Earthrise Diary 109

Earthrise Diary 109

The Earthrise Diary

Don Diespecker

‘What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered.’

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). Fortune of the Republic.

Although I’ve not (yet) read Emerson, I’m curious to know why biographical dictionaries describe him (alphabetically) as ‘essayist, philosopher and poet’ because he formulated the philosophy of transcendentalism and in my humble opinion, philosophy would seem to deserve the first mention. However, an opinion may be no more than a sentiment. Never mind: it’s the silly season and I’ve not only been observing certain weeds, but I’ve been very much among them. The gardens here have been sadly overgrown for years and for several reasons, one of which has to do with feral deer grazing my favourite plants while ignoring my splendid collections of weeds. Another and more impressive reason is that the mighty March 2001 flood destroyed and buried my gardens and lawns and I must use gardening archeology to find them again. The original Big Lawn was never entirely flat or at all level except in disparate places; most of it remains an historical rumour because it remains buried beneath about 750-mm of flood loam. Everything changes.
The 2001 flood, having destroyed the lawns also deposited gifts of the river for my consideration and these included a hair-raising assortment of weeds like the dreaded mistflower (seemingly a close relative of the dreaded Crofton weed), and a jolly selection of grass seeds. Some of the grasses are now doing their best to colonize areas that for years have been dominated by powerful ground covers like Tradescantia pallida (previously described). I’ve recently been doing all of the necessary mowing, having recently lost the assistance of my regular mowing person. I’ve set my new motor mower to cut lower and deeper because I want to remove most of the Tradescantia to give the various grasses good opportunities to thrive. I’ve discovered an attractive soft, yet tenacious grass that’s been struggling heroically, apparently since 2001, to make a New Big Lawn and wherever I’ve mowed recently I find evidence of this ‘new’ grass. (I hope I may not be encouraging anything monstrous like the Queensland broad-leafed grass that leaps up more than 2-m in a good growth season and which seeds hugely and as regularly as clockwork every March: the mature root system of this fiendish thing has to be dug out with a mattock and burned, if possible, and anyone who allows it to flourish anywhere near their gardens will rue the day).

Gardens have always been intensely interesting for me: the first garden in my life was at 1129 Oxford Street in Victoria, BC. When I re-visited that city in 1980, a house similar to the one I remember from the 1930s made the address look familiar but the owner assured me it was a replacement house which had been trucked onto the 1129 site after ‘my’ old home was destroyed for some unknown reason. The remembered gardens of my childhood had vanished. There once were loganberries and raspberries growing against the single car garage and on the lawn side of the garage an old apple tree that produced big green apples (each large enough to provide four large quarters for an after-dinner dessert; Dad grew prize-winning dahlias closer to the neighbour’s fence and sometimes sweet-peas on a trellis and he grew vegetables in season between a peat area and the lawn; there were Michaelmas and Shasta daisies at the back gate and the gate opened on to a lane used for access to other garages and wild blackberries grew all the way along the lane. In spring and summer there were gladioli and at the front of the house, forget-me-nots, primroses, foxgloves, pansies and big hydrangea bushes.
The ‘other’ garden of this era was the very public and hugely popular Butchart Gardens (the gardens were made in what had once been a quarry). The climate was atypically mild for Canada and much of Vancouver Island, for me as a child, was like a remarkable and variegated great garden: parks and public gardens were generally colourful for most months except when it was wintry and snowy—spring wildflowers in the woods grew almost to the ocean’s edge at some beaches; local gardeners grew everything that could be grown in the open in that cool temperate climate. (And not forgetting the great ‘gardens’ of the BC forests: pines and firs and gigantic cedars).
In 1937 I saw sub tropical gardens in Panama on the way to Africa and colourful species in Natal and Mozambique and the Transvaal. Wherever we lived—at Pilgrims Rest in the Drakensberg up in the so-called Middleveld of the Transvaal or in Durban on the subtropical Natal coast, Dad always managed to make gardens. I used to be one of his learner-assistants and so earned the right to make small gardens of my own where I could grow flowers and vegetables. And when Pam and I lived in London in the ‘50s (Hampstead), I’ve just remembered, I used to work one or two half days a week, as a gardener, for 3/6 an hour. My employer was the composer/conductor, Edric Cundell (1893-1961) who, in 1956, lived with his family on the ‘hillside’ above central Hampstead. I like the notion of having gardened in Canada, South Africa, the UK and Australia.
I detour into a floral/herbal past because I’ve put much time and energy into gardening this spring and summer and while it’s hot, sweaty and often exhausting, ‘ordinary work’ is also very satisfying—and a garden, for me, is always a pleasure ground. When I was recently asked why I was working so hard outside, my simple answer was that, regardless of the extent to which I was pleasing myself, I was working to assist the garden in becoming itself. The question was repeated: but why? My answer: ‘because the garden deserves to be what it is, itself.’ Perhaps this looks clumsy, but that’s how I feel about the gardens here. When I think about it: I generally sigh with pleasure when I return home; a garden and the great trees have a greatly calming effect on me, particularly when I’ve been driving. And, when relaxed and contemplative, the garden—it’s varied outlooks and prospects, the changing beauty of light, shade and colour—has the power to transform any mood into joy. Aspects of such ‘power’ surely reside, too, in the gardener: to transform land into gardens having both obvious and subtle dimensions of beauty makes for a lively, if not a joyful garden, the garden simply being itself in all of its simplicities and complexities.

