The Garden at Moorfield Journal: 40
A Butterfly, a Clam and a Jellyfish walk into a Garden.... 09.02.2024
There is a twisted knot in the pit of my stomach. I am uneasy and I have been trying to shake it since first thing this morning. I know what I need to do.
I step outside of the house and begin walking through the garden. By the hedges that need doing that skirt the homestead verandah and the weatherboard extension behind it. They are a little wilder than usual and as lush as they were in spring, all that summer rain makes me feel like December is still to come as I run my hands over the tops of their irridescent new growth. Their vitality so late in the most trying season is a comfort and I am reminded how blessed we’ve been these past two years, as if Mother Nature herself had wanted this young garden to succeed and held back her usual ferocity for these parts.
I walk to the flower gardens and I breathe them deep into my lungs, the honey air of a summer garden on a day of climbing heat. The roses in particular, are making for a heady soup to slowly sift through. I feel like I can pick ‘Nahema’ from the melded spice of so many scents. No wonder they bottled her. This all helps and my heart rate begins to drop, I am returned to a regular respiration as the presence of small creatures floating by and a light breeze visible in the tall feathery grassheads high enough to brush my face, plant my feet back down into the sanctuary I made for us, back down onto the ground again from the great heights of what if’s and what nows?
A smile builds across my face, lifting the muscles in my neck and across my shoulders and dropping them as if strung together, the tension melts all to see the tiniest blue wren bounce along the path in front of me, directing me through the spilling growth. So much abundance, so much beauty. How can one feel anything but deep gratitude in such a moment?
It’ll take me a few days though, I sense, to truly let go of this unsettled feeling, and each day I will follow this same path through the garden to a more peaceful place within myself as I adapt to my new normal. There is a sense of a missing limb, of sorts. I’ve been scurrying about, pleased to finally have the time to myself to work through the mounting list of jobs that I’ve waited until this week to arrive to even begin chipping away at, yet I am so discombobulated by her absence, my wee, chattery shadow.
Nes is off to her first week of Kinder and while she goes off bravely, she always does into new things, amazing me and filling me with a sickening amount of pride and I encourage her to have fun and listen well, I am the one, I suspect, is as, if not more, jittery than she. She is a constant at my side and in my ear, and suddenly, space and silence and I am at a loss for where to start, the captain of my own time once again as much as anyone can be who still needs to pay bills and manage their own household.
I have spent months, in this case three, after the loss of Hugo’s father suddenly in November which has meant much time with family in NSW, away from Moorfield and Nes with mainly me, trying to shield her from the grief and keep her busy with the stuff of life that little people like. We went home only briefly, long enough for Nes to take part in her Christmas concert for which she’d missed every rehearsal but one, and still, she nails it. My heart almost explodes out of my chest to see her unconstrained joy at being in front of an audience and getting to dance and sing her heart out.
“Born for the stage!” I am told this often by those who teach Nes in the classroom and dance studios.
I remember my mum being told that too, of me, performing for my haircuts to Lorraine, the owner of a tiny salon in a remote corner of Arnhem Land who would clap and encourage the other patrons to join in on the applause. A turbulent childhood and much self-doubt as a result, stripped me of that fearless, funny little girl who would’ve taken a shot at anything, early in her life and for a long time. It was replaced with a resilience, a tenacity and toughness. I felt like I had to fight for everything now, or be ready to, not dance for it. I lugged this into my young adult life too, for a while until a garden helped me put it down.
It is not until these most blessed days really, the last decade or so, of finding love, the person I married, the family I made and answering the question of what do I really want to do; building gardens and tending plants and talking to others who do the same, does she, the little singing, dancing girl I once was, meet me here in this life. She comes more and more often, where it is safe to come out now, safe to be her, safe to feel joy and to feel happy.
I laugh, whenever anyone eludes to Nessie’s theatrical leanings and ease with the stage.
“Well,” I assure them, “She actually was (born for the stage), genetically speaking. She comes from a very long line of them”.
