Cinderfella and the Wheels that Go Round

I may not have a car or even a licence to drive one, but as of today, I have a pumpkin.
Found in a charity shop in Hampton, one of Melbourne's bayside suburbs, and costing only $12.99, its signature tells me it was (beautifully) made by the illusive "Barbara W" in 1988.

Who knows? My fairy godmother might appear, and in a whiff of orange-coloured smoke, I'll have something convertible, something with wheels. But I think, instead, this wonderful, fat tureen will be going to someone I regard as my fairy godmother, whose birthday comes any day shortly, just after the equinox.

The workmanship, colouring and finish are finely rendered. To be honest, finding this is more important to me than finding a vehicle anyway. People like me travel without wheels. But then, I have always lived in fairy tales...

A Naturalist on Rona, and a Naturalist in Melbourne

I confess I haven't been to Scotland. For reasons unknown ( a certain purity/single-mindedness/wildness? ), it has held my imagination.

"Sir Frank Fraser Darling ( born Frank Darling, 23 June 1903 - 22 October 1979 )" - so Wikipedia tells me - "was an English ecologist, ornithologist, farmer, conservationist and author, who is strongly associated with the highlands and islands of Scotland..."

"Fraser Darling was born in the loft of a farm stable near Chesterfield in northern England, the illegitimate son of Harriet Ellse Cowley Darling and Frank Moss. His mother was the daughter of a prosperous family from Sheffield. Her family wanted the child to be fostered and forgotten about."
How careless it is to be correct.

"Rona is said to have been the residence of Saint Ronan in the eighth century. A tiny early Christian oratory which may be as early as that date, built of unmortared stone, survives virtually complete on the island - the best preserved structure of its type in Scotland." ( Wikipedia again ). Is it perhaps true that a certain type of Christianity persevered or re-appeared here, in the person of Frank Fraser Darling, a Christianity that sees love for all of the world as its purpose?

Forgive me for not yet knowing enough about the author of A Naturalist on Rona - Essays of a Biologist in Isolation. To continue: his mother "would not cooperate and refused to part with Frank. His father, whom he never met, left for East Africa around the time of his birth, and was killed in action on the Kenya-Tanganyika border in 1917."

This is "Fianuis, Rona." I don't know what it would have been like to have grown without a father, but it may have well have led me also to an island. As it is, as it was and has been, my own relationship with my father drove me towards supporting the environment, to fighting for it, for I felt there was little point in succeeding in the world without due conscience.

I lament the days that have gone, when the world was an easier, simpler place, or so it would seem, wouldn't it, what with Mrs Fraser Darling chopping wood without regard to her public image? I lament that our increasing cleverness often lacks a sense of guardianship. I support those naturalists and environmentalists who've stood out in the cold and bleakness, or in the burning light and aridity, who've loved to hear the crashing waves, the calls of the wild, who've taken the time to stop and listen to their surroundings and who've decided their own needs can fit into those of that world, without any compulsion to obliterate it.

Madly, in Geelong

It's here, beside this assemblage of white clay thrown with classical references before a host of discordant plant-forms, that I find I have got myself to, in the Geelong Botanic Gardens.

In amongst the Aloes and horrible Cacti ( I love them, mind you ), the several acres of outlying parkland, the bit of a tea-room and the lusciously shady mini rainforests and all the respectable statuary, the exquisitely-kept Victorian tidiness, the wonderfully brave southern hemisphere plantings, I was left with just enough time to linger under the timelessness of a ridiculously early spring day. 

I am struck by the Fan Aloe ( Aloe plicatilis ) waving its fingers and its hair all over the place,

and some gymnastic Gymea  lily ( Doryanthes excelsa ), big, bold and leaning out.

All of my photos, thanks to my lack of photographic skill, got bled of life, as maybe I did. Oh what would I do to have got here in a car, or even a limousine, with a. picnic basket. But I am a poor man and so the train is what I take -

 - with a stunning spectrum of personalities, all of them also booked on this particular transit, from out of Melbourne, in any number of the seats around me. A view to die for, no, but I began to breathe more easily.

You approach Geelong Botanic Gardens via scruffy Eastern Park, where Eucalypts like these, and any other number of other trees, stand tall. I like that it's got an unplanned look.

Out around the other side, where new works are going on, you know you're not in an urban landscape.

The new plantings take my breath away, so brave they are against the traditional.

I found a cooling banana and a place to sit,

and a place to hide.

Here it is as you look out across towards the Gardens, with the sea to your left, glistening as it did this day.

And here, a look into the gardens, where a whole lot of development is taking place, beyond the rough-hewn bits of fence.

And here, madly, he who hoped to transmit an idea of a most beautiful garden, both its 2002 reincarnation, and its mid-19th century establishment, is simply propping before you his favourite house in the vicinity, without any idea as to its garden, a ghostly place. What a long journey it all was then, to get back to my little doggy to get un-mad.

Our Shelter from the Stormy Blast

Tonight the State Emergency Services came. All it took was an emergency...but I transgress.
Above is part of the beautiful Christ Church Grammar School straddling the rather neglected and prosaic Fawkner Park in South Yarra, which park is, here and there, getting some long-needed attention.

 I'll avoid showing you the park as much of it really is....soccer fields, tedious avenues of some sort of leafless elm-like tree, or other avenues of unloved Moreton Bay figs, promenades built for promenading Victorians, inadequate mulching, soggy fields where careless photographers step...

