Garden Constructions and Artiworks
7 May 2005
While Jong Pil was with us, we built new steps down to the garden.
...adorning the head of the stairs with guardian women —
Gina Oldham to the right (lovingly restored, after windfall damage, by Bianca),
Ev to the left. We hasten to state that this is a 'BD' – 'before Dennis' - item
and the pig in the picture bears no resemblance to Dennis.
This picture taken three weeks after installation,
with liquidamber leaves falling.
The last time we were in Sydney I had a Gods Must be Crazy moment — recall the film
about the consequences of a Coca Cola bottle thrown from an aircraft over the Kalahari desert,
impacting on the life of a Bushman community.
We had gone to Campsie, that ethnic arrival station suburb where you can buy such things as
Argentinian asado beef ribs (from the Vietnamese butcher) and
fresh lotus stalks, for sour soup (in season).
Everyone there is picking up how to do things in Australia.
We get out of the car and Ev goes straight to a corner rubbish bin and
removes a broken umbrella and puts it in the boot. I was askanced.
As the anthropologist in the family, I ask,
what social impact does the mental health worker think such an action will have?
Well, we will have to go back and explain the artistic outcome, set up today —
also visible in the previous photo above.
As Ev states, it was a much better umbrella (once) than our own
and it had sixteen rainbow colour sections.
The black section of the umbrella stayed with the umbrella, signifying its death perhaps.
We googled, of course, to check the way up for the rainbow (Ev was right)
and got the answer at this super-amazing web site of climate information.
Note in the picture above that the parapluie mort is attached to the top of a net for beans and peas.
Out of season beans grasped the handle of the umbella as soon as it was in place.
We will have to take another photo when the quasi-parapluie is adangle with purple beans.
Here below see the threatening menace of the broccoli –
planted mid-March, so these are six or seven weeks. Heads just beginning to form.
They are growing in a garden created by:
• using the Gundaroo tiller or broadfork to open the soil below to 200mm without inverting
• adding topsoil gleaned from adjoining subdivision work
• adding mushroom compost, home compost, diluted urine, rabbit poo*, a little bit of Alroc
• adding a topping of chipped wood mulch
*Alas, our last rabbit has been brought down by myxomatosis —
we have too many myxo-affected wild rabbits around.
It is extraordinary how much manure can be provided by even one rabbit.
Place a bit of corrugated iron under the end of the cage where they poo
and then rinse that sheet into a bucket of water.
Or move the cage around the base of a fruit tree.
