Playing With Water (11 page)

A mighty day. My old friend from when I lived in Adelaide, Lynn Collins, came with his friend Jo. They are both curators with NSW Historic Houses Trust. They brought with them an old-fashioned pie melon striped with a green and cream wobble pattern from the garden at Vaucluse House. Also they had cuttings of nineteenth-century pelargoniums and irises for me to use at the station.

Earlier this week two cardboard boxes came by mail. Coffins full of life. They sat waiting in the pantry until today. One of these held twenty-three roses and the other seventy-six liliums. I had been idly riffling through garden catalogues one day and, being bored, stood up and went to the fax machine. The Treloar Roses Catalogue (from Portland, Victoria) had an offer of David Austin roses, ten for seventy-five dollars. The catch is all ten must be of the one kind.

I asked Diana and another friend, Dorothy, if they’d like to share some of the roses. Dorothy, a Professor of English, chose Jude The Obscure for its literary connections and because she likes yellow roses. So I ordered ten of those and then another ten of The Armitage rose, which is pale pink and named for ‘The Archers’, an English radio serial. Three gift roses came with this lot, a bonus for ordering twenty. One of the gift roses is Madame Gregoire Staechlin, a fabulous rose that Philippa swears by. She had it at Leura, and although it only blooms once a year it is worthwhile with colossal bunches of pink flowers; really fabulous blooms.

Lynn, Jo and I dug up some of the back lawn. There was no other room left for the roses and the liliums. They made a curving edge with bricks so sweet each time I look I smile. Lynn, seeing the old stones and bricks I’d used to make other edges, said, ‘Do you want to keep it eccentric?’ I realised it was a curator’s term for make-do material. I told him I did. So towards the end he used a piece of slate and then tailed the whole thing off by sinking the bricks lower in the ground. All day they worked with stringlines, digging and building. It is enormously exhilarating to have people helping in the garden who do it just for love.

Inspired, these two dug up self-sown pale blue forget-me-nots and replanted them to soften the brick
edging. We planted a dozen roses and among them liliums, also by the dozen. The liliums look like hands curled upwards with the fingers pointing inwards, clasping promise. These came from Windy Hill Flowers, which can be contacted through PO Box 420, Monbulk, Victoria.

Someone sent me a bunch of oriental liliums and it made me wonder why I didn’t grow them. This thought led me to the Windy Hill catalogue and their LA Hybrid liliums, then to
Lilium longiflorum,
best known as Christmas lilies, and these led over the page to Asiatic liliums. There is a difference, I see from the pictures, between these latter and oriental liliums. As you may notice, I couldn’t get enough, but stopped myself at seventy-six when my money ran out. Two pages on Peony roses began but they will have to wait.

Lynn, Jo, Dorothy, Diana and I had lunch on the back deck and then we walked to Sandon Point. The brides frolicking on the cliff made Dorothy especially exclaim, ‘Oh how beautiful!’ Especially when the flower girls were wearing lilac, which she always wanted to wear when she was a child but was not allowed. Funny how these things last a lifetime.

Back in the garden Jo and Lynn worked on until dusk and the job was done. There is still some lawn left, but what was called the meadow bed is now almost twice as big and bulging full.

The dawn lit the dew on the lawn. Its light cast long shadows and the clouds faded from pink and mother-of-pearl to puffs of oyster grey and white. The daffodils and narcissi were moving in a breeze, pale yellow and cream, full of scent, and around them the citrus trees gleamed with water on their leaves and fruit. The stars had just faded, retreating, leaving the moon alone, silvery white, enduring like a beacon of faith.

Whales. Today, while Sophia was sitting in the train, looking over the head of the big cloth doll she clutched with both arms round its stomach, she told me she had seen six whales. Daily my eyes rake the sea, searching for them. Terry has seen some as they are now coming down the coast to Antarctica to harvest the krill.

When I mentioned white horses at sea, meaning the waves, Sophia could see those too, galloping, she said, under the sea.

I heard a blind man say that, as a child, because he had never seen a bird, he imagined them as four-legged animals with wings. He only discovered his mistake when other children found this out and described them.

Imagination invents whatever we need. So, seeing six whales and horses galore is perfectly normal when a
person has the authority of knowing the names. But I never saw a whale today.

‘It is very hard to live without a horizon, when you have had one,’ Sophia’s father, Hugh, said. It’s true. The horizon, although seldom mentioned, has more power than we give it credit for.

