Playing With Water (4 page)

A sunny day. The unnamed blue vine on the back deck has big clusters of flowers waving and sparrows are flicking about gathering insects from the leaves. Philippa
is making a new bed from lawn inside the front gate. Big winds yesterday brought down the
Thunbergia grandiflora
vine on the front verandah. And the Claire rose fell from this window where it now lapses and droops. The white
Alyssum
seeds I sowed last week are up. They will go into the yet to be dug bed where a car can be parked inside the gate. I am tired of looking at that bare ugly patch, so we are going to sow it with groundcovers. The other sweet peas are up. Two days ago, having a heavy heart and nothing better to do, I sowed stocks in a newly dug bed.

Yellow chrysanthemums are starting to bloom in the back among red, apricot and yellow nasturtiums. I had dug them up from the row at the front fence six months ago. Some remain and are flowering among the cream Edelweiss rose. Philippa doesn’t like yellow in a garden but she looked up while sitting on the lawn digging with a trowel and remarked that they look alright among the roses.

When you take on somebody else’s garden, in a climate you haven’t lived in before, things reveal themselves slowly. The old yellow chrysanthemums are a pleasant surprise.

A green orange. I found this globe swinging from the Valencia orange tree at the back step this morning.
Quickly I went around the other seven citrus trees to see what they held. The mandarin, too, has small green fruit and the blood orange has a single minuscule fruit hanging on the top branch. Both the lemons also have some tiny fruit.

Very reluctantly I sprayed all the citrus yesterday with white oil. The leaves were falling after curling up with an insect infestation. Shirley, at the nursery, told me that there is only one cure and it is to spray with the oil as the insects can’t lay their eggs on the slippery surface.

I see now it is important to put out snail killer at the end of March or early in April. Something had made a lacework of vines and many plants. It bewildered me, but Philippa, who has a fine eye for infestation, began stamping on snails last week and said there was a plague here. She bends and looks under plants and shrieks the name of any bug she spies.

Today I sowed blue lobelia and Pacific Giant pansies. The coriander and the stocks have sprouted green on the grey soil. With what ardour I go out each morning peering through my reading glasses. Yet I miss so much. For instance, why didn’t I see the new fruit coming when I sprayed the leaves? I was looking at the leaves, that’s why. Sometimes I see people pass by as I stand at the front window. Many do not look to the right or left. They seem blind. But I tell myself this is not a test of
intelligence, the person looking at the cement path may be thinking of how to end the play he is writing, how to pay a bill, or a thousand other things. Virginia Woolf walked down The Strand seeing almost nothing while thinking of her novel
To the Lighthouse.
But some people do look at trees and plants.

A blind man came towards me as I stood at the gate yesterday. I had just moved the white magnolia from the back step, where Peri had told me that it would overshadow the garden. I planted it between the olives in the lawn outside the fence. Then, having only one spare star picket available, I used a roll of barbed wire to wrap it; every bud was draped. I stepped out and engaged the man with a white cane in conversation. We discussed the beautiful three days’ weather we have had. Then I told him of the magnolia. He asked what kind, saying that if it was the gigantic one, it was not suitable for that place. But it was a smaller tree. Then, because somebody had parked their car on the path and broken a cement block covering a pipeline, I showed the man this hole. He knelt down and put his hand in the hole, feeling the depth of the cement blocks that had given way. This man seemed more interested and aware than some of the sighted. One day, as he is passing, the scent of the magnolia (full of buds now) will tell him that it is the tree we spoke of. It will be a few notes of Bach for him, perhaps.

Birds galore. I stand and watch the sparrows dart and flit across the back lawn with the mynah birds, starlings, magpies and, in the last three days, seven black currawongs. As Philippa and I sat on the deck at dusk, a very young rosella flew onto the guttering. Its head still too big for its neck, with its scraggly feathers, it watched us. Philippa ran and got cake to crumble onto the railing. She held some in her hand but it wouldn’t come. Next day it returned. The sparrows are helping the plants. I see them dart about picking insects and then suddenly a group of sparrows fly off like the sweep of a brown brush against the blue.

