Playing With Water (6 page)

The sea is grey today and I can’t tell where the sky begins and the sea ends. ‘Oh, what a beautiful day!’ a friend of mine, Franz Kempf, once said, flinging open a window on a grey day in London. ‘A silver florin of a day!’ I wasn’t there, but this artist’s friend told me, laughing, as it was such a shock to him, a dentist.

I have been out treading among the mint and nasturtiums, winding roses up above the side back fence onto the shed’s roof.

My fingers smell of nasturtiums. There’s a glass vase of them beside me, burning orange, lemon gold and rich brown. I used to think nasturtium seeds were capers. But although they were used for pickling during the World Wars and, even now, sometimes still are, it is the caper bush
Capparis spinosa
that gives the true caper. Caper bushes grow wild not only around the shores of the Mediterranean, but in Australia and the Pacific
region. The flower buds are gathered before they show any colour and are preserved in salt. Maggie Beer says in her book,
Maggie’s Orchard,
that after the flowers die, berries form, and these too can be used in an antipasto or with pork. An old recipe for pickled nasturtium seeds comes from
The Experienced English Housekeeper
by Mrs Elizabeth Raffald, who was cook and housekeeper to Lady Elizabeth Warburton at Arley Hall in Cheshire. In 1759 Mrs Raffald ‘wrote down everything she knew’ and this book is the result. I do not believe it was everything that she knew, but that is what the authors of
The Perfect Pickle Book,
David Mabey and David Collison, say when they quote her recipes. Here is Mrs Raffald’s way of pickling nasturtium seeds:

Gather the nasturtium berries soon after the blossoms are gone off, put them in cold salt and water, change the water once a day for three days, make your pickle of white wine vinegar, mace, nutmeg sliced, peppercorns, salt, shallots and horse-radish; it requires being made pretty strong, as your pickle is not to be boiled; when you have drained them, put them into a jar, and pour the pickle over them.

Thank you Mrs Raffald.

Chrysanthemums need dark nights to bloom. A streetlight shining on the chrysanthemums will be regretted. I gleaned that from a book Peri lent me when I stayed with her this weekend. It was called
Green Thoughts
by Eleanor Perenyi.

Star of Bethlehem
(Ornithogalum umbellatum):
a plant mentioned in the Bible, very pretty too, but a terrific weed once established. It invades all parts of the garden, and the slippery foliage breaks off when tugged and leaves the bulbs safely behind.

A friend who lives on a hill above Blackbutt Park brought home from Paris packets of seeds. Among them one of wild grasses. I think that could be the same as plague. But he swears he won’t plant them.

There are many kinds of ivy, but the dark green climbing one is a devil of a weed unless contained by cement walls and even then, when birds eat the berries, it is transported. Given time, ivy can kill a giant tree. I see trees being strangled in gardens where the owners, perhaps thinking it beautiful, let the ivy run. A great blue spruce in the garden next to me in Leura went that way. It remained, in the end, a dark thin finger pointing accusingly at the sky as the ivy abandoned it and crawled, with the fervour of a hunter, to a couple of fifty-year-old Japanese maples. I am glad
there is no ivy in this garden, and while I am here there never will be.

Heavy rain for two days and wind too. A leaf floats down as I stare out this window and the Claire rose waves and tosses in a green arch as if searching for an anchor in that sea, the air.

Bulbs are up. As I walked through the gate, holding an umbrella like a puppet being dragged along, I saw the first daffodils and irises are up. No sign of the liliums. I read, after they’d gone in, that these bulbs ought not to be planted deeply. Just under the earth, almost poking up, the book said. Too late. They’d been in for a fortnight, so it seemed best to leave them.

This is the land of rainbows, I thought and looked up and saw one. When I came to live here, there were rainbows almost every day. Jack and I, riding south, would see one sometimes with one foot on this house and the other in the sea. I leave it to you to imagine how we interpreted such rainbows.

I’ve been out in the back garden tangling great green rainbows, the climbing roses at the side fence, to each other to keep them from being blown to the ground.

