What I do remember?
Honey coloured light and morning dew catches in infinitesimal droplets, the smell of homemade apricot jam on hot buttered toast coming through the open door to find me standing on the wet green grass of my grandmother’s garden. I realise for the first time in my life that the cold has a smell too, having never known it before coming from a place that has no season for it, heaped in more layers of clothing than I had ever had to wear. I had up until this point in my young life been naked, or at least partly so, for most of it. I am 5 and in this moment I don’t know that I am about to experience something that will begin a lifelong love affair that will later be the impetus to the greatest change I ever needed to make in my adult life and bring me back around to this fateful morning many times over when I needed to remember who I was, who I came from and what I was made of.
The timing of this piece seems almost serendipitous. I have spent the day peering through the glass of my grandmother, Gwendoline Joyce’s framed watercolours hung about the homestead and in my mum’s cottage, trying to read the faded led pencil and her florid penmanship to discover the names of her subjects, roses from her garden that she painted some 40 odd years ago. I have an event approaching that has me head long into roses throughout history, revisiting all my old rose books that I’ve collected and been given and more personally, mapping the role they have played in my own life. Something I have visited here with you all many times.
One painting in particular I recognise, it is the very first rose I ever saw or smelt on a morning in my grandmother’s garden in New Zealand and I do know it was the very first to be sure, as I grew up in Arhnem Land where they did not grow. The only flowers I saw in people’s gardens, if any, were New Guinea Impatiens and the vermillion umbels of Ixora that I used to pull the stamen from to suck their nectar. The only scented flower I’d ever known was wild, the white waterlillies with lilac lined petals atop the dark water lagoons that were precarious picking with their sunken stems for what lie in wait beneath.
The rose I remember had unfurled to reach the edges of my young rounded face and the soft petals brushed my hairline as my grandmother urged me to bury my nose and to breathe in deep. The smell I have never forgotten, that moment and as I stare at her painting hung over my mother’s bedside, I am back there.
This same trip we visited the cattle and dairy farm where my mother and her mother both grew up and where our larger family would gather for special occasions and which was home to the much storied rose garden of my Great Grandmother Shar. Shar, Gwendoline’s mother and mother to three other daughters, was widowed in the 1920’s and left to run ‘Oakview’ and hold back the bank, on her own. My grandmother, later widowed too, and with her husbands death, shortly after his return home from WWII, the death of the dream that she and he might ever one day run the family farm themselves or raise their toddler and new baby together there.
These losses compounded their toughness, together with all my grandmother saw at war as a Red Cross Nurse, who left a young, naïve farm girl and returned a much hardened woman from years spent tending the wounded and dying, in both Egypt and Europe. She once told me in a rare unguarded moment encouraged by a couple of extra wines, that she had “lost all of her friends”, referring to the boys that she’d grown up with, who left for the war and never returned home. She was quick to dismiss outward displays of emotion and to speak her mind in a tone that could send even the most confident person recoiling back into their box and her manners were flawless, unless you pissed her off. She was adventurous, determined and talented and she was glamorous despite a youth spent in mud and atop hay bales, her remaining days spent as a fashion buyer and a passionate gardener and grower, and painter of roses.
Shar came with stories from Great Aunts and Great Uncles who remember the tiny but formidable matriarch in head to toe black, the same colour as the two Scottish Terriers always out in front of her on leads as she marched about. She was known for being plain spoken, well dressed, impeccably proper and as much adept at cooking as she was at managing a large farm and being a single mother in a time it was considered the least proper thing a woman could, or should do, upon the death of her husband. In fact, it would have seemed to me as a greatly intimdated small child from the bush who did not know which fork came first, that a softer side to them even existed, if not for their love of roses.
ANZAC Day is here and a speaking event approaches for this coming weekend, on my favourite of all gardening subjects, roses and our love of them, my personal story some you have read here and our love of them as a society throughout history. The most fabled of all flowers.
Nessie and I will pick two bouquets from the garden. One for my Grandfather Stan’s Elm planted on a quiet stretch of the Avenue of Honour in Ballarat where he was born, surrounded by silo’s, fields and old farmhouses which we use in lieu of a grave for the man who died before I was even a thought, homeless and estranged from his family, buried in a pauper’s grave unbeknownst to his son, my father, having served in both World Wars and having never recovered his faculties from the fronts and all he saw. A sensitive soul who had been a talented classical musician since he was a boy, travelling the world with his family’s theatre company.
The other for the cenotaph in our local town which bears the name, Japhet Money Fletcher, the boy who was born and grew up here at Moorfield, whose grandparents built it and who was tragically killed in action on the morning of his 25th birthday in France, his body never recovered. We will pick bunches of roses, as once might have grown in the gardens that I am told existed here when Japhet’s mother, Emily, was the lady of the house.
There would not have been a garden in existence at the turn of the century that did not feature them or in the arrangements picked from the garden, as the story goes, to fill the rooms of Moorfield for parties. I wonder if, at the loss of her son, she took to her garden as my grandmother and Great grandmother did at the death of their husbands, seeking refuge amongst the roses, hidden amongst their heady scents to grieve away from young children and dig their sadness back into the soil. I wonder if in planting them and tending them they tended their broken hearts and weary souls, as I did at times in my life when I needed sanctuary and I suppose, solutions that would only come forth from the clarity of mind I found with my hands in the earth. The diversion I sometimes needed from daily life and hauntings of long ago that could be offered in the endless chronicling one could uncover of the lineage of roses, for they were children too with mothers and fathers and spoken of in this way.
I estimate that between both Little Oak and Moorfield, and the first garden and home my mother and I ever created together in Southern Queensland after my father and her mother had died weeks apart, I have grown over 500 roses. I could name them all for you if you had the time and the inclination to listen, they stay with me like family members and friends and were planted for them; in honour, in memory, in celebration, in love.
No other flower has ever symbolised so many human experiences, been carried over more borders, crossed more seas, been so coveted by the rich and poor alike or named for more people, places and points in history and no other flower has been a greater muse for me and the women from whom this first love came.
Reading…
In lieu of the speaking engagement I have been revisiting this wonderful book sent to me years ago by a very lovely follower of our social media The Garden at Moorfield then called Life at Little Oak Farm, our former farm and garden, about the incredible true story of Antoine Meilland and Francesco Giacomo Paolino, two of the world’s most succesful rose breeders and how their worlds intercepted to create one of history’s most famous roses, Peace.
Thank you as always for being here and for supporting our writing and telling of story and nuts and bolts of the creation of The Garden at Moorfield from scratch. Pip xo
What a journey you took me on - beautiful reflections, beautiful words 💜
Beautiful memories 🌹