Sun is shining

Bird of paradise

Today, the sun made a brief appearance before the rain came down again. But I picked some flowers – strelitzia and other pretty things – and this corner of the kitchen looks like sunshine to me.

A row of pretties

It’s no surprise that strelitzia flowers are called “bird of paradise” (these are from S. reginae; S. nicolai, otherwise known as wild banana, are those giants in the forest). They do seem like paradise in a blue and orange package that could take flight at any moment. Birds, of course, love to land on them and feast on the nectar and pollen. 

These strelitzia grow wild in this part of South Africa, and there is a massive clump in the garden. There is also a newer, yellow variety of S. reginae, called Mandela’s Gold. I’ll try it sometime.  

Sculpture by Genevieve Chorn

They are a joy to pick – I like to cut them with the stems as long as possible – and they last for a couple of weeks in a vase. A couple of years ago, I saw strelitzia for sale in a market in a village in France: they cost 10 euros each.

Single dahlias, a Barberton daisy and a piece of aloe fill the little bottles: there is a changing parade of pretties here, depending on what I can find. And they all crowd around a stunning sculpture by a brilliant Cape Town-based artist, Genevieve Chorn.

Pavers and palava

It started like a regular enough day. The dolphins cruised past, as they do when the sea is calm, and I tried to figure out which weather forecast to plan my day around. I checked the grocery list for my increasingly infrequent trip into town.

Alex

Alex, the old gardener, arrives, as he does more or less every two weeks. He’s been working here for the past 20 years and he came with the garden. I don’t know much about his life, but I do know that he once was a migrant labourer, working on the mines near Johannesburg. He also receives a state pension, but despite his age, he’s one of the toughest gardeners I’ve known.

Alex does not speak English and I don’t speak Xhosa. We communicate in Afrikaans, and much of our conversation consists of him correcting my words and chuckling at what I end up saying.

Anyway, this morning I ask him to cut back some of the overgrown vegetation around the teak table and to pull out the grass that has crept into the beds (I’ll get in there in winter when the snakes have gone into hibernation). I am beginning to hate grass – it gets into everything, except where you want it to grow.

Careful! Bauble missile

Creepy crawlies

This is all necessary stuff, but the timing is mostly for the benefit of my sister K, who lives in Geneva. We’re very excited because she is coming to visit with her daughter next week. But as much as my jet-setting sister in her high-powered job can light up a conference room anywhere in the world with her presentations, she is really, really scared of creepy crawlies.

Alex dives into the most overgrown bed. “Watch out for snakes!” I shriek in my kind-of Afrikaans. It comes out something like: “Careful vir die slang, Alex!” He chuckles. I withdraw to my office to check my mail for the work that helps me pay the bills.

Before: bare dirt

And then the pavers arrive: 44 big ones. They’ve been expected since Monday, but things are delivered whenever around here. After a bit of a fuss about whether the truck will get stuck in the mud – it’s been raining – and overloading my wonky wheelbarrow to within an inch of its life, the pavers are piled up, ready for work to begin. Eish!

The intention is to pave under the big table. The grass here has died, groundcovers have refused to grow, and it’s now all sitting in bare dirt, which can be unpleasant at times.

Caution! Fairy helpers at work

Fairy helpers and all

Alex and I move the table to the side, and he trundles off with the wheelbarrow to load it with sand left over from when Oom Piet replaced the fence: he did a beautiful job, by the way, with unsealed latte (wattle poles). The fairy helpers pull in: my niece, age 3, and nephew, age 6. After a few hairy moments involving rakes and even a spade waving in the air and baubles that turn into missiles, they decide that this work is too much (or there is smoke coming from my ears, maybe?) and they go off and play a game with the granny in the granny flat.

Instead of thesis work ...

The grown-up boy-child is dragged away from working on his chemistry masters thesis (apologies, Dr supervisor) to help me lay the pavers. I am begging the powers that be that my space calculation was correct and that we have enough pavers. Turns out that we do – almost; we are just one short. Not bad.

Shell plugs contain the gravel

It’s dirty work, and so sweaty. I dash upstairs to change out of my town clothes. We painstakingly level sand under each paver. Alex loads up the barrow with leftover gravel and we start filling the gaps – oops, they are a bit uneven – between the pavers. Note that Alex and I have understood each other perfectly well through all of this. 

I see that the gravel is overflowing onto the grass, and run off to find something to plug the ends: ah, all those shells that I can never resist picking up on the beach … “Jy maak baie plan (you make a lot of plans),” Alex tells me as he twigs onto the idea.

After: much better, don't you think?

At last, a quick clean of the most soil-encrusted chairs (okay, not so quick with puny pressure from the water tanks), and it’s done. It’s much nicer to sit at the table now. And we can pretend that there are less goggas around when K arrives from Genf. 

Voila! Just a regular day.

Inside the storm

Living here, on the south-eastern edge of South Africa, we experience some really wild weather. I once watched a black thing ooze over the sea from the west; it took about 10 minutes to reach us, and it was vicious. Add that to some real infrastructure issues, and power outages and interruptions in connectivity become a regular part of life. In fact, I’m on a first-name basis with the technician for our telecommunications parastatal. 