The man sitting opposite us on the train remarked to Sophia on the ships lined up waiting to enter the harbour. ‘Where are they?’ she asked, obviously thinking she didn’t need to imagine a ship. ‘On the horizon. It is there, that line where the sea meets the sky.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, seeing the ships, I assume. And what did the doll see?

What we saw as we came in the gate was the opium poppies,
Papaver somniferum,
tall and drooping, like grey suede gloves, some already forming buds. Dozens of these were self-sown this year. I shook the bursting dry heads last summer as I pulled them out. Where they lay, piles on the lawn, more came up and I have put them around in sunny places. Cosmos grew too, from last year’s, and to make sure I had plenty of white ones, I shook out a dish of soaked seeds through the poppies. This will be a harvest like a meadow in a French painting.

It is odd how quickly these trees bud—the
Ailanthus
tree is greening. I was only away two days, but either I
hadn’t been looking, or it burst during those hours. I bless this tree, for its shade and its faithfulness. More faithful than I ever found a man. It’s like my bed, reliable.

Thinking some more about horizons, have you ever noticed the eyes of people who live or work looking at the horizon? They are actually focused farther out, as if the long looking has given the eye a particular and beautiful length of vision. I married a sailor and it was in him I first noticed it.

The horizon is something rarely spoken of except in certain circles. But it has a big effect. When I go to the desert with my friend Ian North, he gets up at four in the morning to photograph the horizon. He doesn’t take pictures of trees or kangaroos; it is that line he’s after. And if it has a wobble, a few mesas or jump-ups as they’re also called, he likes that too. But a long straight line in a photograph often seems like nothing at all to some. I see this when the travel editors return photographs I’ve sent with stories. I realise that they think it’s a photograph of nothing. But the horizon is like an electric wire dragged along under the sky, holding to the land, full of streaming tension.

The garden now is lit by stars. The sea roars on and all the invisible things in the earth and above go on moving, worms, roots, hope, glee, the pull of the moon and the fish in the sea.

Today, in a coincidence, Lynn, who dug up the lawn last Saturday while I planted liliums, has sent me some old letters of mine he found in a bag. In these letters, written over thirty years ago, I am talking to him about liliums and a few other things.

TO: Mr Lynn Collins

Kibbutz Eilon

West Galilee, Israel

Saturday, 12th February 1972

Dear Lynn,

This is rather wet from Burnside pool and an oozing pen. I lie in the sun and write to you. Heat, heat, it’s the fifth day of it. I bring the children here each day after school in a taxi with their red faces.

Your mother is helping with our garden and I am looking at exotica in plants and asking her opinion. Liliums (Japanese lilies like Easter lilies) are my current favourite. I’d love it if your mother could find some. Last week we took the children to Clare Robertson’s to see her studio and the paintings for our show. She gave Caroline two Italian puppets on strings.

The children woke us next day with a lovely puppet show in a real theatre they had cut with a Stanley knife from a great big cardboard box and had a script, roles
for each of them. We lay and clapped and I wished we had been more awake and appreciative of their childishness.

Caroline insisted on taking the whole thing to school and she could barely carry it all but did and she said all the children stood up when she walked in for she was the first person to ever bring a puppet theatre to class. Bravo!

Monday

Your letter just came as I was sitting on the gallery steps cleaning two copper pots with lemon and salt. I was thrilled to read your letter. It is so taxing to write letters, all of oneself goes into it. I have about ten inside me to you.

I feel such a mix-up today, as so often lately. I am always wondering how I ought to be living.

Can it be that everyone finds it so tricky and complicated to be a housewife? For example, Lynn, advise me where I am going wrong. I like a clean house, but how to get one without becoming obsessive, that’s the critical balance I search for. All of life is related to this balance, I know, and I long to reach it.

Well, this is how it went today. I got up and made the children Rice Bubbles by pouring them out. Easy. Then I made some poached eggs and toast and we all had that.

Then I made carrot and raisin sandwiches for their school lunch.

While I was doing that Caroline had to find some clothes that she was happy to wear to school. She has six, yes six, jumpers left at school and so dressed herself in her uniform and a fawn and green ugly castoff cardigan somebody left here. Then she put on a red elastic headband and all her blonde hair stood around it like a shock victim.

I talked her into changing and she wore a pretty dress with two singlets as a compromise. Half an hour down the gurgler on that.

Then the lunch boxes had to be washed and we were out of cat food. Hugh went and bought Kitty Kat, which is against our rule for it contains kangaroo meat, but they had no Luv, which doesn’t. Well, just this once won’t hurt as I can’t reason with this hungry cat.

