seasons

A damp end to 2009

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Christmas is over and it’s been raining steadily on the mountain since Christmas night. Welcome gentle rain falling from cloud cover that is allowing a pale warm light through as well –and probably putting a light charge into the solar batteries as well.

I have moved the car out of the carport so it can have the dust washed from its once-bright red duco.

Everything green is even greener; I try not to watch the grass growing or think of the mowing ahead of me when it stops and dries out. But that’s next week.

This week I have a good excuse to stay inside tapping away on the computer, working on my next book.
Beyond occasional emergency dashes I am confined within the cabin and the verandah’s dripping edges.

From here I can see the little dam rainspotted and filling back up to its reedy edges, and a young kangaroo mother and child grazing beyond the fence, their fur much darker in the rain. They seem unbothered by the weather; I assume they are warm and dry beneath their bedraggled coats.

I know we’d both prefer this to heat and fire-danger.

‘Tis the season

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Not to be jolly, as we are supposed to be, but a whole mix of emotions, and mostly not even on the up scale to jolly.

Why? Because Copenhagen came so close to Christmas, and delivered such a sad affirmation of the power of the corporate and capitalist world to ignore the urgent needs of the earth and its most vulnerable nations. The gift of the rich to the poor was a callous and hypocritical thumbs-down.

It is even more despairing because leaders like Rudd and even Obama have coupled the words ‘meaningful’ and ‘agreement’ into one senseless compound word; they did not reach anything meaningful if they meant to stop global warming. It is still tokenism.

A pity the U.S. isn’t closer to sea level, or that a tsunami of reality hasn’t hit Rudd yet.

So yes, I am filled with a wide and pervasive sadness for the world, and an anger at those who are the most guilty yet the most unrepentant because they will not do what is needed to make amends; have they even said ‘Sorry’?
I chose this photo for my Christmas post because it holds that mix of light and dark layers which I think many are feeling at present.
For I do have hope. Perhaps it was foolishly optimistic to think that world leaders would have shaken off the yoke of their corporate masters just because the planet is in mortal danger – or not in one go.

After all, they did at least agree that they lived on the same planet.

The tragedy is that it would be so easy to cut emissions and turn our economies around to non-fossil fuels if our leaders and our politics were not so trammelled by the machinations of Big Business.

Yet we have seen some changes — some for the worst, looking at the the Abbott dinosaur party — so 2010 may move minds and generate ‘green’ as the only way to go for smart countries.

Nature always soothes me with its beauty and regenerative powers, so I offer this sky pic to my readers as my seasonal greeting.

I’d better offer it to my friends and family too, as I didn’t get round to sending even one Christmas card this year; somehow all those Santas and presents seemed a little obscene as I thought of the children of Africa, hearing from their leaders that the world said NO.

Peace and hope to you all,
Sharyn

The bounty of bulbs

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bulbs-1Each year the front yard explodes with the bounty of winter-flowering bulbs: tuberoses, jonquils of at least five different types, including the highly-perfumed and multi-layered clusters of the Erlicheers, and the dainty arches of the snowdrops.

I know the latter are properly named ‘snowflakes’, but childhood memories and habits, as well as their drooping stems and rounded heads, insist they remain ‘drops’.
bulbs-2The bees didn’t care about terminology as they crawled inside each little green-dotted cup.
bulbs-3The springtime daffodils are just beginning to unfurl their papery sheaths, so for a few weeks I will have the bounty of both seasons from my bulbs.

They all grow anywhere, fight their way up through tough grass, need no care from me, continue to multiply, expanding into bigger and bigger clumps each season — and offer their collective beauty to delight my indoor days.

Returning to Tuggerah

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tuggerah-1
Librarians are some of my favourite people, being book lovers like me. However, the grey-haired spinster in a drab cardigan no longer fits the bill. Nor are libraries just places of shush and half-asleep old men.

Take young, cheery and goatee-d Adam Holland and his Wyong Shire Library in the enormous Westfield Tuggerah Shoppingtown on the NSW Central Coast. 

Adam’s author talks and events welcome the community in, seat them in comfy armchairs, feed them tea and chocolate bickies and grapes, while writers like me talk about my books and read from them.  For free!

My visit there for my first book was lovely, so I was happy to return last week for Mountain Tails. And, as I had grown up on the Central Coast, and my sister Robyn has retired there, it almost feels like coming home.

It was a delight to see faces in the audience familiar to me from my last talk there.

