Better days

At the end of a bad day, reminding myself it's more often good than bad. And when it's good, it's very, very good.

Naming rights

I'm lazily trawling through the rose sites, making a list of lovely things for the garden. Some of the names are so perfectly rose-like: Gloire de Ducher; Reine des Voilettes. I'm note sure what those words actually mean but they sound so frothy and elegant, I want to slip on some marabou trimmed mules and take to my chaise lounge in the boudoir.

Other titles are a little more ambiguous: La Passionata and - my favourite - Belle of Berlin, which suggests either a Sally Bowles type figure, bold and blooming in corruption and decay or something quiet and hardy, surviving in the rubble of a post-war city, giving hope to a battered population.

But sometimes people surely miss the spirit of the rose. It's a winner, Betty Boop, Las Vegas all sound like racehorses. Jessika could come from the birth notices we giggle at on Sundays. And Dazzla and White Lightnin', well, that's just wrong.

But friend Ttina, who is indeed currently in Berlin, sent me something so odd, so mind-bendingly inappropriate, I can't help but wonder if it is a joke: the Weight Watchers Success rose. (It is, of course, a redi-plant.) When I think about roses I shiver in pleasure at their abundance and generosity, their lushness, their sensuality; when I think about Weight Watchers, not so much - I guess they're going for an image change.

But the more intriguing question is this: what would a Weight Watchers Failure to Achieve Goal Weight Rose look like?

Fronting up

In this past six months dandelions have become my favourite flower in the garden. They are yellow ellipses, linking unfinished plantings and allowing the beds to roll to an stop without ever committing to an end. They bob on single high stems and offer a lightness of colour and spirit I've grown to love. I've looked around for something more socially acceptable for the front yard but every yellow I find is too thick, too obvious, too much - a series of exclamation marks with no nuance and suggestion of further, interesting and specified things to come.



But to cultivate these plants deliberately is another, rather more radical proposition. I'm all for serendipity and I do believe a weed is just an un-appreciated plant but encouraging the yellow dots to thrive and multiply, even when they are exactly what I want in the space, goes against the expectations of the neighbourhood, I'm sure. Al already struggles with the state of our verge and lawn, and while I'm not so worried about what the neighbours say, I can feel a little uncomfortable standing out like a sore thumb - the slum on the street.

But then I think, what's it matter? Like most front yards, ours isn't well used. It's the front stage, the (inexpertly) made up face, denying any business end out back. There's something confronting but satisfying in seeing a different front yard. In Canberra, I saw one laid out in a traditional and stilted manner, but there were aubergines where roses would be, and basil as the prim little border. I stopped and looked, and looked again, and now it remains in my mind after all the other yards, with their iceberg roses and agapanthus, have faded into a mass of nothing much.

What I would love, even more than the ellipses, would be to walk down the path to my door through rustling wheat, shoulder high and golden, a mini-field, the ultimate in mass planting. Or through the lawn grown out, aged and diversified into a meadow, in the way of many front lawns and verges in Canberra, where the drought had turned the suburbs golden and dry. It would be a place for birds to eat at the seeds (and snakes would steer clear), and a counter-point to the rather formal and very elegant white house in which we happily live.

People in decorating magazines say paint your rooms boldly and if it doesn't work out you can always re-paint; I guess the same is true for your garden. But my houses are always cream on the inside, and I suspect for all my fancies I'll end up with lovely conformity out the front and zucchinis out the back.

The pointy end

This morning I picked the blackberries that grow in the old convict cemetary just over the way. (It's worth living here, just to write that sentence.) When I stand there plucking the fruit from the thorns I have visions of brambles growing through the bones interred 150 years ago - it's not such a grim vision when you taste the sweetness while stopping in the sunshine.

I had thought to pick enough to make some jam but that was a plan doomed to failure. The whole process is so fiddly, the thorns so spikey, the labradoodle so greedy and sly (snuffling up the fruit from the basket while I was deep in the thicket), the kids so demanding (there's no explaining why these particular berries are destined for jam and not their bellies), that it would take me hours to gather enough. And, as much as I like blackberry jam, which is especially lovely eaten with cream on white bread, it's always going to be a distant second to eating the berries alone, outside in a field, glad of the sun that's warming up the first cold morning of the year. I'm not a peasant and I don't need to protect myself from scurvy and starvation in the long winter ahead so I'll gather and gobble them while I may and then enjoy the anticipation of next February.

