Oh, for the Fizz...

I'd been to my physiotherapist, to get my back strong and straightened. It began when I was at school, my bad back, when I lent over my desk at nights studying hard for too long, over subjects I sometimes liked and sometimes hated. I knew it was going to be a lifelong struggle.
So I feel for things that don't quite come up to scratch. This monumental, circular bed has only ivy growing in it when so much more could have been achieved with it. Yet it's comfortable the way it is, not needing a 'makeover'.

It's meant to be autumn here, but it's increasingly feeling that autumn is the new spring. I'm sitting here in a light dressing-gown, the window open, the 20 degree temperature about the same as it has been throughout the day, though it's nearly 7pm. Having just read that Australia is likely to suffer another el Nino year - when increased warmth from up out of the Pacific Ocean circulates then an oscillating heat wave that eliminates rain - I am feeling the fizz evaporate.

These photos, as I wandered away from my physiotherapy, were taken on my mobile, but the blurring may well be germane. We're meant to be upside down here, in the southern hemisphere, but our upside down-ness is itself flipping upside down. Things are, in the streetscape, in the gardens, looking remarkably well, after a savage summer, but will we be able to anchor ourselves in an environment that seems as if it's being eliminated?

The exercises my physiotherapist has given me are doing something fine...I am feeling somehow more vertical. I know I can stand up to whatever it is I must. Can the gardens of Melbourne do the same? 

This isn't pleaching, is it, when older branches have been bent into a form to hold the effusion of new growth? Dunno. I'm just hoping that bits of garden history like this live indefinitely here or we'll be getting gardens made out of concrete slabs with bits of green plastic tossed over hem, to look as if they were a real garden. 

God knows I need my physiotherapist. There will no doubt be an even more awful summer than the one we just had, but I will not be able to lug wheelbarrow-load after wheelbarrow-load of mulch over the outline of my garden unless there's some sort of body filling out the outline. Like, I don't do things without a reason.

My mother's nickname for me as a boy was Knuckleduster. Can you believe it? As if I'm meant to stand up to all this dessication without blinking! You need some sort of results sometimes, out of this life, or else it gets to be a bit of a play within a play. Declaration: Gardener Needs Help.  
( PS I got some help today in the form of a new job in a bookshop ).

The Parliament, the Princess and the Pedestrian

 

You can live in a city all your life, as I've done in Melbourne, and be familiar only with parts of it. Parts such as the eastern, Parliamentary end of the CBD, to which I frequently gravitate.

Having traversed and photographed this area often I didn't know I'd be able to find anything new today. Above and below are views from out of the inside of Parliament Station.

Above, the Stanford Fountain in Gordon Square, created by William Stanford 1867-1870 while in prison for horse theft and escaping custody. Perhaps he was tired of walking. Perhaps he just wanted to run. He did, though, earn his freedom, I feel.

I wasn't prepared to risk arrest by entering this untended gate into Parliament House and be horse-whipped or brought before a jury. The gardens are open only one day a year and today wasn't the day.

The Station itself is all underground, and a show-piece when it was built. Its gardens are looking a bit down and out,  greying, like the day...

...but retaining some suitable splendour.

There was a Princess here somewhere, wasn't there? This is her, or at least the side of her, the Princess Theatre, where this pedestrian for a time in his younger days ushered in the crowds and even got to see Lauren Bacall on stage. 

But today I was ushering myself down Little Bourke Street to lunch, glimpsing the past as I went, relieved to see some green amid the prison-grey.

Dragonfly Arise

At Royal Park

Good to know, but Zara wasn't with me.

Much of Royal Park's 180 hectares just north of the city centre look like this, a broad sweep of landscape largely native. And wonderful to roam or fly kites in. 

On one side is the elegant university precinct of Parkville, almost entirely intact.

And in the corner abutting Flemington Road the new Royal Children's Hospital has bitten off a wedge.

It was sad to see so many giants felled, but for the children obliged to be hospitalized here, the outlook couldn't be better.

 Such a vast space it is. I used to come through here often, about 25 years ago, when it was much more left to its own devices.

There's a great deal of native bird-life and many superb plants such as this Eucalypt.

And this native Hibiscus.

First set aside by Governor Charles La Trobe in 1845, there are ancient trees here such as this Peppercorn.

I don't know who gets to live in the Gatehouse above, but it'd be a nice kind of corner of the world.

This is the sort of tree I love most, an old, gnarled Eucalypt, seeming to thrust its branches into the sky.

Some of them have been here since before white settlement and before tram tracks were invented.

I'm still trying to work out what this specimen is, with its sausage-like seed pods, one of which I have with me.

However tough our natives are, many exhibit an almost effervescent delicacy.

So stroll-able it is, without the hordes you sometimes find in botanic gardens.

I can't pretend that I find the new architecture complementary to its surroundings, but the view is to live for...

Shaking the Ghosts

 Though autumn's a time of dying, here where summer's been torturous, it comes as an agent of revival.

This being the Antipodes - where practice is sort of upside down - many native plants come into flower and magpies start to breed. Autumn comes as if it were spring. Our springs are not so much a re-birth as a riot.

So for the human gardener there's running around to be done, the clock of coldness beginning to tick. Above is the beginning of a new procession along a wall too hot and exposed to have been dealt with in summer.

And here a bit of a jumble...good to see because there's only been dessication and a sort of hard-held forbearance till this easing has come.

Aspidistras - which I shall keep flying - are one of my favourite plants, and it's now they seem to wake up - and wake up their neighbourhood.

There's a feeling of relief for me that so many things have survived and have now seemed to have got back their zoomph.

This above is the beginning of what will be filled with foliage. Makeshift, sparse, reduced; soon, as the glowing, glaring days grow shorter, life will re-colonise.

 I salute this land made to be barren, then made to go forth to multiply.

For out of nothing life comes.

and three little kookaburras

At last! The kookaburras have landed!

I was gardening for friends yesterday. It was delightful. Their garden is what I'd call old-fashioned, crafted out of specimens such as a series of roses in whose presence I had to be pretty bloody nimble! It reminded me how gardening is an art that requires nurture, and possibly makes us more understanding, caring people. There is also a continuity or common link among gardeners that goes back centuries, even when their approaches are utterly different.
The one squatting is the young one.

The jacaranda's where I put minced beef most days. It's principally for the magpies I do it, but anything with two wings is welcome - especially anything marvelous! For me, gardening is an interaction with nature that allows me to facilitate improved conditions. Playing restauranteur is part of that.

Uncommon in much of Melbourne's sprawl, the kookaburra's unmistakeable, whooping chuckle seems to come out of ages past...but it's here, now...

here as I write this they're laughing. There were three that came today, and I'm hoping they stick around, now they know where there's some catering. Me? I make a garden so the world has somewhere it can sing with life.