Playing With Water (21 page)

It was three o’clock when we finished. David came back to collect his tomato plants and walked home alone. A furniture truck had arrived in the street leading to the station and had blocked it entirely. I told David it was there, and how he squeezed around it I do not know.

Without sight, everything has a different perspective. But the deeper things remain the same. I keep trying to imagine David’s view of the world. North and south, left and right, day and night, all are altered. But a tree is still a tree and a conversation still a conversation. Even
though it may be punctuated with, ‘Oh, above us now are six pelicans flying behind each other about a metre apart, as if they have measured it.’ And no reply is possible or needed.

Over at the valiant little railway station, where trees and shrubs are kicked, David and I plug on, replanting. For some curious reason, neither of us has become downhearted yet. Perhaps over time we’ve become inured to the death of trees because we’ve learnt that when one is torn up or broken, we can replant two.

Inexorable as the sea, we never give up. I think because it’s a vaguely wild thing to be doing, planting a paddock beside a railway line, we are willing to risk loss. The exhilaration of the faintly forbidden cheers us on, as if we were wagging school or hatching some forbidden secret plot like building a hot-air balloon. The fact that David can’t see the trees and can only feel their new growth when I put his hands on the leaves, or when I pull a branch over to his face, doesn’t affect his ardour at all.

We sit in the shade of a gum we planted ages ago by the platform, David being careful not to hit his head on the platform when he stands up, and drink tea poured from the thermos and eat buns and cake, talking over the news he gleans from Alan Jones on radio.

Sometimes when I decide to alter the shape of the garden, for instance to widen the section by the station steps and to get rid of an unused path, David, who is immensely strong, simply picks up the old wooden railway sleepers that form the shape of the garden and lugs them around as if they were matchsticks, while I try to tell him where it needs to go, nimbly dodging around to avoid the lurching sleeper.

There is now a station rule that we must dress in orange jackets, so recently I helped David put his on while I did up my own. Both soon fell down around our waists as they went on back to front. As David trundled barrow after barrow of old lawn clippings across the line to mulch the trees and roses, I called to him to keep going, not to stop and not to veer off the path. I am at my happiest shouting, mulching, loading and feeling that we are winning the battle to get the trees to grow.

Sometimes I wonder what will happen when we can’t garden any longer or one of us moves away. I think then that it is on the trees I must concentrate, as they will outlast us, and whatever happens down below them, what weeds, what Paddy’s lucerne or kikuyu grass overtakes the land, the trees will stand. The rest can be mowed and the frogs can croak in the creek among the rushes and the lilies.

After about three hours David and I wheel our barrows across the road with me shouting at the traffic
to let us by. We part at the corner, going home to bath and, in my case, to rest.

Among the stones and grass on the western side of the line, a peach tree we planted blooms all pink, and the Claire rose and Souvenir de la Malmaison bloom, also pink, wildly throwing their branches and their petals in the wind. Wild and free as their ancestors once were.

A bird is singing sweetly. A bulbul. In
Silas Marner,
the index calls a bulbul a nightingale, which is a puzzle as the nightingale sings a longer song than this bird. They dart around with their black topknots, like a pen nib.

Yesterday Tabitha at the nursery walked around helping to choose a range of plants to try for a perennial border. It was her last day at work, as she is going to study landscaping full time. I will miss her.

The old rough lavender bushes against the side of the house by the path will go and this trial lot will be planted in their place. The theme is a dusky reddish-pink and while I got enough to cover only about two metres, if that, it cost over fifty dollars, so I see it will be expensive to do the whole side, if this works. I started reading the instructions on some plants, which say to put the tallest plants at the back. This makes me laugh, as it seems obvious.

I have been out tearing at the lavender. The smell is everywhere and the plant is hard to budge. I brought in the labels from the new plants to write them here. At the back Siskyou Pink
(Gaura)
will shelter pink
Echinacea purpurea,
called Kim’s Knee High, which is a dwarf variant of the medicinal herb. ‘Very alluring to butterflies,’ the label says. Then Egyptian Star Flower
(Pentas lanceolata),
in pale pink, will have beside and around it, perhaps (I have to see how they go, away from the placement Tabitha made on the shop counter), the red-tipped grass called
Imperata cylindrica rubra.
And beside these will be a dark brownish-red sedum. In the front, a band of white flowering dark leaf miniature begonias.