Then I went back to bed and read the paper. Why? People are bashing their babies.

Got up and began the washing machine and accidentally let my bath run over. I couldn’t hear it because of the machine. Bathed in half-cold water.

I dressed in my new pink suede shoes and went to pick some yellow daisies and Canterbury bells your mother has grown for us. The copper pot was dirty and I had to clean it.

Then I thought I had better put this oldish old chicken on for dinner. Did that and wrote a poem.

I put the flowers in the Milton Moon Pottery jug you helped Richard buy me one Christmas. Because of all the work entailed in getting the brass really clean, it put me off using it for the flowers. They are all in now but no beds made, mess everywhere, can’t get into the pantry except by standing in a big dish of potatoes.

Now where did I go wrong?

Now, to think of something cheerful: the postman lost his balance on his bike when he was trying to see up the slit in the front of this new dress of mine.

I have finished
The Female Eunuch
and liked it and admired Germaine Greer for her courage. I do think though that it is cruel to desert children even for a revolution.

Because Hugh has been good I relented and have let him have two white mice. He was overjoyed. He called them Simon & Garfunkel. But Simon died next morning. Hugh came home from school ill with grief. He is better today. I wrote a note saying he had stomach ache; heartache is not so easily excusable.

Keep away from evil and bombs, Lynn. Love from Kate.

Looking round the garden

means there’s always an ideal

which spoils what is.

Planting delphiniums, rhubarb, gypsophila

beside pink poppies are optimistic

dreams—there’s always an ideal

which spoils what is.

Playing hopscotch, praying, teaching,

writing—everything’s a struggle.

Racing yourself on the beach, counting

steps

where the sea creams—there’s always

an ideal

which spoils what is.

In the sky weeping horses slide away

fire tinges the horizon as darkness pales.

The bay curves round the reef

where Cook and Flinders found

by scraping beams—there’s always an

ideal

which spoils what is.

Every day solitude

a white crown of flowers rots.

Covering the table made of glass

is poetry a grail

in reams—there’s always an ideal

which spoils what is.

In fever crawling to the bath in darkness

I got stuck behind the door.

A labyrinth of rooms I couldn’t see

up, up away from helplessness crawling.

Water, the world’s poetry.

Stand behind a waterfall and it

no longer seems—there’s always an

ideal

that spoils what is.

Kate, hide your rejoicing, let the frog

reach the cleaned-out pond.

Lie quietly while his call

redeems—there’s always an ideal

that spoils what is.

A
very old neighbour came into this garden some months ago. ‘Oh!’ she said, looking around in shock. ‘You’ve got the job ahead of you, haven’t you?’ I was hurt by this because to me it was, as Auden said of his lover, entirely beautiful. I didn’t say that, to me, a garden clipped and mowed, with only one small trimmed tree, no shade, no wantonness, is not entirely beautiful at all. But to the owner it is and that’s the lesson for me. But, by God, as I walk by those gardens, I long to plant a dozen trees, and in my mind I do. So now, unbeknown to the owners, the street is full of trees; they scrape the sky with their lovely branches, birds call and swoop from tree to tree. Children walking to school walk in cool shade, and sometimes they reach up and take down an orange, and at other times they sit in the shade in the gutter waiting for a parent in a car.

It can tangle with the others: the thought came to me as I dug a hole for the English rose. And that weird tangle surprised me, because in the past I’ve tried to keep air around the roses, thinking them the asthmatics of the garden. But now I see they can grow and tangle, reaching upwards in chaos. When Peri came to stay a fortnight ago, she kept saying, as she always does, ‘You’ve got such growth! You’ve got more growth here than I’ve got on the farm.’ She means in Queensland at ‘Bend of the River’, where she pours on organic fertilisers. Then she said, ‘I can’t get things to grow over paths. No man will ever let me have things run wild. They are drawn towards the tidy. It drives me mad.’ So I cheered up, having thought she might think the wildness a sign of neglect, which, of course, it is.

If you want to write a book, stay home. There is nothing like getting on trains or planes or hopping into cars for delay.

I was muttering this to myself as I stood up, rubbing my back which was sore from tearing up weeds that morning. In the last few months I have hardly been home. The Olympics had something to do with it, though not entirely. But today I planted basil, radicchio and lettuce. Terry had been thinning out his plants and
tossing away what he didn’t need. The idea upsets me, the waste of it. For years I wouldn’t eat bean sprouts because it seemed cruel to stop the plant having a chance at life. But I don’t have the same trouble with weeds. All of life seems ‘yes’ and ‘no’. I think one thing and immediately another seems true. Is this the beginning of wisdom?