We lost my Aunt Glynis just recently. I’m still sad over it, heaped on top of grief for my father-in-law, heavy with empathy for Hugo, his family and Nes, who is so confused by the idea of death and impermanence at 4 and soon after the passing of my godfather back in Finland, a man who offered a safe space in some of the most volatile years. All of them, all at once it felt like, suddenly gone and the chance to speak one last time gone too.
We, Glynis and I and her carer, had been talking much recently, we were to see her last year in LA and then we couldn’t go, and then later this year. Plans were afoot. Glynis was a Hollywood star, an Official Disney Icon for whatever that means it seems quite a thing to achieve in a life, an actress in 60 films and 30 stage productions. A Tony Award winner and Oscar nominee, the oldest living in the end.
The song, Send in the Clowns, was written specifically for her to sing…….it was a song I first heard as a child, by Glynis and then reprised by Barbara Streisand and Bette Midler, two women on repeat in my mother’s house. I could not listen to it, at all. I would have to leave the room, for it broke my heart to hear it for reasons I had to decipher in coming years. I had not known my aunty sang it, that it was her voice I heard every so often and cleaved myself away from, nor that it was written for her for a character she played on Broadway.
The heartwrenching lyrics of missed opportunity, passed on chances, unfulfilled fates, spoke to me even then, so young in years to count but not in the experience of the pain of life where once such promise was born and waited for a chance to be, already half done and then done away with completely. I saw it everyday in my home life.
My Great Grandmother, Lizzie, Glynis’s grandmother, was the first ever concert violinist in Australia and her family, our family, the largest travelling theatre company in the world. My grandfather touring the globe by ship from a small boy, performing on stage, Glynis was only 6 months the first time Lizzie took her on stage.
How far we had strayed, I so often felt, looking at my little island of a family, stuck out at sea, struggling as we did, in all things it seemed from money to marriage and any kind of sense of stability. Our ground shook, everyday. Everyday we were unanchored to anything we could rely on, even eachother. There was no other family anywhere near on either side, no connection to that past but for my fathers’ career as an artist (and a childhood spent singing on the radio) which had hung loosely in the ether and without ties to anything else for so much of my life before I knew these stories of who and what we’d come from, did anything about him make any sense. Or anything about me, for that matter.
As soon as Nessie’s Christmas Concert is done, grateful as I am that we got back for it, she is thrilled to perform, we are headed back to Sydney once more for Christmas and New Year’s Eve, my birthday with family. We don’t return to put our feet back onto our own ground until almost the end of the first week of 2024, back in time for mum’s/nana’s birthday.
We are still when we return, to let the rattle in our bones dissipate, more still than is usual for us, shell-shocked and drained, tired from all of it and the constant travel too. Something I never tire of normally and for the first time ever in my life, I just want to be at “home”. We spend some time sitting and being, in the house, holding us as it seems to, in the garden also, rather than running around as we would normally be after some time away, for at least the first week or so, anyway. We fix some faulty irrigation, we clean the pool, we brushcut and brushcut and brushcut until everyone’s lower backs are spasming and hard graft has sweated out some of the angst of the last few months.
We talk about the glasshouse base, the pool deck, the sunken area in the dry garden, when the excavator and Chris, it’s most skilled operator, needs to come back, we talk about horse manure and needing lots of it. We talk and loop around these same subjects multiple times, late at night before sleep when nothing can be done about them only to resume the same conversation at the same time the next night and so on. Spread too thin as we’ve been with so much time away and a harrowing funeral that repeats sometimes on all our minds but for Nes who I kept away, we do no more than speak of these things, these jobs as needing to happen…..and every utterance of them with, just not right now but soon.
I run about madly with a little one for the weeks to follow when we first arrive home, drawing down more and more on my already low tank after the last two years and now the last few months, desperately trying to keep up with 4, amidst family upheaval and the palpable grief. What an age of endless energy and inquisitiveness, my mind hurts with the amount of questions and chatter that furnish and over-clutter every possible moment she is awake…..and yet, now all is quiet in my office, except for my soft music and Wednesday lapping at her water bowl in the next room. While I had longed for this peace again, this time to finish thoughts of my own, even go to the toilet alone, I now feel such a great cavity left behind by her little runaway thoughts and queries and stories and shows.