I always enjoy the interaction during question time and the chats afterwards when I sign books. Rick Finucane from Borders bookshop in Westfields not only sold my books there but took the photos for me on my camera. Thank you, Rick!
tuggerah-rosesAn extra treat was that Adam presented me with a bunch of yellow roses and some chocolates.

Back home in my cabin that night, having just beaten nightfall and the rain, I lit the fire, arranged the roses, poured myself a glass of red wine, and indulged in a chocolate or two. You could say I felt appreciated.

Next day was grey and cold and windy, but the roses bloomed golden on my windowsill, extending the pleasure of my author talk well beyond its actual time. Thank you Adam and Tuggerah!
 

Autumn decor

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When the wisteria leaves begin to turn their beautiful clear yellow, they suddenly justify my colour choice of bright yellow for the painted wooden chairs on the verandah.

It’s what I see through the window in front of my desk, so I’m very aware of the transition.
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My verandah is as big as my small cabin, and its ‘decor’ and colour co-ordination is very dependent on the natural exterior world for which it is the transition zone.

I just love it when they work together like this and give me such new visual pleasure for even a brief time.

Living walls

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Each summer my verandah grows its own walls on the west and north-west.

Although the ornamental grape and the wisteria have been pruned right back to leafless woody stems, come spring they begin to reach out for each other and interwine.

By Christmas they have made dense, multi-layered walls of greenery that keep my verandah shaded, cool and dry.

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Just like man-made walls, they incorporate a window and a door, although if I am away for more than few days I return to catch them trying to fill in the gaps, tendrils searching across thin air for the other side.

Apart from their practical function, unlike shadecloth for example, they are beautiful and varied in colour and form.

And they’re free!

Spring shades

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Pinks, mauves, magentas, purples – spring is hitting the full spectrum now in its flower offerings.

In the forest, the native Indigofera bushes have burst into prominence with masses of pinkish-mauve pea flowers, carried at about chest-height below the eucalypts. Normally their delicate foliage renders them less visible. Any garden would be graced by these.

In my garden, though, it’s the large and flamboyant blooms of the irises that are catching my eye most often: exotically arranged coloured flags of petals, pink up, magenta down, a dusting of gold feathers, deep purple silk buds.

They even hold their own against the riotous backdrop of the lavender.

Winter morning

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Mist rises from the mountains opposite as morning light grows stronger. It reveals light snow has fallen overnight up there at 5000 feet.

That’s in the wilderness area, so only the wallabies will be marking the snowfall with their prints.

But the sun is rising too, and the mist begins to glow, tinged with rose as the long low rays penetrate it.

The snow will melt during the day; the brief glimpses I get are rewards for the cold morning, and a reminder that I’m not in Sydney!

Season of moss and lichen

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After being cabinbound for a week, when a morning came with no rain threatening, I seized the camera, donned gumboots and went a-walking.

Most blatantly rainloving of all were the mosses, drab in dry times, at their party best now.

On rocks in the gullies they glowed like textured velvet in a rich range of shades of green, with shapes and heights varying as the best of garden designers would recommend.

Set off by the splotches and splatters of the hardy lichens, decorated with an occasional fallen leaf or wallaby scat, my moss gardens are at their best.

On the rocks of the drier ridges, I find the plumped-up mosses glowing less in rainforest brights than in sage and thyme blues, honey browns. Here the lichens stand up amongst it like vivid corals – the flowers in this garden.

Spring or autumn or?

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Some of my garden shrubs are exhibiting extremely strange behaviour this autumn. Like the May bush, the Banksia rose, and the honeysuckle that smothers the outdoor loo.

It would seem they aren’t sure what season it is. When they ought to be winding down and closing up shop for the winter, they are putting out just one or two isolated sprays of blossom!

Totally out of season, but the plants, like the animals, have been so confused by the strange weather this last year that they seem to be having a bet each way.

Just in case this autumn is spring, and the other spring doesn’t come, their genes have told them to bloom, but only tentatively.

Rosey harvest

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rosellas on lawn
It’s easy to see when the predominant native grass in my `lawn’ is seeding, because the yard is taken over by a purposeful band of crimson rosellas.

They proceed en masse up the slope, through thin grass as tall as themselves.

Standing on one leg, each daintily grasps a seedhead stem with the claw of the other, bends it towards their beak and neatly strips it, rather as we’d munch sideways along a cob of corn.

The harvest appears organised and amicable: no crossing of territory, no debate about personal patches, not one squawk of protest.

It is a silent harvest, though highly visible, as the richness of their red and blue plumage turns my plain yard into a moving tapestry.
rosellas closeup