Certain days I know contain

elements of the sublime.

For instance, the impulse today

to dance beside the sea. Over and over

was the refrain,

elements of the sublime.

After rain the sun came out,

white lilies became chalices above the mud

sheets and towels dried on the railing.

Always in the domestic domain,

elements of the sublime.

Day after day I wonder

how I ought to live. Spreading mulch

and compost, watering, then dusk falls.

This holds, I can’t complain,

elements of the sublime.

Mozart played by two Oistrakh

accompany passing clouds. Rosellas

drink from the white grevillea.

Nothing in nature will disdain

elements of the sublime.

As I ran on the sand today,

the sea was white, the bathing sheds

have been graffitied, bins are overflowing.

Yet I hold within my suzerain

elements of the sublime.

Kate, if you can only learn to long

for little, and by looking close

you will find much that will pertain

to elements of the sublime.

A
damp day. I lugged buckets of bathwater mixed with a cup of fish emulsion down the back to three camellias having a dry time. Many gardens have tough, neglected areas. The only two gardeners I know who see these and deal with them are Nan Evatt, my neighbour at Leura, and Peri, who is coming to stay today. For years I did not see sad corners, ugly bits, my eyes glided over these places, called and beguiled by some plant or tree in flower or great leaf. Not unlike my life. It is in a dry place near the compost heap that these camellias struggle, neglected and thin. Yet two are in good full bud and, since the big rain last week, look better.

On Peri’s tropical fruit farm in Queensland there is a front patch she called the Badlands. For years she and her caretakers, Julie and Anton, struggled to get anything much to grow. Yet, after about five years of half failing, spreading manure, watching some trees die,
some live, it suddenly responded. A micro climate developed there. The trees made a windbreak on the slope going up to the house on stilts; warmth and moisture did the rest. But many people would just give up on places like this. So Philippa and I are going to sustain interest in this curved bed where plants struggle. It looks like a bad housing area, a slum where nothing much of grace exists and every inhabitant struggles to simply stay alive. Hopelessness and weeds invade. By heaven, this area is going to have some care and bloom in spring in mighty abundance.

Birds, the fish of the air. They catch those insects, the garden’s krill, and turn it into song. Singing fish. Yes, there are such things. I heard a woman saying to another on the bike path by the sea that, as the schools of fish travel, she has heard them sing.

‘You can hear them coming,’ she said. ‘They are singing in the water.’

The white
Luculia grandifolia
is giving out scent in the damp air this morning. I bent down to smell it as it drew me like a thread. Later as I stomped around, fork in hand, planting bulbs, Terry brought a sunflower head to the fence and handed it over. ‘Would you like to plant this? It’s how we knew we’d have bees for our vegetables in the country when I was a boy. They bring the bees.’ Then he added, ‘You can give them to the birds if you like. They are full of oil. Or you can eat
them yourself.’ I planted some around the compost heap and left the rest by the birdbath. As I bent, planting ten white liliums near the gate, the post came. In it were photographs of my friend Margaret Sharpen, three weeks before her death. I kept on planting the liliums and said, these are for you, Margaret. Forty years a midwife and never able to have a child of her own. A sort of gardener of babies. Plant or person, we all return to the earth.

There are now snowflake bulbs in the drive, which has been dug up. These were my mother’s favourite flowers. The first garden she had as a child had these bulbs under a tree. Cream freesias went in here too, and some mixed Dutch irises into the new bed, edged with white primulas. Yesterday I planted blue cornflowers. I’d sown these into a box months ago and almost forgot them. Double white hyacinths were put in also.

Into three big pots I put pink and white tulips, thinking all the while of Mrs Judd and her advice to bury them a spade’s depth. And for a scent at the back step, I put half-a-dozen pink hyacinths. These are not as chic as blue or white hyacinths, but they went in anyway as they were cheaper.

I see now that it is important to give the tough areas some of the best plants. It is easy to veer away from the ugly parts of the garden, just as it is with people, ignoring what is too difficult to confront.

Terry was right when he said, ‘Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t grow potatoes here all the year round.’ My second crop is doing well, and when the trees above them shed all their leaves, they’ll be in full sun.

