Playing With Water (23 page)

Yes, I have had my successes. You, reader, have heard much of failure, perhaps because failure has a quality to it that brings out long detail. The fascination with the doomed, the wondering, the puzzle of it. Maybe it is simply a melancholy streak, or it may be false modesty. Hard to know.

The roses have arrived for the station garden. Denis pulled up in a van and handed the pots to David, who had to climb the fence as the gate was locked. It was thirty degrees, but we planted all the roses because they may have been stolen if left out of the ground. David dug and I planted in furious haste, because at noon my friend Antonia was arriving to stay from Melbourne.

Among the kikuyu grass and weeds the glorious roses went in, with me chanting their names so that one of us might remember which was which. I buried their names beside them so they would not call attention to themselves and back-filled the holes with rose compost. Sometimes I led David over rocky ground among geraniums, trees and daisies to where a hole was needed. At others, I laid beer bottles, which people had tossed in from the platform, to show him where to dig.

Outside on a fence in the car park we put Mermaid, a beautiful single cream rose, very thorny and a great climber, and may heaven keep her safe. This rose climbs many metres, very wild and tangly.

Nancy Hayward, a red single rose, bred by Alistair Clark, grows in my friend Clare’s garden in Rose Park, Adelaide. When Mrs Hayward saw the rose she was not pleased; she said it had too few petals. This makes me laugh: it is a brilliant rose, almost magenta red. Clare
grew it from a cutting, just a stick she stuck in the ground. She grew ten Iceberg roses in the same way. ‘You only need to dig a hole with a knife and put the cutting in and, for the first year, keep the water up to it,’ she told me.

When I stayed with Clare earlier this month, while walking the dog we saw rose clippings jutting out of a rubbish bin with a pink bud on one. We took them home and Clare put one in beside her back verandah post. That’s how easy it is. And if it doesn’t work, not a lot has been lost. But most will grow. You can’t do it with new roses, they say, but I haven’t yet tested that. And, after all, Nancy Hayward isn’t really new, just mid-twentieth century, so it must be possible with some.

Now at the station, there’s a paddock of David Austin and old roses, and that, I reminded myself as I worried over them and the roughness of it all, is how roses first grew. They may feel they’ve simply come home.

Nobody was at the station office to give us a key, or to unlock the hose shed for us, so we had to abandon the plants without watering them in.

My friend Antonia arrived on a train and sat on a log talking (we haven’t met for twenty years) while David and I planted the last three roses. We walked home with red faces and a barrow full of empty black plastic rose containers and beer bottles. If I had been told a year ago
that I would have twenty old roses to plant, I would have thought it a miracle, and in some ways perhaps it is.

So hot that I woke thinking of the unwatered roses and thirty-degrees forecast. At nine Antonia (who is an artist gardener and has made big installations at Mildura where her ancestors, the Chaffey brothers, began orchards) and I walked over to the station with buckets. From a tap on the platform, which, luckily, had the handle left on it, Antonia handed down the buckets of water to me standing in the paddock below. Everything got half a bucket of water and then we walked down to the beach with the buckets still in our hands.

There had been a storm and seaweed lay in heaps on the sand. After washing the seaweed in the sea we filled the buckets and brought it home. Then Antonia told me how to make liquid seaweed fertiliser.

I wrote a poem to send with Christmas cards today. I began it a month ago, after a walk in the small park next to the station, around the trees that the council, local schoolchildren and I planted. The children, in their green uniforms and hats, ran like a flood of water over the grass as they saw the men and me standing among the seedlings
beside the truck. One or two trees didn’t make it into the holes that Dave, the council worker who helped me with my garden by building the side path, had dug.

All the advanced box trees we planted around the East Woonona Circle car park were torn up within three weeks. But those close together on the edge of the drain near the fence, planted there on Philip Zweers’ advice, survived. ‘They seem to make a microclimate and to safeguard each other,’ he had said. And so it proved to be. We did lose about a third, but those that lasted are tall now.

‘What is in the East?’

                    Elizabeth Bishop.

What is in the East?

Hope, that’s what.

Dawn too

and camels—

they always strode

from East to West

embroidered across

my brothers’ shirts.