So much of this summer seems centered in the weeks from Xmas through most of January and it’s been a hot and humid and often uncomfortable time. I’ve been either inside wrestling with fiction (and using the heat as an excuse to guiltily monitor some (ordinary) Australian cricket and (very good) international tennis on TV) or outside gardening: mowing, raking, axing, digging, cloning and transplanting, planting new grevilleas, pruning, moving barrow-loads of loam, weeding the belvedere—and much more. Most of this ‘gardening’ work has been uncovering, recovering and sometimes discovering what has been hidden or buried. The several-coloured impatiens (once known as balsam) has returned following the disappeared feral deer; after hard raking and mowing and destruction of sundry groundcovers, seedlings of the bleeding heart tree (Omalanthus populifolias) have almost leaped out of their confinement in flood loam and are growing lustily (they thrive in sun or shade and their fruits attract acrobatic brown fruit pigeons).
Now at the end of January, my world is hot, humid with emphatic shades of green varying from eau de Nil to the near-black greens of the bush and the deeply shaded parts of gardens where big trees cut most of the bright light. The days have flown by (as they probably do for all of us conscious of our increasingly Senior Years!).
The overgrown edges of Big Lawn are densely covered in ground covers, weeds, flood debris (including partially buried logs) and, worst of all, the common form of jasmine, (pre the 2001 flood and for years, unmanageable). Jasmine runners have the ability to spread so strongly that they throttle many plants on the ground and also climb big trees and densely envelope not only the crowns but the entire tree; all of the tree’s growth is suffocated; other vines combine and the area is rapidly subdued: big trees begin dying and shedding limbs or they break and come crashing down. The jasmine then invades lawns and mower blades have to be set low. The mix of grass clippings and jasmine has to be re-mowed and kept separate on bare ground from other clippings, mulches and compost. It takes weeks for these materials to become inert; following some interference—digging and scattering—from inquisitive brush turkeys, they eventually leave the piles alone.
One of my objectives is to eliminate groundcovers and jasmine by repeated mowing followed by repeated raking because (theory) much of the litter surrounding grass, i.e., on the ground below the grass tops, is mowed or pulverized leaf litter and bark from the flooded gums (E. grandis) and blood woods and that litter seems to me to sour the soil and the discourage grass growth (whereas the groundcovers love that stuff, it seems). There may be something in this because the grasses I want to encourage are again growing well in mowed/raked areas. Does this look obsessive, dear reader? It sometimes seems so to me, but the alternative is to fuss and fume and curse the groundcovers and litter. Removing that stuff is endless hot hard work, but the lawn deserves to be what it is. A thriving lawn is a happy lawn…