Newly dug potatoes are delicious. I thought I knew what fresh potatoes tasted like because I had eaten white new potatoes from shops. But it is not at all the same. A bit like the difference between freshly caught fish and two-day-old fish.

But where, with all this talk of seeds sprouting, are the
Datura
seeds I planted? I stare at the ground and it stares back. Perhaps I soaked them too long. Perhaps they take longer to germinate than the seeds of annuals. Jane sent them, calling them Floral Moonlight. And that is what those flowers are like. The silver moon on the sea.

Small honeyeaters and sparrows flew around where I had been digging potatoes. Silver eyes, perhaps, I do not know their name, like a thumb with wings. So small, one hung upside down, drinking nectar from a yellow chrysanthemum, its throat exposed like a woman making love. Suddenly, as if to a drum, they flew off into a hibiscus and began to drink from the scarlet pools of flowers.

Rain. It has rained for two days. Within hours of the bulbs being buried it began. I rode to Wollongong in my
Driza-Bone coat. This trip showed how right my late sister-in-law Jan had been when she told me. ‘Your coat needs a fresh coat of linseed oil.’ We were in her stable, rolling our swags before setting out to cross the Simpson Desert. If ever you wish to abandon gardening, cross the desert when it is full of wildflowers. For hundreds of kilometres, great sweeps of flowers of every colour cover the red sand, like the floor of heaven. People stand speechless. Some have tears in their eyes. It is a calamity of beauty. Gardening seems like the act of a fool in the face of such enormous loveliness.

One recovers. But it stays in the mind. Such a grand scale—a colossal untended garden. It certainly puts digging with a trowel in perspective. Or opening a packet and soaking seeds in a bowl. Yet there is something that makes some of us long for greenery and beauty around our houses. It is enough for many to have merely the greenery of a lawn and cement paths. But that does not satisfy everyone. And by now, I don’t think anybody who does not love gardens will be reading this.

All along the train tracks a version of the liliums I planted have been blooming in their thousands. It is like the white Madonna lily called
Lilium candidum.
This is
Lilium for mosanum,
a native of Taiwan. It is easily grown from seed and has naturalised all along the east coast of Australia. It may have naturalised elsewhere too, but I
have not seen it. When I first came to Sydney, I was astounded one Anzac Day to see these fabulous lilies growing wild along the roadside. I got the driver to stop and leapt out and ran back with a big bunch. I couldn’t believe they could grow in such abandon.

Aquilegia.
The word woke me.
‘Aquilegia!
Go back to sleep.
Aquilegia.’
After a few moments I gave up and began wondering if it was time to plant them. Their common name is Columbine, which comes from the Latin name for dove. The flowers, when looked at closely, seem to be birds drinking from a bowl. Nan Evatt rang from Leura and I asked her about
Aquilegias.

‘Yes, you plant the seed in autumn. Do you remember I gave you a barrow of the plants and you put them down the drive?

‘Some,’ she said, ‘are perennials, but some of the new hybrids may need to be treated as annuals.’

I love flowers that move and wave in the wind. A little above other plants, they seem like hands waving to the birds darting above. But it may be that they are this way to wave at bees, and so be fertilised, in a form of dance.

The rain has stopped so I am off to buy the seeds.

There is a blue nasturtium that had been thought to be extinct. It was found in an Oxford garden.
Tropaeolum azureum
is a rare perennial climber that has lance-shaped leaves and grows to about a metre. It has creamy-yellow centres with blue petals. Nan and I shared a packet of eight seeds bought by mail order, but neither of us were successful. I want to try again, but they are hard to find.

Tropaeolum
is the botanical name, and if you look up nasturtium in the encyclopaedia you will find only watercress. In the nineteenth century a white nasturtium was bred, only to be lost.

The wild gardens along railway lines often have great swatches of nasturtiums. They grow, too, on the banks of creeks and rivers. In Adelaide, whole stretches of the banks of the River Torrens are covered by these lovely flowers. Monet’s garden makes good use of them too, where they are allowed to spread like green water over a wide path.

