We are all dof, but I am traa-i-i-ing
I wandered on my bike lonely as a nascent cumulus pouff.
That little bright cotton puff ball hanging over the Amatola escarpment in an ocean of mesmerising, timeless blue just screeched: “Summer!”
By the time I was reversing my route from the office, I just knew that smidgen would have billowed into a towering cumulonimbus, or dubous, mean green storm.
I struck me, like that Corruption Watch advert which is astounded by normality, things just working as they should are an abnormality in our upside-down world.
But I am talking about the weather, not Jacob Zuma’s nauseating attempts to stay out of his cell.
Yeah, just a lakka summer’s day! Enough of the rain bombs, Gweezy’s verbal fossil fuel spillages, acres of internet space used up by opinionated green opponents, and the millions of starving Eastern Cape children, just enough, enough, enough!
I want my ride in the sun with a light thunderstorm to cool me down. I can dream, né?
What is it that I despise the most about this corrupt, psycho-greedy, messed up society? It is that it stops me from reading.
Ask my one friend, I literally only read about one book a year — and that is at Christmas. OK, it’s not that bad — I did once review the national arts festival’s then-printed programme as my offering to the venerable Mellow Fellows book club, and they humoured me.
It is a great tragedy that we have lost our most gentle and ardent intellectual, Vrij Harry, but the club carries on encouraging me, merely by continuing to hold supper meetings, to read a few more pages of the books which peer out from the bottom rung of my cupboard with accusatory looks.
But when that summer heat gets going and the tranquil lethargy of Christmas starts to take hold, that is when I really read. And it has to be a great book. I am actually quite a fusspot about my chosen title. And it is the best thing ever!
I actually do read a lot, damn, I write a lot so the last thing one wants to confront at day’s end is more stacked rows of typography. That’s where the Netflix curse takes hold — who doesn’t want to topple facefirst onto their bed after a long day of smashing words, and just pile into yet another mindless Christmas movie.
Which is why I have started to garden. Not extensively, but poer-poer — slowly but surely.
I started with a hanging chair donated to me by a friend. It had been placed out of sight, a crumple of varnished pole and stiffening rope, but I got it up and swinging me to take in an arc of my laundry on the windy dryer, a glimpse of Gonubie Bay and a chaotic mess called the back garden.
And so the thinking began, just lots of drinking tea, and swinging, swirling.
The angels were talking, “move this bath, get rid of that statue, hack that alien”, but the devil said “bro, just hang out there and think. It will all fall into place”.
And so it did. I started jabbering on about a “hyperlocal garden”, saying I did not want A-lister plants — milkwoods, ngwenyas, erythrinas, aloe ferox, spekboom, white stinkwoods — those are all established.
I want the B team, the forest candlewoods, koeboe bessies, soapwood, the seeplakkie on the dunes apparently used by parents to discipline stouter kabouters.
I wanted to learn and understand what was growing “in there!”, I would exclaim to my over-burdened, long-suffering estuarine expert friend Dr Mandy Uys. Luckily, this diatribe would start after a swim, and with thermogenics starting to kick in, we would get on a buzz.
What was in that ancient forest tumbling down into the Gonubie River, or rising up, great trunks standing tall, arms spread out, just tree-to-tree full of foliage.
“I want what’s in there in my hyperlocal garden collection!” I would bleat.
What is it about women friends? They listen harder than the spyware on our phones. Suddenly plants began arriving in my garden, starting with some tasty herbs grown in an old R10 coffee bag — we filled it with a mix of compost and potting soil, cut slits and slipped the basil and chamomile plants in, and they are still growing. Or in funky planting baskets.
But, despite these gorgeous efforts — I even have a blue rain gauge — I was not getting closer to my hyperlocal obsession.
Still the friends kept trying, slipping me salt bush. “You just stick them in sandy soil and they grow,” I was told, and a little euphorbia.
And furthermore, I was driven to the Kwelerha National Botanical Garden which has an indigenous nursery, and there were some great plants at very reasonable prices, but here is the rub: I still have no idea what I am looking at, where they actually live in my chosen hyperlocal scarp (estuary) and dune forests of Orient, Eastern Beach, Nahoon, Bonza Bay and Gonubie.
And I wonder why. How often do we stare lovingly at these wild wooded places and feel their comforting local presence, safe in the knowledge that, but for the intrepid, desperate or crooked, they are as untouched as any place still unsullied in our beautiful city of biomes.
There is something slightly unhinged about growing up in a place, lolling in massive milkwood arms, strolling down paths wreathed in luminescent ground covers and shaded by a massive canopy and knowing barely a single name in this soulful, spiritual, glorious tumescence.
How many of us have corners of our garden dedicated to these plants and systems? There are some, and they are dedicated sages who should be revered. They are rare. How many of our nurseries have dedicated, curated sections which celebrate this celestial biodiversity? How many actually want to inform and educate us about the joy and brilliance of our local ecosystems?
Think that is an overstatement? How many people have parked off in a chair on the stoep, crisp beer or G&T clinking in hand, at, say Cefani, and through the curling braai smoke, watched the sun sink, bathing those scarp forests in that Eastern Cape dark emerald green, shot through with a glittering river?
Did you not feel utterly rooted, as if time had stopped, and if it was your moment to shuffle off, well, would that not be the place good as any to mark your departure?
OK, a bit indulgent and the truth is that those forests are under threat of expiring long before you and your offspring. Some developers feel Jack about hacking into the environment, scooping up whole bladefuls of living biome, squishing what is left of the natural world into smaller and smaller vacbags.
Truth is, that as a people in a city presently bursting with plant growth from climate change-amped up rain, we know v-all, nothing, nadda, niks, about this wild-Earth splendour. Trust me, I grew up here, I know that if we knew, our properties would be bursting with hyperlocal, hyper-indigenous plantings. We know how to take something to heart.
I am sorry dear readers, you are all dof. And I am dof too.
But I am traa-i-ing!