Jan 25 ’09. Yesterday in Sunday Sydney temperatures eased past 40˚C and here, although it was only about 30˚ humidity on my skin felt like an oppressive blanket; movement of any kind produced constant sweat; it’s remarkably easy to dehydrate dangerously in this weather.
Late in the afternoon while swimmers were still cooling off in the pool in front of the house I was (unwisely?) mowing and re-raking next to the old Funnel Web Slopes (which are really the ‘ancient’ hard dry banks marking an earlier course of the river (Darkwood Road cuts through the same material and the house here is built on the old banks). The shrilling of cicadas rises and falls from time to time and mercifully isn’t continuous; twilight and dusk are popular times to remind me of their chorusing. I’ve regularly met a certain (red-belied) black snake on the steep path between lawn and front steps and have learned to bang my boots resonantly; perhaps s-he lives in the stone wall next to the path; and once I met the same snake on the newly cleared ground between the citrus trees and the riverbank (where my piles of clippings are hopefully cooking) and greeted him/her respectfully from a distance. Fortunately for me, this serpent is little more than a metre or so long but it looks spectacularly shiny and healthy. Perhaps we’ll become used to one another and as I diminish with age the snake will grow bigger and more robust… And there are two garden-roaming goannas this summer, one of them almost black (which lurches up a nearby tree whenever I arrive to deposit kitchen scraps nearby); the other, as blond a creature (quite yellow) as the first reptile is a darkly brunette one. There’s been much rain, most of it as storm showers and frogs rattle and croak along the road when I walk by. There was a violent electric storm here on Jan 29, the detonations so great that my pole house literally trembled or vibrated. –That reminds me of having stood thoughtfully one morning on the Richardson’s Bridge walkway (a part of the bridge deck separated from the deck roadway by a hefty baluster rail) watching (and feeling) a concrete truck driving across in my direction. When it passed (I was close to and standing above the first pier on the west side of the bridge) the vibrations were enormous and I was bounced almost off my feet. These big trucks have a rotating drum and weigh tonnes. I half expected to be catapulted off the bridge and across the river and was reminded of my first and last day in Los Angeles in 1976 when there were appreciable earth tremors. The interesting thing about earth tremors is that one’s view becomes blurred because everything seems to be vibrating…
I guess there’s another month of hot humid weather to come. Today, Jan 29, the news from Victoria and South Aus is worrying: they’re experiencing days of extreme weather (45.6˚ yesterday in Adelaide) with maximum temperatures consistently in the mid forties. Not good. The tennis players at the Aus Open are having a tough time; but so is everybody else; and there are fires. Here, there’s plenty of shade. The weeping choral tree is showing its second seasonal flush of red orchid-like flowers, there are birds in the birdbath, and the gardens are well watered from the frequent showers.
I’m including here a piece I published in 2002; it has some relevance to the 2009 gardens.

© text Don Diespecker 2001, 2009
Streaming

The water runs in so smoothly, the thin poly-pipe pouring it forth once more. Silent in the hot afternoon inside the house he sits watching at first still sweating from outside, and when he’s more settled seeing what might need fine-tuning. More work. The old birdbath basin sitting up again supported by those lay-about opportune concrete slabs and two big river stones alongside. Knew they’d come in useful one day. Tastefully arranged. Cascades. Overflow dribbling. --Meddlesome dragon the birdbath paddling.