The washing line

lies in the eastern portion

of the garden

right behind the shed.

Sheets flap there like tents

and in the farthest paddock

to the East are all the sheep

that the drought has left.

The dried-out creek

lies in the East

an arid metaphor

for a time drained

of so much hope and yet

the East exists

and cannot be erased.

Stars emerge as if on strings

pulled up and down on whim

by kings.

The fact is there’s always

something hopeful in the East

but only some can see it

and first they need to look.

Five willows two olives

ten gums four figs

two melaleucas six jacarandas

three silkwoods.

Trees

little dogs

barking and yapping

at the sky.

I count as I walk

by the creek.

The trees meet me

the mother

the lover who dug the hole

and watered them in

who desires them to grow.

One gum was my sick stick

wrapped in a rug

of barbed wire

safe from the vandals.

Now it is taller than I

and circles the sky

silver and rustling.

It nestles its roots

deeper and deeper

stitching the earth to the sky.

I bury my face

in its leaves

and say Oh my love

Oh my great tree.

The willows green swans

grown from sticks

drink in the creek

and sprout leaves

and soon branches.

Willows, I wait for you

to lift the great fans

of your wings.

You are family to me

harmonious children.

I can feel my hair

turning green

rustling and glistening

my feet growing down

arms high

laden with air and mirth.

Y
esterday Jack and I walked around the Botanical Gardens in Sydney. I looked at the silkwood trees, the offspring of which Peri bought and gave me for the railway station. These are native to South America and are thriving in the Gardens. They had immense pink blossoms when we first saw them, and the seedlings, which sprang up around them, are what we now have.

Here at home, honeyeaters are in the creamy Moonlight grevillea on the edge of the drive. It has grown very fast: in three years it has reached roof height and is full of flowers the colour of clotted cream.

David and I have had weeks of talk about a tulip tree he bought, on my advice, for his front garden. When I read out the description of it growing twelve metres across and extremely tall, he hesitated, because it could
touch his roof’s gutters. For weeks the tree sat in its bag on the back lawn, until I took Peri round to give an opinion. She said that it was far too big and it would be best to plant something smaller. A
Gordonia
perhaps. We had tried a
Gordonia
before, but it had suddenly died, because, we think, the clay soil gathered too much water, being in a small dip on the edge of the lawn.

David went to Canberra for a few days, and in that time the tulip tree, leaning in the shade of the shed, collapsed. I found it dried out, a mere set of tall sticks. David watered it for weeks, but nothing happened. One day he said he was going to plant it in the back garden: ‘I am going to dig a very big hole. As big as a rubbish bin.’ Suddenly I felt sick of this tree and knew it was hopeless—digging a hole a waste of time. I tried to disguise my irritability and said that at least the hole would be useful for another tree when the tulip tree didn’t grow. It was as dead as a dodo.

I’m eating humble pie. The tulip tree is sprouting. David fingers the buds and small leaves and says, ‘These are leaves, aren’t they?’ Certainly they are. I told Peri and she said, ‘Oh, God. Never mind, it will take years to grow.’ (Meaning it will shade the whole backyard in its fullness.)

I took some self-sown tomato seedlings around to David a few months ago. He has a small square-fenced vegetable plot where he dumps all weeds and lawn
clippings, along with a blown-down wattle tree that he cut up. Now the tomatoes are covered in fruit. We staked them, tying them up with stockings. The fences, covered in vines, keep this area very hot and it is also that which makes everything grow fast. We found two ripe cauliflowers among the weeds, which we picked; one a bit too yellow to eat, but the smaller one was perfect. These had been from a punnet of seedlings given by Denis as too advanced to sell. We had forgotten about them and, with no attention at all, they flourished, hidden by the weeds. This is the best soil I have ever seen. Soft, full of worms, warm and lush. I could get into a bed of it myself. And, of course, will one day, like it or not.

There is something about summer that makes me crave my mother’s rice salad. Here is the recipe. She wrote it in her book, calling it ‘Shop Rice Salad’, because she made it by the gallon for my brother’s chicken shop, years ago in Gawler.