...oh yes, tonight's emergency:  a windstorm tonight  ( 100 km per hour plus ) hit home, in a quick, short series of thunder-like thuds, and my favourite, and most stately Eucalypt came crashing down onto the roof overhead, just as I was eating a bowl of soup. Bits of plaster fell before me and into my remaining soup, a stump of tree projecting savagely through the wall. Zara, exemplar canine companion, was the hero of the night, having agitated at least an hour before impact for some sort of affirmative action. I too felt something was going to happen, but prayer protects... PS: this is not my home, illustrated above, however much I'd like it to be, but Christ Church again. What a very confusing post.

This, then, was what thudded through the roof/wall, a fist of a branch, strapped by electricity cabling -

- I was sitting just a little to the right of the centre of the underneath of this image, spoon in hand...

It's all gone now. SES ( State Emergency Services ) have packed their truck up, leaving us with half a toppled Eucalypt sprawled across the roof, having to be removed tomorrow. They, the SES, were splendid, arriving minutes after they were called, sure in all they did, as if scripted, no ego. What I was hoping to make some sort of point about, however, having ambled into Fawkner Park yesterday, a park without much horticultural distinction, on my way to a semi-serious visit to the Alfred Hospital, which visit proved to be good news entirely, is that trees enliven otherwise static environments...

...as do Aloes, or any other plant life, especially in what is meant to be winter, when a bit of sudden colour enlivens a grey, desultory, looming kind of day.

For those without any acquaintance of the park, it lies just south-east of the CBD and is flanked by one of Melbourne's major boulevards, the formerly glorious St Kilda Road, once - as I can still remember - home to glorious mansions, few of which remain, now a thoroughfare dragged down by unnecessarily ill-fitting sky-scrapers, ennobled by rows of Plane trees. Adjacent also is some rather expensive housing. Here somebody seems to know what they're doing with what they've got.

As they do here. I'm sure no Eucalypt fell on this roof tonight, cresting as it does above the mortal world, apparently.

I look at the tree and I look at the building and I believe they compliment one another. Sometimes the built world lends a backdrop to nature.

A Rainbow Lorikeet ( Trichoglossus haematodus ), one of thousands, takes its late lunch as I make my way to overworked hospital staff, to a waiting room, with my bits of paper. I don't want to know I have anything wrong. I don't want to know the park's not being properly cared for. I don't want to know all the beauty that's been more or less made will vanish out of carelessness.

This is my favourite house/garden  in the vicinity, a rarity, knuckled down between high Victorian splendour and the vacuous aggression of corporate non-architecture.

This is what I've been getting at, despite tonight's drama: nature civilizes humankind. It's not we who civilize nature.

Back at Christ Church again. The melanoma proved to be nothing at all - not that I purportedly believed it would have mattered anyway - and I'm grateful to be somewhere momentarily quiet. I wouldn't really recommend Fawkner Park to a visitor to Melbourne, but what experience tells me is that wherever you walk, you're bound to find something behind or within or underneath appearances. All you need is faith.

Much of Melbourne's beauty's been mitigated by greed, as I'm sure it's been in some other places. There are quarters, though, where someone walking without any apparent hope or intention may be able to see a little further than the prospect has devised. I have a strong feeling to reconnect with my church, but that might take a bit more walking.
In our world as it is the past is so often becoming now something to be ditched, as if it didn't matter, as if no sky were falling. Perhaps it is not; perhaps we can build a pretend sky, lit with enough twinkling to dazzle us.

But all I want is a bit of quiet, a bit of a refuge, a bit of space, some green around me, and some blue up above.

Winterior

I was going to be going to Geelong today, to the 'Impressions of Geelong' exhibition. Until I woke up, that is, to bitter winds, recurrent rain and chill.

We've had our mildest July on record, I believe, so I've been getting out there defrosting in the sunlight. And wacko! I've got alot more done in the winter garden than usual ( bent down on frozen knees, cowering in gales, teeth gritted, etc, etc ). Above are some of the remains of a massive Hakea that dropped silently to the ground one night recently in the front garden.

So it's a domestic day instead. That's been good, because I've been able to clear out my fridge and make a thick slurry of a winter soup. I'd been thinking it was good to be getting out every day, but no way is this little winter bunnykins and his preferred canine accomplice going to do other than hibernate.

The African stool and the Chinese bowl were given to me by my brother. The Dusty Miller flowers came from the garden a year or two back and still prove useful.

You're getting bits out of my kitchen now. When there's no garden to go out into, there's always the garden within.

It may not always be known in the northern hemisphere that alot of what blooms and grows in the southern hemisphere can do so in the colder months. We are upside-down, of course.

Here's that Dusty Miller again, in my kitchen. Melbourne's winter can be bleak, for sure, but it's not the wipe-out it is up in the northern half of the world.

What is a blizzard? That's a big, overwhelming thing that happens in books. Soup cooked, my windows open to keep the air fresh with gusts of cold air, there's a sort of relief to be away from the absurdly hot days we'll get later on, when the heat hits like a thousand fists, Mr Bond...

The sky outside is white, bleached of fire. Trees swagger in the wind. Nothing could induce me or the Young Miss Zara McWoof to go out there -

- much better it is to be screened, sequestered, holed up, observing outer reality rather than participating in it...

...for there's a silver lining in every gale, on every storm-front, pitted as we are against hyper-reality. If you'll toss me a piece of toast, Zara, I'll go and get your slippers...