Playing With Water (25 page)

When I plant trees I remember Roger McDonald, who is another frenzied planter. He says in his book
The Tree in Changing Light,
that when his friend’s truck came loaded with trees it was like a float in an agricultural show. I remember when Philip Zweers, David and I planted trees in the park and the street, the truckload of trees arrived looking like something biblical. A mass of waving fronds. How long people have been using branches as signs of joy. Think of Palm Sunday. On the matter of tree planting, I saw on ‘The Inventors’ television finals that a plough has been invented that doesn’t tip the soil up on top of itself but rather spins it in a rotary fashion, letting the moisture stay within, and pulls down the weeds to make humus and mulch, all the while letting the microbes from the deeper soil stay where they are healthiest and those near the top stay where they also thrive. I am mad to have one of these ploughs. I could get to Perth along the railway line. The
Nullarbor wouldn’t be the Nullarbor any longer. It would have an avenue of trees.

We’ve had an episode of snakes at the station. Tom greeted me shaking his head recently, saying, ‘You’re going to have to pull up all of your garden, you know. One of them young fellas saw a snake down there. I’ve rung Wollongong and they’re sending a snake expert.’

I heard this with as much calm as I could muster. Next day the station was swathed in blue-and-white bunting like a murder scene. The whole garden was roped off. They were waiting for the snake man to come. A day or two passed. I asked Terry about snakes at this time of the year. (Tom had said that the snake had been about a third of a metre long and very thin, showing me with his hands separated as if telling a fishing story.) ‘They’re only little grass snakes, Kate. You’re lucky if you get them in your garden. They eat the insects.’ I walked over to tell Tom, who said the snake man had been. The bunting was taken down and the event faded away, as these things do, with nobody being very sure of what actually was seen or heard or said or by whom. But it was another lesson to me to keep my head when I hear of orders to tear up the garden.

Three pink and grey galahs. They were sitting on the deck railing when I walked out this morning. One put
its head to one side, blinking, as if pondering a question, almost thoughtful. After a night with Peri interrogating our lives, it seems a perfect illustration of our talk. Giving no answer except its pink and grey beauty, it flew away.

Later. A bonanza. Today Peri and I drove to Wollongong Art Gallery and on the way saw a sign to Bunnings Hardware. Turning in, we stopped and went into a vast store. Peri bought me a watering-can. I got two Majestic palms, self-cleaning; meaning they drop their leaves themselves. A native of Madagascar, they enjoy humidity, so will fill spaces down near the frog pond in the mottled shade. I felt uplifted and radical buying these palms because I’ve never thought of putting palms in what’s really an old-fashioned cottage garden.

As we walked around, I saw a fishtail palm, pot-bound and leafless. I asked if I might have it cheaper for the station garden and the manager, Rhonda, said I could have it free, as it had been left, waterless, behind other plants. Peri went to get the car and I walked out with the green-tipped tall palm and saw a pallet of trees outside the door, reduced to two dollars each. ‘Look what you’ve missed,’ I said to Peri as the car pulled up.

‘No, I haven’t. I saw them on the way out, and I’m going back to get the lot for the station.’

As we loaded some of the trees into the station wagon, Peri said she had asked if there was a man she
could hire there who would come and help me plant the trees. There was nobody and that’s how I like it. It is a volunteers’ garden and I don’t want people paid to help. David and I can do it. The trees were in my hair as we drove home. We put them on the verandah and went back for the second lot.

Organic lucerne pellets were on sale at four dollars for twenty kilos, which had been reduced from over twenty dollars. I bought some and asked why it was cheap. I was told it was beginning to break down and they wanted to get rid of it quickly. We loaded everything in, along with six terracotta pots, also a big bargain, and saw a sign to a fair. We went in and bought Indian food and some spices, asafoetida and other mixes. Peri walked around eating a packet of onion fritters while I slumped in the car with the trees.

Beside me on this table are two packets of rare flower seeds: one is of blue butterfly nasturtiums. Nan Evatt and I shared a packet once before, but I didn’t manage to get those seeds to grow. I am keen to try again. This has blue flowers with a white throat.

The second packet is a feathered poppy called White Knight. Originally introduced to England before World War I, and then seemingly lost. It has huge blooms, the packet says, twelve centimetres across, resembling balls of finely cut white feathers. To be sown from midsummer to early winter. I will sow them before I go to
Adelaide for Writers’ Week so that they should be ready to plant out when I get back in mid-March.