1 kilo of white rice, plus one cup. Cover rice with water to a thumb-knuckle length over the rice. Boil
for ten minutes. Allow to stand, covered, ten more minutes. Pour cold water over it through a colander and leave to drain and to cool. Then mix one grated onion, two tablespoons finely chopped parsley, half a bunch of celery (cut finely), three large carrots (grated and covered with the juice of one lemon and one orange). Add one cup of sultanas and each chopped green and red capsicum.

Dressing:

1 dessertspoon curry powder

1 dessertspoon dry mustard

1 cup sugar

³
/
₄
cup olive oil
1 cup vinegar

Mix these things and pour over the rice, which has been put in a serving bowl. Add the vegetables last, stirring gently. At the end of the recipe my mother has written…‘Good’.

Diana has gone to Cyprus to write a book about the archaeological dig of the fourth-century theatre. It’s been minus eight degrees in Cyprus. She fled the bushfires and only just caught her flight by taking a long trip around the fire. Whenever I see a white
Gaura
flowering I think of Diana, because she told me about it growing on archaeological sites.

Today a card arrived from Nicosia, where Diana writes about buying buds of narcissus ‘which have opened with their sweet clean scent filling my room’. She says:

We walked to the main square at midnight on New Year’s Eve, a band playing Theodorakis’ old songs, a few rather patchy fireworks—the people dancing, and suddenly I realised they were migrant workers from Sri Lanka and India. Sikhs in turbans, whirling to Greek music, and beautiful blonde Russian prostitutes in lace tights; Cyprus a melting pot as ever.

I went to the markets in the old city on the first day here; the smell is so familiar, a mixture of incense, souvlaki and petrol fumes.

A great day in the garden. I rode to Corrimal and bought pink and white and blue
Lisianthus
for the front gate bed. A bargain of white gladioli,
Ismene festalis
Inca lily (I am trying it again after no luck with the first) and white
Nerine
lilies. I moved a small sick rose which has never thrived from outside the front gate.

On the matter of that dream of mine, to have a hedge of cream and white roses like the one I’d seen on television, it was not successful. Inside the picket fence they got only morning sun. Roses are very obliging
plants and will endure a lot, but they cannot cope without six to eight hours of sun a day. At Leura, I tried every kind that were supposed to be able to manage with less sun. The only people I ever saw at Leura who had really great roses were Nan Evatt, the nuns in the mall and Cheryl Maddocks. One rose has driven me mad, and every time I return I see it beside a pergola in the mall; it is Altissimo, a great red rose, and it has bloomed once, as far as I know, since it went in a decade ago. It is in the shade. I want to leave a note in the letterbox, but do not dare. The rose deserves a note. The house is dark terracotta pink with mullioned windows. Who will move the rose?

Jane in Adelaide, where everybody, from the best to the worst gardeners, has radiant roses, had a climbing Maria Callas over her front verandah and that’s a sight to see. It’s twenty metres long at least. Highly scented too.

I moved the hedge of pale roses by the front fence and spread them about in sunny spots and this saved them. The lesson is hard to learn. Over and over, I see that even people who know a lot plant things where they are going to have a hard time.

I didn’t know that violets could be weeds. Pulling them from the trunk of the other pink robinia at the front bed, I saw that it has collar rot. I have poured water and fertiliser on that tree. Nothing made any
difference. Nan, who gave it to me, said to have a look at the place where the trunk meets the earth. There it was, all spongy and sick. Denis told me to use white oil. He delivered a bottle of it. I couldn’t see that there were instructions, such as a booklet taped or stuck on the back, so poured it holus-bolus onto the neck of the tree. Kill or cure. Nan says she will give me another robinia, but I am keen to save this one, so I wait.

Barbara and Ruth rang from Peel to say they have taken the honey from their bees and that they were badly stung, more than any other of the three years they have kept bees. It is a bit too late in the season, Barbara says. They got eleven litres. With no poisons in the house, not even fly spray, and none on the trees, they can sell the honey as certified organic, if they decide to. So far, they have always given it away or bartered it. They were properly dressed for the job, Barbara says, but sweat made their clothes stick to them, and the bees stung through the cloth.