The white dahlia is bowed down to the wet earth. Anders Dahl, a Swedish botanist whom the dahlia is named after, procured dahlia tubers and, by his death, in 1789, had produced some hybrids. A celebration to honour the dahlia plant was held by the Spanish king at the Madrid Botanical Garden in that same year. Dahlias were discovered by Europeans in Mexico. The superintendent of the Botanic Gardens in Mexico City, Vincente Cervantes, sent dahlia seeds to Abbe Cavanilles, the director of the Royal Gardens of Madrid, and it was this man who named the dahlia.

Until recently I did not know dahlias could be grown from seed. Daphne, Terry’s wife, showed me a small plot with some green shoots in it months ago. She said they were from dahlia seeds she’d gathered. The flowers are now in bloom and I will walk next door and see how they are.

Later. The dahlias are finished. Cut back to stalks and their seeds gathered. Terry was out staring at his sugarloaf cabbages, watering-can in hand. There was some kind of liquid fertiliser in the can. He began to tell me that he had lost many parsnips in the heat.

‘I sowed row after row of carrots and parsnips; I even kept them under planks. But the ground was too hot. Boy, when I did get some, you saw hundreds of baby carrots. And I mean baby carrots. The ground was too
hot and they just stopped growing. You remember the stunted parsnips I gave you?’

Yet now there are two rows of parsnips thriving, their green tops waving in the strong wind.

‘You thought seeds needed heat to germinate, didn’t you?’ Terry continued. ‘Well, they do, but the heat can kill them too. Even in the shade under the verandah in pots they died. I lost all my beans and all the lettuces.’ He gestured to the peas growing up a trellis and to where the rows of beans once were.

Earth’s long ivory tooth

in a buried smile

which becomes

winter’s snarl

tugging at the hem

of my skirt as I walk by

looking for a cabbage

bending to see

into the heart of the

green thornless rose

that is not yet ready

but this parsnip is

spilling earth

as it comes out.

A life spent in a grave

beneath a green fern

it lies on the path

like a fish

dying in the air.

Walking indoors

shaking off the soil

that gave me this parsnip

to boil

all it needs now

is pepper and a bit of butter

but the hole most surprised

born in that wrenching moment

lies there gasping in the sun

dark and thoughtful.

Terry returned then to the topic of olive trees and the magnolia in the street. While I was away the magnolia was pulled up and left lying. Terry waited until a break in the rain to replant it. When he went out, council workers driving past saw him and stopped. They replanted the tree for him, and for me. Terry went inside and did not see them take the barbed wire away from all the trees. I suppose it is illegal. But that was fifty dollars worth of wire.

It is a mistake to think that the ripping up of trees means hatred of trees. It is just something to do when
idle, perhaps, just something to do when irritable with drink. I keep thinking that it is important not to take this personally, either as a form of hatred of gardens or trees or of myself. We are all connected, but while I may have provoked those who have pulled up the trees, it’s better for me not to blame them, or myself, but put it down to an act of nature. I am struggling to deal with another grief, and seeing the trees, so seemingly unprovoking and benign, being attacked makes me think it’s best to just plug on. Some kind of hope, some faith, is necessary and, above all, no bitterness. Give me a gracious acceptance of my lot.

One day, I hope I will harvest olives from my three trees. One day, I hope my olive oil can be used as a form of stock for soup. I mean by this, that if you don’t have any stock, vegetables and olive oil make good soup. For instance, Peri wrote out the recipe for the soup she made for our dinner; more a list of ingredients to boil than a recipe. Here is the list: tomato paste, soaked chickpeas, a tin of tomatoes, garlic, onions, water, plenty of oregano and good olive oil. Boil until chickpeas are soft.

There are several other very good soup recipes in a book using olive oil as the essential ingredient. Here is the best lentil soup I’ve had:

150 grams of brown lentils

1 large onion, sliced

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 small tin of tomato purée

200 grams of fresh peeled tomatoes or 1 x can of tomatoes

3 tablespoons of olive oil

900 millilitres of cold water

salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Soak the lentils for an hour or two, rinse and cover with cold water. Boil until tender, with all the other ingredients. Then blend or just mash the mixture. Either way, don’t make it too smooth. Season and serve with good bread and more oil.

