A shower of rain falls. A promise of more to come. I’ve worked my body hard. Load a barrow full of soil and I’m heavy breathing. I move three at a time before I go around this obstacle by finding another task - just as important - which allows my smoking lungs to recover. Don’t tax cigarettes - just ban them. Any junkie will tell you that nicotine is far more vicious than heroin.
I rake the soil and the generous beds take greater shape. I am on holiday. I work part-time and it’s not too hard to have two weeks away. For a few ‘aways’ I went to Sapphire for the month of August - beautiful in Central Queensland - still generally cold in the Blue Mountains. This time my ‘away’ has been in the garden putting in the last large brush strokes of my energy into a co-creative effort with nature stretching fourteen years.
I’m taking a break from making part of a tree disappear. It’s a job which takes a few hours with secateurs, shears, a lawnmower with the blades in need of a change .... and a saw. We can’t burn off here in the mountains. There’s sound reason for this but as we are also responsible for fire hazard reduction around the home it’s a problem. So I end up mulching the twigs and leaf with the lawnmower and creating a woodpile which will disappear into the garbage bin over time. Sounds wasteful but the Blue Mountains is a fire hazard on a gigantic scale. Our valleys are immense - not the sort of valleys which get carved by rain. If they go up it will get very hot along the ridges upon which our towns and villages are placed.
I’ve lived in rooming houses. Odd places and uncertain situations. I’ve been reduced - although I never saw it that way - to having a few house plants to work with. Decades in rented places where I’d quite often move more than once a year and usually not by choice. It’s where I started growing flowers. They’re cheerful, cheap and flower before the lease runs out. It doesn’t take much effort to start and then nature does its bit.
In this garden - a tree fern, woodland garden - the bulbs of my childhood, snowdrops and daffodils, jonquils and bluebells will give way to the more exotic tiger and canna lilies. The petunias, pansies, dianthus, and polyanthus will be splashing their colours across the ground, with greater abundance. This is two months away and now it all relies upon nature and a kind cycle of weather. I’ve done a whole series of tasks in the process of moving eight ton of soil around. Clumps of bulbs have breathing space and very little has been wasted.
As the majority of the tree ferns are of the slow growing variety which add two perhaps three sets of fronds a year, this garden will be at its ‘fullness’ in twenty to thirty years. A small rain forest oasis for some other human to have a ‘lease’ on.
Canna lilies look like they belong in the jungle. I have a three metre circle of them enclosed by a discrete, concrete border. They become a jungle if given free rein. Spears of colour, reds and yellows stand the height of a man with leaves the size of forearms. Now they just look gentle and innocuous as baby plants at knee high.
I lifted and straightened the fountain. It’s not fancy but it’s beautiful and the birds do actually bathe, drink and play before my eyes. When I first heaved the basin bowl into place, the underlying soil settled at an angle which has bugged me since. Lots of hmm ..... and dig a bit, hmm .... and dig a bit and eventually the whole thing is raised a few inches and is near as damn perfect as I can manage. Not that it looks any different to a casual inspection but me and the birds know.
My pause in music continues. Any creative effort is elsewhere employed and I’m happy with that. It’s the first few days of Spring here in Australia.