These seeds all come from Erica Vale Australia Pty Ltd, 1747 Anzac Avenue, Mango Hill, Queensland, or from PO Box 297, Kallangur 4503. A blue perfumed nasturtium and white tasselled poppies. There’s nothing like it to lift the heart.

If you are depressed, try digging. Swimming’s good, but digging is better. Digging to plant something, I mean, preferably a tree or two.

Sometimes when I feel forlorn, whatever from, I get into bed with Treloar and Ross Roses catalogues and the
Botanica Rose Encyclopaedia
and just concentrate.

We have been back to Bunnings and got another load of trees and pots. Diana came to lunch, arriving just as Peri and I drew up with the trees. She began to talk to Peri about Nicosia. I was in the kitchen, cooking prawn risotto, and I overheard Diana saying, ‘I saw a mandrake in Paphos. It was on the debris of the old city, beside the sea, in rough grassy country. I was walking with Neoptolemos and Eustachios from the Museum. I gave a little shriek when we came to the mandrake. I had the book on Cypriot plants and it had a description by Pliny of the mandrake.’

‘Get with child a mandrake root,’ I said, having run in and picked up a page of paper to write on.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s an aphrodisiac.’

Peri said, picking up something else Diana had been saying about Greek painted churches, ‘Well, the best painted Byzantine church I ever saw was in Budapest. It was like walking into a field of paisley pattern.’

‘Don’t get off botany, Peri, I want to write this down,’ I said. ‘Yes, Lotha,’ Peri said, referring to me, (her nickname for me, as I call her Mandrake, the magician from our childhood comic books) and I jolted when I saw that Mandrake had appeared in two guises in our talk.

‘I’m going to see those painted churches in Nicosia, with the Reckitt’s blue ceilings, Diana,’ Peri went on.

Diana, seeing I had the pen waiting, plugged on: ‘It was spectacular. It’s a big rosette on the ground, twenty-five centimetres wide, not more than five centimetres, or two inches high, with bell-like flowers and a rosette of leaves, the size of hydrangeas, all around the flowers, which are violet coloured. I just looked at it and went back later to draw it.’

Such a day. For the first time I saw that the station garden is beginning to look like a park, with trees dotted about
above old roses and, below, the grass. There comes a time in every new garden when there is a turning point, as if the garden heaved a sigh and emerged.

I planted the last trees that Peri gave: a golden rain tree
(Koelreuteria paniculata),
which grows to fifteen metres and comes from Korea and China, a tropical peach, the shrub Snow in Summer, and nameless others. Down the track, where David and I had moved the ficus, I took a barrow of water and two buckets, along with some clay-breaking mixture in a bottle. I read the instructions and, taking the best and thus the easiest way, poured some capfuls of the mixture into the buckets, filled them with water and poured it among the roots. I dragged the barrow back through the ditches and got more water. Then I gave three jacarandas the clay-breaking treatment.

As I walked back the three hundred or so metres to the station, I counted the frangipani cuttings that have taken root alongside the platform. Eighteen. Ten more went in there too, the idea being that what flourishes should be repeated. One day, in a summer far away, the whole platform will have frangipani trees and jacarandas in bloom.

Three unknown native trees Diana gave me have taken too, but her guava was mowed and sits torn and valiant like a ripped flag. I stuck a three-metre long green-painted bamboo stake beside it which I had bought at
Bunnings. I had been meaning to tie up something in my own garden with that stake, but I could no longer remember what. Now the guava has a tall green-painted flagpole next to it, and this may keep it safe.

Tony, who is an occasional worker at the station while Tom is on holidays, said that Tom had been back to check on things, and it may be that he will agree to changing the mowing people, because they have mowed the daisies by the cyclone fence for the third time. I saw this when I got off the train on Tuesday and, suddenly, found myself engulfed in fury. I walked home, trying not to think about the lost bushes that had once again started to grow, along with two passionfruit vines that have stalwartly withstood two previous mowings. Until then I had not been upset when things were dug up or when the children fell off their skateboards into the red geraniums. But now I was gripped by an unholy rage.

Sinna had sweetly put a notice on the board inside the station, saying that staff looked at this daily and therefore the mowing men would be told again that the daisies beside the fence needed to be avoided. I again felt that wave of impotence which comes when you have tried every way you can think to tell somebody not to harm a plant. When the person doesn’t know the plant is there, you can be sorry, shrug a bit and feel that it is nobody’s fault. I took a bath and calmed down.

