoice.

Down the back, under the
Ailanthus
tree, the hydrangeas are in bloom and the arum lilies I got from the creek are thriving. Farther down, Peri’s white and pink tall begonias are flowering among bird’s-nest ferns and metres of self-sown blue Michelmas daisies. Margaret O’Hara’s clivias, which have travelled with her from three houses, are now in six gardens on the coast, including mine, where she has given them to friends.

Along the back fence the jacaranda, which the previous owner planted from a cutting, once used to lever a log during a train mishap, is twenty-metres tall. The pinkish-white oleander I brought here in a pot from Leura nursery has covered the iron fence, and next to it a pink hibiscus is ten metres tall and in full bloom.

Outside my bedroom window the frangipani is in full bloom. I have taken many cuttings from this tree and some have grown beside the train platform. Two which had taken on the eastern side (the place dug up eleven times) were lost in the last disturbance, but then they cost nothing. I was sorry to lose them, because you get fond of a plant over the years.

Outside the bathroom window, in full shade, nothing has ever grown and I have wasted a lot of plants and
time there. It has taken years to learn a lesson I thought I already knew. That is, to grow plants in places that give what they need. There is something perverse in me that keeps ignoring this. I can’t understand why I keep doing it. Had a camellia been put there, it would now screen the window even though they need some sun to bloom. Instead, I planted grevilleas and these, by coincidence, are in today’s green rubbish bin collection—mere dead stumps.

I have been out picking strawberries. Ruth has three strawberry beds, miraculously without snails. It may be too hot here for many snails in the summer, or it could be that and the combination of frost in the winter.

Today I read Martin Luther’s biography about him sheltering at the castle of the Wartburg, where he had picked strawberries as a child. It shows how long people have been gathering strawberries. They may have been wild strawberries, it doesn’t say, but it seems likely that they were grown domestically, and this would have been in the late fifteenth century.

The native trees we planted when Ruth and Barbara bought this farm are mostly flourishing. The wattles have just finished blooming and some are five metres
tall. The eucalypts vary between half a metre and three metres tall. About a quarter of the trees died in spite of a watering system being installed. But all around, dozens of self-sown gums are sprouting. Walking around with Ruth this morning, I asked her about them and she said, ‘It’s because there are no sheep here any more.’ I never saw a clearer sign of the damage sheep do to land. This is why there is so much erosion here, the deep runnels where the water runs, draining out the soil like a haemorrhage. The bales of straw and rock put in the erosion ditches have helped in many places. Over and over I see how the land wants to mend itself. The self-sown trees and the way the land makes the women want to fill the eroded places and help it heal, as if bandaging it. The women themselves are part of the land’s healing, as they live on the land and, in empathy with it, they respond as if to a cry.

Each day for five hours Ruth goes out onto the verandah and writes her thesis on sati, the Indian practice of widow-burning. Barbara walks up to the shed and writes her PhD, comprising a novel among other things, and I lie on the couch in the house and read.

Len and Helen came to lunch today. Helen is writing her PhD too, on ecology and feminism. She told me about her trip to India, to a community that grows almost all its own vegetables, and another one of
women only, which began in the seventeenth century in Europe.

Last night, at dusk, as we were setting the table, three kangaroos, probably a family as they were different sizes, came to the wire fence which Ruth has put around the garden and ate grass. The female probably had a joey in her pouch as well as the small one that hopped around eating. The two dogs inside the fence seemed to know the kangaroos and simply lay on the verandah on their couches, watching, unsurprised.

Hot, with steady rain all day. I took the Peel rose cuttings out of the glass of water and, as Clare told me, dug a hole with a knife’s plunge, dipped the cuttings in hormone powder (although this wasn’t in her method) and stuck them in. Watered well for a year, some should grow. It feels like saving a cave painting.

It says in an old
Your Garden
magazine (May 2000) that Pat Toolan has a heritage rose register where you can send details of a rose that may be worth saving. Her local council inspired her because, for almost a hundred years, roses had bloomed at a cemetery fence in a thirty-metre bank, which they sprayed and killed the lot. She began a formal register of old roses growing in cemeteries, ruins and gardens. She
propagates any that appear to be under threat. Genetic material is saved this way, but heritage and cultural value are better saved if the roses are preserved in their own situation. That’s not always possible. Local councils need to be made aware, Pat says, so that they will value what they have, and save it. The number to contact her on is (08) 8564 8286, or write to her at PO Box 61, Keyneton, South Australia 5353.

I had the Peel rose growing for a year, out on the nature strip by the front gate, but it was hit and cut off twice at the butt with the lawnmower. It re-grew; then it was kicked and this time it died. I see now that a rose can take two calamities, but not a third. It ought to have been planted in a safe, sheltered sunny spot. I have learnt these things on the back of many losses. Old people are important for gardening, because they know a lot of forgotten things and tricks that can save plants. They are a bit like heritage roses themselves, some of them.