This is the look that professionals, and those in the know, get, and now I am on my way towards it. All this because in Mornington I saw Paula’s
Sedum,
Autumn Glory, and bought one. That, I forgot to say, will be among these plants, towards the back, because it is a dusky mushroom-pink and should meld with them.

Great-grandfather’s stamp collection

A gold sovereign

My mother’s silver bracelet (in a sand dune)

Friends

Watches galore

Some hearing

Opportunities

A brace of lovers

Several stone

Parents

A dinner set (at Central Station)

A husband

Luggage

Recipes

My father’s moth-eaten maroon woollen bathers

Teeth

Desire for revenge.

B
less Ali Gripper. She put the fear of God into me. A journalist on the
Sydney Morning Herald,
she has rung every six months or so for the last two years to see if she could write about this garden. I did not want her to see it because it was still shabby and not at all what I hoped for. I always put her off and gave her the name and address of somebody who had a good garden. So Ghilly and John got a visit among others.

The last time Ali rang and I put her off, I said I would not do it again, and that if she rang in spring, we’d make a date. This has stirred me mightily.

When Gem Flood came in the front gate one day and said, ‘Oh, I’ve been upset about my front garden, but yours makes me feel better,’ that stirred me too. There’s nothing like seeing something of your own through a friend’s eyes. Be it hair, clothes or garden, it can be a
shock. And it was merely a passing remark, more of personal relief than malice.

I rang concreters and got quotes for a path to the verandah. Fred came and mixed a colour, with two-thirds white and one birch green, which seemed suitable. He poured a valley, a gully, a river of concrete, while Jack and I stood on the verandah and watched.

When it was dry, I rang Murobond and got a colour card for their cement-covering paints. I painted the side path and the verandah with their Ficus, which looked like pale-green felt when it was done, and matched the new path. Ali, see the effect you have had. I painted the iron railing on the verandah with Murobond Aubergine.

Today Margaret O’Hara took me to Fairy Meadow Nursery. There was a sale of gardenias on. Some were a metre high and I bought eight for five dollars each. It seemed like a dream. I ran around loading up a trolley in a sort of trance, a frenzy of pleasure.

It reminded me of the feeling when, as children, my brothers and I found a paddock of mushrooms, and everywhere we looked, there they were. Such abundance. Such luck and pleasure.

Beautiful plants. I planted them at once with eight bags of organic potting mix. Then I rang my friend Kathy Lake (these watery names are real), because I see I need more gardenias and she will kindly drive me to the nursery. Let’s have monoculture at this price.
Stunned with scent, I plan to swagger round like a drunken bee all summer.

Kathy took me to Fairy Meadow. I bought sixteen gardenias and eight more bags of that black compost. Few things have made me happier than lugging that trolley up to the counter. I rang Patricia Harry this morning (who has the best eye I know for colour) and asked her what colours I ought to use with these gardenias. Should I have white alyssum for the borders and blue pansies and white petunias? She paused a moment and said, ‘Blue pansies? Nah…get black ones.’ So I did and it is all planted. Now there are forty gardenias in the garden, with glossy green leaves. All planted by 4 p.m. I’m a wreck.

All week there has been a box of bulbs at the back door, but other matters took me away, so the delphiniums have grown shoots in their packets and the Oriental liliums have pink tips bursting out, everything longing to find its place in the sacred dirt.

I have tipped the box out, so that each time I open the door they lie there in blunt appeal.

Once I saw a friend come home from a trip we’d made to the desert and, walking into her bedroom, she
took her underwear drawer and tipped it out onto the floor. I have always found this a useful method since, and I copied her. It doesn’t exactly work with cutlery but with most other things it’s invaluable.

Six white gypsophila are in the box, a plant I’ve never grown before, and brown bulbs of French shallots, rhubarb and something called the Cut Flower Selection, which must have been a box I ticked back in autumn when I lay on the couch with the Windy Hill’s summer bulb catalogue.