Basil, the king of herbs, has self-sown all through Terry’s vegetable garden. Yet I have taken the dried heads of his basil, shaken them on the earth and nothing has happened. Perhaps it was too early in the spring.

Today I am making yoghurt and also yeast tart bases. There is something thrilling about turning one thing into another and having it grow within hours. The yoghurt is easy and two or three litres grow in the sun within six hours. The trick is not to pollute it by stirring with an unsterilised spoon. If you bring as much milk as you want yoghurt to the boil, it will sterilise the pan and the milk. Even though the milk is already sterilised, boiling it serves two purposes. First, it heats the milk to begin the bacterial changes, and second, it sterilises the pan. Then, when the milk has cooled and reached blood temperature, tip in about five hundred millilitres of good shop-bought plain yoghurt, trying all the while to make it pour in blobs or drips, to mix better with the milk. Nothing more need be done except keep it warm for six hours. You can swill the pan around from time to
time to help the blending, if you wish. If it is not a sunny day, the pot can be put over a pan of warm or hot water and checked for temperature from time to time. And that’s it—yoghurt.

When taking yoghurt from the pan, it is best to pour, not spoon it out, and so keep the mass sterile. You can make labna cheese from this by simply pouring the cooled yoghurt into a sieve lined with muslin and leave it to drip above a dish overnight. In the morning the result is labna, a white cheese that can be made into little balls with a sterile spoon and kept in olive oil in the fridge for two or three days. Again, don’t pollute the jar by using anything unsterilised to take out the balls. They can be rolled in chopped chives or other herbs and served as part of an antipasto platter.

Now here is a coincidence. Wondering how to spell a word, I have just now idly turned to a magazine on the table and opened it at the recipe for labna. I had no idea there was a recipe for that in those pages. Sometimes I think that simply speaking or writing of a thing makes it appear. From talk comes action. I’ve made it a motto. That, along with ‘Put things in envelopes’ has proved useful.

‘I’ll make that woman some shortbread,’ my mother used to say, tying on her apron. She was acting on one of her strongest mottos: ‘A little help is worth a ton of sympathy.’ It would be for some woman whose child
had drowned in a dam or whose husband had been rolled on by a tractor, or some other tragedy.

There is a pool of apricot nasturtiums outside the French windows on the back deck, they are climbing through the mandarin tree and the tall fronds of the Claire rose. I did not know that nasturtiums will climb metres if left alone and will decorate trees, just as roses can.

The great thing is, I now see, to let things be. Some of the best effects come from neglect. Tidiness is a form of death. But what is love but the paying of attention? Yet, in the garden, it is often the thing that is not noticed that, left alone, finally gives the deepest pleasure. That is a paradox.

Then there is the moral question of snails. Is it better to poison them, to drown them in dishes of beer, to squash them? Unless a swirl of snail pellets is left around a magnolia late in August or early in September, there will only be leaves of lace left. And then, after two weeks, the job needs repeating. Squashing mating snails seems vicious. Sometimes I wonder if there isn’t an element of envy. Or perhaps that miserable impulse, deeply hidden but the more powerful for that, of pleasure in the destruction of innocence.

And then the phone rang. It was Nan Evatt, my friend from Leura. She said in passing, ‘You know, plants are healthy and happier when they are grown close together. You can see it, their leaves are greener; it is as if they like the company of others.’ I said that she ought to know that this would go straight onto the page and she laughed.

Mulch as love. That’s a new idea. A man on the radio, speaking about the development of character in people and using nature to illustrate this, said that if a plant is left to grow naturally, without extra water or fertiliser, it will develop a strength rather like character in a person. However, if fertilised or watered too much, the plant will be weakened into keeping shallow roots that allow it to fall in wind. So, he reckons, if you really care for a plant, you will not spoil it by such indulgences, but merely give it mulch.

Later. I have been out looking. I was wondering how the roses I transplanted two days ago were faring. Yesterday, one had wilted. But today the plant has lifted its head. In the night I decided to dig up the big orange hibiscus called Surfrider. Too many discussions and too much time has been spent on it for too little effect. I decided in the night that if I put in the pink robinia, which is five metres high, pot-bound and not wanted by Peri for whom I got it, the hole from the hibiscus will be filled well and the pink flowers will mingle with the
tallest olive tree. Now, of course, I can hardly wait to start digging. But it’s a big job and must wait.