Having plenty of geranium and white daisy cuttings, because Peri had pointed out that the pots in my garden needed pruning badly, I stuck these in among the frangipanis down the side of the platform where some geraniums from other plantings have begun to bloom.

I am now wondering why I am gardening in a long line towards the south. Why not spread out and widen the plot towards the back fences of houses that face away from the line? It makes an eccentric garden, this long line of trees and now flowers. I think the answer is that more people will enjoy the longer line of garden than if it sped by their eyes in a flash as their train passed. And as they walk down the platform, coming north from Wollongong, they will see the trees growing up through the railings.

Over and over in my mind I can hear Philip Zweers saying, ‘Why not natives?’ And I say again, ‘Beggars can’t be choosers, Philip, I plant what I am given.’ But his voice is there, like a moral.

Here, in nights of light,

you can’t hear anything except the sea.

At dawn the clouds

can’t sear anything except the sea.

Forget-me-nots, indigo plants, old roses,

this is autumn.

Days of ease and langour mean lately you

can’t fear anything except the sea.

Lucid hope, floral ginger scents,

sky blue plumbago, the comforts of old

age.

Fighting siblings drift apart

Christmas means they

can’t steer to anything except the sea.

A monument, a book, a psalm. Thomas

á Kempis gives more comfort as a

seer than anything except the sea.

Running on the beach, does it matter

if the sand is soft?

With flesh

that’s had a tear

don’t try anything except the sea.

‘Weeping may endure for a night

but joy cometh in the morning.’

Persecuted, think of this. Even

if inconsolable, you can’t

be near anything except the sea.

Kate, accept your daughter’s gifts and

trials

remember her in childhood when she

called

a frog a flog. So dear, she can’t be

compared

to anything except the sea.

T
oday I read in the free local paper that fifteen thousand people commute to Sydney daily from the south coast and that doesn’t include the rest of us who go up and down intermittently. That is enough reason, I think, to keep planting in a line rather than veer out and widen the garden.

I have only reached the far end of the platform, with one palm a few metres further on. It will be a long trek with the barrow if I try to reach Bellambi, which, as you know, is a foolish dream I sometimes have.

I have found an enormous pink frangipani tree and took ten cuttings on the way back from the sea pool at Bulli today.

There is four hundred kilos of lucerne pellet fertiliser in bags on the front verandah. Half for my garden, half for the station. As I planted at the latter yesterday, I spread some around the trees and piled up the lawn
compost among it. Then I laid grey rocks over all as extra mulch, to keep the moisture in. That saying of my brother’s, ‘The best fertiliser for land is the owner’s feet’, came to mind when I saw that the fig tree David and I moved had fallen over in the clay. Too far away to be seen, when I was spreading fertiliser and watering in trees, it was lucky I had walked down to check. Propped up now with rocks, it looks healthy enough.

I did a matron’s round of the garden and thought I should tell you of an angel.

On a cold morning (concerning the exact date there’s no possibility of being precise), a train loading mainly elderly people, with a busy male conductor wearing a necklace, let me board carrying a rare plant at Spencer Street, which is in Melbourne, going to Central, which is in Sydney, as a spring day was dawning.

The plant was
Acacia cognata
and I had got it from Plantmark at the Landscape Garden Conference in Camberwell Town Hall. For three days I had sat looking at this plant, more like a green cat than a shrub, as it stood decorating the edge of the stage. It was said that the plants were not for sale. But I had to have one.

Andrew, a young man from Plantmark, was supervising the loading of a truck with the stage decorations and I persuaded him to sell me this weird and beautiful green shrub. Antonia, with whom I was
staying, drove me home to her house and put the plant into a box ready for the train trip the next day.

When the conductor saw the plant he took my ticket, turned it over, pointed to the fine print and said that there was a rule against taking plants on interstate trains. I told him I would nurse it but he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’Then suddenly he had a change of heart and agreed to let the plant come on board with me, as I told him it was rare and that I was alone and there was nobody who could take it away. It would have to be called a surfboard and I would need to pay the price a surfboard costs to travel. I did this with alacrity and relief.

At Central I saw that it wasn’t possible to carry the plant in its metre-square box at the same time as wheeling my suitcase. I took the box, leaving the case beside the train, and put it onto the Wollongong train. Then ran back for the case, which was still there.

