garden

In recent days I’ve watered the garden with perspiration. I lay paths, massaging bricks into curves, and swing the mattock at the uneven earth and roots that break the surface looking for the water they can’t find deeper down.

My son occupied my house during my three and a half years in Bendigo. He planted turf after I had expunged every blade of grass over the preceding eight years, then sold my mower in a gesture of faith. During my absence and my son’s non-ownership of a mower, the turf morphs into an extra-terrestrial species whose tenacious tentacles penetrate everything.

For seven months after returning I stare at it glumly. Finally I begin pulling it out in clumps by hand, but make little progress. I have at it with the mattock, but it’s so densely packed the mattock blade can’t cut it. I swamp it with the bricks reserved for the paths, but it lives on. I chuck a mat of hardenbergia hacked off the rear of the carport onto it, but it fights its way to the surface. Against all that I hold holy, I spray it with deadly toxins, and reluctantly it relinquishes its grip on my yard.

A new backyard garden emerges. It’s organic in the sense that I simply lay the bricks for paths around the edge of where the turf was. No bed of sand, nothing straight, no strings guide the layout and no level ensures its evenness. Then a low border of basalt boulders is dug out and repositioned. I churn the earth that grew the turf and painstakingly pick the roots out of each clump.

Daily Bunnings visits fill my car with bags of cow manure, seedlings, pots and saucers. A time-lapse camera would capture me clocking up the kilometres in every part of the yard, tacking mesh onto fences, filling pots with soil, hosing, raking, sweeping, pulling weeds out of cracks, a one-man ant colony formicating over everything.

The garden is enormously enjoyable and therapeutic.

      

Rock on.