The Mountain

Treasure hunt

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After being cooped up in the cabin for too many days, wondering if my wood supply is enough to last out the wet spell, especially as the tin cover blew off the woodpile – I seize the chance to go for a walk in the forest as soon as a likely long fine break occurs.

I know I am bound to find something interesting or beautiful or both. My first stop is always where the dam overflow crosses the track and heads down the gully. 
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First treasure found: water sliding silver over rocks, moss glowing green and tiny plants as pretty as jewels.

Next I walk around the dam, squelching over the grass where the hidden spring higher up is running across the clearing. Few trees have seeded here, no doubt because the wallabies and kangaroos love this spot and graze here daily.

But at the base of the one large shade tree, I spot a bright splash of colour against the dark trunk, and head towards it.
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Second treasure:  a clump of fat fungi crowded together, orange to amber on top, flesh to salmon to brown below, upcurved bowls for catching leaves.

Light rain starts to fall and I hurry home, grateful for the brief outdoor time. And for the fact that here on my mountain I am always assured of finding at least one treasure.

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.

Autumn fungi

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In the forest, after rain and while there is still some warmth in the sunshine, I am bound to find some stunning fungi popping up amongst the leaves or blooming on the tree trunks.

What amazes me is that each season I find new ones, at least, never before seen by me here. In just one week here’s some of the treasures I spotted without walking very far or looking very hard.

The black object on the bottom left is my gumboot-shod foot, just so you get the scale of this rosy trio that erupted right beside the path up to the loo.

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This rather slimy little chocolate cap came with tiny choc chips, a dollop of whipped cream and an insect visitor that I didn’t even see until I blew up the photo. It was spotted from the loo itself, which has no door to inhibit nature watching.

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Like orange sherbet ice blocks, these dainty fungi look good enough to eat, and there were hundreds of them scattered throughout the grass in a small area. I resisted.

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As if orange sherbet wasn’t tempting enough, just inside my house yard a batch of half a dozen freshly baked chocolate cakes, un-iced, had appeared overnight.

Plump and smooth and bigger than cup cakes, two of them looked as if someone else had already taken a bite. I could almost smell chocolate cake!

Any ideas of the identification of these fungi will be very welcome; I have looked in my books, but have given up!

After the rain

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My world looked different after the rains stopped. Blue sky seemed bluer, white clouds whiter than ever before, brighter than memory allowed. Grey skies had dominated for so long.

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My native animal neighbours appreciated it too, coming out of shelter to feed and scratch and dry off. Not having seen many since I got back from Thailand, due to the weather, I am relieved to see them.
A few wallabies, a family of roos…‘ Sawasdee-ka!’ I greet them, Thai style.

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An echidna appeared just near the house, poking about in the overgrown herb garden. I have seen it, or a relative, there before. I expect the rocks provide good insect hidey holes for it to investigate.

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Near the herb garden a large Wanderer butterfly decorates the lavender shrub. Although they are common here, familiarity does not breed contempt — they are very striking in colour and pattern, and I am grateful for their abundance.

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Next day the echidna is still wandering about the yard as if intends to stay.

It feels like company; I am pleased to be sharing with a creature again, and to see something is using the useless grass.

As I have trouble putting a spade through this kikuyu sod, I am impressed that the echidna can poke and wriggle its snout through with no apparent trouble. An efficient ‘poker’ indeed.

Wet, wet world

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wet-1Recent rains seemed endless as I remained cabinbound for the week, standing on the wet steps and peering out over the falling autumn leaves at the wet, wet world around me.

Over 300mm of rain fell, encouraging the kikuyu to grow ahead of my efforts once more.

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Gum boot shod, hat dripping water down the neck of my Drizabone, each morning I had to at least venture as far as the rain gauge and the diminishing wood heap, as well as checking the batteries in the solar power shed.

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The maned wood ducks liked it, and clearly felt secure in this watery world, seeing me restricted to the verandah far more than usual. They nibbled their way at leisure across the yard, much closer to structures than previously.

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On the first morning of no rain, I ventured out with the camera. Low cloud still hid the far mountains, and the trees still dripped latent raindrops, but it was good to be out walking.

Water ran over grass like mini-creeks, and water plants flourished in puddles.

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Although the horses have been gone for months, their presence is still evident in the rotting lumps of manure scattered here and there. On the track each ball of manure has sprouted tiny fungi, like candles on a cake.

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In the house yard, colours are darker, leaves shinier, lichen brighter. The plants look happier than I do – as the rain begins to fall again

Mountain Tails has arrived

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mt-200I have been told that my new book, Mountain Tails,  has arrived!  It is probably at my post office right now, for me to collect next week when the road dries out and the creek level drops!

I can hardly wait, even though I have of course read it – the real book is quite a different matter from an on-screen or A4 manuscript.

What will it feel and smell like? Will I cry as I did when I first held ‘The Woman on the Mountain’? Will my drawings look OK in actual print? Will I find any missing commas?

It is also heading for bookshops all round the country, but Exisle, my publishers, have made a special arrangement for my web site visitors — you can buy Mountain Tails at a special 20 per cent discount by ordering from the Exisle website here and quoting the coupon number MT2009; you can use that coupon any number of times.

This collection of short pieces about my wild animal neighbours here in my wildlife refuge is accompanied by my black and white drawings, and hopefully it will amuse, intrigue and educate readers as much as the critters themselves do for me.