Because it was nine at night when the train reached Woonona, I had been wondering how I would get home from the station, because Tom would not be there to mind my case and there was no waiting-room in which to leave it. As I stepped off, thinking I would leave my case on the platform and carry the plant home first, because I could risk the loss of the case more than the plant, a young man stepped up and offered to carry the plant home for me. It was out of his way but he strode along holding the box to his chest, chatting. I told him about the
plant and the station garden we were passing. He said, when I explained that the garden was made by somebody who was blind and me, that his mother was also blind.

I have never seen him since but if the archangel Gabriel had stepped up and lifted the box I could not have been more surprised and grateful.

The green acacia has flourished. I took it out of the pot and put it into the ground. Now, brushing against it on the side path, it feels like a cat stroking your leg. It forms a soft mound, the size of a labrador dog, and is still growing bigger.

A glorious day. David and I gardened at the station to good effect. Kikuyu grass, being easy to feel, and Paddy’s lucerne, the weed with the deep root and yellow buttercup flowers easily traced down to the soil and pulled, were tossed over the fence onto the ramp by David. I put in another tropical peach left over from the load Peri gave me weeks ago, along with a barrowload of cuttings.

David and I ate ham sandwiches and drank a thermos of tea under the old wattle tree, surrounded by the roses, which are thriving. We seemed invisible to all that went on on the platform above, and were glad of it. We began our work again, David hurling weeds over the
fence up onto the platform with vigour and me using a spade to weed (a new rough effective way I’ve found). The prickly bushes of holly Denis gave me ages ago have mainly thrived and help to thicken the garden there and, perhaps, to keep it safer. I know nothing’s really safe, but it’s a pleasure, sometimes, to think it is.

At the university one of my students, hearing about the garden in an aside I’d made, said, ‘Oh, we could never have a garden where I live. There’s too much vandalism.’ I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t think of a reply that wouldn’t take a lot of energy. But I treasure that remark.

Having taken two barrows, one by one, to the station, I asked David if he would like to help me take them home. Eager and willing as ever to do any work, he agreed. Together we crossed the road with the barrows and empty buckets, my heart beating faster as I showed David where the road was. He can’t use his cane while driving a barrow but we came home safely and I have been exhilarated ever since. Unique and game for anything, David took the best barrow down the side path and left it at the shed.

We came inside and had afternoon tea, laughing. My wreck of a second barrow, which I’d used to cart over the lucerne pellets, is useful nonetheless, and I see now a person can always do with two barrows, and that’s not a widely known fact.

I have asked people what they think comprises happiness for them. Independence, freedom, health, they say. Yet you can have all these and be unhappy. You can be suicidal and have them. I’ve been there. There is never time to tease the whole matter out because I ask at lunch and the food and other talk gets in the way. The American Declaration of Independence ends with something about the right to the pursuit of happiness. I keep going over this matter and only see that it is when I am engrossed that I am happy. The joy of abandonment, of forgetting oneself. So when I am under the camellia, tearing at the weeds, things fall away and then later, standing, the world appears and is astonishing. During those minutes of lostness, happiness grasped me. In his book,
The Wreck of Western Culture,
John Carroll says that Shakespeare, although leaving no lucid readily clear code of behaviour, seems to be saying that to live well and wisely a person should be honourable, and that it is important to be honest and loyal to friends while also being gentle, even given the turbulence of life and good and bad fortune. These things can be clues to how to live well. Nonetheless, you can do all these things but happiness may not necessarily be yours. But you will possibly be happier, and so will those around you, if that is the way
you choose to live. Walking indoors to replenish the teacup I feel I am a person who is always grasping after something that is just out of reach. Something sometimes glimpsed that fades away. Clues, there are always clues.

Happiness comes unexpectedly. For instance, a woman bringing in the washing that has dried in the afternoon sun hears pigeons cooing on the lawn and sees shadows growing; she walks inside with her arms full of warm linen, puts it on a chair and locks the door against the night.

A silver day. Very still and full of conundrums. For instance, should the
Magnolia soulangiana
at the front gate be removed? Shocking thought. But nothing beats taking a long hard look at a plant over a year to see if it really is successful. The mere word ‘magnolia’ sets me off into a romantic denial and a deeply ingrained unwillingness to actually look. The tree, planted with such belief and ardour, is often a shabby tattered grey crocheted sort of doily. The west winds tear at it and shred the leaves. I have stood by it in the last fortnight shaking the branches to make the leaves drop, to let the buds show forth.

