growth

After months lying in desuetude the garden springs to life. I complete the small retaining wall on the last vegetable bed, till the soil, hack out roots and weeds, break up the clumps of hardened loam, rake and smooth the surface.

In every nook a weed sprouts, and in every cranny there’s a cranny. Nice word cranny. Must use cranny more often. Lots of crannies in my garden. I drag a little wheelie-bin thingy behind me all over the yard, front and back, plucking weeds and lobbing them in.

I ferret round in the garden shed, extract the three-pronged soil-breaker—must be a word for this tool but I’ve no idea what—and scarify—perhaps it’s a junior scarifier—the hard earth under the lemon tree. Mustard spinach will go in there.

I till the two boxed vegie beds and chuck a bag of cowshit in each. The cat regards this as his dunny, the turned soil redolent with cat-piss stench. I cut up metre and a half long wire netting cloches and bed them in to protect the vegie seedlings—parsnip, climbing beans, green mignonettes, cos lettuces, cucumbers, leeks, broccoli, capsicums, chillies, always chillies.

Last in are zucchini and tomatoes. Round the side of the house the snow peas are already ascending the netting surrounding them and the baby spinach are pubescent.

In the dark corner at the bottom of the garden where no vegetable wants to grow I’ve banged in some native shrubs, none likely to exceed a metre and a half. On the back fence outside my kitchen window I pop in two hardenbergias. They’re a favourite. Not much brightens August’s gloom but hardenbergias defy winter.

The last planting is a boronia. My mother raves about her boronias, the all-pervading fragrance; my good woman says the one my mother gave her fills her whole garden with its delicacy.

My nose is a boronia black spot: I just can’t smell it. I bury my face in a boronia in full bloom. Nothing.   

Rock on.