The heavy cupped mauve-pink blooms of the Peel rose, highly scented, may be known to others by name, but to Ruth, Barbara and me it is a mystery which makes us desperate to save it. Diana, due home soon from the dig in Nicosia, probably feels the same about one of those fourth-century mosaic floors she is always drawing, photographing and weaving patterns from.

I have been over at the station, with an umbrella, planting daisy clippings near the Mermaid rose and the sprouting passionfruit vines. I can’t tell you of the zeal and pleasure. I am rabid to have this garden grow.

The frog is back! As I walked out in the heavy rain to take a bucket (of rainwater caught while I was away) to the pond, I heard the frog calling. After three months away, it’s back. Cleansing rain. We have had a quarter of a year’s rain in two or three days. The back garden squelches and shines with water.

In the night the frog called like a clock.

As I rode on the bike path south to Corrimal today, frogs were calling in a small creek by the caravan park. It means that within four days of heavy rain, frogs emerge and some reach calling stage. Perhaps it means that the adult frogs have been hibernating, buried in mud. I don’t know why the frog left the pond made from the old bath, but I know why it came back. Yet we have had heavy rain while the frog’s been gone, not as heavy and fast as this, but regular rain, and the frog did not return all through that time.

I am taking some frangipani cuttings to the station in a minute, and I expect the drain, which is now a creek with trees and vegetation, will be full of frogs’ noise.

Peri is coming for the weekend. Her living-room ceiling fell on Monday night, when the big rain began. Some tiles on the roof were broken, the ceiling filled with water and collapsed. It is a Queen Anne Federation house, so now she’s looking for a plasterer who can mend it in the same style, and living with intriguing calmness among buckets and plastic.

Later. Only one frog croaked in the creek while I stuck daisy and frangipani cuttings into the bank. I never manage to see a frog there, no matter how quietly I creep.

I see now that the fervour with which I began the station garden has waned a bit, but whenever I go there and start to dig I become engrossed, and as I look down the line to Bellambi I long to see trees receding into the distance. I looked hard for the palm seeds Jack and I planted months ago, but so far no sign of life.

When we were planting Park Road last spring, I told Philip Zweers, the botanist, that we had sown palm trees down the railway line and he groaned. I asked why and he said, ‘They aren’t natives.’

‘Beggars can’t be choosers, Philip. I plant whatever I can come by or am given.’ But I saw his point. That day, David and I saw a fallen hakea tree in a front garden. The young couple who had just moved in there ran out when they saw the truck with the trees. The man explained that they had lost my letter asking if they
would like a tree, and so had not been in touch. They wanted a tree and they got one. David and I tore off the wooden seedpods from their hakea, which Philip, seeing us doing it, said only lasts about twelve years before falling as this one had.

I burnt those seeds and sowed them in a seed tray with smoke chemicals from the Botanical Gardens’ shop sprinkled on top. But from the dozens of seeds of all kinds, including flannel flowers, that I sowed in that tray, almost nothing came up. What did come up were some seedlings I had thought were the Guinness black and cream poppies that Patricia Harry had given me. After months of watching these strange fronds, so unlike any poppy, I remembered that there had also been some dill planted at that time. I went out to the bed where it grew and tasted it. Dill indeed. So I lost those poppies too.

Today I took a bag of native seeds I had gathered at Tucker and Patricia’s at Watervalley in November and, without any burning, or anything at all, I threw them along beside the train line, past the platform to Bellambi.

The
Eucalyptus robusta
which I bought for seven dollars three years ago is twenty metres high, I saw today. Well, if not twenty, fifteen. Once a tiny thing in a pot, it seems incredible it could be so robust. It is inside the station’s cyclone fence, so I think it is safe—well,
as safe as any tree can be and that is only a mite safer than a person. (Trees don’t walk across train lines.)

When I began to garden here, my ardour was only matched by my ignorance. I was thinking, as I walked home from the planting of the cuttings today, that it takes at least two years, in a new garden with its new geography, to learn the most basic things. I used to watch Philippa when she began a garden: the way she simply dug and slipped things in. She was like an inexorable, benign bit of weather. She just kept coming on and on. The garden was never dug for plots, as some do. Just a knife, a hole and a cutting. Within a year, in both the gardens I saw her make from scratch, she had things waving and looking natural. I learnt from her to begin, to start anywhere.

What I see now is that knowing so little about the climate and the soil meant that while this method has given me trees quickly, most things have to be moved thrice at least.

I watch the vegetable growers, Terry and also Peter Cundall on TV, and the way they prepare their plots as if making beds for people. I watch Daphne, Terry’s wife, who, when I first came here, told me that onion weed is such a problem that she plants almost nothing in the ground. She has got around this problem through a series of about a hundred black plastic pots in which her entire spring and summer crop of
Nemesias,
petunias and phlox grow.

You can put a person down anywhere and, if you knew their previous garden, you will be able to recognise the new one within six months. Their hand print will be clear. We think we go around in the world somewhat invisibly, but few things show us as what and who we are as the gardens we make. Recognisable almost, as our faces.