Peri rang a week ago and asked if the Corrimal nursery might have an advanced yellow robinia as they are very expensive in Sydney. Things in the country are sometimes cheaper. So when Tabitha at the nursery dragged out the huge plant, I didn’t care that it was pink and took it anyway. But it’s not what Peri wants. And I now do. The pink robinia Nan gave me years ago in a pot at Leura is in bloom near the front verandah. When I told Nan this today, she gave a happy cry, as she thought it had died long ago.

Cold and wet in the mountains today, damp here. Which is why I came.

On my brother Tucker’s desk is a sign which reads: ‘The best fertiliser for land is the owner’s feet.’ So when I was out on matron’s round today, I remembered to dead-head the roses. I always thought this was done to stop the rose putting its energy into seeds rather than growth. But in
Botanica’s Roses
I read that it is to trick the plant into making more blooms. It used to be thought that cutting the stem of the bloom back hard was best, but now it’s thought that just taking the head at a small swelling below is best. Lieutenant Colonel Ken Grapes writes in his chapter in this book, ‘Recent trials, however, have clearly established that the more foliage a rose plant bears, the better its performance,
and it is now recommended that the dead flower heads be snapped off at the abscission layer…This is a revolutionary new method that applies to all large-flowered roses. Not only does the rose come back into flower between flushes more quickly, but with appreciably more flowers.’ He goes on to say that this principle should be used when dead-heading cluster-flowering roses. He has an impatient attitude to roses that are not performing well, rather as an inefficient new soldier might be viewed: ‘If a rose performs poorly and continually gets disease, it is a pain in the neck and should be thrown on the bonfire. In some countries, this is called “shovel pruning”.’ So, in the good soldier’s ideal rose garden, if you are out of step, you’re out of line and you’ve got to go. But soldiers and nurses are trained differently. On hatching day, it was my obsession to run around behind my father’s back, peeling shells from emerging chickens to save them from the dreadful bin. This was because all the chicks not fully emerged by an hour decreed by a clock, some human convenience and a date went into the bin. I couldn’t bear it. Half out, covered in wet black feathers like commas, squawking and thrusting towards life, why shouldn’t they be given a chance?

However, my father was acting on a healthy, honest, survival-of-the-fittest ethic which all farmers need to practise, especially if they are going to sell the young.
But there’s many a chook alive today that owes its life to a fourteen-year-old girl saving an ancestor long ago on a Gawler poultry farm.

The idea of the bonfire of roses is interesting. Maybe it’s still done in the English countryside but garden fires are banned here. But, my God, this soldier knows about roses. For twenty years he has been Secretary-General of the Royal National Rose Society. He runs the world-famous ‘Gardens of the Rose’ at St Albans, where international trials for new roses are held, aimed at testing the truth of many widely held ideas.

Butterflies concealing bombs. It’s such an original idea that I keep laughing when I think of it and I laugh also because I was told of it in such a way. Yesterday at the station, on the way back from the shops, I was leaning over the fence, staring at the weeds and thinking about them, when an elegant old woman paused and said, ‘Pansies, are they?’ I said that, yes, there were pansies there as well as other flowers. ‘They blow in on the wind,’ she said. I replied that these were actually planted, feeling a vague sense of pride, I suppose, and not wanting her to think the whole garden had been an act of nature.

‘Do you have children?’ she asked.

‘Well, mine are grown, but I have grandchildren.’

‘Well,’ she said, as we walked across the train line together, ‘you must warn them that if there is a war,
they are hiding bombs underneath butterflies and flowers. You warn them.’ I said I would and came home thinking of the strange ways of madness, its beautiful and terrifying originality. She was not an unhappy old woman, not at all. She was alone, and seemed well. In fact, she was so normal, I am beginning to think she might be on to something that’s been kept from me. But they’d have to be very small bombs. What would it be like to be the only sane person in a world full of the mad?

On the matter of weeds: I feel for the first time since Philippa stopped working in this garden, because she moved, that I am managing them. For a long time I was worried because I could not see how I could ever keep them at a certain level. There were more and more because, although weeding was done, it wasn’t enough. A simple bit of arithmetic. I keep thinking of what my brother Tucker said, when I asked him after a small rain during the eight-year drought they’ve had, how, if the cattle eat the new grass, there can be enough seeds left when this goes on for years. He said, ‘Nature always provides more than enough.’ Like sperm, I thought, thinking of the population of the world. Now I think, when weeding, I must stop this abundance. So as I walk
I snatch at seed heads. At least if the roots aren’t out, and they may come out later, that abundance can be quelled a little.