I remind myself that the garden can easily fill weeks, months, years of that longing and that all the while I build it, it is that wee little mind who I want to impress with it the most, who I want to share it with the most. I build it for her, all of it is for her, from the moment I learnt she existed as a spark of life, perhaps even before, for the possibility of her. For all it does for me and therefore, for me as her mother.
The fresh air, the exercise, the focus, the achievement, I dig and divide and plant, so that oneday she will see her mummy may have come from not much and some hard things to make something beautiful of her own and a life lorded over by pay check to pay check living and surviving for so long, can there be room made still for big idea’s and big risks, and should be; that her mummy chased dreams, even when the way was not clear, and did something she loved.
I push back the most voluptuous perennial growth on my way through the garden and I feel immediately teary, happy tears, overwhelmed tears, grief, joy, the marvellous mix of all one can feel. I have many moments where I think, how did she get here? That little girl who got so lost from the things that made her truly happy?
I have not yet expressed much of my own emotion and I suspect that is why it spills over now, in my first moments alone in months, so busy I have been swimming in the tides of everyone else’s and making sense of it all to a little one, or trying to at least. Concepts she could never really grasp at this age, that we all struggle with, of life and death; ours, hers, every living thing, in fact. She is baffled by this and asks endless questions, I answer them all and I try to finish everything with traces of hope so that, that frightened little face might soften again and thankfully, it does.
We talk about butterflies and how they live only a short while but that the life they live is chocobloc with beauty and transformation and for some, great travel. How they do such an important job in the small amount of time they have. She seems not to mind this analogy she does not know I make between a butterfly and three people we have lost whose lives were all long and well lived with great impact on so many who knew them, we speak of butterflies only but soon I am being asked about the life expectancy of every form of life on the planet. I google madly.
The longest living animal on earth is a clam, by the way, at 506 years old and there is an immortal jellyfish, incidentally Nes’s favourite animal. I leave that one out for now, save confusing matters even more.
Soon this subject which involves us all at some time or another, except a certain jellyfish it turns out, has taken on a skin she is more happy to wear. We talk openly about missing her Tata, she gets less and less upset each time. I, however, am shaken to the core by the thought of it and constant speaking of it, mortality that is. I can never be without her, or she, without me, I think. It is too hard a concept to grasp and yet we have asked her to. The garden will help, I remind myself, as it always does.
I keep walking until I am birthed it feels like, out the end of the Long Border turned jungle into the clearing of the orchard and I find two random Mariposa plums I didn’t know were there. They are the first fruit to grow in our orchard here at Moorfield. I save them for her, for Nes. She will devour them in the least careful way and enjoy them the most. She will offer us a try, knowing her. The ‘Mariposa’, meaning butterfly in Spanish, by chance Nessie’s second language, and the subject of a song she sings of an insect associated with the spirit of someone passed on in many Hispanic cultures.
I walk on to pick armfuls which become vases full of dahlias, and roses too and cradle them as I admire the tiny tomatoes that have begun to form in our late planted veg patch. The smallest flower tipped fingers of new cucumbers dangling from the vines that have gripped onto the stakes I offered them in the first weeks we were back.
The tears that came quickly before, have disappeared back inside somewhere, maybe not yet done but done for now to make way for oxygen. My breathing is slower than it has been in months that is for certain, maybe years. To be here at this point where not all is perfect and not all was forseen but food and flowers grow where once there was none, and the baby I held is learning letters and numbers and making friends and learning to negotiate her own hard things and to be brave in the face of them.
I am still learning to be brave, do we ever stop? I hope not, for surely that means we’re still doing new things, still living that little bit further and further into life’s offerings.
Nes draws a picture of me in a green dress, surrounded by flowers, the sun shining high in the corner of the page and some rain in the other corner, a big smile on my face. And I can’t stop smiling (and wanting to cry immediately) when she holds it out, explaining that it is me, happy in my garden with the sun and the rain because I like both and lots of flowers because, “You love them, mummy”.