Earlier, on his knees before a still-buried stonewalled garden romantically turning the start of a modest project from work to archeological dig. Remembering there even earlier moments when sitting inside and seeing out there was the envisioning glimpsed image of the revivified birdbath with fountain driven by a little of the piped creek. Pure pleasure. Exclusively his. Almost. Not forgetting birds and taking account of territorial dragons. Through the mind’s eye, then, fantasizing his idling self there in the shade in the not too distant future. That imagined image followed by another of The Dig, a long shot seen in three quarter view from his relaxing inside chair when reflecting down and out to the two garden riverside chairs. In that second image he unearths the cock and valves the sidelined-held flow out to the garden edge and up a little then down into the bath, all the water falling way down from the trembling creek in the rainforest, then through the bath on the high bank to pour over dribbling, then soaking and meandering to the river below. A detour. Picaresque. No harm done. Seen by passing locals he’d be the harmless rogue digging to bury his treasure, or possibly an enemy.
Later than earlier, in person, in real time, the mock archeologist pulls away the profusion of weeds where stands the stone wall while glancing aside to yet another reclaimed wall where his mattock rests beside tonnes of agglomerating flood debris. There has been no soaking rain for months. There is not even earth to be dug but only loose fine sand and shifting silt as palpable as powder in places dusting up and floating away, a sad orange-red in the heat, drifting into the trees. Lightly using the shovel one-handed he digs. Like scooping flour. No need for big tools. Quickly finding the cast-iron twirled tap cock top by the metallic clink of the spade he simultaneously is found by an incoming sortie of stinger scouts: the first fighters fly from out of the sun from behind, low and out of sight, fully armed and sharp to harass and torment and artfully skilled in softening the target for the following squadron to dismember. Taking over the world, or at least his pleasure place, his Cockaigne, he thinks before remembering briefly times of divining springs there, absorbing rhadomancy exercises with twin fencing wire wands fleeting years ago. Running with sweat he brushes off the rusting knurled wheel to charge the flood-buried sideline and sees the clear water pouring distantly, sweating now into his eyes and dripping, then starting up cursing, escaping the fat flies, leaving them to the voracious dragons while the reptiles torn between cooling plunges in their own dragon bath and plump luscious stingers the courtesy of the human stalking horse, pause in perplexity. His salty exudations nevertheless appreciated. A dip before dinner or eat first? Reptilian quandaries.
Later yet as much in the now as ever having gone up to the house to rest and then seen what he previously seemed unable to see clearly, he intently had rushed down muttering with his pruning saw to remove two expired flood-stricken tree-heath saplings thereby liberating the view he was craving, that of the clear crystal fountain pouring into the birdbath shimmering above the flood loam covering the destroyed lawns and gardens, all parts of the view of delight, the riverbank the river the trees the world the waiting two chairs. Best to go back up and view the vista. He did so then arriving hotly once more in the tumultuous present was enabled to see again past things present in his mind.
Now, while scuffling once more through cloudlets of disturbed dry silt to those wavering riverbank chairs and seeing the clear flowing from the pipe, he slows to allow old pictures and the oft-repeated flashing facets of bygone rerun images their jostling for space-time in the present. Old pictures. Mind pictures. Showtime. Stopping uncertainly. He is merely another unsettled dragon.
Now, thinking on the rainforest creek pressed into the mainline articulation pouring its libation through the rose-head bathroom shower where the un-curtained window is an eye to the riverscape, a means to see more than can be seen, he recalls immersions hot and cold clothed in the creek’s cleansing holy water while being in the picture show of his mind, sub rosa, pulling past images and enticing future ones into the flickering present, moments reflective prospective introspective contemplative and possibly interspective were he sufficiently and magically brained, and now remembering Europe long ago, that statue-fountain the small boy pissing, while here on the riverbank in the open there is again a steady stream from the pipe of plenitude the flowing from the pipe as robust as