But little has come close to what we got this week: a massive storm that knocked out power for the night and internet connections for a couple of days. Our little village was literally inside that storm. Terrifying, exhilirating, spectacular. Fortunately, my grown-up boy-child is home for a while, and he’s pretty good with his camera. Here are some of his photographs:

Pics: CHE

Here and now

Once, not that long ago, I clawed and sweated my way along the corporate ladder. This was the done thing, so it seemed, and I worked hard to meet the goals that my society taught me were good. When I was not too exhausted, I thought that I was indeed a successful someone. And then I walked away, moving from the bigness and busyness of Johannesburg to the quiet of the small coastal city of East London on the south-eastern coast.

At the time, I put it down to the hole that corporate life and its values had bored into my soul. I see now that it had more to do with sheer burnout and, mostly, to the realisation that it was more important to me to spend time with my children, my partner and my friends than to chase the next story, the next way to make some money, the next rung on the ladder. It was not about losing my ambitiousness: it was about being more honest to me about what I wanted to achieve. In short, it was about getting a life. Was it sensible to abandon the salary and security that came with the big job and the big career? Probably not. But 10 years later, I do know that the hole in my soul has taken care of itself. Perhaps there is a different way to be sensible.

Watching from the milkwood tree

So my series of choices has brought me here – to this place under the milkwood tree – at this time. I remain as ambitious as ever: at any random moment, my ambition may be to grow the perfect organic brinjal; at any other moment, it may be to find exactly the right words for a piece of writing, my own or someone else’s.

But, first, before we go there, let me tell you about here. This part of my garden is its heart. It edges onto the coastal forest and I share it with all kinds of creatures, not just human. As I sit here at the big teak table, a thrush is busily darting about. Earlier, from my bedroom window up there, I watched a pair of orioles high in the branches of the milkwood. I can hear the troupe of very naughty monkeys scuttling in the forest, quite close. An entire nursery of guinea fowls is scratching through the aloe garden, which I can just see from here. And Isis the cat is trying to crawl onto my keyboard. On weekends, the human kind of creatures gather around the table. Perhaps we make a fire – a braai (barbeque). Probably, we eat some of V’s freshly baked ciabatta and drink some wine. And definitely, we begin again to solve the world’s problems.

There is not just one lonely milkwood tree stretching its branches over my head. There are, in fact, two milkwoods (Mimusops caffra) and an allophylus: my friend, Kathy, cracks into a smile every time I remind her of the allophylus’s name. Overhead, I can’t make out where one tree ends and the other starts. Baubles from Christmas Day – we had lunch here, of course – still hang from the branches. We left them there because they look so pretty. A useful spinoff is that porcupines apparently don’t like the shininess of the baubles. Perhaps this is true: since we added the baubles to the bits of mirror mosaic and little solar lights, the porcupines have stopped digging up the agapanthus and the paintbrush (haemanthus) and sand lily (veltheimia) bulbs.

The larger milkwood is a handsome fellow indeed. He is big and strong, even more so since we hacked away the bougainvillea that had slithered all the way to the top, happily smothering the poor thing. The trunk of the smaller milkwood has, intriguingly, shot at a 45 degree angle from the ground. The trunk now bears a “face”; to V’s horror, I gave him this face as a gift, along with some LED solar lights in the shape of butterflies and dragonflies. Well, I thought they were gorgeous. 

Beyond this milkwood is a knobwood tree (Zanthoxylum davyi). If you crush its leaves, it offers a delight: the scent of lemon. Today, freed of a thick choking vine, this little fighter stands upright, reaching proudly for the sky. Soon, it will rival the milkwood in height.

This part of the garden blends into “the bush” (this is how South Africans describe all kinds of groupings of native vegetation), so today, almost all the things growing here are indigenous. There are pools of sun and pools of shade. Closer to my level is an array of treasures, among them, a few types of plectranthus, red hot pokers (kniphofia, including a yellow variety), blue felicia, wild iris (dietes), wild garlic (tulbaghia; the story goes that it repels snakes), bulbinella (the gel is brilliant for soothing cuts and scrapes), a pavetta (forest bride’s bush, which I grew from a cutting; it should reach a couple of metres in time), little creeping aloes, plumbago, and thatching grass. The previous owner brought the crinums, which grow in this part of the Eastern Cape, from a nearby farm; I have divided the bulbs and spread them around, and the big spiky white flowers in mid-summer are truly majestic.

Guinea fowls in the aloe garden

The slope towards the sea is covered in clivias (mostly miniata, but also some of the lovely nobilis variety). This is one of the most beautiful plants you could ever wish for: its shiny strap-like leaves are always attractive, and its flowers are mostly of the craziest, almost neon orange. The flowers brighten the late winter days, and are followed by bunches of seeds, which slowly morph into fat red troves of new plants. Some of these clivias were decimated by amaryllis worms – sorry, I can’t see any beauty in the black and yellow stripes that coat their thick bodies – but I think I have found a way to control them. I make a “tea” out of chopped chilli, crushed garlic and shavings of green household soap, and pour the diluted liquid into the heart of the plant. Strained, a spray of this mixture helps to keep bad goggas (insects) off roses and vegetables: you have to use caution because it probably gets rid of some good goggas too.

From this heart, the garden fans out around the house, past the outdoor shower, past the fire pit, past the big, big clump of strelitzia. If you bear with me, I’ll take you to every corner of my garden, sometimes my life, and share with you what I have learnt and have yet to learn.

Note: I will do my best to provide the proper names of plants, but I ask forgiveness in advance for errors!