Every waking moment she is not with me I am both grateful for the chance to find myself again in small quiet moments of being her mother, and grateful that I even get to be this in the first place. All the while I am pining for her to be at my side from some deep, guttural reaction to her absence. I think often about what I want for her, now and as she forms her adult world and life, and the only thing that comes quickly and with the most certainty is……happy.
I want her to be happy, that is all I really want. Perhaps she won’t love flowers, perhaps she won’t believe in the things that I do, perhaps where her happiness will be found will not be in a garden or in world travel or in the pages of books or the playing of music, or the making and sharing of food. Maybe it will, maybe all of these things she loves now, that we love, she will love later but it doesn’t matter what it is, how it comes, only that she knows she can have it and create it. The fact that she sees me as happy, that she drew me happy, doing what I do with the time I have been given, while being her mum, means she will believe it is possible because it is, she has seen it and that belief is everything. It was to me, everytime I lost it, I knew it was there to retrieve when I really needed to.
I remember by the time I was old enough, before 10, after 4, these years of my youth blur, to know that home was not a stable place and fear became the loudest voice in my head for a while, I lay on the floor of our living room in a fibro mine built box in a cul-de-sac in Arnhem Land, watching Mary Poppins. The magic of storytelling and music sparking in my veins, the escape it provided.
A beautiful blonde lady in a hat with big eyes and a bright sky blue dress with a white sash I didn’t understand then, saying, “Votes for Women”, began to sing in this huskey voice. A voice that would later sound like mine when I sang for school, as a teenager, though my drama teacher was convinced it was because I smoked too much. She would scold me for not caring, not caring that I could do this, “If I wanted to”………the stage she meant, for a living.
“That’s your Aunty.” My father said it matter of fact like and in passing as I lay on that floor, head in hands looking up at the TV, and left it there. I don’t remember more of an explanation than that at the time. A great chasm of questions to be filled with possibility. I stared at the screen, in disbelief.
My aunty!? My aunty was a movie star?! My aunty was Mrs Banks?!
I held that moment for years without really knowing its power then but it made me somehow feel less out of control. I held it through every fight, every time I feared the ferocious turns of a normal day gone bad and could sense coming after a while, until there were no normal days left. I held it the moments I feared for my life as a child and a teenager and a young adult. There she was, my aunty, my blood, she made a life she loved and could be proud of, a life far away in some place that seemed so improbable. She did something hard, she did something very few get to do; she did what she truly wanted to do.
She is with me when I make such decisions myself, in my early thirties, big bold choices begin to govern me, when I start to pull my life back around from the great diversions I had created that lasted decades, in order to favour money and stability, expectation, other peoples that is, praise and predictability……..but never happiness. When I choose that, I remember being on that floor and seeing what was possible, for the first time.
I stick the picture Nes drew of me up in front of my desk, a vase of open faced, and I always think, happy dahlias in the foreground. I tap away at these keys, I take moments to watch chamomile and fennel swaying in the breeze outside my office door, bees and birds whiz about freely, a garden I have made for them and for us, my family. Hugo, the best dad and husband, and friend, comes in and out from his office intermittently, and always checks in. He makes me coffee, offers lunch. The words flow, and so does great joy and it seems to evaporate the weight that great change can sometimes bring.
Of all the things I could’ve become and all the things I didn’t believe were possible for the longest time, happy is the most incredible thing I could’ve never imagined might ever be me, and in my work to boot, so much so, that my daughter sees and draws it so young. And in that moment, all my fears for all I might get wrong on this journey of motherhood, and there is plenty I am sure, she gives me the gift of knowing I got this bit, the most important bit, I think anyway, right…..
To find what makes you happy and do that, despite everything that will try and stop you, including yourself, for you might be the butterfly, you might be the clam but none of us get to be the jellyfish.
So, cast off the shackles of yesterday!
Shoulder to shoulder into the fray!
Our daughters' daughters will adore us
And they'll sing in grateful chorus
"Well done! Well done!
Well done Sister Suffragette!"
