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I am often struck by the different ways we use words.
Rereading a favourite book of mine recently I found myself marvelling at the author’s ability to evoke particular experiences and emotional states. Her unusual choice of words drew me into her world, but equally, caused me to consider their meaning. I had to read slowly and in reading slowly found myself consciously appreciating the craftsmanship of her writing. Continue reading greetings
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the force
of what lives us
outliving the mountain.
Last week I was delighted to come across this animal.
Part of my pleasure was that I thought I could identify it. Even though it was now in the front herb garden, and no longer among the camellias at the back, I presumed it was the same fine grasshopper with which I began this series of blog posts.
I don’t think this recognition was at the heart of my response though. The best clue to this are the words I said to myself at the time. If my response had been recognition of the same individual, I would have thought ‘Oh, it’s that same grasshopper‘. But this wasn’t my response. The delighted thought that came to me was ‘Oh, it’s you‘. Why did I say You? What did I see that made this a You and not just ‘that same grasshopper’?
This isn’t a minor grammatical quibble. There is a world — an ecology — of difference between the two utterances. Continue reading This is not a grasshopper
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Looking at this caterpillar, in a basil plant, it is tempting to ascribe it intentions that it does not have. Certainly it has brilliant camouflage, not only in its colour but in its twig-like behaviour, but is it intending to deceive a predator? Is it deliberately hiding in greenery; has it decided to act like a twig? Continue reading Camouflage
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I am fond of this photograph, because of its poor quality.
I find it difficult to take good photos of the birds that frequent the garden. They move fast, they move often, without regard for garden fences, and I don’t own a telephoto lens. But a family of noisy miner birds moved into the back yard during autumn, with a demanding fledgling, and I was determined to take their picture. Several times a day, whenever I heard them being especially chatty, I’d go out with my camera. But they were always too high and too fast for me.
One day I saw a docile pigeon on my neighbour’s TV antenna. Pigeons aren’t exciting, and it was too far away to get a good shot, but here, I thought, photographically speaking, was a sitting duck. I took three images of the distant pigeon surrounded by too much blue sky. As I pushed the shutter button for the middle image, I heard a whooshing noise, but only when I enlarged the photo did I realise that the noisy miners had photobombed me. There they were, tiny figures about to depart the top right corner of my shot. To show their disdain, they had glided past, not even bothering to flap. Continue reading Birds of Newtown
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Gardeners often talk of their state of mind. Gardening relaxes them. It changes their mood or perspective. It makes them feel differently about their lives. Although we often imagine that moods and states of mind are attributes of an individual, these experiences of gardening suggest that states of mind are a matter of ecology or sociology rather than individual psychology. The changed state of mind befalls the gardener; it emerges from their relation with the garden.
Indeed, just to take this thought a step further, maybe this is what is important about gardens. They are special places where people learn that what is innermost is also outside them. This is how they learn how they fit in a broader world that includes them but doesn’t belong to them. Continue reading A gardening state of mind
Honey fungus is a popular culinary mushroom, praised by Antonio Carluccio. And one particular honey fungus, found in Oregon, is said to be the world’s largest organism, covering 890 hectares and measuring 3.8 kilometres across. At 2400 years, it is also one of the oldest living organisms. The mushrooms that Carluccio eats with spaghetti are the fruit of an underground behemoth, which is made up of vast networks of mycelial cords or rhizomorphs.
I love the idea of these secret organisms, and it delights me to know that some thrive, just below the surface, in my own garden. That is why I’ve had so many fungi sprouting recently. In fact, the stinkhorn that I wrote about last week was the fruit of the rhizomorphic network pictured in the photo that leads this post. And an intriguing form of life it is. Continue reading The fungal underground
When we decided to have a stream built in the backyard, the landscape gardener asked two questions. What sound did we want from the small waterfall? Did we want moss on the rocks? He returned with metres of pvc pipe, rolls of pool liner, and truckloads of bare bushrock and river pebble. He was finished in three days, and at first his stream looked as artificial as a water feature in a shopping centre.
‘Now you wait’, he said.
And we did.
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In our garden there are seven plantation pink sasanqua camellias along the back fence, five dark pink hiryu camellias down the side fences, and there is one prostrate hiryu which will eventually reach across the pond. We planted most of the plantation pinks over 25 years ago, telling ourselves that we’d prune them every year. These trees are now up to ten metres high, taller than the peppercorn tree, the Chinese pistache and the jacaranda which complete the canopy. Each has a trunk circumference of 60 centimetres. Continue reading Camellias
To learn to take photographs is to relearn how to see. Whereas the selfie and tourist snapshot are confirming, the viewfinder and focus dial on a camera force you to reconsider what you are really seeing and how you are framing the world. They probe both the world and your unconscious preconceptions.
The focus dial, in particular, tests out relations of scale. Working as both microscope and telescope, it allows you to see things that are too small or too large or too distant or too close for you to normally see. As you test its possibilities, you glide between macrocosm and microcosm, part and whole. What is your focus? What is your detail detail of? What are you really seeing when you look at this or that? What are its wider implications? Dare you acknowledge a scale that you would usually brush aside?
Something’s been thumping on our roof at night. It could have been the neighbourhood cats.
Something’s been eating the succulents on the balcony, even after protective wire was put around them. It could have been a rat, perhaps.
At night, something rowdy has been ransacking the camellia flowers and shaking loose the palm nuts from high up the neighbour’s tree. It could have been the flying foxes.
When I have woken in the earliest hours of the morning, and looked myopically through the bedroom window, isn’t that a silhouetted animal I’ve seen, scrambling down the long branches of the ash tree? Continue reading Charismatic Mammals