This recipe is best doubled or trebled, as I can’t see the point of making just enough. This is for four people at one meal.

Moss. In the cracks on the footpath beside the highway in Corrimal emerald-green moss is growing. I stepped up from the gutter and saw it. Moss can’t grow in pollution. It can be used in gardens, playgrounds and
other places, like canaries were used in mining, as a warning of danger. Roses are used in this way in vineyards, to warn against disease threatening the vines. Here and in France there are vineyards with a rose planted at the end of every row.

That the bright moss could grow there beside the road, with cars drawing up beside it at the lights, snorting out fumes, is amazing. David Bellamy, the botanist, reviewing a book called
Moss Gardening: Including Lichens, Liverworts and Other Miniatures
begs people never to collect living mosses, lichens or any other plants from the wilderness. And never to use peat under any circumstances, because peatlands are some of the most endangered living systems on earth. He says to use peat substitutes, which are easy to buy.

There is a lot of peat for sale at almost every nursery I visit and I wonder if the sellers know it’s endangered.

This little spill of moss, so bright, innocently growing there beside the cars and trucks, put a spring in my step all day. It was so valiant, such an emerald splash, squandered there by the gutter. What this moss also means is that there are spores wafting through the air by the million, waiting to fall on a suitable spot to grow. Many of these plants, lacking common names, are known only by their Latin names. So this drizzle of emerald that I saw probably has a Latin name. People were hurrying past with their shopping, or walking into
the optometrist nearby. It gripped me and it still does. I cannot get over it. It seemed so emblazoned, so unexpected, and such a gift, as if a tree had bled there.

The liliums are up. Knowing that they were planted too deep, I have been out there looking daily. Yesterday I planted pink foxgloves and tulips. Said I’d do it weeks ago. But saying a thing is about to be done is not necessarily doing it.

Only a couple of the pansy seeds have come up. And a few of the
Aquilegias
too. This sowing of seeds is addictive. Something in it is atavistic. For so long humans have worked in agriculture that it may be something deep being fed in me when I sow. It is also the thrill of a gamble. A bit like throwing dice. Whatever the reason for it, I am devoted to sowing. I turn first to the seed racks when I enter a nursery.

In Tanzania, I saw women sitting sorting seeds in the shade of an open iron shed, piles of seeds alongside them. Their babies lay beside them, or strapped to their backs. From time to time the women fed the babies and returned to their sorting. Some had a leather bottle with them which held a mixture of mashed banana and something else, I am not sure what. A woman would take a swig of this and give some to the baby.

Each time I tear open a packet, I remember those women laughing, working, feeding their children beside the piles of seeds.

Gerberas, impatiens, nasturtiums, stocks, these were some of the flowers my friend was growing for seeds on his farm beside Mt Kilimanjaro. The price per kilo of impatiens seed on the international market is fifty thousand US dollars, and when you look at the seed you can see why.

The pomegranate seeds have worked.

You fed her those at dinner

in that old pink hotel by the lake

like a farmer feeding Ratsack

mixed with liver to a crow.

But you have reckoned without me.

You’ve announced in numerous legends

you’ll not be leaving your wife

I hope to God you don’t—

ruin three lives, not four.

I know you’re smitten,

you only use seeds

when you’ve spotted something

you want and know you can’t

otherwise have—and is half the age

that you are. Yes, I admit

she’s enjoying the darkness

down there in your lair of secrets,

dead birds and bones.

But she’s a creature of light,

of the sun, beaches.

Your cold gloomy pool lit with forty-watt

globes

won’t satisfy her in the long run.

She’ll want to come up to the light.

I know you don’t care

how much you’ve cost

and what you have ruined and smashed.

But read Birthday Letters and think.

Do us all a favour, go hunting,

let her go

shoot a crow

kill a stag

be a man

give her the antidote—

it’s not too late

although there’s a chill in the air.