And then I fell into the brambles. They really hurt. In an old book from my own and my mother's childhood, called At School with the Stanhopes (complete with boarding school, japes and sexually non-threatening but crush-worthy older brothers and teachers' husbands) there's a incident where they whole school takes off from conjugating French verbs and studying Georgian history to go blackberrying, so that they can learn the worthy art of jam making. The uppity girl is pushed into the brambles, which is presented as a bit of harmless fun. The way those thorns bite, more like serious assault, I think.

Slide night :: travelling in style

I love slide nights. I love the translucency of the colours, the musty smell and the faint heat from the projector, and the little stories that come with each picture. My Dad has thousands of slides, and I love sitting in the dark and staring at the past. We don't as yet have a slide scanner to take those images digital, but Dad does have a scanner and on the last, sad trip to Brisbane I collected up a whole lot of Grammy's photos and put them on a thumb-drive. Mum doesn't know what to do with them - they're another person's memories. But I'm happy just to look and marvel at the difference and the sameness I see between those people and my own life.

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These photos are from a trip my Grammy and Grandad took to Japan with my mother, back in the 1960s, back in a time when people made more of an effort when they travelled. I'm always a little taken aback by the get-ups I see in the airports - I'm not saying people should travel in furs, with their maids carrying the jewels in morocco cases, but surely there's nothing wrong with being turned out - and seen off - in style. I was going to write "My Grammy is the woman in the headband, standing next to the woman in the glasses", but I now see there are many glasses, it was the age of glasses. So I'll keep it at, my Grammy is the woman in the headband, the one with truckloads of style.

Rooted

Travel is tiring. Not so much for the hours but for the lack of sureness, the constant need to negotiate where I fit into the surrounds I find myself in. But today the equilibrium started to be regained. I cooked and gardened and started to feel like my home and my life are mine, again. This morning I went to yoga and then all afternoon I built a compost heap from all that wilted promise that greeted us when we came home from Brisbane. The zukes, loads of tomatoes that didn't make it through our comings and goings, the straw from the no-dig potato beds, the last of the mildewed plums, the first falling leaves and rotted apples - it's an end of summer compost heap.

Composting is tiring, especially coming on top of an unexpectedly hard yoga session (it didn't feel that strong at the time) and the upheavals of the past month. It has to be something you really, really want to do, if you're going to get through four hours of hauling and pitchforking and being soaked by the sprinkler. And I really, really wanted to do it. It was hard work and immensely satisfying work and now, this evening, I feel rooted.

Comings and goings

When we were in Brisbane I looked at this photo a lot. I love the way it shows the baby still left in an increasingly kid-like Lu, who is all muscles and big words. But I love it more because it was taken in our backyard, just before all these comings and goings began five weeks ago. Throughout Canberra and Brisbane and then Brisbane again I've been home sick. I've missed my house and more so my garden, and most of all the rhythms we have as a family. The girls had a pretty good time in Brisbane - Grandad and Meema have a pool and a dog and there's a park down the road. Al and I were not so happy - even without the sadness of Grammy's passing we were at a loss outside of the home we've created together.

Getting back was so lovely, even though I was faced with a garden that had collapsed without watering. It's not going to be a season of plenty, more a season of grilled green tomato chutney and composting (which are both indications of plenty in their own way, I guess). But last night we ate well: a free range chicken from a place down the highway; and corn, boiled potatoes and a salad of lettuce and cherry tomatoes, all from the sad-looking garden. Eaten at our own table, it was a delight, even with the food on the floor and the screaming and shrieking and spitting out of food with bold declarations of 'Yuk', that are part of the fine dining experience down here. It was soul food and a reminder of why I live where I do.

Also, Nell can now say 'potatoes', and can eat about five in one sitting. I just love her commitment to food.

Today it's up to Sydney for a few days, to sound knowledgeable about stuff and to make awkward conversation over fruit platters at morning tea (I don't think I can stand many more fruit platters - it's been a year of fruit platters). I'm not super-keen because I just want to work in my garden, but then I'll be home on Friday night and maybe then we can get some of those rhythms back again.

I think I love that photo of Lu because she looks how I've often felt these past week: wistful and hopeful and looking to somewhere else. I'm happy that very soon, I'll be looking to where I am, not where I want to be.