Looking round at other magnolias I see the same problem, and it is not just here by the sea that they are
grey and tattered. The
Magnolia stellata
in the back lawn doesn’t give much pleasure either, and I wouldn’t plant one again. I still think David has the best tree in Woonona, a
grandiflora,
a tree for all seasons and all people. Cream flowers, the size of dinner plates, that scent his whole garden and which I pick and keep on my dressing-table, watching them turn pale brown, as if in an invisible oven, a lightly browning custard. The scent is with me all night. I know I am sleeping with magnolias, even while I dream. It reminds me of the time Barbara Pak Poy stayed and said that she knew she was in white damask sheets, even while she slept.

Peri came to visit and, after parking her car in the drive, stepped out beside the pink robinia tree Nan Evatt gave me. It was weak from collar rot that no amount of pest oil could cure, and she said briskly, ‘Get rid of it and plant something decent. It will never be any good.’

I had told Nan how sick the tree was and how superstitious I was about taking out a tree that had been planted to remember somebody (what if they got sick?). Nan said, ‘Take it out, darling, I don’t mind at all.’

On Mothers’ Day, Hugh dug it out for me. I saw when it had gone how ugly the shape, so sickly and weakly waving, had been; few leaves and flowers, more like a dying giraffe than a tree. I was glad we’d put it out of its misery. Now, of course, there is the pleasure of deciding what tree to plant in its place. This pleasure
gets rarer as a garden goes on, simply because there is no space left and the decisions, right or wrong, stand there letting you know for all time whether you were wise or foolish. (Unless you can face their removal if they’re wrong, that is.) I’d take out the magnolia in the front, but it is healthy and was planted for Sophia, and I don’t want to tempt fate.

Jane rang from Adelaide last night and told me she has catalogues of tree peonies. Would one of these thrive here? I think if a
Magnolia soulangiana
is in trouble, so too would be a tree peony. I need to enquire widely. There was an avenue of yellow tree peonies a century old at Sorenson’s Nursery at Leura which were removed when it was sold for housing. Some of us will never get over it.

The smaller peonies of the bulb type are beautiful and not widely grown. They are thought to be difficult, but Don Burke says that the most common problem is that people plant them too deeply. They need to be planted with the tip almost uncovered. Delicate, delicate, that’s what you need to be. Bulb peonies are the cream sponges of the garden. Yet, I want one of those trees.

When Jane read out the list last night, I said, ‘I bet they cost about five hundred dollars each.’ But I was wrong. The price ranges between a hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars. Here is a sample of what’s available: Qing Xiang Bal (delicately fragrant white), flowers early.
Growth, vigorous. Tolerance, average. Flowers, many. Size, tall erect. And: Gui Fel Cha Cul (Superior Imperial Concubine), proliferate form, pinkish-red. Flowers, mid-season. Growth, vigorous. Tolerance, average. Flowers, many. Size, stalks long, stiff and upright, tall erect. And, finally, one that can stand tougher conditions: Wu Jin Yao Hui (glossy black). Rose form, dark purplish-red/lustrous. Flowers, mid-season. Growth, medium. Tolerance, tolerant of adverse conditions. Flowers, many. Size, medium height. The address of the supplier is Hilltop, Cherokee Road, Kerrie, Victoria, 3434. Phone (03) 5427 0260. Fax (03) 5427 0594.

Veering away from the peony for a moment, there is the possibility of the most perfect of all tree shapes, and that is the persimmon. Planting something you can eat has always seemed to me to have a moral value to it. The world has only got enough food in stock for two years or so, maybe a bit more, but what if the weather failed in both hemispheres? Wouldn’t you wish you had put in some citrus, nuts, figs or potatoes? If a war came, wouldn’t it be good to be able to dig up a few potatoes and give them to a beggar if you, by some miracle, had enough for your own family? I am thinking this way, about the beggar, that is, because I heard a woman on radio talking of her war years, when she starved and begged food from farmers who gave ‘a few potatoes’. I have never understood why we don’t have streets lined
with orange trees, or apples or quinces or figs, or anything at all that we could eat on the way to school. In the Barossa Valley children used to pick quinces, smash them on posts, leave them to sweeten in the air, and would then eat them raw on the way home. I have not tried this but read about it in
The Barossa Valley Cookbook
by Angela Hoezenroeder.