In raising awareness of their uniqueness, it also aims to raise awareness of the plight of our threatened and endangered species, and at the end I have included lists of ways to get involved for those who want to help, and contacts for doing so.

I will be giving talks at various places and as Exisle arranges them I’ll put up posts to let you know. Always good to meet my readers, such as Kez at East Maitland last year.

Many events wlll be before Mother’s Day, as Exisle think it will make a great Mother’s Day gift.

PS: I have it! A dear little book, but the only time I felt like crying was at the dedication to my Dad, whom I still miss terribly. Exisle have again done a beautiful job of production – designer Nanette is so attuned to the tone of a work that I can’t imagine a different cover now.

Yes, I’d like to redo one or two drawings that don’t look so good at the reduced size; but mostly I just wanted to add all the other animal events that have happened since, dozens of postscripts needed – or a second collection in a year or so? I had forgotten that, for example, the whole python saga was after the manuscript had been sent off!

Kikuyu punishment

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kikuyu grass stops mower

A month away from the mountain is a long time. The bush itself requires no attention from me, but my domesticated area does, and the 350mm of rain in February has effected a great deal of green growth. Not all is welcome.

I continually apologise to the environment for my ignorant crime of introducing kikuyu grass here thirty years ago. As punishment, its runners are the scourge of my garden, but until lately the horses kept its main expanse munched very short, its patches the first thing they headed for whenever I let them into the house yard.

With the horses gone, that munching is much missed now after my month’s absence. Mowing is the only answer, and with these dewy autumn mornings that has to wait until the sun is hotter than I like for outdoor work.

Thick and tall kikuyu is a hard task for a mower and when wet it is an impossible one, a sudden choked capital green full stop.

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Kikuyu mist

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Just before the heatwave ended, I noticed a patch of the dreaded kikuyu grass seemed to be dying off, becoming pale and yellowish and oddly ‘misted’.

The native grass parts of the ‘lawn’ were browning off but usually the kikuyu is the last to go brown in hot and dry times. Its runners extend so far underground and it is such a determined survivor that it is a supremely equipped invader.

Originally from east Africa, it is a particular scourge on the coast where good rainfall allows it to mount fences and swamp sheds under a bright green tide if left ungrazed. 

I curse the day I bought it here, on the advice of the then Soil Conservation Department, to hold the soil on freshly made banks and dam walls. Fortunately it does not do very well here where it can be grazed by the native animals, so it’s mostly only inside my house yard.

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There are no horses here now  to be let in to eat my grass, and I haven’t got around to mowing yet.  When I  took a closer look at the odd patch of kikuyu it seemed to have very fine spiderwebs over the whole widening arc. But they were nowhere else.

Having never seen this before, I wondered why it should be connected to the lack of grazing or mowing. I began to  wonder if this wasn’t some sort of slime mould, as they can take the most extraordinary forms.

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But when I searched the net I discovered that it is a rare event: the flowering of the kikuyu.

Why it should be happening in only a small patch, I don’t know, but apparently ‘the pollen sacs, or anthers, extend above the grass on slender white filaments and give the area a whitish cast’.

Another site said that it flowers infrequently and that when it does, the area may seem ‘covered in spidery threads of white filaments’.
Without  a doubt this is what I was seeing.

Pennisetum clandestinum is the botanical name for kikuyu … and ‘clandestine’ is most appropriate for its strange and secret flowering. Yet another example of the amazing ways of nature!

Morning jewels

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Last week gave me a morning of perfect synchronicity between light and water. A dewy night, mist lifting in time for the morning sun to illuminate the thousands of spider webs strung through the trees. They are probably always there, but invisible until diamonds are added.

There were elaborate and intricate multi-storey webs, webs that incorporated bright leaves into their settings …

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— and webs that bent twigs to frame their creations.

By contrast, this week has been hot and dry; no mist, no dew, no diamonds, only the bright morning light.

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This web, a regular at the end of my verandah, shone finely outlined like a giant thumbprint, the classic spiderweb we learn to draw without acknowledging the complexity and range of spidery spinnings.

Bush beauties

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At some point in summer I will catch a glimpse of a faint splash of pink in the long tussock grass. The native Hyacinth Orchids are back!

They are hard to spot because they are solitary flowers; Dipodium punctata does not grow in clumps. They are also only thinly dispersed here. Like me, their needs for space and privacy are large.

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They have no leaves, as apparently their thick fleshy roots draw enough food to sustain these exotic-looking beauties.

Undistracted, the dark burgundy stem shoots up about 60cm before erupting into a raceme of pink stars spotted with deeper pink and burgundy.

The new buds at the top clasp each other closely until it’s their turn to spread their petals and show their star quality –’Ta-dah’!

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!

My missing creek

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The one thing missing here is a creek. I have many springs and a high rainfall, but I chose to be on a mountain rather than in a creek-centred valley.

So after a lot of rain when my spring-fed dam overflows and runs with a rush and a roar down the rocky gullies, I cherish the brief experience of having a creek on my place.

It will usually run white water for a day, then more gently for perhaps a week. At present the water table is so high that my precious creek ran across the track and down the gully for two weeks.

The mosses and ferns loved it and the elkhorns on the edging rocks looked on with great approval.

I could almost pretend it was a permanent creek, a compensatory gift for the dreadful bog of my access tracks after rain.