Later.
Aquilegias
are in. Shirley at Corrimal sold them to me and at the same time I ordered a
Magnolia soulangiana
called Scheherezade. It is watermelon pink, like a great tulip. Don Burke had three new magnolias on his television show and it was there that I saw this fabulous flower. Jim, Shirley’s husband, was out among the trays of seedlings with a punnet of strawberry-pink foxgloves in his hand. I bought them to plant among the rocket which has self-seeded for the third time around the side path. This is the most successful part in the
whole garden. It may be that the house and fence shelter it, or that the soil is not worn out, as it was concreted as part of the ugly drive and the edges left to weeds. It could be that it gets more sun and, being narrower than the two back beds, is easier to weed. Whatever the reason, the plants there thrived. The roses bloom, the
Alyssum
and rocket are profuse, the lavenders have grown fast and the cleomes and cosmos waved above until last month. This place is a boost to see. Everything went right.

I got more pink tulips too, and when the rain stops will plant them among the foxgloves in between the corners of the slabs of stone that make the path. Then it will need a lot of that celestial blue bog sage and something white to cool it down. Sometimes I think I ought to be planting trees. I ask myself, why am I fooling around with annuals? Yet a small garden can’t be full of trees. Though I suppose it could.

I saw a program on the Prince of Wales’ garden at Highgrove on television yesterday with Sir Roy Strong, Rosemary Verey and Marjorie Olein Wyndham-Quin, the Marchioness of Salisbury. Each, one at a time, walked with the prince around the parts of his garden they had helped design. Rosemary Verey was wearing a dress the colour of the blue gate at her own famous garden. The Marchioness was wearing the same hat, shoes and long soft skirt and jacket she wore in a
photograph in
Gardens Illustrated
magazine. As I watched, a wisp of wind blew and she clutched the jacket modestly around her chest. She is in her seventies and has made two famous gardens. The present one is at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. She planted mopheaded
Ilex
trees in pairs down either side of her East Garden. First she had considered pleached limes. Then she thought of the Boboli Gardens in Florence. The
Ilexes
were sent from a nursery near Pistoia, Italy (in case you are looking for them). But I imagine some are sold here—somewhere or other. Not surprisingly, this is a mighty aristocratic attitude towards gardening.

The Marchioness said plants had always been important to her because she spent much of her childhood with her Irish grandparents in County Limerick where her grandfather had an arboretum. ‘He used to take me for walks and talk to me about the trees,’ she reminisced.

I feel certain that talking to children about plants and helping them make a garden of their own, or even just to plant things and to sow, begins what can be a lifetime of pleasure. Gardening is sometimes a little like bird-watching. It gives great pleasure and doesn’t, as a rule, make a noise, pollute or damage anything. There are a few mistakes that cause damage, it is true, in every gardener’s life. A tree pruned too hard, or something not watered. But mainly those are silent things, the
plants simply respond with leaves and flowers. Plants don’t yell.

Even princes make mistakes in the garden. Walking around with Rosemary Verey, Prince Charles pointed to an area saying it was a disaster and he would have to try it again. He was beginning to learn disaster and, as a result, parts of the garden did not work. This man likes to dig and to plant. ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’

For ages I have wondered what pleached limes could be. Somewhere, I can’t think where, I saw this method illustrated. Bamboo stakes are used to help weave the branches of the trees into a tall wall, beneath which people can walk (if the lower branches are cut and the higher ones encouraged). Or the pleaching can begin quite low with the bamboo stakes holding the branches. The tree, of course, is not a citrus lime, nor the kaffir lime used mainly for its leaves in cookery, but it is
Tilia europaea,
the European Linden or common lime tree. This tree can grow up to forty-five metres tall, has heart-shaped leaves and pale yellow flowers that are sometimes used for making tea.

The pleaching of limes is a form of haute couture in gardening. Mainly, I think, because it is so much work and because it needs a large area of land. However, it can be done to one or two trees in a smaller garden. But then it needs a practical purpose, such as sheltering
flowers or vegetables, or simply covering a wall, rather than making an avenue.