Henry Mitchell, who once had a gardening column in
The Washington Post,
says in a book called
The Essential Earthman
that catalogues are one of the most delightful and addictive things in gardening. One reviewer said of Mitchell that he wrote about gardening the way that Herman Melville wrote about whales.

Last year Oriental and Asiatic liliums were a tremendous success all over the garden. I hadn’t tried a big order before and they bloomed for weeks. (You might think that there is no difference between these liliums but I assure you there is. The Oriental ones are bigger and more lavishly beautiful; very opulent, like a potentate.)

So what works, I plan to repeat—an old gardener’s trick. It has taken me years to learn this or to admit it. I keep saying it but I don’t do it.

For instance, rhododendrons are no good by the sea. I have lost half a dozen and should never have tried them
here. Camellias I thought were cold climate plants but they thrive here and even the meanest garden with cement, a scrap of well-tended lawn and a few glaring azaleas often has a wonderful camellia tree, pruned within an inch of its life but thriving and abundant.

Dorothy, Diana and I walk to Sandon Point on Saturday afternoons and take afternoon tea with us. We watch the brides (there are always brides here) gavotting in the wind with photographers in black suits running beside them on the cliffs. It is an odd thing that, once dressed for a wedding, people alter marvellously and behave in ways they never would otherwise. Grooms pick up their brides and stand with armsful of silk and tulle on the edge of the cliffs, laughing in the wind. The brides pick up their hems and run, waving their bouquets as if fleeing from a horde. Sometimes I wonder what the fathers think, watching their daughters explode into action.

We have so far never seen a whale even though we search the sea and we know they pass regularly, going north to breed or south to feed. But last week Diana remarked that maybe one day we’d see a bride out at sea and whales marrying.

Recently we went to a camellia show in a Boy Scouts’ Hall in Wollongong. The men who compete were there and William and Brad Walker were among them. William, who grew the Laska Beauty I first saw, took us
round and we all bought a plant from the stall. Dorothy and I chose Elgans Splendour, a great pale-pink ruffled flower which I put inside my front gate.

Belinda and Clive Jeffery have come to lunch. I wrote her a fan letter, because when I got down to cooking for one, just boiled chicken and noodles or tuna and rice, I thought if I didn’t try something new I would break out in sores. I opened Belinda’s
100 Favourite Recipes
book and life got a lot better.

What do you make for a food writer? I decided to try something complicated. No reason not to make a difficult situation more so.

Charmaine Solomon’s recipe for fried, stuffed cheese balls seemed just the thing. It involves curdling two litres of boiling milk with lemon; rolling it when cool between your palms until your hands become sticky; stuffing small balls of this with almonds, chilli, coriander and sultanas; frying these balls in oil; and then putting them into a sauce made from fried onions and garlic then mixed with half a cup of tomato paste and some of the whey and a cup of cream. The tricky bit is draining the cheese. This involves hanging it in muslin, which is not easy to buy around here, from the ceiling for a few hours over a pan to catch the whey. Don’t try this at home, as they say on television about the gymnastics.

When Belinda left, I offered her a litre or so of whey, but she sensibly declined. I thought it strange
that you write a letter and end up offering the recipient whey.

Because I told Belinda I’d made Upside-down Tomato, Cheese and Basil Pie a lot, she gave permission for me to quote the recipe. It is a very good dish for lunch or a picnic and will reheat quite well in the oven, but not in the microwave. So here it is:

1 x 800 gram can of tomatoes

225 grams of self-raising flour

1 teaspoon of salt

1 dessertspoon of mustard powder or mustard paste

100 grams of parmesan cheese, finely grated

125 grams of unsalted butter, cut into chunks

50 grams of cheddar cheese, finely grated

2 eggs

¹
/
₂
cup of milk

6 medium-sized ripe tomatoes, preferably Roma, thinly sliced

a handful of basil, shredded

Method:

Preheat oven to 180°C. Butter a shallow, 26-centimetre round ovenproof dish and line the base
with buttered baking paper. Pour the can of tomatoes into a sieve over a bowl and leave to drain. Whiz the flour, butter, salt, mustard and cheeses together in a food processor or rub in your fingers until it is like breadcrumbs. Tip into a bowl. Beat in a separate bowl, the milk and eggs. Make a well in the cheese mixture and pour in the liquid mixture. Mix until it is a fairly stiff batter.

