Breathing in the Backyard

Homes #3: Gaia's Garden

The geraniums are showing off. They’ve been doing so for a few weeks now and they really are lifting my spirits in the garden, shocking in pink, or red, or at times also in a delicate purple, flowers standing out amongst those distinctive leaves. There aren’t any of those citrus ones you get in the mountains though, that delicious smell which you get from rubbing the leaves on hikes. Many varieties, all though from round here in the fynbos lands of the Cape.

There are plenty of other flowers in the garden though, vying for attention as the southern spring continues to power impressively into green October life. Poppies have, well, popped, erupting with joy. Dandelions, familiar little weeds, whose roots make a deliciously healthy coffee substitute; their floating seed-feathers, after their burst of yellow, etched into memories from each of my decades of life. Nasturtiums, noisily spreading into their edible yellows and oranges, their colours echoed the other night in my dance floor journey by other dancers’ spring-feeling tops and skirts. Granadilla - passion fruit - maracuya flowers beginning to unfurl, coating the wall and an adjacent tree. Grasses in many forms darting across the land.

Before we built the house here, we prepared the garden: a digger-loader, hired for a day or two, ripped great trenches out of the unpromising dune sand so that we could beg kitchen scraps from our neighbours and compost the earth. Comprosma pops up everywhere: not indigenous, but hardy and green. The colours of the daisies are, of course, a little bit of laughter; and then there are the bugs. Worms who chew their way through the soil, and woodlice and other pale characters getting on with digesting the old year. The birds who wake me early and remind me that it is going to be a glorious, ephemeral day, again. Of course, there’s a general sense of the great power of Gaia, Pachamama, gifting abundance, as I sprinkle stored rainwater once more on my growing spinach plants. The wild figs - who crashed off their great tree like soft grenades, and brought a wild bunch of birdlife a month ago - have now passed for the season, and the leaves have dropped down to need raking before they become humus. Elsewhere the scraggly buddleia begins to put forth her delicate flowers and the lavender is fluffing itself out. The cactus I bought as a first houseplant in my flat five years ago is loving the freedom of the garden, alongside a hodgepodge of other sleepy succulents. The spekboom - a major source of vitamin C in the parks for elephants - experiments itself with different ways to be in different corners of the garden, light, shade, wind. Hibiscus blossoms too: recalling my daughter’s favourite street-corner bush, years before, perhaps also waiting (I now know!) to become a subtle cordial flavour. Taking the time to notice all this is an act of coming home, and it helps to have a different way of looking: noticing, with interest, the forces at play, the presence, the movement, the being as a whole - not dividing up into analysed bits, but aware, like Goethe long ago, of another kind of science that comes to really see Her hiding behind her forms. Breathing it in.

An evening bat teases its way across the open sky, echoing the sunbirds and the bees who came out a while ago, between the late rains. Butterflies capture the attention of our chunking cat, though he largely prefers lolling. Even so, that animal essence, movement, is still something he does much more of than the restio reeds, agile as they are when the southeaster blows. Snails are sometimes a problem, escaped (so the rumour has it) from some local restaurants, chunky European intruders, and found growing fat under the juicy leaves of the aloes. High up, the moon peers down. Being in nature is, of course, very nurturing, and I feel very grateful that it’s right here, in a place where my family has for years built up relationships. And a few short hours later, pigeons and hadedas cleanse the space and remind me to wake up: birds give us a little spirit song if we remember to listen.

Twenty years ago, the untended plot was more barren, fuller of unmanaged “weeds” that grew unkempt in the decades between the demolition of the original colonial building here, and the arrival of the new building we raised. And that time was certainly as mixed up as today in terms of inhabitants: it’s a long time since pure coastal dune fynbos lived here. The modern fauna-flora menagerie is as diverse as the city itself: even if we cultivate to be water-wise these days. Back then, it was still quite green, if less defined, reflecting the inbetween state of things, as gardens do.

I had a different sense of my garden as a child. A lilac tree that could be climbed; a laburnum that should not be, for its itchy, toxic bark, but in which a swing was placed, it holding our weight well. Rhubarb and exotic rhododendrons, a world away. These days on the phone my mother tells me of her climbing camellias, English gardens full of creatures like this from distant lands, captured by the botanists who went with the soldiers. Held in glasshouse prisons, though when you’re a plant that moves by growing, and will find your way through anything if you really want to, I guess ‘prisons’ and ‘cages’ aren’t the same thing at all as for us busy types. I recall sunflowers in the front yard, almost as oversized as our king proteas. Obviously, gardens are defined by plants, for all that they need animals too. As I’m coming to appreciate more and more my presence not just as a house custodian but as a land custodian, it’s the plants that bring me home here and give me a mind map of back then and there. I recall the quince tree, the pears so hard and the gooseberries so tart they had to become crumble ingredients rather than bitten into raw. (The golden yellow Cape gooseberries are ripening now here, able to be quickly savoured by whoever unpeels their papery shell). Soothing dock leaves which knew how to grow as saviours near the patch of nuisance nettles - before I understood nettles’ witchy brilliance.