I have been putting out seed for birds on a piece of wood nailed to a corner of the deck railing. A white cockatoo, unlike any I have ever seen, comes. It looks as though it has been rolling in ashes. I can’t tell if it is old or young. They live to be about a hundred, I think. My grandmother had one in a cage on her back verandah
and it was almost as old as she was, she said. Diana taught me this trick of nailing a board to the railing. She has lorikeets by the dozen, many white cockatoos, which eat the railing, and after they have gone pigeons come. Now green parrots come here, a few minutes after the white cocky. They all come within half an hour of the seed being put out. I do it silently, so I can only say what I have said before: it must be that they smell it.

A huge black fat crow was strutting around the lawn this afternoon and I wondered if I had upset the balance by putting out kitchen scraps. I don’t want the nightmare plague of crows that Peri has on her farm.

Christopher Lloyd’s book,
Colour for Adventurous Gardeners,
has come in the post. I read him on white. A great burden of unsullied purity of white. Cold, staring and assertive, it draws your eye but makes you wish it hadn’t. It is the colour of ice and snow and once was the colour of funeral flowers. Professional landscape gardeners of the worst kind are wild about white. They have a formula of some dark green
Murraya
with glossy leaves, white flowers and scent, white agapanthus, usually the small variety, and a line of black mondo grass and that’s a garden. I think you might be able to do better yourself even if you don’t know much. At least a garden done by a person without a formula would look interesting. Don’t worry, I have had my flirtations with white. I still like it, but it needs blue and some other colours. Blue is a
wonderful colour for furniture or buildings in a garden. It’s what Henry Mitchell recommends.

Because I am going to leave self-sown white cosmos all through the back bed, I have decided to sprinkle Peri’s wild zinnia seeds through. She got several ounces of this seed from a gardener at Nimbin, when we went to see a collective community a year ago. I was afraid that it might become a weed and spread into the native bush near the sea. But it has been a mild, though blazing bright plant, and gives the most wonderful zinging orange splatter to a bed.

I once gave a book by Gertrude Jekyll to Peri for a birthday present and she was so upset she said she went to bed for two days. Her Mosman garden and her farm garden are full of brazen colour. The diagrams Gertrude drew of coloured plants, arranged as a painter would, made Peri feel her garden was a failure. But Peri was a bit before her time. Colour: purple, orange, scarlet, dark blue, yellow; it all goes together now.

The Jekyll book was another gift that didn’t hit the spot. I have never given Peri anything that she has truly liked or found useful. She doesn’t say that, of course, it is just that later on I work it out.

As I stood on the deck this morning, staring at the garden, I saw that the coastal banksia, one of the first trees planted here at the same time as the olives, is taller than the house. It towers behind the shed, next to the
olive, which has no fruit this year. It must have put all its energy into growth. Out the front, beside the road, both olives have plenty of fruit. I am waiting for some to grow black and then I will harvest the green and black as I did last year.

I couldn’t find a recipe for pickling, but half-remembered reading about buckets of brine soaking the fruit over weeks. I had read Patrice Newell’s book,
The Olive Grove,
where she said something about cutting the olive before soaking. I did that and it was a terrific success.

For about two months the olives lay in a bucket of strong brine which I changed every three or four days, more often at first. Then they were drained and put into jars with garlic, rosemary and olive oil. After about a month, they were ready. People couldn’t tell that they were homemade. It was not a big job to put a slit in each olive and it was this that leached out the bitterness.

Once, in Victoria Park, Adelaide, near where I used to live when married, I was flying a kite with Caro and I took a fresh olive from one of the trees. I spat for half an hour. The taste wouldn’t leave and there was no tap nearby.

The height of summer. A still morning. Only birds calling seem to move the air.

I have decided that two summer crops of flowers in the big back bed may be the best way to manage it. The early big pink poppies fell in the rain and wind, as they always do, and the tall white cosmos fell down after seeding the bed. Now that the barrowloads of cuttings of climbing roses have been taken away, all is bare. I told Peri, on the phone at the farm in Queensland, of my plans for the back bed and that I thought two summer crops, relying on a late summer or early autumn flush, will be the way to do it. As she didn’t tell me not to, I think it might be alright. She has saved me from a lot of mistakes with her advice over the years.