Good night my dear Aunty Glynis, you showed me the way out, you showed me that there was one. You will be with me on many a morning Long Border walk, you will be with me, in Nes xo
PIP’S PLANT PICK
Species Gladiolius ‘Papilio’ (aka ‘The Butterfly’ Gladiolus)
Let me introduce you to one of my most treasured plants that I never knew I needed…
Of all the plants I popped into the Long Border unsure of how they might fair so unfamiliar I was with growing Species Gladioli (the common gladiolus everyone knows, I think anyone can grow with their eyes closed), this beauty has been one of the most unexpected ‘doers’ in this garden area, and I couldn’t love it more.
I was impressed by the first tall, elegant stems it sent up, in ones and twos and the most beautifully marked nodding bells of flowers in cream and maroon, not a colour combo I would’ve expected to love like I do but now it has better estblished it is growing in great clumps (as above) and offering something apart, from the whispy and blousey looks of all the other perennials in this border.
After the initial cultivation of the Long Border area, which does have good soil anyway I must confess, and my fussing over the spaces the small corms (like bulbs for anyone not familiar with the word) of the plant had been planted into weren’t accidentally forked up during weeding or planted over top of, I have largely done nothing to help them along. Yet for the last summer and a half, I have been surprised by how effortlessly they just pop up, their clumps bigger and bigger everytime. Something so delicate and exquisite looking I just expected to be a lot more work, I suppose but clearly they are just as easy to grow as their more common cousins.
GROWING DETAILS:
CULTIVATED AND FREE DRAINING SOIL 💩 💦 WILL FORM A CLUMP 📏 NEEDS FULL SUN 🌞 FLOWERS EARLY SUMMER ALL THE WAY TO AUTUMN 🌸 PROPAGATE THROUGH DIVISION ONCE ESTABLISHED ✂️ LOW MAINTENANCE ONCE ESTABLISHED 😌 WILL NEED HIGH SUMMER IRRIGATION 🥵 BENEFICIAL INSECT ATTRACTING 🐝 CUT BACK DEAD STEMS LATE WINTER 🪚 HEIGHT 90CM
TOXIC TO DOGS, CATS AND HORSES ☠️ (Thankfully Wednesday is not interested in eating plants and never has been but if you have an animal that is likely to give it a try, do not plant this.)
COMING IN FEBRUARY….
I am attending the Land Eascaspism Event with Tom Stuart-Smith, Dr Sue Stuart-Smith (both of whose books I’ve mentioned here before), Steven Wells and Georgina Reid in Sydney at the end of the month. I am beyond excited about this and is focused on the healing nature of gardens and gardening.
Planting out our autumn annual blooms that I sowed a few weeks back and that are doing very well, destined to squeeze in amongst the dahlias in the Cut Flower Garden and in some of the gaps in the veg bed in the hope they will succeed. To see what I sowed, visit The (Moor)Field Guide: 7 and scroll down to the Cut Flower Garden section toward the end of the guide.
Much weeding and mulch laying, in beds and paths, the constant rain followed by warm days has meant an explosion of neverending growth.
Here on substack you can expect, ‘The Long Border’ Garden Guide, The (Moor)Field Guide: 8, first installment of our The Design Guide: Little Oak vs Moorfield. An Overview and maybe another Cheat Sheet if I can wrangle it.
Thank you as always for being here and for reading my stories and following the making of this garden. I know not all I say in these journal entries will speak to you personally, it is after all from my own life experiences and the perspective it has given me. I hope only that it might meet you somewhere, anywhere and if not feel heard or seen, then perhaps set you to consider how you think about gardens and the act of gardening. Pip and family xo
Were fortunate to find solace in our gardens, and I'm so jealous of your butterfly Gladiolus - I tried it once and lost it but will do so again one day. See you the Art Gallery...
Another beautiful post, Pip. I recently was lucky enough to see Bernadette Peters singing Send in the Clowns in London, and I saw Judi Dench years ago. I knew the story of it being written for Glynis and I can only imagine how bittersweet it must be to listen to it. It’s bittersweet enough anyway - everyone around me was in tears in the theatre last month - grown men and women sobbing at the beauty