Every little patch of turf, of terroir, given its opportunity, will gently flood into a vibrant cornucopia and be a reminder to slow down. I remember trotting after my grandfather to pick wild strawberries in his garden, part of the wholesome Dig for Victory mentality perhaps of the wartime generations of Britons, for whom a communal “allotment”, if you didn’t have your own garden, was an essential part of domestic life. The war on bugs only came after World War Two, of course, pesticides birthed as rude by-products of weapons stockpiles, and everywhere the soil got poorer. Now, we try to be kind again to the mites and fungi, without (at least in my case) really understanding their roles, their interactions, what mysterious forces cause them to emerge or retreat. The moon winks. My other grandmother’s husband planted concrete pathways that were more interesting stepping stones for me, drawn perhaps as a child to their geometric symmetry, rather than the golden mean of the curly plants around them. Then again, we would escape frequently from that little garden, to a walk up to Dundry Hill, English patchwork green farmland with a view.

There’s a concrete flyover near me with a fairly sizable tree that’s managed to push its way out of the side and find a route from there up to the light, apparently floating nowhere near soil. Isolated stories like this are being written all the time, if we slow down enough to drink them in. A slow mosquito passes me, having made my ankle briefly itch, probably disoriented at being up and about so early in the season. We live near the vlei, an open estuary, full of birdlife, daisies, duiweltjies (little devil thorns needing wary steps), and molerats. At the edge, a little fynbos nursery, hosting some of the scarce miracles of these flat lands which the Dutch Company once crudely ripped out for firewood. Restoration, amidst the restios, is the new/old wisdom.

In the Garden Route three weeks ago my partner gleefully swung a hoe into the loam on the hillside, at the Ecolution tree-planting festival. Dig, compost, plant, wattle-bark mulch, save the plastic bag container, water, repeat. A mini forest emerges, competing for space, which is healthy for young trees. If only our politicians and economists would learn from trees: competition establishes those who are strong enough, but thereafter diversity and co-operation are the name of the game: all the living beings around supporting each other in helping the forest mature. Prevent competition in the first place and the rootstock weakens. Stay competitive indefinitely and everyone stays stunted, perhaps. Time to take a breath, feel the nourishment in the roots, and mature like oak. Each tree, too, tells its story. While we planted, some of those gathered recognised saplings they’d nurtured till now. All around us soft black wattle trees, rampant invaders of moist spaces in South Africa, choking waterways and now being removed. Yet not so fast: they also create richer soils for these saplings, and so their removal, clearing their spaces, is a careful process of thinning rather than clear-cutting. Their shade still valuable at many a campsite I’ve been to: and nearby grow indigenous keurbooms, relatives from across the ocean, and a wondrous lourie rises from next to the biggest bumblebee I’ve seen. The black wattle’s story is one of typical human capriciousness: brought in because they provided organic products needed in the leather tanning industry. Then that industry went synthetic, and the trees were left to go feral.

US Americans call gardens ‘yards’, a word I instinctively dislike because for me it speaks of concrete, though no doubt it also emanates from jardin. In the first home my children grew up in, our back garden was more of a yard, so that we brought in some squares of turf to give the tiniest of grassy patches for kids to explore. We still had a climbable tree for them, and dog roses and morning glory creepers. I don’t always appreciate the way that creepers weave their webs and mats, but it’s still remarkable, finding their ways through the urban territory, climbing up the walls and fences we’ve used for marking zones. Were there so many creepers around before humans started making boundaries? Before that, I would hazard you found them mostly in the forest. Our desire to separate from each other and control pieces of land gave them an opportunity to experiment into sunnier zones: something always thrives when humans are foolish in new ways. The great daisy fields of Namaqualand we visited last month would have been slightly less dazzling before the old farmers came to try their luck and clear shrubs off the slopes. Of course, Something is directing us too, would be the most logical way to look at all this; we are just another part of the picture She’s painting.

For this is the game of the garden. As the geraniums spill through the cracks and onto the public pavement, it reminds us of this great force of life in which I, you, we, are in a constant relationship. We’ve been rightly taught, now, to be wary of monocultural fields and lawns, yet their patchwork elegance is perhaps simply a framework we’ve provided for what comes next. There is much evidence that the Amazon was substantially planted by ancient cultures, rich soils giving rise to great groves of edibles, a fabulous mystery we might recreate again if we can stop those competitive number-crunching petrodollar agribusinesses from ripping up all its wisdom. Robyn Wall Kimmerer pointed out in ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ how the sacred, wild herb still expects us to pick it and bursts into greater abundance when we do, at least when we do it in an honourable, relational way. Rather like my spinach, which fluffs up its metaphorical feathers and bursts forth a little more into leaf if I judiciously choose some of its fuller ones for my supper.

So the Garden is a resonant Home, connected to the bigger Home of Life on this blue-green planet. It allows us to breathe out, because it reminds us of our connectedness, beyond the fence. I know so little of just how much life, how much living, is going on around me (just as little as I know those billions of living organisms that are accompanying our bodies, weeding and gardening in our guts and elsewhere). I know little of what forces bring these rainbow colours in the visible spectrum into my world, alongside the calming green, centre of the rainbow. Tonight my elder daughter and I sheared the mphephu’s shaggy coat, and bound some of its stalks into bundles, to dry and burn one day with thanks for the land and its previous custodians. Its hearty ancestral smell even now recalls moments with its brethren, still growing, rising, flowing. Years ago a friend - who passed away recently and even now is returning bodily to the soil - made a great soft bed of mphephu (heliochrysum) on which we danced while Jupiter kissed Saturn in the night sky. And tonight the spirit of the wind whirls all these threads, stalks, roots, petals together as the sun sets once more; all the evidence of Life before my simple senses. Life that I know loves me noticing Her, out here amidst the birdsong, in this place of rest, on this planet of Home.