January 3, 2014

The summer heat is like a bully, bearing down on everything, slamming us with its heavy fists. None of the nuance of an autumn morning, where crisp air can hold a warmer hint. Summer pushes its way in, flattens the weak and shrugs past the strong.

Yet somehow, it’s also a time of abundance. I wake up and see a massacre of small flies littered next to my pillow. They were buzzing me so much last night that reading became a noisy, chaotic ordeal, and I turned out the light mid-sentence. I go out to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and there is a puddle of their dead bodies on the floor, in a circle under where the kitchen light was on. They are sprinkled on the table next to the laptop where I was working. Their dead bodies blow in the breeze. I sweep them up into a black pile and throw it out onto the silverbeet. I won’t let so much energy and ex-life go completely to waste.

I go up to the top garden to water the tomatoes before it gets too hot. They get some mulch too, to help them through another day. One clump of tomatoes has either been burnt right off or been eaten by something, possibly grasshoppers. The wallabies don’t like tomatoes, and are even deterred from eating other things by their presence.

Seed packets might say ‘germinates in 14 days, pick in 6 weeks’, but there’s no guarantee. They haven’t factored in the sudden blast of furnace-air, the sudden gust of wind, the wallaby that eats the delicious new shoot or the bandicoot that burrows underneath it, sending its new developing roots out of the nourishing soil and into heartless exposure. They don’t warn you about the heartbreak of getting a seed germinated, planting it out and staking it only to find some creature has bounded through the patch during the night, upturning the stakes and the seedling. Seed packets are aspirational, projecting a mirage on your horizon. Just don’t die of thirst as you try to reach it.

29 December 2013

Many Christmases ago, when I objected to the built-in obsolescence of a pine Christmas tree, one of our beautiful children gave us a Wollemi pine. It was a tiny little tree with a great big certificate. Its recent discovery, or I should say, its recent entry into our known world, overawed me. Could I keep this precious thing alive? Despite its lack of familiarity with the suburbs and their small gardens, it thrived in a pot. It sat under the jacaranda and grew its ancient leaves (leaves? branches? some other technical term?), the new growth extending from the previous year’s leaf (leaf?) in a bright-green flourish, a new crown of leaves (?) appearing at the top. It moved into a bigger pot, almost annually. The trunk thickened, and it became the happy bearer of baubles and tinsel, spending a week or so inside the house every December.

But when we moved out of the suburban house with the suburban garden and became bi-homal, as one friend describes it, with a flat in Sydney and the house at the farm, the fate of the Wollemi pine became uncertain. Although we continued to celebrate Christmas in Sydney, with our obstinately Sydney-based family, there was no room for a Wollemi pine in the flat. The obstacles were even greater at the farm. We have bushy gullies that might suit a Wollemi pine, but we were unwilling to introduce an alien species into them. We have all sorts of trees near the house, but we don’t want big trees – they’re a bushfire hazard, they drop leaves in the tank, they shade the house in winter. We wavered, week by week, unable to decide. Spring came, unseasonably dry, and it was a bad time to plant anything. Rain came, and we dashed around planting fruit trees and all the summer seeds we’d held off on. Whenever there was a high wind the Wollemi pine fell over in its now-inadequate pot. It was becoming battered, neglected. It entered my dreams. It played on my conscience. It endured. It grew a new crown and I felt less culpable until the day I found a grasshopper finishing off the last of the green shoots.

Yesterday we chose a spot, dug a hole, planted and staked the Wollemi pine. It was a hot day, the spot is quite near the house, and we had to tease out the roots ruthlessly. Today the wind is blowing fiercely, and the shadecloth I wrapped around it seems to bow it down, rather than protect it. I hope this is not a memorial to the Wollemi pine, but the beginning of a story of recovery, of rights wronged and neglect redressed. I’m going to water it again now, and put in stakes for the shadecloth. My remorse won’t let me do any less.

22 December, 2013

Talk at Christmas drinks turned to the ‘70s, with one couple reminiscing fondly about their first house, built for $25,000. It was decorated with orange vases filled with pampas grass, seaweed matting and quarry tiles on the floors, a flokati rug over pieces of foam to make a lounge, and a huge chianti bottle. “One day,” they said, “the girls were given a beach ball. They blew it up in the lounge room and before I could even say ‘Don’t throw that in the house’ it had bounced down the spiral staircase. It hit every step of the staircase and went straight into the chianti bottle. When we left that house six years later, we were still picking bits of green glass out of the seagrass matting.” I couldn’t make up a story that would evoke the ‘70s better than that.

Christmas drinks had to be inside, because it was too hot outside. It hasn’t yet reached that heat that sucks the breath out of you, that furnace heat, but it’s close. Cooler air slowly moved in once the sun went down, and we sat outside to feel the heat ebb away. Stars appeared in a hazy sky and we dragged the telescope out to magnify them into glorious brightness, transforming blurry constellations into shining dots that quivered around the edges as if we could see the gases burning.