a Maori child's garden words

In her novel Potiki, Patricia Grace gave an intensely wise, sensitive, beautiful, poetic and moving description of planting a passionfruit vine when she was a child.

"My mother Roimata had taken a passionfruit cutting from Granny Tamihana's vine. At the time when I caught my big fish the cutting was dry and without life, that's what I've been told. But after we buried the fish head and fish guts there the plant began to grow and grow. The branches began to swim everywhere like a multiplication of eels. It was as if the big eel head with its little seed-eyes was birthing out trail after trail of its young. All the little eels swarmed the shed walls and the trees, whipping their tails and latching them to the walls and branches, still growing and multiplying all the time. And the eel-vines had a thousand hidden eyes, a thousand tails and a thousand hidden hearts.

"The hearts are dark and warm and fit in the cup of your hand. You can pull out the hearts without pain, and when you open them you the thousand dark seed-eyes. The seeds are a new beginning, but started from a death. Well everything is like that - that's what my mother Roimata says. End is always beginning. Death is life.

"The goldy seeded fruit is sharp-tasting and stinging, and leaves you with red stained fingers and a smartingk, blooded mouth.

"And the endless vine going everywhere is like a remembrance of the time, which is really a now-time, of when I was five, and of the big barking fish that I knew was waiting for me on the white sky night in the orange lagoon."

Patricia Grace reminds us that gardens exist in time, and that we are inextricably intertwined with our total environment.

gardens in Patrick White's The Aunt's Story

I have just finished reading The Aunt’s Story by Patrick White. In his poetic prose he describes two gardens. This novel tells the story of a woman, Theo, who never quite fitted in, who never quite felt at home in her body, her family or her social world. The gardens seem to be characterized by a sense of uneasiness, by instability, like Theo herself. They seem to have been deliberately put there for negative reasons, like exercising power, or imposing order.

The garden in her family home was a rose garden. It was made because Theo’s mother wanted it. But it did not grow naturally. The roses were “carted specially from a very great distance” and the only satisfaction Mrs Goodman derived from the garden was a momentary feeling of power when it was first established.

Theo basked in the roselight and felt close to the roses. Theo never could work out where she ended and other entities began. “The roses drowsed and drifted under her skin.” Some of the roses had pale grubs curled in their hearts. Theo’s sister, who was as pretty as a rose, had no difficulty in hating the grubs. But Theo could not condemn the grubs, even though they appeared to spoil the roses.

Roses are not native to Australia, and were brought to the English colony by the white settlers. The grubs presumably were native, and strove uncomfortably for some kind of co-existence. They were feared and hated by the powerful mainstream. They were the ‘other’- like Theo.

The garden in the French hotel where Theo stayed during her travels was called a jardin exotique. In fact every attempt was made to expunge the exotic, the dirty, the unexpected. Control was all-important. “Preserve me from the swish of dead leaves and urns full of torn letters” said one of the other guests. Theo didn’t have a chance. The jardin exotique could not contain her feelings of desperation. It merely provided temporary sanctuary for Theo on her spiralling towards madness.

I find it interesting how different writers use gardens as metaphors for different things. I think of these two gardens as malignant, which I guess gardens can be, when they are designed to colonize, suppress, supplant and control. You can see Theo as intrinsically damaged, or else you can see her as merely unusual or eccentric in a hostile unforgiving environment.

slow blogging

The Slow Movement challenges the "cult of speed" - described by Carl Honore in his 2004 book In Praise of Slow. Honore sees himself as a radical activist who, in a world of ever growing and developing technologies, reminds us we must not forget human needs . I am a fan of slowness and to me gardening epitomizes this philosophy. Gardens develop over time, and the act of gardening is an investment in a future that is never completely predicable. Gardening can be a meditative, reflective, mindful process - as well as an outcome. This blog used to be called Slow Garden.

And now to my delight, I discover Slow Blogging. The Slow Blog Manifesto starts off: "Slow Blogging is a rejection of immediacy. It is an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly, and that many thoughts are best served after being fully baked and worded in an even temperament. "

There can be tyranny in the pressure to produce postings. Rewards are accrued to those who are most active - they are the ones who are ranked highly - and who are noticed. I need to work out my own pace, my own priorities, and the Slow Blog Manifesto reminds me that blogging, like gardening is fundamentally about appreciating the Now, the process, and not just about results.

family matters

It is a mystery where I got my reverence for nature. In my family nature, unless strictly controlled, is thought of as a dangerous and unclean state, at war with civilized values.

The other day I was with my mother in the garden when she spotted some ants. "Ants!" she said with alarm. "So?" "Well, aren't you going to spray them?"

My mother in law has a garden, which she loves, but wishes she could repel the birds which dirty the tiles and make the garden untidy. As for the possums which eat - but do not kill - the mature camellia bushes - this normally polite, restrained 80 something year old, is filled with dreams of hatred, violence and vengeance.

transitoriness

The Banksia roses bloomed and faded in what seemed like 5 minutes. For that brief time they were achingly perfect, now they are dried and shrivelled. In this respect gardening reminds me of the sand mandalas created by Buddhist monks.

The monks spend a week or longer painstakingly construct beautiful pictures from coloured sand, then ceremonially destroy them. This symbolizes life and death, and the transitory nature of existence. Gardening for me is like a sand mandala. I work away intently, something beautiful is created, but it doesn't last and never remains the same.

dryness

It has been an extremely dry spring, and there has been relatively little rain for a couple of years now.

The other day when I was renovating the garden bit near the compost I was shocked to notice the dry sandiness of the soil. My tough minimal watering practice depends on nurturing and enriching the soil with compost so that the soil is on the one hand not too loose and drainy, and on the other, not so dry, hard compacted that any moisture runs off instead of penetrating.

It also depends on growing tough determined plants who are able to push their roots down, down, down, towards any underground moisture.

So far this has worked. But with another record hot dry summer predicted, who knows what will survive and what won't? Time - and this blog - will tell.

points of view

I renovated the bit of the garden near the compost heap. It was overgrown with violets, which were strangling some of the other things. So I pulled some things out, moved a few things and voila! a more peaceful scene emerged.

To my eyes, visualizing it as it grows, it is beautiful already, and will certainly improve with time and growth. But to other eyes it seems to be simply a bit of the garden that is emptier than many other bits.

some current pictures

The delicate, delicious love in the mist are flowering, en masse because I had the patience last summer to wait till they dropped their seeds before pulling them out.

It is a lovely spring day, and it even rained the last few days - a rare occurrence indeed. The garden is smiling, and I love this soft, soothing pallette of greys and blues.

The opium poppies were everywhere, and I culled them fairly ruthlessly. Now there are just a few popping up gracefully, enhancing the garden pictures.

yellow feather

My garden seems to be a battleground for birds lately. A group of crows have taken ownership and there are furious squawks and rustlings going when wattle birds or others encroach. I haven't seen any coloured rosellas for a few weeks, and I haven't seen any of the tiny bush birds since last summer.

But a bird with brightly coloured feathers left me a calling card today - a yellow feather.