life on the hill (IV)

Beauty and the beasts: camellia bloom and dirty gardener’s fingers – the flower, struck down by cruel seasonable winds, and rusty from violent useasonable rains before it had time to blossom; the fingers, long past their unlined, flexible, un-arthritic best.

Like spring, flowers for the most part leave me cold. It’s not that I don’t find them attractive (excepting some pet hates, like orchids and bird-of-paradise flowers), but the pleasure-to-labour ratio of keeping flowers doesn’t work for me.

Perhaps it’s just ignorance, but a successful flowerbed seems to involve a cycle of buying, planting, enjoying for a short period; then discarding and starting da capo – endlessly – that is not to my taste. Different species for different months, different exposures, different kinds of soil. That, plus pest control, feeding, deadheading, pruning, all adds up to a kind of chequebook-gardening cum full-time dedication that is out of my league in more ways than one. Some will say that it is this very evanescence that makes a flower’s charm. I say, give me permanence – the concept of planting something now to last for a century. Trees, in other words. Lovely, stately, uncomplicated trees – dig a hole, fill with dirt, stick in a sapling, enjoy.

So I’m a reluctant gardener at best. My buzz is forestry.

To date, 84 trees have been planted on the Hill (a round seven dozen which, though fortuitous, appeals to my sense of order):

Lemon tree colonised by bougainvillea
in the kitchen garden

9 poplars (one “born” spontaneously in a vase of pelllargonium, then transplanted to the ground)

9 umbrella pines

8 oaks

1 magnolia

1 judas tree

1 chestnut
13 plane trees (in fact 15, but two were double-planted, meaning two saplings into the same hole so they’ll grow as double-trunked trees)

19 fruit trees (4 pear, 4 peach, 2 cherry, 2 loquat – “poor man’s trees”, a friend calls them, but I love loquats –, 2 orange, 1 lemon, 2 tangerine, 1 lime, 1 plum)

2 cedars

3 ashes

15 cypresses

1 crape myrtle

1 cork oak

1 tulip tree

In addition, there is a maritime pine and another cork oak, already growing wild on the plot when we bought it, and a jacaranda recently uprooted and put back in a vase (after 7 years of failing to develop properly), in a protected space, to see if it survives to go back into the ground in a year or two.

Ash and tangerine trees

The main surprise to me – and my main delight – has been the way the oaks have thrived (despite warnings against trying to grow northern trees and bushes in "these southern lands"). All were harvested as minuscule saplings from the undergrowth at Grandmother's woods and brought South in plastic bags, then nursed and planted on the Hill. A couple are now up to 20 feet high, and all are thriving. In fact, Oakland (or perhaps Oak Park, in homage to FLW) might be yet another candidate in our unfinished quest for a name for the House.

Just a thought.

The orchard. There is a plan to make it into a walled garden at some point,
with benches for reading in the shade and a fish pond.

Umbrella pines and poplars

Plane trees in their winter garb (or no-garb, rather), and a cedar in the background by the firewood shed,
striving to win the race for sunlight against the wild reeds bordering the plot.

A young oak (about 7 feet), and a maritime pine (12 feet) in the background at right.