Lie the sliced tomatoes in overlapping circles in the base of the buttered dish until the base is covered. Spread the drained tomatoes over the top and sprinkle them with torn-up basil. Dollop spoonsful of the batter over the tomatoes. With lightly floured hands spread this out evenly, but if there are a few small gaps don’t worry as they will fill as the pie cooks.

Bake for 30–35 minutes. The time will vary depending on how thick your dish is. Test by putting a blade in to see if it comes out clean. When, and only when, it does the pie is ready. Remove and let it sit for 5 minutes before inverting onto a platter. Scatter with extra basil leaves.

(If you wish, you can slice one or two red onions into rings and place onto the base of the dish before the tomatoes, which makes the dish richer and more succulent.)

Peri has come to stay for the weekend. Her station wagon is packed with trees. She has given me three pink-flowering silkwood trees, the pride and joy of Sydney Botanical Gardens. Silkwood
Chorisia speciosa
is written by hand on a white label. The Gardens are now raising and selling them.

There are also a lot of cuttings of begonias wrapped in newspaper, for the dark spots in my garden. I tried these at the station, but the vandals knocked them over too easily. We need stalwart things there. Yet, again, as the garden increases, I feel it will have less damage as it will seem normal to have flowers, trees and shrubs there.

The important thing in public gardening, I’ve discovered, is to be prepared to lose at least three-quarters of the plants (not necessarily while the planting is actually going on, as that would be too daunting).

I told Peri how one Saturday, after lunch, I was waiting for a train to Sydney and I saw a group of boys wearing back-to-front baseball caps jumping up and down on the benches on skateboards. I realised what had happened to the tall red geraniums beside the steps leading up to the ticket office. There is a steep ramp here and the boys tried to skate down it. But it is so steep, none could do it and they fell off into the geraniums. I saw that it was not malicious, merely that
the plants cushioned the falling. This cheered me up, because these children have nowhere to skate: the streets and paths aren’t safe, there is no purpose-built rink for them and the station is perfect. They wait till Tom has gone.

I walked around my back garden with Peri, looking for a place to plant a silkwood, as they are superb trees. When we joined the Friends of the Botanical Gardens earlier this year, we were taken for a walk by volunteers and they showed us the silkwood trees in flower. The volunteers we saw later, in their pinafores and hats, were digging up the silkwood seedlings under the trees and potting them.

I thought that if you had an apartment, it would be a good way to go on gardening, if you could be a volunteer, and you would learn a lot too. Some of these women are very knowledgeable about gardens. One of the women we had morning tea with, Margaret Stead, had her own radio talk-back gardening program.

We have decided there isn’t any room here for one of the trees. It would only be squashed. So I will put all three in at the station, and may heaven keep them safe.

Weeded the lawn. Is this madness? Winter-grass is everywhere. It is obsessive and feels like doing a jigsaw.
This weeding, at night I can’t stop thinking about it. In bed, I see the weeds and keep prising them out. Am I wasting my time? I’ve got a sore muscle on my elbow and this wrist feels broken.

Remembering the idea that with one hour of work a day, an acre of bush can be weeded in a month (or is it a year?), I weed the lawn from about three to four, when the children are walking home from the school a few doors away. Their voices rise like waves at recess and lunchtime. The cries of children.

A day of lilies. Last week, on the way to Diana’s on my bike, I saw a creek with arum lilies in bloom. Today I decided to take the barrow and a spade and go and liberate a few. (The road over the creek is to be widened and the lilies will be covered when that happens.) Squelching down into the mud, where the lilies grow in wild abundance, I dug and lugged them one clump after another up the creek bank into the barrow. The mud came up over my knees, and as I tugged the root ball upwards it had to be held against my chest like a child to stop the leaves and flowers falling from the base. As I worked that Michael Flanders and Donald Swann Hippopotamus song about glorious mud cooling the blood, went over and over in my head. Then I thought,
this is happiness. We came from the mud and we return to it.