pure as that dream image in the film, Madeline’s Dream, herself dreaming of water of a fountain, when she told Fritz Perls (the facilitator), ‘I don’t know much about myself. (Pause, begins to cry) I come. I don’t know how I come but I know I’m good, that’s all I know. I would like you to drink me because I know I’m good. I don’t know where I come from. I’m in that big vase. It’s a black vase,’ trying to exactly recall her words while seeing her face clearly. Her flowing-ness. Her youth. Now remembering fountains like the Trevi where the trotting Alpini go clattering by on the cobblestones of long ago and Tivoli the water gardens at Villa d’Este watering and running and pouring and spouting and fountaining, now remembering piercingly with pleasure Kermanshah in Bakhtaran in a time before the revolution and the young women in the sunlit hotel corridor early in the day the women wearing the chador doe-eyed and beautiful though well covered with everyone giggling at the tile-surrounded single faucet, brushing teeth. Try that veiled. The spigot. Clear water issuing. No bathrooms. And there again is the public bathhouse in Khorramabad in Lorestan on a winter’s night water flowing, hot inside, frosty out, and Eric’s damp hair icing. Friends laughing. There again is the dangerous evening scene in the apartment up at Shemrun with kerosene dripping openly and traditionally from the throttled spigot to the inclined metal runnel descending to the hot heater that puffs and woofs exploding flames, and seeing again views from unpressurized DC3s of the Dasht-e Lut pocked with minute mole-hills of spoil marking the qanats the deep-down handmade conduits moving mountain water and blind white fish beneath the desert to then run fiercely through villages and towns, the creek-like jub in place of gutters, crystal clear at the top of the town and fouled beyond it. Water.
Now, his mind runs on netting old images, his mind a conduit through time, so that fluids and flowing approach unbidden and then recede, like water on an aircraft window forming briefly in torn-apart clouds, like the unbidden horror of the burning oil well at Qum, like ugly flooding in rivers and glimpsing memories of everything fluid that flows, like molten gold being cast in the assay office at Pilgrim’s, and seeing again in a back room of memory the Shangaan slip and fall from the ore train the gouts of blood, his torn leg pumping, and waiting for the bus at Qiryat Shemona while nearby foot-hung chickens are killed methodically and ritually, their blood funneling and pouring down and away in the abattoir for chickens, an upside down Tivoli, a reversed water garden, a blood garden, or when he was a kid at the abattoir on Pilgrim’s Creek long ago seeing the animals there, all blood, blood everywhere and running away darkly in the creek to join the cyanide-brown tailings in the Blyde, the Happy River that once was and seeing suddenly his mother weeping wracked and engulfed in frightening sorrow, remembering other rivers in time and brooks and rivulets and deep dark pools and short stretches gurging in sunlight all fluvial and making love on forested banks and riparian meadows on hot afternoons sweat showering to earth thrillingly in moments of falling passionate gentleness and sometimes in long seconds of tender riving in the changing light and shade patterning deep inside the forest, secretly, and later plunging in the rolling water the river achingly cold and fiercely enlivening and remembering very long ago bright days hiking along even colder mountain streams in the Drakensberg and waterfalls and torrents and glinting rapids and plunging in and out and even longer ago than that the splashing toddler in the shallows of the Cowichan with the family and once again seeing the green algae on slippery stones on sunny afternoons in the 30s then going ahead in time again to the clear upper Blyde far from the reduction works and the pounding stamp batteries again his loved river of golden childhood in Africa and the trout holding station in the shallows an arms length below the ledge and always wishing for rivers big and small quiet and crowded seeing suddenly again the Seine in late winter and barges surging by in the cold air and a comfortable family on board looking up at the bridges and his being half a couple gazing down fondly and the barge flags streaming--
Reference
Perls, Fritz (1976). The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy. New York: Bantam Books, Inc, p 193.
Acknowledgment: ‘Streaming’ was originally published in The Australian Gestalt Journal (2002), 6(1), 8-10.
This Diary is No. 14 in the New Series (previously 1107, 108, 208, 308, 408, 508, 608, 708, 808, 908, 1008, 1108, 1208; this is109). DDD January 29 2009.